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Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- Found out about a couple of faculty members that were working in areas that I was interested in. So, no instant messaging or anything in those days, no email. So I had to write letters, saying, reading a paper, and saying, "This is something I'm interested in. Are you looking for a student? I'm interested in coming to the United States." And one of the faculty members at Brown University, and I didn't know it was an Ivy League or anything to that matter.
- Yeah.
- It's just a color, right?
- A professor at a university.
- Being a former international student as well, you have such a misunderstanding about the educational system in America, generally. And you don't know what's a good university, and what's not a good university. You just kinda like go, and then hope it all works out. In your case, worked out really well. Today, I'm happy to have with me my friend Pranesh Aswath, who's the Provost and Executive Vice President here at Texas State. Welcome to "The Current."
- Thank you so much, Kelly, pleasure to be here.
- I'm glad to have you here. I'm glad to have you here at Texas State, and I always like to learn about people's Texas State stories. So, tell us a little bit about how you got here. So, tell us, start going back like where you grew up.
- I grew up in India, in a city called Bangalore. I spent my first 24 years of my life there. Got my high school and undergraduate degrees there, two undergraduate degrees. I have a degree in the sciences and a degree in engineering. And then came for graduate school in the United States.
- When you were first going to college, were you thinking about getting into the faculty or was it more of a career track at first?
- It was not. You know, when I was gonna college, I wanted a good job.
- Yeah.
- As in the key was, get a good education. Get a good job, support the family. And when I went to the Indian Institute of Science, where I got my undergraduate degree, it tickled my interest in research.
- Okay.
- It was small group settings, and I had a faculty member who took interest in me, and gave me a project to work on, and got me excited about research. That's when, when I was getting to my senior year, I said, "This may be a track that would be of interest for me. It would be something that would quench my desire for research and curiosity." And so, that's when I thought, "Perhaps this track of," I wasn't still thinking of being a faculty member. I thought I'll go to grad school and then get a job.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And the faculty thing came in later on when I was in graduate school to see the opportunity to shape young people's mind. Being a teaching assistant as part of a graduate student.
- Ah, yeah.
- Is when I started seeing the power of education and how it transforms lives. And the fact that you couldn't have such a big impact on a young person's life being a faculty member.
- Now, did your parents go to college?
- Yes, they did.
- Okay, okay.
- What did your folks do?
- My father was a interesting trial. I'll just take a minute to talk about it because he is my inspiration. He went to college in the United Kingdom.
- Oh.
- In 1936, before the Second World War. And they went there without an admission. He went to... He went on a boat, landed in the UK, went from college to college to find admission, and he got admitted in the University of Birmingham. And he finished his degree in three years, which was a four-year degree because he had money for three years. And they let him do it. And it's always been my inspiration that he ended up being first in his class at the University of Birmingham. And he wanted to be a professor, and never got to do it because of the Second World War.
- Ah.
- And he told me that, "Do something that I could never do." And that was always in the back of my mind that this is something that my father wanted to do, didn't have an opportunity to do, and if I have an opportunity to do it, I will try to do it.
- I've known you for a couple of years, I've never heard that story. That's awesome, yeah.
- Yeah.
- I always wonder like, what is a driving force behind someone's decision, their activities, and in your case, it's your dad.
- Yeah, my dad, yeah.
- Yeah.
- Absolutely.
- So, what? So he went, did he go back to... I guess he went back to India?
- He went back to India. He got married, and then he wanted to go back. He had a fellowship for a Ph.D. And the Second World War broke out, six years of war. The only way he could go back to the UK was by ship. And every time he booked a ticket, his father told him not to go. And every time that was the right decision because the ship was sunk.
- Holy cow.
- And so, six years later, life changes. You move on to do something else with your life.
- You get this interest in research and decide to go to graduate school. So, what was that decision process like, and where'd you go?
- You know, I was fortunate that when I was in my undergraduate study, I worked in the library. It was very formative for me because my job was to shelve books, and journals, in particular. And so, it was an opportunity for me to look at what was going on in research. This is pre-internet time.
- Sure.
- So if you wanted to study about what was going on, you went to Metal Abstracts. I went to Encyclopedias, and you learned about what was going on. And my advisor at that time had been encouraging me to work on a topic that I didn't know anything about at the time I started. But working in the library, you have a lot of downtime.
- Yeah.
