(Editor’s note: This is the second installment in an occasional series of interviews with the state’s new wave of higher education leaders. You can read the first installment here.)
Ioannis “Yannis” Miaoulis, 60, grew up in Athens, Greece, the son of a civil engineer who pushed him toward obtaining a degree from the best universities in the world. “He always wanted me to do better than I did,” Miaoulis said. “He was never really happy.”
Attempting to meet his father’s expectations, Miaoulis earned four degrees in the 1980s – a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate in mechanical engineering, and a master’s degree in economics from Tufts University in Medford, Mass., as well as a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Miaoulis fulfilled a childhood aspiration in 1986 when he became a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts and was later promoted to the dean of the university’s College of Engineering.
After 17 years at Tufts, his career took a turn when he was appointed president and director of the Museum of Science in Boston. When his father died shortly after he took the museum position, it was then that Miaoulis learned that his father often bragged to friends and family members about his son’s accomplishments.
Sixteen years later, Miaoulis turned back to higher education when he took over as the 11th president of Roger Williams University in August 2019, filling a vacancy left when Donald J. Farish died a year earlier.
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LEVELING UP: Ioannis Miaoulis, former president and director of the Museum of Science in Boston, says he couldn’t resist the opportunity to return to higher education and lead Roger Williams University “to a totally different level of school.” / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
Why did you decide to return to an academic setting after running a science museum for so long? Roger Williams approached me just three days after the museum announced that I would be leaving [on a sabbatical], and I could not resist. It was too good to be true to pass it up. I am so happy I took the job. It is truly a remarkable place with a lot of potential. It has lots of great ingredients. And what I saw was a great opportunity that, with the right strategy, could be propelled to a totally different level of school. The school offers a rich combination of liberal arts, along with superb professional programs and a law school. That was appealing to me, as I saw the opportunities it presented. Right now, one opportunity is a new strategic planning process for the university’s disciplinary programs. Also, I was impressed with Roger Williams’ emphasis on community involvement and experiential learning for students. We have excellent connections with outside businesses and community organizations, where students volunteer or have paid internships where they learn and solve real-life problems. So, it’s a win-win situation where our students learn in an exciting way and also support the community.
What skills from your experience in the engineering college at Tufts University have you applied at RWU? First, I learned how to navigate in the academic world. I learned how to work closely with faculty and staff to create a new strategy for an institution and then start implementing it. At Tufts, I learned how to do fundraising, which I continued at the museum. Solving problems is one of my favorite things. I am an engineer, and engineers solve problems. And at Tufts we solved a lot of problems. One of them was that we were losing about 25% of the first-year class in engineering to liberal arts. And, although we were doing better than the national average for an engineering school, I saw it as a problem. So, we changed the curriculum in an exciting way, and Tufts became – and still is – the only engineering school in the country that more students transfer from liberal arts to engineering, [rather] than the other way around, because of the exciting first-year program.
Also, there were challenges in attracting women. That problem was also solved at Tufts. And we are working on improving that at Roger Williams, as well. Although the university is about 50% women, in engineering we could do better. So I made some changes in faculty hires, and physical changes in the engineering buildings, and our number of [female students] went up by 40% in engineering. And our number of faculty went from one woman to 25% in women faculty members.
What lessons have you learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic? This was not the typical year. What I recognized and learned is that we have a great community that came together – faculty, staff and students – to ensure that the students received an excellent education, even when the university was under stress. That’s not common in many places. When there is stress, you sometimes get people fighting with each other, but this was not the case here. So, I saw that as a great foundation, one to build a new strategy and join forces to implement it.
How is Roger Williams University changing under your leadership? One of the things we are considering is providing more opportunities for “upskilling” for people in their careers, so they come back to the university and get a bachelor’s degree in a certain area through an accelerated program. Or they could get micro-credentials, or certifications, where they can take short course work to advance a bit more in their careers or change their careers. And students can also layer on additional certifications and micro-credentialing that are offered in a variety of ways, some of them are fully online, and some are short courses that they can take in person.
We want to make the students’ experience more personalized by improving upon our career guidance, through academic advising in a much more integrated and connected way. We would also like to improve and enhance research opportunities for faculty and students in selected areas. And we want to pursue our approach to philanthropy to ensure that we have the proper resources to afford all these great new directions and programs.
