EWU chief gets quick course

Rodolfo Arevalo has been taking a short course in the Inland Northwest.

In his first days on the job, the new president of Eastern Washington University met the governor and key legislators in Olympia. He’s met community leaders in Spokane and Cheney and the region’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C.

Back in Cheney, he’s still meeting with members of every academic department and others around campus.

“To a certain extent it’s drinking by fire hose,” said Jeff Gombosky, EWU lobbyist. “But he seems to be taking it in well.”

Arevalo started April 1, coming from his hometown of Edinburg, Texas, where he was the provost at the University of Texas-Pan American. And while he’s spent a lot of time on campus, his schedule off campus illustrates a reality about modern university presidents – their jobs are as much about off-campus issues like politics, fundraising and community interaction as they are about what happens on campus.

“It probably took me three or four years to meet the governor of Texas,” he said. “Here, it happened on the second day.”

Arevalo ran into another chief difference between his old job and his new one soon after he arrived, when contract negotiations with the faculty union broke down and went to mediation. The faculty at UTPA are not unionized.

In recent weeks, Eastern’s faculty has been more public with its dissatisfaction about salaries and workloads, rallying on campus Tuesday as mediation began and passing a symbolic vote of censure against the Board of Trustees.

“It’s an issue I’d rather not be dealing with, but it’s not atypical of bargaining situations,” Arevalo said. “If I had all the money in the world, it would be very easy to reach a contract. But we have limited dollars, and so we have to negotiate.”

Faculty leaders say they’re encouraged by Arevalo thus far, and that he seems knowledgeable and patient and has spent a lot of time listening. But they say it’s too early to tell whether he’ll be better at addressing their concerns than past administrations.

They’ve said that the school’s professors are paid below state and national averages and are low among comparable institutions nationally.

“The management team and the Board of Trustees put the new president in a very difficult position,” said Sally Winkle, president of the Faculty Organization. “He’s got this huge challenge, a very difficult situation with faculty who have many concerns.”

Mayor-slash-CEO

Balancing his on-campus duties with broader regional objectives will be an ongoing part of the job for Arevalo. One of his key values for the university is to connect it to the surrounding community, several people said – to provide training for local businesses when possible, to collaborate with other local institutions and to focus on community service.

Rich Hadley, president of the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce, said the job of university president is a unique mix of responsibilities. Hadley meets regularly with college and university presidents in the Spokane area to promote cooperation and coordination among them.

“On one hand, Rodolfo is the CEO of a major corporation, whose product is students taught in higher education,” Hadley said. “On the other hand, he is almost like the mayor of a community.”

A native of South Texas, Arevalo has moved into the president’s house on campus with his wife, Nadine. He says that, while free time has been sparse, they have taken some late-night walks around the campus, getting a sense of the place. He’s attended football scrimmages and track meets, and spent part of an afternoon this week reviewing the research efforts of undergrads at EWU’s annual celebration of that work.

Promoting research was a hallmark of Arevalo’s time at UTPA, and he hopes to bring a similar emphasis to Eastern, which is not a traditional research university in the category of Washington State University or the University of Washington.

At UTPA, he helped form centers of applied research, which essentially look to tie university research to uses in the marketplace. He says he’d like to see EWU do more of that, as well.

Gombosky said the new president is likely to consider expansion of programs in science, math and technology, in response to the desire for better-trained workers from the local business community. EWU is also undergoing a review of its programs in Spokane as it looks to sell its downtown center and build on the Riverpoint campus it shares with WSU.

Once Arevalo finishes meeting with academic departments and others on campus, he plans to develop priorities and build on the school’s strengths and improve its weaknesses, he said.

One on one

Several people interviewed gave him credit for working hard to hear a lot of different voices on campus. He said he’s tried to focus on meeting in smaller groups.

“It’s just my general style to work with people on a one-on-one or small-group setting,” he said. “Once you get them in smaller clusters they get to know you a little better, and you get to know them a little better.”

Tony Flinn, president of the United Faculty of Eastern, has met with Arevalo a number of times and said he’s found him highly professional and knowledgeable.

In the sessions he’s attended with the new president and faculty members, Flinn said, “Pretty much everybody there was encouraging him to use his influence with the Board of Trustees to settle the contract in a happy way.”

Arevalo, on the other hand, said that salaries, workloads and the contract negotiations are not the focus of comments he’s hearing from most faculty members. Rather, he said, they’re concentrating on teaching and students.

“Do I think morale is low?” he said. “In the general faculty, my sense is that it’s not.”

Part of the dynamics of working with a unionized faculty would limit the approach to bolstering research that Arevalo applied at UTPA, where he gave salary bonuses and lighter teaching workloads to top scientists. With a negotiated agreement governing faculty pay, he’ll have less leeway to do that, he said.

Several people interviewed about Arevalo said he has a low-key, quiet demeanor, particularly right now – as he’s drinking at the fire hose.

“He doesn’t use a hundred words when 10 are sufficient,” Gombosky said.