On an Even Keel

Brooks A. Keel assumes the presidency of Georgia Southern University

Being from Georgia was not the number one reason Brooks A. Keel accepted Georgia Southern’s offer to become its new president. But it didn’t hurt.

Keel, who was born and grew up in Augusta, became Georgia Southern’s 12th president on January 1 and has “hit the ground listening” – listening to faculty, staff, administrators, students and alumni – as he prepares a plan and strategy to put Georgia Southern where he believes it should be – in the company of the nation’s top research universities.

“It was an opportunity to come home,” said Keel. “I was born, raised and educated in Georgia and Georgia is a state and a culture, a way of life, I am comfortable with and have always been comfortable with. Being a product of the educational system in this state, it was a great opportunity to be able to come back and participate in that process from the standpoint of being an administrator.

“Clearly that’s one reason,” Keel said. “But perhaps the bigger and the better reason than just coming home is that I saw Georgia Southern being a place of opportunity. Not for me personally, but an opportunity for higher education in general.

“There is tremendous opportunity here to do things in a very unique way that I haven’t seen at any other place,” he said. “And I want to be at a place where I can make a difference, and I saw Georgia Southern as that place.

One of the first things I’m going to have to do is try to learn about the campus. – President Brooks Keel

“My task, the first six weeks at least, was to hit the ground listening to learn as much as I could about the University so that I could participate in a cohesive way in terms of helping make those strategic decisions,” said Keel. “Clearly there are strengths here. There are some unique aspects of what Georgia Southern has. We need to look at what makes economic development sense to South Georgia, as well.”

Keel said he will implement a regular schedule of meetings with the Student Government Association and the student body in general through, perhaps, “brown bag lunches” in the Russell Union. He wants to know what’s on their minds.

“One of the first things I’m going to have to do is try to learn about the campus,” said Keel. “I’ve got a lot of faculty to get to know, a lot of staff to get to know, and I want to talk to students and learn more about the culture here.

“I think one of the worst things a president can do is come in and try to change things instantly without understanding where the University is right now. Clearly, I think the big issue that is going to need to be addressed in short order is a new strategic plan. The strategic plan that is in place now has brought this university to a tremendous position. I think when you make that next leap you’re going to need to know what that leap’s going to look like. We’re going to need input from the faculty, the staff, students and our alumni.”

Keel will also be looking for input from the Statesboro and Bulloch County community as well and praised the “town-gown” relationship of city, county and University. “Georgia Southern is so ingrained with the community that it was one of the things that attracted me here,” he said. “We have tremendous community support. That was evident from the very first day I arrived on campus and it has become evident in the short time I’ve been here. That openness, that welcome, was apparent from the very beginning. Not only do I have to listen to the campus, but I’ve got to listen to the community.”

The next level: Becoming a major research university

“Georgia Southern has a long history and a strong culture of being student-centered,” said Keel. “Teaching is the number one thing here and it has always been that way. And yet, it has now moved to that point where it can take a huge leap forward in terms of doing things that other major comprehensive universities do – such as research, increasing creative works and scholarship, and participating in economic development.

“Those are the types of things that Georgia Southern has done some of, though we have not done it at a level you would when you think of other major comprehensive universities,” Keel said. “I see it as now being able to do that with a teaching backdrop. I think you can do research and still focus on the student. Many of the larger universities have lost that student touch that has made Georgia Southern so popular.”

Georgia Southern is uniquely poised to move to a higher calling, said Keel. “Every university will tell you they want to go to the next level, but here I think we are at a very special point in time where we can truly do that. The faculty are ready for it, the students are ready for it, the staff is ready for it, and our alumni are as well. If you take that student-centered culture and use it in a way to help guide that next direction, you can do it as a very unique place.”

Students come to Georgia Southern because they want university experiences like athletics, art galleries and concerts, he said. But also, “They want to have an opportunity to sit one-on-one with professors and learn from him or her. You can get that here.

“Whether it’s real or perceived, you can’t get that at the University of Georgia. You can’t get that at Georgia Tech and you can’t get that at Georgia State. Georgia Southern is becoming a ‘university of first choice’ for students, and that’s a big deal.

“For me to be an effective president, especially at this university, I’ve got to know what’s on the students’ minds,” he said. “I’ve got to listen to the faculty’s advice, too, but they’ve got more of an opportunity to tell me.”

Major universities tout their research capabilities and many cite teaching strengths which come as a result of the research they conduct. But most universities’ research efforts are collaborations between faculty and graduate students, leaving undergraduates to be mentored by teaching assistants. Also, faculty, who are expected to spend large amounts of time conducting research or creative activities as prerequisites to promotion, often find themselves with little time to spend interacting with undergrads in or out of the classroom.

