zNewsletter Sunday

Sunday Sit-Down: West Liberty University President Tim Borchers

Derek Redd

It has been a time of change at West Liberty University, with new university president Tim Borchers at the center of it. WLU announced in May that Borchers, then the vice president for academic affairs at Peru State College in Nebraska, would become WLU's 38th president. Since then, he has had to mend fences following the tumultuous term of his predecessor, W. Franklin Evans, and navigate position cuts in order to counter a $2.7 million budget deficit. Yet he sees a bright and solid future for the university, which he described in the Sunday Sit-Down.

Q: You’ve been in the position for a few months now. What are your initial impressions now that you’ve had a little bit more time to get settled into the West Liberty campus and the university itself?

A: Well, the campus is beautiful, especially this time of year. I'm really looking forward to homecoming coming up and the leaves turning and being more beautiful, but inside it’s really beautiful, too. We’ve got great people who really care about the students. The students have been fabulous. They are engaged on campus, they’re engaged in the community. They really take an interest in their future and it’s been exciting to be able to see that.

Q: Let's talk a little bit about you, about your background. What was it really that brought you into the education field? And then after that, what was it that made you say, "Okay, I think my path is going to be educational leadership."

A: I would say just the quest for knowledge, trying to always learn more. Learning is one of my top strengths. And so, as an undergraduate student, really being interested in learning and being really interested in creating knowledge and then going into graduate school, and then getting a job as a faculty member early on, and just really being able to learn more, but then pass that along to students. So really being able to teach students to see them grow to see them develop, and then just kind of naturally, I just kept saying yes to positions and found myself as a dean at Minnesota State University Moorhead. And after seven years of that, I went down to Nebraska as a vice president for academic affairs and seemed to have a skill of being able to bring people together and the skill of being able to assemble information so that people can take action on it. And then when the position opened up here, it just seemed like a good fit. The school I came from is very similar in size, similar student population, the oldest school in Nebraska, located on top of a hill so it seemed like a good, good place to make a transition to.

Q: Where did that love of learning start? Did it start when you were really little? Did that seed germinate in middle school, high school? Where did it really come from?

A: I don’t know. I used to read encyclopedias. So probably from an early age I would read through encyclopedias and just try to learn what I can and I was able to retain a lot of it. School came pretty easily for me, so it was always always a challenge to try to learn more.

Q: Did you just one day just grab a book, just grab the Bs and start going through?

A: Probably, or hearing something and then just being curious to find out more about it. You know, now we’ve got our phones so we hear something, we can pull it up right away. I think it was the same kind of thing. It was a little harder when you had to go to the bookshelf and pull the book out.

Q: Was there a point kind of in your higher education journey that you’re like, "You know what? I really want to be a faculty member. I want to impart this love of learning to others"? When did you feel that happened?

A: Well, I had some really great mentors. One of my mentors was Dr. Jack Kay. He was my advisor, my wife’s advisor. We really saw in him a dedication and commitment to service, as well as to teaching, but he really made things come alive for people. And then through my graduate school years, I had a number of other mentors that really played a powerful role in setting a good role model and being able to learn from them in a very intimate, personalized kind of way.

Q: And what are the big things that you have always wanted to impart on the student when you were teaching them and how has that kind of evolved as you’ve grown in leadership roles, and now as president?

A: We’ll always try to help them see the big picture and see how they can be a part of that big picture. So trying to frame the big picture, but then really focus on applied hands-on work and having students do experiential learning assignments, internships, study-abroad experiences. So really having students immerse themselves and, more than just learning, really applying what they’ve learned.

Q: Now that you’ve kind of had that chance to dig in, when you look around at the university, what parts do you see as jumping off points? In growing this university to be viable and necessary and integral, these are great launch points that we want to fortify?

