The University of Colorado's 12th Chancellor, Justin Schwartz, shared his vision for the university and talked about head football coach Deion Sander's rise in popularity in a recent interview with The Denver Gazette.
Schwartz previously served as the executive vice president and Provost at the Pennsylvania State University for just under a year, and he also served as Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Penn State's College of Engineering for five years.
Before that, he worked at North Carolina State University, Florida State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana.
Schwartz took over earlier this month, replacing former longtime chancellor Phil DiStefano, who served at CU Boulder for 50 years and held the position as chancellor for 15 of those years — the longest in CU Boulder history.
As chancellor, DiStefano led the university in doubling its total research funding, awarded approximately 117,000 degrees, receiving its fifth Nobel Prize, and having its largest and most diverse graduating class, according to CU Boulder.
This interview, which took place three weeks into the chancellor's appointment, has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Denver Gazette: Why Colorado? Colorado is a different place geographically and politically from Pennsylvania, so why did you come to Colorado, and more specifically, CU Boulder?
Justin Schwartz: We were very happy in central PA for seven years, and that wasn’t the only place I lived. I really wasn’t looking for other places. ... But when I looked at the description for this position at CU Boulder, everything about the position aligned with my professional goals. Professionally, it just felt right.
And then on the personal side, we've always preferred mountains over beach. I'm not a very fast triathlete, but I've done four half Ironman, and my wife will do an Ironman for the third time this weekend, so I wanted to live somewhere where cycling and running and triathlons are big. And Boulder is on the top of that list.
DG: What are your top three goals for this university?
Schwartz: The overarching goal is that CU Boulder becomes and is recognized as one of the premier state universities in the country. I would argue very strongly that we are already an elite campus, and I want us to expand on that but also really amplify the recognition of that. ... I want our mindset and our persona to be that we are elite but not elitist.
I also think it's really important to us also that we impact globally and locally, built in with the spirit of being part of the community and not above the community. We want to be a place where students can thrive and leave with a competitive advantage for whatever it is they want to do next. Yes, we want them all to graduate and be able to have the career path they want, but we're not only a training organization. There's more to higher education than job preparation.
We want our students to know that if they come here, they're going to have tremendous experiences inside and outside the classroom and meet the people that they're going to know for 50 years and be able to say: “Wow, those years I spent in Boulder really drove the trajectory of my in the right way.”
DG: Do you have any potential plans for students and faculty to invest in the community?
Schwartz: Our faculty are part of the community; they can't really be separated from it. I'm still learning how much we empower and engage our students with the community, and I think we do a good job already from what I've seen so far. But we’re always looking to see if there’s a next step there.
DG: Would you recommend a student to go into a liberal arts major such as English literature as opposed to getting a degree in something “more practical,” such as mechanical engineering or computer information systems?
Schwartz: Let the record show you're the one who said an English degree was not practical but, that’s a great question. And I think if a student’s passion takes them into English, it prepares them for a very successful life. There are a lot of people out there with English degrees who are doing amazing things with their lives.
Not everyone getting a degree is looking for the major with the highest salary, and not everybody's goal is affluence. I'm not saying that we should be offering every single possible esoteric degree that one can think of — that's not the message. ... In a world of conflict, inter-societal, and inter-cultural challenges, to not be thinking about humanities and understanding culture and language doesn't seem very strategic long-term to me.
DG: You’ve been speaking to the value of education, so what would you consider the true value of college education to be today?
Schwartz: In the context of socioeconomic status impact, and there's massive amounts of data that shows the difference between the future of students with a high school degree compared to students with a college degree. ... That's not to say that people who just have a high school degree don't often have great incomes. I'm not advocating that everybody should go to college. Certainly, there are a lot of important career paths that don't require it. But there is a step function in terms of the bigger picture, and there’s a huge impact simply in terms of having diverse experiences in your life. There's both tangible and intangible impacts on students when they go into a community of 37,000 people from all around the world. Hopefully, they’re really spending their time learning how to think — not “what” to think.
DG: To a 16, 17, or 18 year old student just graduating high school and thinking about going to college, why should they choose CU?
Schwartz: They should choose CU if they are passionate about having an impact on the world with their life. That's the fundamental theme across this campus. We want to have an impact with what we do. That could be the trajectory of quantum, that could be working on sustainability, that could be impact on preventing Alzheimer's. It could also be things happening in the music school that are influencing and impacting human life positively. If that's what you want to do, this is a great place for you to come. ... If you want to infuse your educational experience with a community that loves to go in the mountains, loves to go hiking, kayaking, and cycling, and running, this is a pretty hard place to beat. If you want to get together in a 50,000-seat stadium and watch a bison run around, you can't do that anywhere else but here.
DG: One of the challenges that students face is the price of tuition. How do you plan to address rising tuition rates, and how can you ensure that students will be able to afford CU Boulder?
Schwartz: I'm still fully understanding our landscape, and one of the things I've talked about with leadership is that we want to continuously look at how we use our resources. I'd like to see us, over time, put a larger percentage of our funds into academic students needing support — which isn't to say that we're unaligned right now. But we should, from the engineering perspective, always be looking to be more efficient, and not at the expense of service. ... The question we ask is: “How do we maximize the amount of resources that go to our mission and vision and values?”
