Just a couple of months ago, the University of Arkansas gained a new chancellor when Charles F. Robinson took the helm following a unanimous appointment by the board of trustees. Robinson, after serving as interim chancellor since Aug. 16, 2021, became the university’s seventh chancellor this past November.
His appointment checks all the boxes needed to help lead the state’s top academic and research facility: Experience, check. Leadership skills, check. Passion for the job, check. Hogs fan?
“I think that’s a requirement,” Robinson said with a laugh, although he admits he wasn’t yet on the Hogs bandwagon when he made his way over from Texas in the late 1990s. However, he has seen the light since then, and he’s all-in, both for sports and for every other facet of the university.
Having started as an assistant professor of history at the U of A in 1999, Robinson has enjoyed a long-time partnership with the school. In those 23 years, he has been promoted to various positions, including director of African and African American Studies, vice provost for diversity, vice chancellor for Student Affairs, provost, executive vice chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs and interim chancellor.
A couple of weeks after being named chancellor, Robinson sent out a public memo to the University of Arkansas community in which he stated “I assure you that I have emerged from this search reinvigorated and ready to get to work.” The selection process, it turns out, had been quite an exhausting challenge.
Emerging reinvigorated
The long and rigorous search for a new chancellor hit the home stretch in September 2022 when the U of A narrowed its high-quality pool of applicants to four finalists, each one a proven leader and each one with a specialty that could benefit the school. All applicants were fully and scrupulously vetted, and each visited the campus for multiple day meetings with students, faculty, staff and university stakeholders, as well as participated in a livestreamed public forum. By October, the search was down to two applicants, and then finally in November, the board of trustees unanimously appointed Robinson as chancellor.
Robinson said he learned a lot about his community and about himself during the search. He found that he was well-supported by the campus community and its external alums. The many messages he received during the search process reaffirmed his sense that he was in the right place and that it was the right thing to press on.
Job one for Robinson: Callin’ those Hogs.
“The outpouring of support, for me, was really defining,” he said. “When you come through something that’s trying – and it’s not just me – but if you look at the figures in American history, and you go through something that’s trying, and you emerge out of it, it does give you a sense of renewed hope that anything is possible. Everything is possible. And you can move forward towards bigger and better things.”
You can’t take the history out of the historian. Robinson, who started his academic career as a history teacher, continuously draws lessons from history. He leans into the concept that the whole trajectory of the United States is about constant improvement, and that people are in constant motion. We may not reflect on each day or even each year as positive growth, “but if you look at the whole gamut of our history,” he said, “it’s one in which you can see progress, and so, I’m hopeful.”
The encouragement he received during the search and immediately after his appointment allows him to “galvanize that support and push the university to greater heights.” A self-proclaimed glass-half-full kind of guy, Robinson plans to rally his community to become the type of community people say they want to see.
“We have power. We have agency. We’re not simply the products of our setting or a coincidence,” he said. “We can create the outcomes we want, and we have to work together to do that.”
Robinson with former chancellor David Gearhart
And because Robinson knows optimism is infectious and that people need to believe that positive change can indeed come before they can actually strive to achieve it, he makes it a point to spread encouragement. If people can hear it straight from the pulpit, then he knows he can create a springboard for moving to bigger, better and greater heights.
Bigger, better, greater heights
Soon after his appointment, the new chancellor published a letter outlining his thoughts for the coming months. In his message he shared his “100 days plan,” prioritizing three important goals: Advancing student success; augmenting the research enterprise and making the university an employer of choice.
In terms of advancing student success, Robinson hopes to continue to raise the number of students who successfully finish their college education. Over the past five years, the university has increased retention and graduation rates significantly.
“We’re real close to being where we should be based on the academic metrics tied to the students we admit,” he said.
The numbers, he explained, are based on a predictive graduation rate versus an actual graduation rate. However, Robinson doesn’t want to simply hit the predicted graduation rate, he wants to continue to press on and upward so that retention rate and graduation rates exceed their predicted numbers.
“We know that when you look at 26,000 undergraduates, they’re not all created equal,” Robinson said. “They’re not all experiencing the same graduation rates, and we know that our Pell Grant students have a much lower graduation rate. It’s about 20 percentage points below the overall graduation rate, but that’s an opportunity for us to do something about that, to close that gap, to erase that gap, so that our Pell students have the same outcomes as non-Pell students.”