How can those demands be balanced at the kind of university Georgia Southern aspires to become – a major research institution which maintains its traditional focus on a special relationship between professors and their undergraduate students?

Most major universities build their research on the backs of graduate students, Keel said. “I think the unique aspect of what we have here is not that we build research on the backs of graduate students, but that we can build research with the participation of undergraduate students. What I’d like to see is that every student who graduates from Georgia Southern has an opportunity to have either a research, creative, or a community-based learning opportunity,” he said. “What I want to be able to do is build a research environment here that involves undergraduate students, not just the graduate students.

“Yes, we’re going to build the graduate programs here, no doubt about it, but we want to make sure that the undergraduate student has an opportunity to do research as well,” Keel said. “The other thing I think is so commonly thought of is that you never think of research as being a teaching moment. You think the faculty member either spends time teaching or doing research. I think we have a chance to do something a little bit different so that research can be part of the undergraduate teaching opportunity for students who come here.”

Funding for state universities is rarely an abundant commodity, and in times of economic downturn, universities are placing holds on hiring, demanding heavier teaching loads from existing faculty, and reducing faculty development funds. Where can Georgia Southern look in a period of both economic hard times and booming enrollment to fund its aspirations of keeping student/faculty ratios low and encouraging serious research?

“We are in a unique position in that our enrollment has increased so dramatically over the past three or four years,” said Keel. “We are in a position that the revenue being brought in by the additional students is helping us meet that budgetary challenge in a way that I don’t think a lot of other universities have an opportunity to do. We’re in a position now with good stewardship of the money we have, to meet the budget cuts and, if not to go out and hire a whole group of faculty, at least to be able to maintain the faculty we have.

“Obviously, a faculty member can’t teach four courses a semester and have an active research program and write grants,” he said. “One way to handle that, of course, is just to hire more faculty, and certainly we need to have more faculty. If you bring in more faculty you begin to share that teaching load and provide more time for faculty to pursue their research. It’s going to be a priority for us as we move forward.”

A novel idea: Multidisciplinary hiring

While at LSU, Keel had the opportunity to be part of a program called the Multidisciplinary Hiring Initiative, which is a unique way of hiring and funding faculty who are chosen specifically to provide world-class expertise for teaching and research on issues of importance to the institution’s service area.

“It’s something I’m very, very passionate about,” he said. “I had a chance to see it work at LSU, especially when we first started it, and I saw what it did in terms of changing the culture on campus as well as what it did for the reputation of the university.

“It’s a unique way of hiring faculty and it’s done to bring faculty into research and creative themes – not into departments,” he said. Keel explained, “You get a group of faculty together, intentionally multidisciplinary. They basically write ideas, or proposals, if you will, so that the ideas come from the faculty not from the administration. We mandated that the individuals who wrote the proposals had to be from multiple departments and preferably from multiple colleges.

“We had some 20 to 25 proposals. We vetted them from a committee internally, narrowed them down to seven, brought in a panel of experts from outside to give us advice on which of the seven they thought would have the greatest impact nationally and then we took three of them to fund.” New faculty were then hired to meet the needs of the chosen research areas.

“That is the sort of model I’d like to do here,” Keel said. “The unique aspect of that model is you get participation from the faculty, you get participation from the administration in choosing to put money into very programmatic and strategic areas. It allows you, with an external panel, to create a buzz across the country with what you are doing.

“Then, the hiring is not done in the typical way that you hire a faculty member,” he said. “You don’t create a committee. You don’t broadcast an advertisement and see what comes over the transom. The individuals who wrote the proposal form the search committee and they aggressively go out and seek individuals. It forces the faculty to go after true stars in the field. In fact, you go out with a faculty better than you currently have. Then you marry that person with the best department based on the discipline and their expertise, and then you go through the normal faculty tenure-hiring process.”

While realistic about the budget, which has sustained a 20 percent reduction since the current recession began, Keel is optimistic about the prospects of future funding. He also sees students continuing to flock to Georgia Southern.

“We have asked the faculty and staff to hold on with these budget cuts,” he said. “Everybody is doing double duty and working extra hard so we can get through this budget cycle. Hopefully, once we get through this budget cycle we will be able to start hiring additional faculty that we’ve been putting off for the last year or so to meet the budget cuts. So we’ve swept salary savings from unfilled positions to help meet this.

“We plan to increase enrollment. I’d like to see us at 20,000 next year,” said Keel. “I think we need to think about increasing enrollment to whatever that sweet spot is for this particular university. That’s going to push the existing infrastructure pretty hard. I don’t think you can reach that until you begin addressing the issue of more faculty and more staff,” he said. “We need everything from faculty who do teaching all the way through advisors to help with issues for the increased number of students we have. But there are ways to increase enrollment other than just the typical traditional freshman who comes in.”