DG: Do you think the government should forgive student debt?
Schwartz: I don't think it's a simple answer. ... I think it's more nuanced than: “Should we forgive debt or not?” I think in terms of affordability, we should be looking at the total amount of money it costs student to graduate. CU Boulder offers four years of fixed tuition. First year students at CU Boulder know what they're going to pay for four years. ... And then the other really big piece for affordability is that last thing — I said fixed tuition for four years, not five or six.
Keeping students progressing so that they're graduating in that four-year window is how we support our students. In some ways, the worst outcome is to leave the university with debt but not with a degree. When a student makes that commitment, we want to make sure that we do everything we can to help the student, and part of that is getting to that graduation point in a timely fashion.
DG: Do you have any plans to promote safety on campus or to connect with local law enforcement?
Schwartz: Boulder is one of the safest campuses around. The No. 1 threat from a criminal perspective is bike theft. Bike theft is a deeply offensive, painful thing for me, but not compared to the other crimes that people talk about on campuses. I think it's important the message is that CU Boulder is a safe campus. ... But campus safety is still important. ... Even before I started here, I met with the associate vice chancellor of public safety, the provost, and the student affairs chief operating officer to talk about our plans for campus safety this fall, and we're still having that collective conversation.
DG: Something that has gained a lot of popularity at CU Boulder is the football program, and more specifically Coach Deion Sanders. Some have said that CU is handing over its entire identity to Coach Prime.
Schwartz: I would encourage them to familiarize themselves with this thing called quantum, and the number of times that the governor has talked about the impact of quantum at CU Boulder on the state and the future or of its impact on the economy of the state of Colorado and the Mountain West. ... If the only thing you read in the newspaper is the sports section, then you think everything is about sports, right? And if you only read the science section, you wouldn't know anything about the football team. If someone's not looking at us in their entirety, then they’re not going to know about us in our entirety.
The reality is the presence of Coach Prime on this campus has increased our applications by 40%. ... At a time when some universities are struggling with enrollment, that's over-the-top impressive.
Is Coach Prime a different sort of head football coach? Yes. Absolutely. Is that bad? I don't think so. Part of Boulder’s identity is being innovative and entrepreneurial, so why wouldn't we have the most innovative and entrepreneurial football coach?
DG: Is CU Boulder doing anything right now to support and encourage a broad range of thoughts and opinions, especially in light of protests that are happening across the county, and especially on college campuses?
Schwartz: We are committed deeply to free speech and First Amendment rights. ... One of the purposes of an academic institution is to encourage people to openly speak and share ideas so that ideas evolve, and the way we have an impact on society is by not thinking the same way we’ve always thought. ... People say that Boulder is woke and left-wing, but we’re not fully. The Benson Center is not that. We host people who have diverse opinions. Free speech does not allow you to harass. Free speech does not allow you to try to intimidate. Free speech is not there so that you can diminish somebody else's sense of belonging. Free speech means you don't have to listen to the other opinion, but you can.
DG: CU Boulder, as you mentioned, has the reputation of being a pretty liberal area?
Schwartz: I honestly find those labels to be a little oversimplified. ... I try to stay away from labels like that. And you know, we have a campus with a very strong history of supporting military students and military veterans and their families. Most people wouldn't say that’s left-leaning woke, but it is part of who we are.
DG: Is there anything else that you’re doing to ensure that a wide range of political ideas can be heard on campus?
Schwartz: The question is, in my mind: “How do I ensure that we have a culture and a community where anyone feels comfortable expressing their feelings?” I'm not sure I would say that I should be looking to find someone from every political viewpoint and bring them to speak. That's a bit top-down. My role is to ensure that any student group or faculty group that wants to articulate a certain perspective on a certain topic can do so freely and comfortably.
DG: What's more important to you? Is it the most diverse faculty, or the most competent one? Is it more complex than that?
Schwartz: That’s a false question. Our goal as a university is to better reflect the diversity of Colorado, in both our student population and faculty. Right now, we don't do that in either category. ... Do we reflect the scale of the African American community in Denver and in Boulder? No. We can do better. Do we reflect the Latino and Latina populations from around the state, both urban and rural? No. We can do better. Do we represent the percentage of all demographics from around the state? No. We excel in just about everything we do, but we need to make sure that we are doing what we can to reflect the diversity of Colorado.
DG: Do you have certain criteria that you would be looking for when hiring faculty at CU Boulder?
Schwartz: First and foremost, if we have, for example, a dire shortage of computer science faculty, we're looking for people experienced in computer science to fill the need of the position. We want people who are going to really support the cultural richness of our university community, who understand the role of higher education in Boulder, in Colorado, and around the globe, and who are going to be truly committed and engaged with supporting diversity. We want faculty to ensure that students from across Colorado — from every demographic, from urban Denver to the Western Slope to Pueblo — feels welcome at CU Boulder and is enabled to achieve both personal and individual goals in life.
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