A: Well, I think experiential learning is a great jumping off point. We have students who are doing really interesting and really important research with faculty members. Some of the research that I’ve seen some of our science students do is clearly at the masters level, even though they’re undergraduate students. So student research would be an example and we’ve got that throughout the curriculum.

There are students doing research with faculty and all kinds of different academic programs, going to conferences presenting that work. We’ve got students who have done internships all over the valley, locally, as well as in some other places. We had a student go to New York this year to do a residency for her art program. So really, I think experiential learning is a way that we can set ourselves apart from other institutions as well, by giving our students really applied learning opportunities so that they can see how they can make a difference in the world.

We’ve got some really good graduate programs and we’ve got some good leadership in our graduate area that is looking at new opportunities, opportunities to maybe for our own students that continue their education. The new doctoral program that we’re launching (in education), I think, will have a really good contribution to the valley in terms of preparing more doctorally prepared people.

It's also very exciting to see that our athletic program here is very strong, and has been strong for years in a number of sports. And as you may have seen, we’re going to be adding women’s wrestling, which I think will take a really good advantage of the strong wrestling program that we have as well as the strong student interest in that sport. So that’s definitely a launching point that we’ve already launched off of. I think our arts programs here are very strong as well. Our theater program has students winning awards and I'm looking forward to the first music concerts of the year. Our art faculty and our art students are very ambitious and they always have exhibitions up.

And then of course, Gary West, who passed away (recently) has created many opportunities for our students both through facilities but also through the support that he’s given for scholarships and for our College of Business.

Q: With what you said about experiential learning, applied learning, is that really the future of higher education? There is always that lecture concept but really now, with kids, through technology I think they want to be more active. Do you think that the experiential side of the learning process is really kind of the future of higher education where it’s not just sit and listen, it’s go and do?

A: I definitely think it is. I think students don’t just sit there for an hour and 15 minutes or for 50 minutes and listen to a lecture; it needs to be broken up. They need to have the opportunity to do hands-on work. I think a lot of the students that I’ve worked with really appreciate doing that. The research on it is very strong as well. For years, numerous studies have pointed to high impact practices such as experiential learning, internships, study abroad, those being really ways to increase student learning and increase the learning for groups of students who are disadvantaged, sometimes students who haven’t had the same kind of high school experience, students who come to us with a little bit of a deficit. They can grow even more and learn even more through some of those high impact practices. So I definitely think it’s a good bet to double down on.

Q: Where are some places that you’ve looked at in the university and said this has room to climb, some room to grow? Where are those places that you think need fortified?

A: We know that our students are coming to us after the COVID pandemic with some real challenges. They’re coming to us with mental health challenges. So making sure that we have those support systems in place and bolstering those ... again, I think they do a great job, but we’re just seeing so many more students coming to us with some mental health conditions, and also academic preparation (issues). So we need to really make sure that we’ve got good tutors in place, that we’ve got creative support programs in place for those students to look at how we teach some of those students who might need more help with math or with writing. And I think we’ve got some good people and we’ve got some good programs in place for that. But the demand is just so great that I think that’s where we’ll be spending a lot of time to make sure that those students can get caught up so that they can be successful here as well.

Q: Did it surprise you that the level of demand is at the point that it is after COVID for those types of services?

A: It shouldn’t be by this point, but I think we’re still surprised by the numbers. From what I’m hearing from our counselors, their numbers are way up even over last year. So I think we probably would have thought that, by now, things would have leveled off, but I think they’re only getting exponentially greater demand each year and seeing some of the local scores from some students you're definitely seeing the drop off where the students would have been going through the pandemic and in terms of their math scores, for instance. So I think it’s going to be a problem that’s going to take the whole community to approach. We need more math teachers. We need more students interested in math at a young age so that they continue to learn because math skills are so vital to our health industry. They’re so vital to a lot of the fields that students want to go into so it’s really important that we that we take a community approach to trying to address some of these issues.

Q: You’ve been in educational leadership throughout the pandemic, what was that like for you to see that from the start to everything reopening? And what do you see as kind of your greatest concerns over getting these kids back to good?