Keel hopes to continue growth in the number of students taking classes online, boost the number of transfer students and non-traditional students, and foster cooperative arrangements with two-year colleges. “I think there are opportunities to take advantage of cooperation with the two-year colleges and community colleges as well,” he said.
“We already have some of those relationships, but there’s no reason why Georgia Southern couldn’t enter into an agreement with a community college in another county for that hybrid personal class,” Keel added. “It doesn’t have to be on this campus. It can be somewhere else. Now, that’s going to require faculty who have an interest and an excitement to do that in a high-quality fashion, but that’s the way I want to see us go.”

Athletics: What’s next?

Given his experiences at LSU and Florida State, Keel is keenly aware of the excitement and sense of community that athletics can engender. It is also a tool to recruit more and better students.
“Athletics provides what I call the front porch of the University,” he said. “It gets people to look in through the window and see what the inside of the University looks like. And it does it in a way that nothing else you do can do for you. It provides an opportunity for students to look at us who may have never considered Georgia Southern.

“It provides student-athletes an opportunity to say, ‘I might want to go there, because they’re successful.’ And it provides alumni and the community an opportunity to support the University in a way that you couldn’t get support before.

“I’m a big supporter of athletics. I’m also a big supporter of the student-athlete. The word student comes first and that’s something we have to keep in mind.”
In 2009, an independent study on the viability of a move by Georgia Southern from its current level at the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA) to the Football Bowl Subdivision (I-A) was released. The study showed that Georgia Southern is capable of successfully making the jump to a higher level and also provided a road map to do so. The financial obstacles, however, are not easily navigated.

“I know there’s been a lot of discussion about that,” Keel said. “It’s something that I hope we can continue some discussion on.

That was an excellent report that the consultants generated. It says a lot about not only athletics, but about Georgia Southern in general. Basically, what that report says is that we could make a move to the FBS, but it’s expensive and some of that cost is going to require additional scholarships and some of that cost is going to require facilities to be built.

“I think that instead of just saying, ‘okay, let’s move to the FBS,’ why don’t we concentrate on trying to get some of those things done first? We could have an opportunity to say ‘let’s put some money into our basketball arena,'” said Keel. “Let’s put some money into our football stadium, so when we do decide to make that jump, we already have a lot of that groundwork done. I plan to use this as a fundraising opportunity to set the ground rules for when we can make that move.

“Clearly, this is not the time to do it for a variety of reasons, but we’ve got to get the facilities, we’ve got to get the infrastructure in place, and we’ve got to start winning some more games,” he said. “The study does very nicely lay out the steps we need to do in order to get there. It’s going to require not just support from this campus; it’s really going to require support from the community. So if you think about it, it’s not really Georgia Southern’s decision. It is truly the community’s decision if they want to go there.”

Management style: Plan, delegate and hold accountable

Keel revels in a working environment of diverse ideas, opinions, world views and the exposure that diversity brings to the entire University community. And, he wants to lay to rest any notion that his scientific background makes him view any one aspect of the University more favorably than another.

“The thing that I discovered when I left the academic medical center world and moved to Florida State was the beauty of being at a place that has so many unique things going on,” he said. “One day I had an engineering professor in my office and the next day I had an English professor in my office. The complexity of the issues made my job absolutely fascinating.

“I love being at a place that provides that sort of comprehensive atmosphere. We’re not just teaching scientists here. Nor are we just teaching musicians. We teach both. You have to have that sort of thing to provide a well-rounded education.”

Keel sees his role as president as setting direction and administering steps needed to establish that direction – not being involved in day-to-day decisions he sees as best left to the vice presidents and deans. “You can’t do those sorts of things as a president,” he said. “You have to give more responsibility to the deans. I’m a very strong believer in having a strong provost position and having the academic affairs of the University be handled by that provost. Which means then, of course, that the provost passes that responsibility down to the deans and the deans handle that.

“I won’t have the time nor the expertise to go tell the deans how to do their jobs,” said Keel. “I do have the time and the inclination to hold the deans’ feet to the fire with expectations that they produce a quality product. They have the responsibility to produce a high-quality education and to produce high-quality scholarship out of their colleges, and they’re the ones who are held responsible for that. They, of course, pass that down to the chairs where the bulk of the decisions are made.

“The person who is really responsible for that is the provost. We have an opportunity of looking at a provost position here,” Keel said. “Gary Means is doing a fantastic job as interim provost. He has said he’d stay as long as I wanted him to and I am delighted to hear that, but I think we have an opportunity to move in that direction and provide more opportunity to give the deans an active role.

“The deans are not only going to have an opportunity to do fundraising, there’s going to be a definite expectation that they’re going to do so,” he said. “They are going to have goals that they are expected to meet. From what I’ve heard from the deans, there’s a tremendous amount of excitement about being able to participate in a capital campaign, for example, which is one of the goals we have.