- And I was working the night shift from 6 p.m. to midnight. So, we finished shelving all the books in two hours, and I have six hours to read books. And that was an opportunity for me, to really delve deeper into the areas that I was interested in. And I found out about a couple of faculty members that were working in areas that I was interested in. So, no instant messaging or anything in those days. No email. So I had to write letters, saying, reading a paper, and saying, "This is something I'm interested in. Are you looking for a student? I'm interested in coming to the United States." And one of the faculty members at Brown University, and I didn't know it was an Ivy League, or anything to that matter.
- Yeah.
- It's just a color, right?
- A professor at a university. So I wrote to him, and they said, "Yeah, I have a grant, would you like to come?" I said, "Yes, this is what I'm working on. Are you interested?" He said, "Yes, I'm interested in this topic." And that's all it took. He said, "Okay, send me a letter, and apply." And two weeks later, it said, "You're admitted."
- Wow.
- And you have a fellowship to come and study at Brown University. Then, when I tell other people, I told my advisor, "I'm going to Brown," he almost fell off the chair.
- Yeah.
- He said, "You know, going to Brown University is one of the best universities." Like, I don't know, you know? All I know is this professor is going to take me.
- Being a former international student as well, you have such a misunderstanding about the educational system in America, generally. And you don't know what's a good university, and what's not a good university. You just kinda like go, and then hope it all works out. In your case, worked out really well.
- It worked out very well. It was a great opportunity, great professor to work with. It was very formative for me in those years.
- I also think it's pretty normal for current faculty members to have started like you did, thinking I, you know, I'm kind of exploring this.
- Yeah.
- But not really thinking about being a faculty member, but-
- That's right.
- Your first experience being, or one of your first experiences being a grader or a teaching assistant.
- Yes.
- And you start to think, "Well, maybe, you know, maybe I could do this." And then, I think the most faculty members happen upon-
- Yeah.
- The profession as opposed to like always growing up wanting to be a professor.
- That's right.
- Yeah. So, then you decide, you get your Ph.D. from Brown?
- Yes.
- Yeah. And so, then you got a decision to make, go back home, or stay here.
- You know, that was an interesting, there was a fork in the road at the time, whether I go back and become a faculty in India, or to apply here, and see if we get an opportunity here. I was very fortunate that even before I completed my Ph.D. dissertation, I had a job offer in my hand.
- Yeah.
- And so, the decision was sort of made for me because it was a great opportunity to come down to Texas at the time, to UT Arlington. And they had a position open for me. I said, "I should try this." I could go back and get a faculty position in India. But this was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up.
- So what was it like going from Brown to Texas?
- It was very different.
- Yeah.
- Very, honestly, I think, from a small East Coast liberal institution to a larger public institution in Texas took some adjustment, but at the same time, it was a very welcoming place. Texas has always been welcoming to me. It has been a place that has created huge opportunities and has always given me a chance to do what I wanted to do. So, even though it was coming culturally very different from the East Coast to Texas, at the end of the day, the fact that you're working with students and helping students succeed didn't change. Students are students, whether they're in the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, they all want a future for themselves. They're looking for an opportunity to grow. And so that was there in Texas as well. So I was very fortunate to come down here.
- The play is the same, the actors are different, right?
- Yes, exactly.
- So the plot is always the same.
- Plot is always the same.
- So, just like many faculty members have no idea about what they're gonna do until they happen upon the job. Many of them, once they get in the faculty, think, "Well, I'm just gonna be a professor for the rest of my career." And then, something happens, a door opens somewhere where you can maybe get into administration.
- Yeah.
- So what was that experience like? What happened that changed you from being a pure faculty member to also having an administrative job?
- You know, at my heart, I'm still a faculty member.
- Yeah, I had the same way, that's how I define myself.
- I still define myself, when somebody asks me what I do, "I'm a teacher. I teach mechanical engineering." When the probe a little deeper, I say, "Yeah, I'm in administration. I also do this other thing." So for the first 20-odd years, 20, 23 years, that's all I did. I had 20 Ph.D. students, maybe 40 master's students. I published, I did patents, I did all of the stuff a faculty member does. But at the same time, I was also very engaged in service for the college. I didn't do it because I wanted to get brownie points, because it was the right thing to do.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And one of the things that I was doing, and this is an interesting story. It might resonate for you, you know? I was in a small material science program to recruit students as a challenge. So I told my chair at that time, I said, "I need to go down and find students across the state. Can I just be part of Texas Swing?" I don't know if you heard of Texas Swing. Texas Swing is one. It happens even today, where there's a recruitment event that moves all across Texas.
- No, I've not heard this.