Robinson acknowledged that much of this disparity is tied to resources. Students who qualify for the Federal Pell Grant are, by definition, poor. Many of them, on top of receiving the grant have to work to pay for college, sometimes 30 to 40 hours a week.
Robinson speaks with reporters after being introduced as chancellor
“It’s hard to have the same outcome when you have that kind of financial burden and responsibility,” he said.
To combat that problem, the chancellor is looking to raise money for an endowment that could be tied to Pell. His team is calling it the Pell Plus. Although this eternal optimist acknowledged the difficulty in creating equal outcomes “because of the way we’re set up,” we have a responsibility to try.”
In regard to improving the school’s research enterprise, Robinson said he wants the university to remain a research one institution, which is already a great achievement, as the school resides in the top three percent of institutions nationally. But he is aware of the need to do more to expand the research grant funding for both federal and state funds and also tie research expenditures and achievements to economic development more effectively.
One opportunity he mentions is the federal CHIPS and Science Act, which just passed last year.
“We have some of the best scientists in the world who can help do research on chip production,” he said. “We have some ideas and plans around that, which I’m very excited about.”
In order to carry out these plans the school must focus on Robinson’s third major goal, making the U of A an employer of choice.
Robinson addresses 2022 graduates
“You can’t become better unless you attract the top researchers, the top administrators and the top staffers,” he said.
To that end, Robinson is looking carefully at employee benefits, hiring practices and employee management to find room for improvement. He wants to ensure current employees feel highly valued while offering incentives that are competitive with other institutions to continue to draw in the best people.
As ambitious as that all is, Robinson said he’s actually ahead of schedule on his 100-day goals. Having been in the position of interim chancellor before his promotion, he didn’t have to do the same “listening tour” that an outside candidate would have had to do. His already-firm foundation coming into the role has allowed him to mobilize his team into strategic planning to lay out objectives and share them with the campus community.
Even with great ideas, there are obstacles. Robinson’s biggest challenge is the same one that plagues all university leaders – source management. That is, figuring out how to manage current resources so that new things can be done on campus to better support more students while not raising tuition.
Fortunately, the U of A has had record enrolment in the last two years and is predicting more strong numbers this fall. High enrollment gives the school a good foundation for the resources it needs and, coupled with responsible budgeting, allows the school to keep in-state tuition and fees below a one percent increase.
We’re hot
Keeping the cost of higher education from rising too rapidly, thereby pricing some students out of attending, remains one of Robinson’s most pressing concerns. His passion for affordable education is palpable – especially when it comes to making college education possible for the state’s most vulnerable students .
But while relatively affordable tuition, in comparison to competing schools, could be one of the major reasons for the rising enrollment rate at U of A, Robinson believes it’s much more than that. The chancellor touts the Sam M. Walton College of Business, which has a national reputation as a business school, in addition to many other impressive programs.
“I also think it’s our brand,” he said. “When students come here, and they have good experiences, they become our best ambassadors. I think we’re hot! Our reputation is growing. Our brand is growing. People like to feel like they’re getting a bargain, and for many, when they learn who we are, what we are, what we charge – my goodness they feel like this a great deal!”
Competitively low tuition, nationally recognized programs, top research departments and popularity are great, but Robinson said they “can’t rest on that.” He doesn’t want to get stuck merely thinking about the past or the present, lest the institution miss out on the future. Moving forward with hope seems to be the new chancellor’s creed.
“As a historian, I know that everybody has a dash,” he said referring to the idea that our lives are reflected by a birthdate a death date and, in between, a dash. “The real question for us is, what are we going to do with our dash? I want the dash to be a placeholder. I want it to be filled with hope and with examples of how we help transform people’s lives, of how we really deepened our connection to our land grant mission and how we served our state of Arkansas better.”
“I think the University of Arkansas is a special place, and we do a lot that we don’t talk sufficiently about, and we need to talk more about it. Not for self-aggrandizement, but because those good stories offer people a sense of the hope and the opportunity that they can experience if they join us. And so, I don’t want us to hide our good news under a bushel. Our light needs to shine from a hilltop, and we’re going to try to make sure that happens on my watch.”
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