Low Profile, Big Changes

Marc Lebryk, USA Today Sports

On a Monday evening late in August, Michael A. McRobbie is, briefly, the star of the show.

McRobbie, president of Indiana University for more than a decade, is introducing his choice to open the university cinema’s season of art films. From the stage, he reads a synopsis of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cult classic Blow-Up, which he recalls from his days as an undergraduate in Australia. He is a connoisseur who relishes the movie’s details, pointing out cameo appearances by the rock band the Yardbirds and a young Michael Palin, who found fame in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The cinema is more than a showcase for the president’s passion for film. It’s a small but significant example of how McRobbie has sought to revitalize the university — not just by eagerly eyeing big splashes, but by retooling and repurposing buildings and programs. His approach shows one path forward for public universities struggling with financial challenges and flagging public confidence. Instead of simply abandoning programs and spaces to save money, Indiana has searched hard for strategic ways to give them new appeal and relevance.

The movie theater, for instance, was a small auditorium with a stage for live performances until 2002, when it was closed. It sat unused for a decade. To McRobbie, that empty space was an opportunity: The university paid for a $15-million renovation, creating a cozy space that preserved the early-20th-century decor and artfully disguised the venue’s state-of-the-art sound and projection technology.

AJ Mast for The Chronicle

The refurbished cinema has now become the anchor of the film-studies program, serving as both a classroom and a place to showcase the university’s archive of movies and related memorabilia. It has attracted filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, who appeared as a guest lecturer, and the performer Meryl Streep, who gave a master class and received an honorary degree.

More important, the cinema has brought new prominence to the film-studies program nationally and even internationally, says Gregory A. Waller, director of cinema and media studies at Indiana. In August, for example, the university played host to the 25th annual conference of Visible Evidence, an international group of scholars that supports research and debate on documentary and other nonfiction media.

McRobbie, 68, has a “talent for seeing the big picture and what’s missing — what can be pulled together to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts,” says John S. Applegate, executive vice president for academic affairs.

What has resulted is a renewal at a university where many on campus once felt that progress had halted. McRobbie’s leadership has coincided with a building boom — including a significant number of new classrooms and research spaces — a major academic reorganization, and a healthy bottom line. The changes have paid off particularly in the number of students on the Bloomington campus, where enrollment grew more than 23 percent from 2008 to 2016, to nearly 50,000. The number has fallen since then, because of a decline in international students, says the university.

In the Big Ten, only Rutgers University increased its enrollment as much over the same period, and that was due to a 2013 merger with a public medical school.

All of this has happened with little fanfare for McRobbie, who has often been overlooked by the media in favor of flashier personalities, such as Mitch Daniels, president of Indiana’s other Big Ten public institution, Purdue University, and Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. Despite Indiana’s successes, McRobbie’s name is not usually among the cadre of high-profile presidents who are named as trendsetters in higher education.

Richard M. Shiffrin, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana who has known McRobbie for nearly two decades, thinks he knows why. “Technical competence,” he says, “isn’t a good story.”

Renovation, Not Retrenchment

McRobbie took over as president in July 2007, just as the bottom was about to fall out of the U.S. economy. In 2009 the state cut tens of millions of dollars from the university’s budget — about 6 percent of its top line.

As the state’s tax revenue fell, McRobbie and the university’s trustees took a number of steps to mitigate the shortfall, including freezing salaries of administrators and faculty members, cutting back on travel, and limiting nonacademic hiring. Those austerity moves have become common at public institutions, including the neighboring University of Illinois system, that have been plagued by budget cuts and financial uncertainty.

But instead of just retrenching, Indiana’s new president saw a silver lining in the financial clouds. The university increased student aid by nearly $20 million and hired 129 new faculty members to keep up with enrollment increases. And McRobbie laid out big visions for the campus’s physical and academic structures. Late in 2007, he announced the development of a new campus master plan, with the goal of eliminating a shortfall of classrooms, adding five million square feet of research space, and updating nearly all student housing. And in 2009, McRobbie formed a committee to consider a broad academic reorganization.

“From his perspective, the economic downturn was a ‘buying opportunity,’ " says Lauren Robel, the provost. Interest rates were going down, so borrowing for construction would be cheaper, she notes, and top-notch faculty members from other institutions might be available.

After a decade, the result is $2.4 billion in construction, with 40 percent of that spent on renovation and deferred maintenance. The university made a deal with lawmakers to use the capital budget only for the cost of repairs and renovations, relying on philanthropy and internal money to pay for new construction, McRobbie says. The approach has allowed the university to escape a common criticism from lawmakers — that public institutions are building flashy new amenities at taxpayers’ expense, he says.

The emphasis on repairs and renovations is tactical in another way, too. As you walk to the campus from downtown Bloomington — just inside Sample Gates at the entrance — Franklin Hall is just on the left. The building opened in 1907 as the university’s library, but more recently it had housed administrative offices, pushing students and their liveliness away from the center of campus, says Thomas A. Morrison, vice president for capital planning and facilities.