- From university to university to university. So I said-
- For graduate programs?
- For graduate programs. This is not for undergraduate programs. You just take a, you know, a little table, you set up your shop at a university center, and you talk to students who come by. And they said, "Yeah, if you wanna do it, you can take a week or 10 days off." And I would load up my car with all my paraphernalia, and I would go from university to university, and set up shop. Talk to college kids, and say, "Hey, come to UT Arlington, and here's some opportunity for graduate study." I would not only sell my program, but I would sell the university as a whole. And said, I got nothing out of it other than several grad students from different schools that expressed an interest to come work for me. I would reach out to faculty before I went there, and say, "Can I come talk to your class, and talk to your senior class, and talk about opportunities?" I got noticed, and I was doing this for no other reason other than to recruit people from my group. And so, people said, "Why are you doing this?" I said, "This is what you should be doing if you wanna get people to come to work in your group." They said, "Can you do this for the school? Can you do it for the department?" I initially became an associate chair, then associate dean in the College of Engineering, and they put me in charge of graduate programs, traveling across the world, doing what I was doing in a small scale at a much larger scale to recruit students. And that became a passion of mine. I loved doing this. I loved talking to students, I loved talking, creating opportunities for students. That was essentially, somebody noticed it, and created this opportunities for me. I was the inaugural associate dean. I was the inaugural vice provost to do the type of things that I told them I could do.
- Wow.
- And so it was a organic process. It was not something I asked part for. It was something that I've recognized that I had some skills to do, and somebody recognized it, and told me, "I'll give you an opportunity to do it."
- You know, one of the things I think that is interesting about both your story and then as becoming a graduate student, and then your administrative story is the distinction between applying to graduate school versus applying to undergraduate.
- Correct.
- Because I think it, undergraduates tend to apply pretty broadly. Like, "I want to go to college, I don't really care where, I'll see where the scholarships kinda line out."
- [Pranesh] Right.
- But grad school tends to be a little bit more, you know, driven by the relationship with the faculty member. Because you're going there to learn about research and you've gotta be aligned with someone there.
- That's right.
- And they have to be accepting of you.
- Correct.
- Like, you're gonna come here, and you're gonna be working for me.
- Correct.
- And so, the relationship between faculty and students in the graduate setting is, it starts before they're a student. There's a recruiting process, and then they become your responsibilities. So if they don't graduate, it's on you, right?
- Yeah, and you're a lifelong relationship with your, in fact, I still have a lifelong relationship with all my grad students.
- Absolutely, they're like your kids, right?
- They're like your kids, exactly.
- Absolutely, so at some point, you're a vice provost, and there's an opportunity for you to become the interim provost.
- Yes.
- There's a leadership change there. And so, now you're in the big chair. Do you remember your first meeting where you're the-
- Yes.
- The new provost?
- Yeah, it was-
- Because you were already a vice provost, so you were-
- I was senior vice provost, and COVID hit. And there was upheaval at the university. The president resigned, the provost became president, and they came and told me, "You're gonna be the interim provost. Are you up for the job?" I said, "Sure." You know, I'm here for service. I recognized that the university is gonna be shut down in the next two days. And this is gonna be an enormous responsibility to manage this, but being in the Provost Office for the last four years or so, I knew how to run the place, and I knew what are the challenges and opportunities and it was a opportunity to serve. And I looked at it purely from that perspective. I thought, "This is gonna get over in the next six weeks, or so, that will go through the process. I'm gonna go back to my old job, and it'll be fine." Who knew it was gonna be two years after that, and we had to get out of COVID, and then transition out of that. So, nobody knew you're going into uncharted waters at that time. So you just jump in and do what you have to do to help your university.
- Do your job, right?
- Do your job, yeah, exactly.
- Get up every morning, and try to figure out, solve the problems that are in front of you.
- That's right.
- Yeah, and I think we do our discipline and misservice if we don't remember how challenging those days were, and all we accomplished, I mean, think-
- Absolutely.
- Some people look back at that time, and think about, we know, we had a lot of restrictions on what we could do. And the accommodations we made at universities across the country were unbelievable. Thinking about the distancing in the classroom, and wearing the masks, and the faculty member having to wear a mask, or teaching online if you weren't able to teach in person. But at the graduate level, it was also challenging because you had, you know, people had labs and such.
- Yes.
- Labs were being shut down, and incredibly challenging times. That really was a trial by fire. But you probably learned a lot about yourself in the process.
- Absolutely. Realize that you have to be humble.
