Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 26

jor elements: a big emphasis on access, student success, cultivating
a teacher-scholar model rather than a high-intensity
research effort, better engaging with the community, serving
underserved communities. It all seemed to make sense. "
In the immediate years prior to Cruz Rivera's arrival,
NAU had been facing an identity crisis. Like other college
presidents throughout the nation, his predecessor, Rita
Hartung Cheng, had taken steps to position NAU as an R1
school, confident that such a designation as a high-activity
research institution would make the school much more prestigious
and competitive.
What striving college
presidents almost never do is
make their institutions less
selective and pour funds into
programs that meet local
needs rather than burnish
their national reputations.
Yet that's precisely what
Cruz Rivera has done.
But not everyone was convinced that this was the right
strategy. NAU had a limited base of financial resources and
research power with which to pursue a determined campaign
in the U.S. News rankings. Meanwhile, many professors and
administrators felt that a hunt for prestige was less important
than making NAU accessible to the community, which
has been a priority since the university's early years. When
the school was founded in 1899 as a teacher's college, it served
as an economic backstop during the Depression years, when it
trained up jobless people and placed them into the local workforce
through New Deal programs. In the postwar years, NAU
built a diverse student population and grew steadily to become
competitive in enrollment with Arizona State University
and the University of Arizona. Chasing cachet above all else
wasn't the NAU way.
" It just felt like a stretch, " Julie Mueller, who is currently
the chief economic adviser to the president and has taught
economics at NAU since 2008, said of the focus on research.
Facing pushback on her vision and controversy over a state
audit of her travel expenditures, Cheng decided not to renew
her contract in 2021.
When Cruz Rivera was hired to replace her, he didn't
waste time getting started. In fact, he arrived in Flagstaff in
April 2021, three months before he officially began his new
job, to commence what he called a " learning tour. " It was important
to him both to understand the campus's needs and
26 September/October 2024
to get to know the university leaders whose buy-in could help
him achieve his goals. To that end, he filled his cabinet with
advisers who knew the campus and shared his priorities-
advisers like Mueller, who had been skeptical of NAU's prior
focus. " It was really exciting to hear what [Cruz Rivera's] vision
was for the institution because it felt like something we
could do really well and that resonates here, " Mueller told me.
When he formally started work, in June 2021, Cruz Rivera
convened a presidential transition committee, assembling
seven different university-wide working groups to chart out
a strategic plan for the next three years. What emerged from
that process in May 2022 was a new road map that acknowledged
the school's legacy of inclusion while updating its methods
for the future. The plan is based on three main pillars: creating
a universal admissions program with an academic pathway
for every student who applies; making tuition-free college
education available and accessible to every Arizona resident
with a household income of $65,000 or below; and dramatically
increasing the number of Indigenous people who enroll
at NAU and finish degrees. In short, Cruz Rivera hopes to get
more students from underserved backgrounds into NAU, to
get them their degrees on time or even early, and to ensure
that they're civically engaged and ready for the workforce.
" And we do all of this while keeping the cost affordable for
students and parents, " he told me.
Laurie Dickson, vice president for university strategy and
senior associate to the president, recalled that although there
was excitement about the arrival of the new president, the
campus was still feeling some " skepticism " about big changes
after the past few years of Cheng's leadership. However appealing
his message, Cruz Rivera was another university president
coming in with big policy changes to sell-changes that
would require a lot of work from faculty and administrators
to implement. But, she told me, " listening to him speak, he
is also very convincing because he is so authentic, and it truly
aligned with the vast majority of people, especially those of us
who have been here for a very long time. "
W
ith a plan in place, Cruz Rivera started off by making
structural changes to NAU's bureaucracy. Too
often at large universities, leaders are siloed in their
own offices-admissions, athletics, financial aid, academic
support-and miss opportunities to collaborate. One of Cruz
Rivera's first official acts after releasing the strategic plan, in
June 2022, was to announce an office of " Social Mobility and
Economic Impact, " which would consider university-wide
changes that could help students from underserved communities
get access to an education at NAU and finish their degrees.
To lead the office, Cruz Rivera brought in Jonathan S. Gagliardi,
a longtime CUNY colleague who has led social mobility and
student retention efforts both in that system and nationwide.
Gagliardi's team launched into a top-to-bottom evaluation
of the school's financial aid process, which had not been
updated in some time. What they found, according to Anika
Olsen, vice president of enrollment management at NAU,
Washington Monthly - September/October 2024

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