Leading an Island University: No Vacation

He took the helm at the University of Guam, in the northern Pacific Ocean, last year. When he told colleagues and friends that he was leaving the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University, which he had led for five years, to take the island post, their general response was “Wow, OK.”

While many colleges in the outlying U.S. territories or commonwealths are led by people whose higher-education experience is local, a few chief executives got their training on the mainland. David Hall, a former provost of Northeastern University, leads the University of the Virgin Islands, and Jorge Haddock-Acevedo was a dean at three mainland universities before returning to his native commonwealth to be president of the University of Puerto Rico.

Chief executives who take over at territorial institutions find that they face issues similar to those on the mainland, including diversity, brain drain, and government disinvestment. They rely on the same federal student-aid system as on the mainland. And, of course, they also encounter challenges particular to their new territories’ geography and culture.

Krise says he had never visited Guam before he applied for his current post. He grew up partly in the Virgin Islands, though, and “everyone who knows me knows that I’m an island kind of person.”

The University of Guam has more than 3,700 students, including the indigenous Chamorros; people of Filipino descent; and residents of neighboring islands, like Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, as well as people from the mainland United States and Hawaii, American Samoa, Japan, and Korea. Many of the students are military veterans, and Krise, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, says the university is seeking ways to better serve them and military dependents through its 25 bachelor’s- and 15 master’s-degree programs.

“There’s a strong sense that the whole region is dependent on the quality and work of the university,” he says. “It just matters more than any place I’ve been before.”

As the university seeks to develop doctoral offerings over the next five years, Krise is looking for ways to balance the area’s needs with program sustainability. For example, Micronesia needs audiologists, but perhaps 30 in all, not 30 new ones a year, he says, so it would not make sense to establish a doctor-of-audiology program.

The institution also plays a leading role in promoting environmentally sound practices on Guam and other islands. Its scientists are working to preserve cultural artifacts and indigenous plant life on unused land on Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base in conjunction with the Department of Defense’s plans to relocate about 4,000 Marines based in Okinawa, Japan, to a new Marine Corps base there.

The university has a contract to move rare orchids out of the way, and it is propagating shoots of a Hayun Lagu tree on the base that is the last wild tree of its species on Guam.

As might be expected, “we have both the people facilitating the expansion and the people opposed to the expansion all within the university,” says Krise.

In April, the university hosted its 10th annual Conference on Island Sustainability, which included a summit for island university presidents to discuss how they can promote sustainability in their communities.

Lessons From a Storm

Closer to the continental United States, another university leader with higher-education experience on the mainland had his own struggle with environmental issues, produced by a hurricane.

David Lenihan had never been to Puerto Rico before he made the decision to become president of the island’s Ponce Health Sciences University in 2014. He had served as a dean of the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, in New York, before he joined the private-equity firm University Ventures, which bought Ponce. Lenihan has focused his work in Puerto Rico on a central question: “How do I help people who have been slightly overlooked?” — students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds who are not getting into top medical schools like Harvard and Yale — to prepare themselves to enter the health-care work force.

To help accomplish this, he says, he has tried to keep tuition for Puerto Rican students at the for-profit institution lower than what they would pay if they studied on the mainland, and he restructured the traditional teaching style so medical students now watch videotaped lectures before class and then work through clinical problems in class.

Lenihan has also worked to expand the campus, although he did have to change course when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017.

“I can run a school,” he says he told his board chair as the storm approached. “But disaster recovery?”

Students and faculty members from Ponce stepped up to provide medical and psychological help to residents of rural towns in southern Puerto Rico before Federal Emergency Management Agency workers arrived there. Lenihan decided that a new building, which had been in the planning stage, would have to be constructed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

The lesson Lenihan took away from the storm is: “Move forward, make a decision, move forward, and keep moving forward. If you make a mistake, you can fix it.”

Training medical professionals to understand the cultures of the people they are serving, he says, is a crucial part of the education at Ponce.

Lenihan estimates that about half of the doctors Ponce trains leave the islands for work. Many of them provide valuable bilingual, bicultural care in underserved areas of mainland states, he says. He hopes that many of those who leave will return to practice in Puerto Rico after they pay off their student loans. The university plans to expand from 90 medical students per class to 150 to help meet the commonwealth’s need for doctors.

Ponce’s president shares Krise’s views on how much colleges in the territories matter.

As Krise says, they “carry a special sort of weight and burden and are just really, really important in ways that it’s hard to imagine in the mainland.”

Julia Piper, an editorial associate, compiles Gazette and writes the Hiring Trends feature. Email her at julia.piper@chronicle.com.