- Yeah.
- You have to put yourself out there, recognize-
- You don't know all the answers, yeah.
- Yeah, you don't have all the answers. And people are afraid. And you have to be reassuring. I think a calm voice in a troubled world is much more valuable than trying to solve all the problems.
- Yeah.
- People solve their own problems if you give them the time and space to work with themselves. You don't want to fuel a fire which is already there. Instead, you want to calm it down, and let people settle down and do what they can do best, and challenge them to do what is best for themselves and for their community, for their students, and so forth. That's essentially the way I looked at it, is empowering people to do what they do best, and let them know that we are here to help.
- There comes a time-
- Yes.
- When you learn about a position opening here at Texas State.
- Yes.
- And let's talk about the decision to leave the place. You were at UTA for a long time. Talk about the decision process about coming here, and then let's talk about what you're doing here now. So, start off now the process of applying to come here.
- Absolutely, you know, at the time I had been at my former institution for 33 years. It was a time where I felt that I had given all I could give.
- And they made tremendous strides like becoming R1 institution. Their enrollment was bursting, number of Ph.D. graduates and programs.
- Everything was going well. I felt that I couldn't contribute much more. There was a change in leadership at my institution as well. I thought this is a time where I can contribute somewhere else. I love being in Texas, and I saw Texas State as a great opportunity. You had just started there about a year ago. I started doing my research to find out more about you, and what your mission was, and what you're trying to see. It resonated with me. The fact that you're trying to take an institution to an R1 status, grow the research program, but more importantly, the mission of what Texas State stands for resonated with me. That it's a place which is inclusive, creates opportunities for students. It's also very, it's not an elitist institution, but it is an institution which is inclusive. It's creating opportunity, especially for first-generation students.
- [Kelly] Yes.
- And so, that resonated for me. You know, having gone to a school like Brown, which is very selective, I recognized the distinction of creating opportunity. And I think here in Texas, and Texas State University in particular, the first-generation students, especially if you are coming from limited resources, it opens doors not just for the student, but also for their families. And it's a generational impact. And it resonates a lot more for me there than in a school, where perhaps you might have an incremental impact on somebody's life. Here, you have a transformational impact on somebody's life. And so, I think that is an opportunity where I felt that you are opening doors, and growing enrollment, getting this to the next level. It's an opportunity for me to be part of that experience.
- You know, a metaphor I use a lot is that at some schools, the students are using a baseball metaphor. They're born on third base. I mean, they're already in scoring position. And our students, about half of them are first-generation. About half of them went to a school that didn't prepare them very well to go to college. About half of them are Pell-eligible, which means their financial situation is not great. And so, they're bunting to get onto first. They're doing everything they can to get on first. And then trying to steal second to get into scoring position. And you know, our goal is to get them on first base. And then, once they get there, to make sure they get all the way around. So, having the biggest freshman class is great, but having the biggest graduate classes is even more important. And I think that's kind of the shifting mission of the university now is just focus on student success. Which I think is the thing that resonated with the search committee when they met with you, is that you had a real strong orientation, not just to becoming an R1 institution, which is also a goal of ours, but to focus on what is the most important thing, which is the success of our students who come here. So talk a little bit about that, and how that is driving what you do on almost a daily basis here.
- I think it's critically important that you have to remember your mission.
- Yeah.
- You know, you have to have a singular focus that why are you here? We are here for the students. We would, neither you or I, would have a job if students were not here. So we have to be a student-centered university. And in that context, what that basically means is we have to be here to help our students across the finish line. And that comes in a variety of different ways. I recognize that students in the past, as the faculty would say, "Look on the right and look on the left. One of you is going to graduate. The others are not going to." that's the wrong way of approaching this. The moment a student is admitted to Texas State, it is our moral responsibility to help them across the finish line.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Because not only are they dependent on this, their family is dependent on that. And so, in that context, I take this as a solemn oath, almost, that I have to do everything I physically can, and create an opportunity where a student can succeed. So working with our Division of Student Success, working within our own office, we need to figure out ways in which we find out what are the challenges students are facing. Recognizing it's not just academic preparation, it's a combination of a number of things that results in student success. That we need to address it from all of the different angles so that the students, at the end of the day, are able to cross the finish line and get a good job. So not only do they complete, but they need to be getting credentials of value.
- Yeah.
- So it's a combination of a number of things. So we have to address it from all of those different angles.
- I'm gonna go back to the conversation we had earlier about how faculty tend to recruit graduate students differently from undergrads.