A: Well, I’m not sure we’re going to go back to normal. I think we’re in a new normal. Like here and like at Nebraska, we sent our students home in March 2020 and we brought him back in the fall semester. I know some schools did and some schools didn’t, but we brought them back fall semester. I think we kind of thought, OK, everything’s going to be back to normal. But as we look back on our data there, that fall semester was the worst semester for our students academically, and we lost a lot of students. If they were out on quarantine two or three times, they missed a lot of class and you just can’t make that up with Zoom. I think you’ve got to be there to listen to the class to talk to the instructor. So we thought, OK, we’re back to normal, but definitely we weren’t in demand as we’ve seen each class come in. The students have not been as engaged as they once were, not as academically prepared. As I’ve said, I think from what I’m hearing, our freshmen this semester are very engaged here. They’re going to class, they’re taking advantage of opportunities. We invited students over to the house before classes started, and we were just blown away by how many showed up and they showed up right away at the opening and they stayed and they had a good time. So I think we’re seeing that engagement level, but then, under the surface is where you start to see some of the more anxiety, some of the mental health concerns and some of the academic preparation. So I think in some ways, they’re getting back to the kinds of first year students that we’ve always been used to, but I think in many other ways, when you dig below the surface, it’s a new normal that we’ll have to adjust to and we’ll have to be creative in how we adjust

Q: In providing and bolstering those services, this is a local university with a finite amount of resources. What do you feel West Liberty University can do to fortify those services for the students? And you were mentioning earlier, it's going to take a whole community. Where now can the community come in to help not just at this university but all of the small colleges around the Ohio Valley?

A: I think prioritizing when it comes to funding, prioritizing where we need to expand our funds, and if we need to provide more funding to some of those services, to do that. We’re looking at adopting some new software that can help provide holistic support to students. So we’re really moving to a model where we have not just any one advisor working with a student, but we’ve got a whole team of people that will surround that student and will be able to have the technology so that we can share information - when appropriate, obviously, protecting confidentiality - but sharing information in a way that we all have a little bit more knowledge when we’re working with that students. So those are some of the ways that we’re doing it from a community level. I think it’s developing strong relationships with the schools. We’ve got some dual credit pathway programs. The "Grow Your Own" is trying to try to bring students out of our local schools, get them some early college credits so that they can get back into the schools as certified teachers a little bit quicker and hopefully a little bit more energized. So I definitely think those kinds of pathways, those partnerships will be important.

Q: What do you think about the level of partnerships with the local schools?

A: I think we’ve got some really good partnerships, like the dual credit that I talked about with several other schools. There’s always more that we can do. I’d love to get around and meet with all the principals and superintendents. I know that our education dean and our faculty meet regularly with their counterparts and I’ll be attending those meetings soon. I think are really good opportunities to get them in, but really the Grow Your Own model is a great one. If a school has some promising high school seniors or juniors that they want to bring back, then we should be able to work with them to get them educated and get them the experience so that they’re willing and able to go back to their schools

Q: How important is it to be the type of university where you say, "Hey, Ohio Valley students, you can come to us if you want to stay in the valley. We’re a great place for you to get that degree and to further your education so that you can stay within the Ohio Valley"? And how do you look at building partnerships with other industries around so that when these industries are looking to hire, they look to you guys?

A: I haven’t had a great chance to do that yet, but it's certainly on the agenda. We’ll be launching some new strategic planning this year and hope to get out and meet with some businesses to really hear about their needs and to be able to form those partnerships. I know that we have students that are interning locally, there are apprenticeships and different kinds of on the job learning opportunities. Being able to provide the career support to our students that they know about those opportunities, those could all be avenues that we pursue. I think ultimately sometimes students don’t want to go to the (university) just down the street. They want to try to go somewhere else and broaden their perspectives.That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. But for those that (want to stay) we are a good fit. We need to make sure that they know about us, and probably most of them do, but they need to know how we can be transformational, how they can get the same opportunities, the same experiences here that they would get at other places. And that’s a that’s a communication issue that we’ll be working on to make sure that they have that knowledge.

