For a university to succeed, Joseph Rallo said, it has to hang on to its first-year students.
Rallo, a candidate for the presidency of Emporia State University, knows what he’s talking about. It was just two years ago that his own Western Illinois University in Macomb was losing 40 percent of its students before they started their sophomore year. Not good, especially with state money becoming tight.
“If you spend a lot of time recruiting a student that’s academically and athletically what you want, it seems counter-productive to lose 40 percent of them within the first year,” Rallo said during a breakfast this morning at the Trusler Business Center.
So, he said, he and the school used $1 million and a more focused approach. Freshman classes would not be larger than 15 students. Faculty would have mentors. Instructors would even have a little extra money for things like a class pizza party.
Now things are turning around. It’s still too soon to say if the program caused the success, Rallo said, but it surely hasn’t hurt.
“We wanted to create a first-year experience where the student felt valued, but got more support than they usually would,” Rallo said today.
That’s typical for Rallo, who visited Emporia today and Monday. Another program he was involved with, “Learning to Lead,” took a handful of students, gave them some management training and then placed them in Washington, D.C., internships. Some ended up with the CIA. Others were placed in the National Park Service or the National Archives. All had their eyes opened to what leadership required.
Rallo holds a bachelor’s degree in Russian history, a law degree, and a master’s and doctorate degree in international trade policy. But in his own student days, Rallo might have seemed an unlikely scholar. He had been a bright high school student but floundered early in his freshman year.
Then, in December, his philosophy professor threw an unusual question to the class: “If I call the tail of a horse a leg, how many legs does a horse have?”
“I said seven,” Rallo recalled Monday to an audience at the Memorial Union ballroom. “The tail, forelegs, and the hind legs.”
The professor stopped cold at the pun. Then he told Rallo “I don’t know where you’ve been all semester, but there’s something there.”
“That was when I first learned how useful humor can be,” Rallo said.
So can a wide-ranging background. Rallo has driven for smokejumpers in the Grand Canyon, served in Navy intelligence before transferring to the Air Force, and been a fellow at a Florence, Italy, university in addition to the more normal posts of professor, business dean and provost. Even now, he stays active — he’s taking part in one fraternity fundraiser using Big Wheels.
“So I’ll be circling the arena for an hour with my tongue out,” he said Monday.
Rallo is a colonel in the Air Force reserve, but said the odds of him being called up are next to none.
As might be expected from his academic background, Rallo is a big believer in international education. The key, he said, is to make sure that visiting students don’t remain in their own enclave but become part of the campus life.
“This is not just about bringing students here or sending ours over there,” he said Monday. “It’s realizing what they can do once they’re on campus.”
If a student couldn’t have an international experience any other way, Rallo said, WIU would arrange a trip to Chicago. For students from small rural communities, he said, even visiting the embassies and the trade missions could make a huge impact.
Macomb also sits near a large Hispanic population at Beardstown, a city that’s an hour’s drive away with several meatpacking plants. Western Illinois took advantage of that, Rallo said this morning, by sending its English as a Second Language faculty out to the Tyson plant. The proximity didn’t hurt either.
“The Hispanics wanted their children to go to a university, but not too far away,” Rallo said. “And thanks to our relationship with the parents, we’re beginning to see an increase in the number of Hispanic students we get from the high school.”
Rallo also has one Kansas connection — a daughter who is a fifth-year senior at the University of Kansas.
If chosen as president, Rallo said Monday, he intends to remain connected to the students on campus as much as possible.
“There’s no better job than to be paid to think and be around young people,” he told the audience at the Memorial Union. “It’s a wonderful life.”