Michael Lane wants to be the man at the top of Emporia State University. But that doesn’t mean he wants to make every decision himself.
“My style is to push a decision down to the lowest level at which it should be made,” Lane said this morning at a breakfast meeting at the Trusler Business Center. “I hate micromanaging. It’s a waste of my time and it’s a waste of the manager’s time. And if I’m micromanaging the manager, I don’t need the manager.”
Lane, the provost at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, is the fourth of five candidates for the presidency of ESU. He visited Emporia today and Tuesday.
Before becoming provost in Arkansas a year and a half ago, he held the same position at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania for five years. Mansfield is 4 to 4 1/2 hours away from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and several other major cities.
“In marketing lingo, we were in the middle of everywhere,” Lane said. “In reality, we were in the middle of nowhere.”
On the other hand, by increasing recruiting efforts in those cities, Mansfield was able to increase its minority enrollment from 6 percent to 10 percent while Lane was there and to retain 69 percent of its minority students instead of 62.
Lane was also part of an effort by Mansfield to work with the state, Temple University and a local hospital to establish a free dental clinic. After a rocky start, the clinic expanded quickly, serving 2,200 patients by 2005.
It’s vital, Lane said, that universities take opportunities like that to work with the community,
“We have to be a partner in the economic development of the community and in the social services of the community, because we are part of the community,” Lane said in an interview this morning.
Right now, he said, the most crucial issue facing any public university is funding. And increasingly, he said, that means using private funding and donations. Given that, Lane said, the university has to make good use of its alumni to approach prospective students and their parents.
More public programs such as athletics and fine arts also help, he said, by strengthening a graduate’s tie with the university. Those programs also often have a side benefit for the community as a whole, he added.
“When a business is looking for a place to locate, it’s looking for quality of life,” Lane said. “The athletic events, concerts, arts and the rest all contribute to that quality of life and we need to be aware of that.”
Lane holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and master’s and doctoral degrees in accounting.
He stressed the need for Emporia State University to look at its marketing plan. Its Teachers College has a fine reputation and will always be the flagship program, he said, but other programs could and should be promoted as well.
It’s also important, he said, not to just promote ESU as the lowest-cost university in Kansas. There’s a perception among some, he said, that you get what you pay for, so being “the cheap school” could hurt as much as help.
“We need to look at tuition and whether to raise it, but we also have to be very conscious that, as a state university, we need to remain affordable for those who have difficulty affording higher education,” he said at the interview.
His current school is in the process of shifting from a community college to a university. Tuition and faculty pay levels are still being worked out, he said, but are nearly where they should be.
But the most important thing for ESU’s students or any college student, he said, is to get them some world experience.
“I’ve often said that if I woke up tomorrow and became the czar of higher education, my first decree would be that every student would spend some time abroad as part of their education,” he said in a Tuesday address in the ESU Memorial Union. “This is a very small planet we’re occupying and it’s getting smaller every day.”