Q: Speaking of communication, the couple years prior to your arrival at West Liberty were pretty tumultuous. What do you feel have been the most important ways that you’ve gone to the people who work at West Liberty and show them that this is going to be a tenure of stability, this is going to be a tenure of communication?

A: Through regular communication. I’ve been sending out email updates that have been very well received and I think keeping everyone updated and having them hear from me is important. I tried to get out and walk around and meet people. I have met, I think, over 120 faculty and staff in individual or small group meetings since I’ve started, and those have been very valuable for me to not only learn about the person but to learn about how they contribute to our mission. I think starting to build trust, starting to build that rapport with people is important. We created a president’s council. So it’s a larger group of people that we bring together monthly to share important information and updates. Our strategic planning process will have a lot of opportunities for faculty and staff and community members and alums to be able to plug into different sessions so that they can provide their feedback as well. So I think it’s being responsive, it’s being present, it’s being accessible. I think those are all some of the principles that I’m trying to achieve.

Q: How much do you think that has helped bridge the gap that I think wasn’t there between the president’s office and the university?

A: I think it’s been really important. Sometimes when you speak to a group, you hear the loudest voices. I’m trying to hear all voices, trying to just interact with them informally as well. We had faculty and staff up to the house as well before school started, and a lot of them said, "Oh, I've never been to the president’s house before. And I’ve had people say, "Oh, I’ve never been to the president’s office before." So I think that’s been good. But also I have been meeting with department chairs in their spaces. I’ve had tours of our facilities, almost each building, so I understand the challenges that they have. We have a lot of deferred maintenance, a lot of infrastructure needs. So I’ve been able to see that firsthand instead of just reading about it or hearing about it. So I think that’s been really important too.

Q: In your talks with folks, what's the coolest thing you’ve learned so far?

A: Let’s just start with the academic success of our athletic teams. I’ve been really pleased to see that our students perform well in the classroom as well as on the athletic field. And that’s a real testament to the dedication of our coaches to make sure students stay on track. Seeing some of our science facilities ... you know, a lot of our facilities need updating. We’re waiting on deferred maintenance, but Campbell Hall has some state of the art facilities that our students are able to take advantage of. Seeing how our people have been creative with grant writing, to be able to get the equipment that our students can use here that they probably wouldn’t be able to use unless they were a graduate student at a larger institution. So here, first year and second year students are getting exposure to some really top level scientific equipment.

The Appalachian Aquatic Conservation Center, that whole enterprise has been a really fun topic to learn about, just how established our faculty and students are in terms of supporting that kind of work, with saving crayfish from development areas and then nurturing them and then putting them back in the environment. And probably just how friendly people are, how willing they are to engage and how willing they are to connect and that hasn’t been just on campus that’s been throughout the whole community. I went to the July 4 symphony concert and fireworks and met so many people that night and so many people really interested in West Liberty and then that has just continued at every steak fry or every banquet that I’ve gone to or every opportunity I’ve had to meet people in the community. They’ve been very welcoming and really interested in in West Liberty and in our future.

Q: How closely are you looking at the situation at WVU with academic transformation, budget deficits, those types of things?

A: Well, we’re looking carefully at that. As you know, we had some some budget gaps to fill before I started, but we’re looking at doing strategic planning this year. We’ll take a look at all of our programs across the institution to figure out which ones we can invest in which ones can be those launching points for further enrollment. Enrollment obviously is a concern everywhere and a concern that we have as well. So we will be doing a lot of work this year with strategic planning to really identify those strengths and to figure out how we can capitalize on those strengths.

Q: Do you have a concern for the future of higher ed as a whole?