In 2016, after a $21-million renovation, Franklin Hall became the home of the new Media School, which includes the departments of journalism, film studies, and telecommunications. Reorganizing the university’s journalism school had been debated for more than a dozen years before McRobbie told the departments involved that “they had to think it through,” says Robel.

It’s one of seven newly organized academic schools on the Bloomington campus, comprising mostly programs that were moved into different academic units. Those include two schools of public health and the School of Art, Architecture, and Design.

Not all of the new and reworked programs came easily. The changes that led to the Media School, for example, were met with resistance over concerns that the research aims and cultures of the affected programs were too much at odds.

“The vast majority of faculty and graduate students with whom we have spoken have made clear their objections to being part of a new school,” concluded a task force formed to consider the issue in 2010. “While we do not share all of their concerns, we recognize both their significant stake in such a step and the difficulty of building a successful new venture over their opposition.”

But McRobbie says programs had become outdated. “Our journalism school was well-ranked and had a fine history focused on print. There were many people who saw that as important, but it has also faced extensive criticism from students who said there was too little focus on digital media.”

Controversy over the creation of the new school has ebbed, says James Shanahan, its dean, in part because the change has included hiring more faculty members and has led to an increase in enrollment across the programs.

But the carrot of a high-profile spot in Franklin Hall was crucial in helping McRobbie avoid waiting around to change the minds of all the people who had reservations, says Fred H. Cate, vice president for research. “In the end, what comes out seems so desirable. It’s hard to be disgruntled in your new building with your new budget.”

‘A Talent in Planning’

Evidence of McRobbie’s roots is displayed throughout his office: A decorative cricket ball sits on a desk, not far from a ceramic poppy from a Tower of London art installation commemorating World War I. His grandfather, who left a deep impression on McRobbie, fought in the Great War and kept a diary, which McRobbie now has.

McRobbie was born and raised in Australia, where he earned degrees in logic and researched automated reasoning, a building block of artificial intelligence. He played cricket into his 30s and became a U.S. citizen only in 2010 — by then there was no doubt that Indiana was his home. His favorite item in his office is a painting of an Indiana scene, “So Brilliant Is the Setting Sun,” which he acquired from an emeritus faculty member, Barry Gealt. “I’ve had it since I arrived at Indiana,” the president says.

J. Michael Dunn, a professor emeritus of informatics and founding dean of that school at Indiana, met McRobbie when the future president was working on his doctorate at Australian National University.

“He has a very interesting combination of strategic thinking and tactical, hands-on type thinking,” says Dunn, who helped recruit McRobbie in 1997 to be Indiana’s first vice president for information technology. In that post, he acquired one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and established the nation’s first school of informatics.

The job also gave McRobbie a detailed understanding of how a campus works. “As CIO you have to know how to manage a structure to get results,” he says. “If the email system goes down, you have to know whose job it is to fix things.”

Not surprisingly, information technology and international studies are two areas in which McRobbie has sought to put his personal stamp on the university, reorganizing key programs and adding to their appeal with investments in distinctive facilities.

The arrangement of the new School of Global and International Studies, which combined foreign-language instruction and area studies, was “almost obvious,” he says. “The university had a history of foreign-language studies, but they were diffuse, unorganized, and unloved.”

AJ Mast for The Chronicle

In 2015 the university dedicated a newly opened building for the $54-million school, which was recently named in honor of two former members of Congress, Lee H. Hamilton and Richard G. Lugar, who now hold faculty appointments. The exterior of the building, like nearly all those on campus, is made of the limestone that is quarried near Bloomington. But inside, one wall of its airy atrium features stone from several continents.

The academic programs now housed in that space include four departments and more than 20 centers and institutes, combining areas that had previously been part of other units. The new school’s trump card is that it combines language training with the focus on culture and politics that area studies brings, says Lee A. Feinstein, a former ambassador to Poland who is now the dean.

The new arrangement has not benefited all departments equally, says Benjamin Robinson, an associate professor of Germanic studies. Many faculty members see McRobbie’s approach as supporting only financially successful programs, he says. Germanic studies, for example, is housed in the new building, but by next fall the department will have lost a large share of the tenure-track professors it had in 2008, he says.

“In general, it seems like a lot of things have done really well — why wouldn’t faculty have a sense of well-being?” Robinson says. “It’s a question of a commitment to sustaining fields that aren’t based in an entrepreneurial mind-set, programs that create value in ways that aren’t easily monetized.”

The restructured School of Informatics, Computer Science, and Engineering now incorporates not only information processing and computer science but also library sciences and a new program in intelligent-systems engineering, which includes research in artificial intelligence to “create systems that sense and react to their environments.”

The university didn’t need to create something from whole cloth to succeed in these areas, McRobbie argues. Instead, he and the reorganization committee looked for “optimal ways to organize that are attractive to students and helpful for faculty.”

Again, they sought to back up those goals with physical spaces. Luddy Hall, home to the school, is meant to maximize space for students to brainstorm in teams, says Raj Acharya, dean of the school. Glass-enclosed meeting rooms are positioned between the main floors of the $40-million building to symbolize the interactions of different disciplines, he says.