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STUDENT ENGAGEMENT: Roger Williams University President Ioannis Miaoulis speaks with Colby Peters, a senior who is studying mercury in recreational fisheries. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
The university’s graduation rate is around 63%. Is RWU pleased with that number and are you taking any steps to improve it? We are taking steps to improve upon that number. Although, we are better than the national average for four-year private schools. We are putting significantly more resources into creating pathways for all the students. One of the things that attracted me to the university is the great care that our faculty and staff provide for the students. To give you an example, we have a parent advisory group that was designed to consist of parents that would advise us and support us on issues related to students. I was shocked when I first met the group, as more than 50% of the group are parents of [students who had already graduated]. That’s because the university did such a nice job of helping their children succeed here that the parents stayed on after they graduated to continue supporting the school.
Statistics indicate that about 74% of the students are white. What are the plans to increase the enrollment of minority students? We are doing a good job, but we have lots of plans and we’re implementing them to do a better job with diversity. That means creating an inclusive student and work environment. We want every student and employee at Roger Williams to feel like they’re valued and like they belong at the university. We have developed a pretty comprehensive equity action plan in order to move the university forward that we are integrating with our strategic plan. We also brought in a new chief diversity officer who is terrific and will help bring equity inclusion into everything that we do at the school. So we want to diversify both the student body and the faculty and staff because they are very interconnected.
How much of an emphasis is placed on diversity at the RWU School of Law? The School of Law is doing a terrific job of attracting and retaining students of underrepresented groups. We just went through an accreditation visit, and the group doing the accreditation review said that of all the schools they had visited, Roger Williams was one of the top schools in building an environment that attracts students from diverse backgrounds. In 2018, the law school developed a strategic plan for diversity and inclusion that is now being implemented.
The university recently announced that the School of Law will become one of the first nationwide to require a new course on race and law. Why was that done? The law school recognized that this was a really important step to take because race has always been center to American law, to constitutional law, immigration law, civil rights law, employment law and so on. Every field of law has been deeply shaped by matters of race. We felt this required course was important. There was consensus and desire for it from both faculty and students, and support from the Black Law Student Association. It will train the law students to think for [themselves]. Not having it would [make] our students’ education incomplete. Those are the reasons why we put the curriculum together.
Does the university want or need to build its total enrollment? If so, how is RWU going about doing that? We’re bringing in more students than we were targeting for enrollment. However, we are adopting a strategy, as New England is going to see a decline in potential college students [from this region]. So we are expanding and improving our techniques to attract more students that would transfer from community [colleges], as well as tradespeople, while expanding graduate offerings and our certificate programs. We don’t plan to grow the university in numbers but will instead shift the focus on the kinds of students we attract to adapt for the demographic challenges that all universities will face. The decline I mentioned is a population issue. The forecast for New England shows a decline for graduating [high school] students in the next few years. So that will be a challenge we will have to face.
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STEM FOCUSED
Before arriving at Roger Williams University, Ioannis Miaoulis was dean of the Tufts University engineering school and the top administrator at the Museum of Science in Boston. Under Miaoulis, RWU has put emphasis on its science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs, or STEM, including drawing more female students into those fields of study. / SOURCE: Roger Williams University
Office of Institutional Research[/caption]
Tuition this year was $38,274. Is it too high for families, affordable or a bargain? We’re one of the most affordable private schools, especially for the kind of school. We’re a comprehensive university for our size. We offer many opportunities for our students to minor, double major, sometimes triple major. We have an excellent core curriculum. So I think it’s a good number. We also give a significant amount of grants and scholarships to students. And financial aid is about $18,000, so if you take that out of the $38,274, as well as loans, we are an affordable school. It’s one of the reasons that we attract students, outside of our curriculum. If you look at the range of tuitions for other schools, we are much more affordable for what we offer than a lot of the other universities. We are very conscious of the cost, and we try multiple ways to make it easier for students and their parents.
Roger Williams University is No. 31 in Regional Universities North in U.S. News & World Report’s current ranking. Are such rankings important to you and what is being done to improve it? It is one of our priorities. We have some programs that we need to brand better. For example, we have architecture, marine science, criminal justice, history and cultural studies, and the law school, these are programs that we are working on enhancing their branding. The rankings are weighted heavily by student success, retention and graduation. We are working on all the areas of the university and what it offers to improve.
When you took over at RWU, the university was in the process of completing a new $13.8 million laboratories building for the School of Engineering, Computing and Construction Management. Where does that project stand? The building opened in the spring of 2020. It is fabulous. It is beautifully designed. It can be used for both teaching and research. It has really become a model for what an engineering building means to a university. It has a maker’s lab, which we call the innovation lab, where students – not only engineering students but anybody – can reserve space to work on individual projects or research. It is one more jewel in the Roger Williams crown.
Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Shuman@PBN.com.