A: Well, certainly, I think you see the demographics and certainly, when you look at traditional college age students, you see the demographic challenges. You see the fact that a lot of them have chosen to stop out for a year or two and not go on to college. So I think our traditional way of thinking about college might be changing and permanently changing. I think schools are going to have to be creative and nimble and looking at online programs, looking at some of those students who do stop after a couple years. What does it look like when you have a 23 or 24 year old freshman coming to campus and how can you meet the needs that they’ll have? I think workforce connections are very important so that we’re providing the kinds of programs that students need, but I also think it’s important to get out the idea that that our society needs well rounded thinkers, thinkers who know about history, thinkers who know about economics, thinkers who appreciate the arts. But I think that will be important and that’s probably a story that’s harder to tell these days. But I think that’s an important story that we need to think about creating these people that are going to transform the world and they really need to have a broad set of knowledge and skills and dispositions in order to do that.

Q: How tough is it for an institution to become nimble?

A: I think it can be difficult. I think that a couple of key variables would be trust and communication. I think everyone at the institution needs to trust the collective vision and trust where the institution's headed and that has developed through interactions and developed through communication through people being part of the process. I think another key variable is being educated about what’s going on. We’ve got to be able to share information. We’ve got to be able to share what’s happening at other institutions, what the best practices are there. So I think education, trust and then just trying to create a culture in which people are willing to move in different directions. Those things are difficult to do sometimes. But I think that those are all things that are going to be pretty critical to being able to adapt and to be nimble so that we can meet the challenges that are coming our way.

Q: You talk about wanting to develop the well rounded student, the well rounded thinker, but how do you strike the balance of developing the well rounded thinker with a wide range in the course catalog, but also making sure that you are are focusing on getting students into the workforce in the field of their degree?

A: Almost every conversation I’ve ever had with a business leader, when we asked what do you look for in a college graduate, it’s not the technical skills. They say "we can teach the technical skills." What they’re looking for is can they communicate, can they write a good email, can they write a brief white paper, can they communicate interpersonally with others, can they work in a team? Because that’s critically important. Are they critical thinkers? Can they look at information and make judgments, decisions about that? I think that getting that message out to students can be a challenge sometimes because they do tend to think you know, get your general studies classes out of the way so you can focus on your major. But what I hear from employers is they really need both and probably need the critical thinking and leadership, the communication skills, even more than they need that the technical business skills. So designing programs so those are mutually reinforced in our students, but also bringing employers to campus to talk with our deans, to talk with our faculty, with our department chairs and with our students to let them know what their priorities are because that might make people think differently about some of their goals.

Q: West Liberty has partnered with Marshall University to develop an aviation program at the Ohio County Airport. What do you see is the future of that program? And do you think that is just the start of more programs like that?

A: Well, I hope it’s the start of those programs and I think that is going to be an exciting one. Aviation is another one of those fields that desperately needs employees. So students see that as a good career path where they can get out right away and make some money and it’s a pretty exciting job as well. I think that’s a really good place to meet a workforce need and also to offer that support to the airport so that it can grow and develop and continue to serve the area. We really enjoyed working with the RED economic development group as well as the county commissioners to make that happen, and with Marshall. I think that’s a good example of working with other institutions to try to meet some of the needs that we have in the state.

Q: We were talking a little bit earlier about the financial challenges that West Liberty had right before you came in. As with any business when that happens, when there are layoffs and things like that, that can really sock a company's community in the jaw. How has West Liberty climbed back out from that and how do you feel things have gone since what I’m sure was probably a pretty tough couple of weeks?