“I do have a talent in planning,” McRobbie says. “I can see connections in wildly different areas that not everyone can see.”

Building Ties to the State

Despite the level of change at Indiana, McRobbie has remained out of the national spotlight. In part, that’s because he was hired from within. He wasn’t a well-connected politician brought in to smooth relationships with state lawmakers or a captain of industry who promised to move a university from “great to greater.”

Nor has he hired a lot of top staff members from outside Indiana. “On the whole, I’m a big believer in internal promotions,” he says. “There tends to be very little start-up cost, and you get an opportunity to see that person in action, how they solve problems, how they get along with other people.”

McRobbie represents something of the opposite of Daniels, president of nearby Purdue, who has made a name for himself as a change agent and frequent critic of higher education from within. Daniels, a former Republican governor of the state who writes an opinion column for The Washington Post, has made waves with high-profile disruptions, like allying the state’s land-grant university to a controversial online college.

McRobbie’s leadership and methods have not relied primarily on novelty or broad enterprises. The university’s online-education profile has grown significantly during McRobbie’s tenure, but he has focused largely on shoring up the fundamental operations and building deeper ties with the state and its residents.

At the same time, he has managed to challenge some of the state’s longstanding conventions of higher education. Purdue is well known for its engineering programs; before McRobbie’s presidency, Indiana had ceded that territory, with no such program at all. When he decided that Indiana needed an engineering program, McRobbie sought a small niche, intelligent systems, that would not compete directly with Purdue’s. He worked with policy makers to convince them it would be a benefit to the state, says Robel, the provost. It was a tough battle — Purdue tried putting a stop to the effort — but McRobbie won.

Indiana also started a master’s degree in architecture in the fall, even though Ball State University already had a College of Architecture and Planning. In this case, the McRobbie leaned on the extraordinary collection of architectural styles in the city of Columbus, Ind., which has a population of less than 50,000 but boasts buildings designed by giants like Robert Venturi, I.M. Pei, and Eero and Eliel Saarinen. It’s also home to Indiana University-Purdue University at Columbus, where the university has established its program. The city gave the university system a chance to create a sort of living laboratory for architecture students, McRobbie says.

“There were some who felt encroachment,” says David Ferguson, interim dean of the architecture college at Ball State, in nearby Muncie. Indiana’s new program forced Ball State to focus its own program on its core strengths, he says. “It was not the most comfortable process, but it made us better.”

Academic reorganizations and building booms are, of course, not unusual for flagship colleges. Many of the nation’s largest public universities have sought to maintain their appeal and relevance even as they face continued financial uncertainty over state appropriations and uneven enrollment since the 2008 recession.

Unlike many other such institutions, however, Indiana is seeing signs of success. The university is doing relatively well on a number of measures related to its bottom line and its student outcomes.

Moody’s Investors Services cast a negative light on the outlook for the higher-education sector generally in 2018, but it gave Indiana a big thumbs up last month. The university has a healthy amount of cash to cover its debts and operations as well as solid support from the state, the bond-rating agency said in a news release.

That last point is important: From the 2014 to 2019 fiscal years, under the state’s outcomes-based funding formula, appropriations increased more than 10 percent for all of the campuses of Indiana University, including nearly 9 percent for the main campus in Bloomington.

Purdue, on the other hand, has seen a small decline under the state’s performance-based formula over the same period, and a more than 3 -percent decrease for its main campus, in West Lafayette.

Indiana University has also had success in courting donors during McRobbie’s tenure. It met a $2.5-billion fund-raising goal in July, three years ahead of schedule, and is now aiming for a total of $3 billion by 2021.

Its financial strength has allowed the university to avoid shifting more of the cost of education onto students. Student net price has increased during McRobbie’s tenure, from about $9,700 in 2008 to more than $12,600 in 2016. But even after that increase, Indiana’s price was next to the bottom among its Big Ten peers. Only Purdue had a lower net price in 2016.

Less than one-third of Indiana’s students take out federal loans, according to federal figures, and their average debt is about $22,000, well below the national average and within the range of its peer institutions in the Big Ten.

For all the spaces that McRobbie has repurposed at Indiana, though, there’s one that he hasn’t had much use for: the presidential house. He has declined to move in. He’s remained, instead, in his private home.

“It’s no secret, Laurie and I are particularly private people,” says McRobbie. They married in 2005 after both were widowed.

On campus, his lack of pretense sends a certain kind of message. McRobbie is “not a photo-op kind of guy. He wants to engage substantively — he’s not a ‘stop-by-for-a-drink’ kind of guy,” says Cate, the vice president for research.

For McRobbie, it’s just more evidence that he’s assimilated to life in the Midwest. If 20 years in Bloomington have instilled anything in him, he says, it may be a reluctance to tout his work.

“One of the faults of being a Midwesterner,” he says, “is that I don’t always promote some of the important things we do.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.