When you visited TU for the first time in March, what was your biggest takeaway?

I loved a few things. The first was how everyone rallied around our theme of being student-centric and caring for student success. When I was talking to people, they always came to this point: “How does this help our students?”

TU, in the midst of all the turbulence that's happening in higher education, is doing the fundamentals really well, and unwaveringly. Yes, they share some of the issues with higher ed from across the board, but that did not deter them from doing right.

Things like student retention—everybody can only dream of the numbers like TU has. And the second piece is four-year graduation. You graduate your students that we bring on time. That means a lot, especially in a transformational institution like Towson.

That means lower student debt, increased capacity for transformation. These are fundamental to some of the work that we do. Yes, intellectual pursuit is what a university is going to seek to excel in, but over time, these important factors also have become defining for the university's strength. And I found TU to be extremely strong in those areas.

What about CBE in particular?

When you come in from outside, you look at the faculty profile. Where the faculty are from, what kind of work they are doing in terms of research. When I started talking to them, the incredible passion that they all had in terms of serving the students, I think that is the key if you want to make a transformational impact on your students, engage with the community or create societal impact.

Faculty support. In a university, they take a lot of ownership in terms of the intellectual power, the curriculum and inspiring our students. The students come back to see not the dean, they come back to see the faculty.

A peripheral example in how that translates into student success is how technology has been a guiding factor for business success in the last several years. There is always a call to make newer technologies embedded in the curriculum so that our students become workforce ready and have in-demand skills in terms of technology. When I looked at the curriculum and asked around, I was amazed by the extent of technology that's been embedded into the curriculum. CBE's culture of being forward-looking, improving continuously, was very impressive.

What are some areas where you think CBE has the potential to grow?

The current generation of students and generations to come are going to be different type of learners than what we were used to when we were learners. There are some behaviors you expect of them that they don't exhibit, but that's just the changing times.

One of the strongest things that I advocate is that the only reason students come to campus cannot be just to attend classes. We need to give strong reasons in terms of experiential learning, co-curricular activities on campus that the students feel really enthused about and want to be part of. So that's a big push.

One of the things I'm working on, even while we keep our eyes on the big price of a new building for the College of Business and Economics, is how do we create inviting spaces for the next several years for our students?

The other great opportunity is engaging with the alums. We have just scratched the surface in my view. I've created a framework to work on how we create a base right before they leave and bring them back for engagement, which should lead to advocacy and philanthropy.

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We’re living in an era of tariffs, cryptocurrency and the emergence of AI. Why, at this point in time, is an undergraduate business education so important?

Business, technology and society are getting drawn together so much that you're not even able to distinguish between them. Many businesses should have started off as an existing business taking on new technology to serve customers in a new way. But the way it happened was a technology company found a way to serve the customers. A technology company like Airbnb…why did not a big hotel chain found Airbnb?

Now, if you look at some of the cities in Europe, they're banning Airbnb because people are not able to find housing. So there is a societal impact. So you have technology, business and then society coming through.

So the business education would have to help you scan the environment, both from a technology perspective and from a societal perspective and—in the middle of all that—ask, “How do you responsibly make money for your investors and yourself?”

That [combination] of technology, business and society is a platform that's not going to change. And our students, the more they are conscious of and well-trained in that confluence—which we do already; it's just that it's not presented in that format—that's the strength of the business education.  

[The concern is] not just, "Okay, tomorrow if entry-level accountants are replaced by AI, our students won't have a job." Accounting, as much as it is bookkeeping, is strategy. It's the same in marketing. You will go back to work on the fundamental needs because some of the intermittent marketing work could be [assumed] by AI.

Similarly, any of the jobs which are repetitive and can be gleaned from existing data, those things, AI is going to play a big role. But then people are not going to, in my view, blindly follow what a tool is going to do. We have seen that fail a number of times in some of the big financial areas, where believing that the system you created is going to work.  

I think the fundamental education that we provide our students is socially conscious and transformative, where critical thinking and innovation are built on top of what the AI can already do, not in a way that AI can replace it.