A: You know, I think it’s had an effect on the psyche. I think that’s where they’re thirsty for communication. They’re thirsty to learn more about what’s going on and how we got to this situation, and really what we can all do to work to avoid it in the future. So kind of an all hands on deck for enrollment for retaining students. That’s some of the response that I’ve seen from it. I’ve seen some creative ways of trying to address where we were. We may have some staffing challenges due to some of the layoffs that we had to do and hopefully we’re finding ways to to be more nimble, to be more efficient and to prioritize what needs to get done and how we’re going to get it done. But anytime you do something like that at an institution, it has impacts on it. It raises the bar for the level of trust and a level of respect that needs to be given to the leadership and that’s what I’m trying to step up and to make sure that we have that trust with our employees.

Q: You mentioned retention. It’s one thing to bring him in. It’s another thing to keep them and to get them out with a degree in their hands. How tough has retention been in that post-COVID era and what are you guys looking at in fortifying retaining students so that they can get out of here in four years or five years with that degree?

A: We have some of the better retention rates, if you look at other institutions in the state. So we’re starting from a pretty strong area. We want to improve that because obviously it’s about transforming the lives of the students that we’re able to retain and help them be successful. It’s definitely a key priority of mine. I think some of the ways you do that is by providing holistic support to students, where you have a whole team of people working with them. We’ll team up people knowledgeable about what their needs are and how we can meet those needs. It’s understanding that those students aren’t just having ... if they’re not doing well in class, is it because they’re not going? And if they’re not going, why aren’t they going? So what we can do to get to the root cause of some of the challenges that the students are presenting. But, certainly, it’s been more of a challenge, post pandemic and it’s something that will be with us, but we just need to be more creative, I think, in addressing how we’re going to address that.

Q: What do you feel is West Liberty’s place in the larger landscape of higher education, especially when you’re seeing like the big land grant universities like WVU have their struggles. Where do you feel you can make sure these kids who are going to college see your value?

A: Well, I think that’s exactly what it is, it's value. It’s the affordability that we provide, but then the experience that we provide as a result of that. So they’re getting a comprehensive experience here. They can do student activities, they can do research with faculty. They’re learning from some very qualified and very skilled faculty members, are supported by a great staff and they’re doing it at a tuition rate that is pretty competitive, especially when you look at some of the other places that students might choose to go. So I think it really comes down to the value proposition. You look at the affordability. You look at what you’re getting in return for that. And I think for a lot of the students in this area, it’s a really high rate of return on what they’re investing in their education.

Q: This past August, you had to be there for kids who were at Alderson Broaddus when their university closed. Is that a kind of a new path that you as university leadership are going to look toward?

A: That situation made us look pretty carefully at how nimble can we be in terms of moving students through the admission pipeline pretty quickly. And I think we learned a lot, but I think we had a lot of good things in place already to make that happen for students. So I think we’ll always be looking to see, if a major is eliminated somewhere, do we have capacity to take those students on? I’ll just give a great credit to all of our staff who made it possible for us to take on the AB second year physician assistant students, because that was a really heavy lift to be able to do. We brought over their faculty, we were able to get all their placements squared away. So those students would have a place to go do their clinical work. And we were able to take about 20 of the second year AB PA students.

Q: How much did that kind of bolster your feelings about the people who work for you and with you, that they were able to do something like that and do it in a really quick manner? I really think that speaks to the resiliency of the faculty and staff.

A: It was very inspirational. We knew there were roadblocks, we knew there would be some real challenges in doing that, but everyone was resilient. They persevered, they stuck through it and I think the big thing is they kept those students in mind and these weren’t even our students, but they did it for those students. They did it because they wanted those students to be able to go on. It was a real commitment to the workforce because, as you probably know, the need for PA students is great. So being able to get 20 more students into the workforce at the end of this academic year will definitely be good for the state and for the valley.

Q: How do you take the resiliency and the inspiration you saw there and spread it out to the rest of the departments of the university and say, hey, we need to do that everywhere?

A: And I have to figure out how to do that. But I definitely think it’s a great story that we can continue to tell and a great example for others that might say, oh, we can’t do that. Well, they found a way to do it. And so we can be creative in our responses and putting in the hard work to make a difference for students.