“I think you have to set the bar and let everyone know what your expectations are, and get the heck out of the way and let them do their jobs.”

Milestones: Life choices and influences

Brooks Keel’s father was reared on a farm, and his mother grew up in a very small town in South Carolina. His father was an industrial machinist who attended Wofford College for two years before leaving to help take care of his parents. His mother, who still lives in Augusta, was what he termed “an on-the-job-trained nurse” who worked for several physicians in the Augusta area. “I think perhaps her experience working with physicians got me interested in the medical field,” he said.

“We had a typical home life, I think. I’ve got two older brothers, both attended Augusta College,” explained Keel, “and we all had science backgrounds. We had a very middle-income-type existence. My parents had three sons who finished college, which my dad was very proud of.”

He describes his childhood as uneventful – maybe even boring. But like many young Boomers, he was fascinated with the U.S. space program in the 1960s. He remembers well the Apollo 11 moon landing. “I was sitting in the living room watching it with my family. I remember that very distinctly,” he said. “We had a relative who lived in Houston so I had a chance when I was a kid to tour the Houston space facility, but I never got the chance to go to the cape. Those guys … You talk about heroes.”

There was one other event which left a vivid memory – one which might have also had an influence on his later direction in life.

“When I was five years old I was in a car accident with my grandmother – a very serious car accident,” Keel said. “I broke my neck, my leg and my jaw and was I in the hospital for six weeks – which for a five-year-old kid was quite a traumatic experience.

“I was incredibly fortunate to have lived through that sort of thing and I’ve often wondered why I lived through that sort of thing. That had a major influence on me and gave me an opportunity to appreciate life for what it is really worth.”

Keel was going to be a physician, but it was during his undergrad years at Augusta College his career direction moved from medical practice to medical research. But something more, something bigger in scope, also happened to Brooks Keel as an undergraduate student.

“When I went to Augusta College, I was majoring in biological sciences and I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “One of the first courses I had to take was music appreciation. I hated it before I even walked in the door. I thought, ‘Why did I need this? This is just a waste of my time and I’m never going to use it to be a doctor. How is this going to make me a better person?’

“I went to class a couple of weeks. I hated it and I was an awful student until the professor played Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.’ It absolutely changed my life. I’m not just making that up. It really did. It completely opened my eyes and I had just found a pretty significant part of being a human being,” he said. “That course really did change my whole attitude about things. It gave me an appreciation for the importance of providing not just a high-quality education but a well-rounded high-quality education. I didn’t go to medical school. I wound up going to graduate school, but it was that appreciation for the total aspects of an academic environment that really excited me.”

Now, he said, “I have a very eclectic taste in music. If you were to look at my collection of CDs, you would have everything from E. Power Biggs playing Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue D Minor’ all the way up to jazz, blues, rock, just about everything you can think of. I got a chance to see Luciano Pavarotti perform when I was doing post-doc study in Houston. That was pretty spectacular, too.”
While working toward his undergraduate degree, Keel joined a fraternity – a move that he said introduced him to valuable lessons in leadership and management. “That made a definite impression on me,” he said.

Finding his niche: Research scientist

Keel was also introduced to a biology professor at Augusta College whose influence on his choice of careers was profound – John Black. Black was instrumental in nudging Keel toward his future career by giving him research opportunities as an undergraduate. “It really sort of set me on my path to where I am today,” said Keel.

John Black is now president of East Georgia College in Swainsboro. “I remember Brooks very clearly as an undergraduate,” said Black, who at Augusta College was the advisor assigned to students interested in going to professional schools for dentistry, pharmacy or medicine. “We had a very strong department,” he said, including field biologists who, in addition to teaching, took undergraduate students out to do field work in identifying flora and fauna. “Brooks was exposed to those classes,” said Black.

Keel became involved in an elective course in undergraduate research for promising freshman or sophomore students, said Black. “Brooks seemed to gravitate more toward the lab sciences than he did the field sciences,” he said, and he invited Keel to assist in his research. Black’s background was reproductive endocrinology, and at that time, sperm donors were not closely screened for the possible transmission of diseases, Black explained. Keel’s work with Black and the late groundbreaking Medical College of Georgia researcher Armand Karow help set disease screening standards.

“That was what led Brooks from Augusta College to the Medical College of Georgia where he got his Ph.D., and he had some of the same faculty that I had when I was preceding him,” said Black. “Brooks was always very bright. I don’t know anybody who has had the breadth of experiences that Brooks has had. I think if you had taken all of the eligible candidates and tried to pick one out of all the eligible presidential candidates that would fit Georgia Southern University, if there’s anybody in the world who can harness what you have and see the future, I think it’s Brooks Keel.”