Dan L. King
Position: Vice President of Academic Affairs
at Rhode Island College and professor of educational leadership since 2003.
Background: Prior to his current position, King was dean
of the faculty of applied science and education and an associate vice president
for teacher education at Buffalo State College in New York. He also served as
a dean at the University of Wyoming and Arkansas State University, and was a
faculty member at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa and North Dakota State University.
He was also a high school music teacher in Michigan schools.
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Education: Bachelor’s in music and religious studies from
Madonna University in Livonia, Mich.; master’s in educational research from
the University of Detroit Mercy; and an Ed.D. in educational administration
from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Residence: North Providence
Age: 57
PBN: Explain your responsibilities as vice president for academic affairs.
KING: This office really has responsibility for all of the personnel
that are associated with the academic endeavor, the faculty, professional staff
that supports the teaching. And we have responsibility for all of the curricula,
developing it, monitoring it, evaluating it and making sure it stays solid.
Those are the two main functions. The less well-articulated responsibility,
but maybe the more important one, is that the president expects the vice president
to come with a bit of vision about where a college ought to go and how it can
get better and how it can serve students better, serve the state better and
so forth. While you wouldn’t find that in my job description, that’s what I
spend a lot of my time doing.
Q. What is your vision for Rhode Island College?
A. I think this is a great college. It’s much like the place I came from – a state comprehensive college with a mission and that makes us different from a university in that we have to be a whole lot of things to a whole bunch of different people, and I use the metaphor of a river. Comprehensive state colleges and universities frequently are like a river that’s 2 miles wide and maybe 8 inches deep. There’s a lot of breadth and that sometimes has to spread itself real thin. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good environment; it’s a real useful environment, but it’s quite different from Brown University or the University of Rhode Island. We’re just different places. So one of the challenges of every place like this is to continually improve the quality of what we do do, and we’re doing that. We’ve been doing that for years. But also to think about other things that we can do, given the kind of structural limitations. So one of the things that we did this year that you might have heard about was to establish the new Center for Public Policy. We did that because one of the missions of this college is to serve the needs of the populace, the state. And so this is more than a place where we teach a set of courses for a curriculum in a classroom. We have a responsibility to the people of Rhode Island, and the Center for Public Policy is one way we decided we could better respond to that outreach. I guess if I’ve got a vision, it’s one I’ve developed over a number of years, and it’s one of academic excellence, one of ensuring that undergraduate students are taught by professors that I call scholared teachers – that have an appropriate mix of focus on teaching excellence and a focus on their own intellectual scholarship. And making sure that we do respond to the needs of the state.
Q. What is the role of the new Center for Public Policy?
A. It brings together, in order to strengthen, a number of independent units that already existed on campus. The Poverty Center, for example, is a high-profile policy-related endeavor on campus. The Poverty Center will continue to do what it has done for years but this transcending Center for Public Policy will strengthen it in that it will regularly bring together the directors of the Poverty Institute and several other centers and institutes to talk about how they can interface and draw on the strengths of one another. Two other things the center does is that with the center we’ve created a bureau of government research and services, and that is going to fill a niche that was absent before. And now governmental officials and officers will have a place to go to do survey work and get consulted on codes and things like that. The third thing the center will do is that it will have an overall charge to elevate the public visibility of the policy-related services that the college offers.
Q. State schools are under constant scrutiny from the General Assembly. Is there anything RIC can do to lessen its dependency on state funding?
A. I don’t know if it should. And I wouldn’t characterize it as dependency. I would characterize it as states in general simply needing to recognize the historic commitment in the U.S. to fund public higher education. It’s been since the 1950s that every state made an absolute commitment to provide universal higher education and it’s simply more expensive to provide that now than it was in the 1950s. While the states weren’t able to fully fund higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, they’re far less able to do it now because it’s just gotten more expensive. It’s gotten much more expensive for a lot of reasons, but not the least of which is that education is so different today. If you think about the amount of money this college has to spend on technology when it didn’t have to spend on technology even 10 years ago. When I started teaching in higher ed in 1979, I was tickled to get a typewriter that had self-correcting ribbon on it, and those typewriters lasted forever. Now we have to replace computers every four years. That’s become like the electric bill, and that’s just one example. So on one hand I’m not terribly anxious to look for ways to reduce our dependency, particularly for state colleges that serve a population of students that many of whom have tremendous difficulty finding the financial wherewithal to go to college. We rely, as a society, far too much on loans so there are far too many students leaving college with debts and I think it’s a reality but it’s unfortunate. If we reduce state reliance or support for higher education that would simply escalate.
Q. Do you worry that too many students simply won’t be able to afford college?
A. I think students will always be able to afford a college education. I think students will do what they have to do to get it. The students who are here, by and large, would make whatever sacrifices they need to make to be here to get their degree because they clearly see the economic and quality of life advantages of having a college degree. I think what it would mean is that they leave with much more debt because there aren’t grants and scholarships sufficient to make up the difference. What will happen is that the federal government will increase the availability of loans and students will leave with $40,000 of debt instead of $20,000 of debt. It’s bad for the individual, but it’s also not a good thing for society. For that student who leaves with $40,000 in debt, it influences what they’re going to spend their income on, it takes money out of circulation in the economy. It’s going to continue to escalate.
Q. What is Rhode Island College doing to form a relationship with the business community?
A. One of the mistakes in higher education in general is that our efforts to collaborate with the business community haven’t really been collaborative efforts. They’ve been us looking for ways to either subtly or less subtly, enhance the resources that we have through resources that the business community directs back to us. Gratefully, I don’t see us doing that here. The relationships here with the business community are really true relationships. One of the things we’re doing and about to expand heavily is identification of internship and externship experiences for students, particularly in the school of management technology, but in all the other disciplines as well. One of the things that we’re committed to doing over the next two years is in all of the majors on campus, finding the real-world experiences that relate and enhance the major. So it won’t be anymore that it’s just the school of management technology that’s doing the business-based internships, but that a major in English might look to an internship with a business journal or a major in anthropology might well look to an internship with an architectural planning firm.
Q. RIC is celebrating its 150th anniversary. How has the college changed over the years?
A. It has evolved into a completely different organization. It was originally solely intended to prepare elementary teachers, and rather quickly evolved into an institution that prepared elementary and high school teachers. The (originally named Rhode Island State) Normal School that started, that RIC grew out of, really wasn’t even collegiate level; this was something folks did instead of high school to prepare to be teachers. And then it became the Rhode Island College of Education, still with an orientation toward teacher and educator preparation. It’s really only been since the late 1950s – a relatively short period of time – that we have become a completely and truly comprehensive state college. So on one hand it’s a completely different institution. On the other hand, it’s still very much the same and it is one of the things that makes this college distinctive.