- Yes.
- And then, because you're recruiting these students, they're your responsibility, that is actually shifting now to the undergraduate level where faculty now are taking ownership over student success. It used to be, well, student affairs can take care of that. But you know, my job is just to teach. In fact, I think there used to be kind of a point of pride of teaching the weed-out class. Like my job is to make sure that I'm the gatekeeper here.
- [Pranesh] Yeah.
- I think our faculty are shifting, have shifted towards also being oriented towards student success.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah, I see our faculty care about this thing in a way that may not happen at other campuses.
- You should, in fact, when a parent drops a kid off to college, they're actually signing a compact with you.
- Yeah.
- "We took care of them for the first 18 years of their life, it's now your job."
- Yeah.
- To help them to the next phase of their life. So it's not just the fact that you're teaching them in one class. It's a culmination of all of the classes they take, the experiences that they get, they're gonna grow as individuals, and they leave us. When they leave us, they're like a kid that you're leaving off in college. We are sending them off to the next phase of their life. So it's our responsibility, when they're here, that we make sure that they have an opportunity. They have opportunities not just in their classroom, but overall to grow as people in leadership, in activities that will grow them as individuals, interpersonal skills, all of those are pieces of student success. And so, we have to address it from all of those different angles.
- You've been doing this for a long time now.
- Yes.
- And I think it's no secret that there's an ebb and flow in the history of higher education. And there's challenges and opportunities that exist now that didn't exist before, and so on. What do you see as kind of like both of those? What's our best opportunity, and what is our biggest challenge?
- I think our best opportunity is the fact that we continue to be an institution of access. I think, even as we grow in reputation, we fundamentally should not shift from that mission. I think we need to keep our eyeball on that mission that we are creating opportunity. So that's our greatest strength. But it also is our greatest challenge because students who come in sometimes are not coming in with all of the right preparation. So creating those pathways for them to succeed is not easy. And because each student is an individual, and the challenges that each student brings with them, whether it's in a classroom setting, or co-curricular-related settings is something that we have to spend time and effort to understand so that we can actually provide them the services they need. So that, to me, is a big challenge because students today come from a variety of different complex environments, complex preparation-type of high schools, and so forth. And it's not a clean-cut way of dealing with it. So it's more complex today. So that's where I see the big challenge. But it's also, I see it as an opportunity because these are kids who would never have gone to college 25 years ago.
- Yeah.
- This was not on the cards for them. So these are kids who are first in their family to go to college, so they don't have a peer, they don't have a parent who's going to college so they can lean on. We are those parents, and they are their siblings that they're leaning on to get them across the finish line.
- Yeah, I think you've put your finger right on the pulse of one of the issues here at Texas State that you and I are both very passionate about. And I think our entire campus is, that's oriented towards this question. You want to open the doors as widely as possible. But you can't just open the doors and not provide the resources that people, 'cause then you actually, I think, you may harm someone's worse than help them to admit them, and not give them success. They end up having student loan debt, and not having a college degree, maybe delaying entry into the workforce, or frustrating them in such a way that they don't get a degree. And we believe that this is a life-changing experience. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be doing it. And so, you gotta do the job right.
- I think in that sense, we have to transform ourselves as an institution.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause our rules and regulations are slow to change.
- Yeah.
- And that's a challenge.
- A lot of our rules were written in the 1960s, right? And so, we're still like, you know, 60 years later, going, "Why are we doing this?
- Why are we doing this? Right?
- So that's, and I know you've hired some new leadership in the office. And part of their charge is to rethink what the future of higher education looks like at Texas State.
- Yeah, I told them that there's no sacred cows.
- Yes.
- I told 'em, "There is no sacred cow here." Do what we have to do to help our students succeed. And if that means tearing down some preexisting misconceptions of how we need to do things, yes, we will do that. As long as we do not hurt the reputation of the university, we do not hurt our students, everything else is fair game.
- Well, Pranesh, at every podcast we invite our viewers to submit questions for a future show. And they've done this, and so I've got a question here. You get to be the podcast host here, so.
- Okay. Well, Kelly, if your life had a tagline, what would it be?
- Holy cow, that's a good one. There was, I'm inspired by music a lot. And one of my favorite Canadian rock artists was Corey Hart. And he's famous for having a song called "Sunglasses." "I wear My Sunglasses at night," or something like that. But he had another song on that same album that became a theme of mine. And the song is "Never Surrender." And what I loved about that song is it reminded me of Sir Winston Churchill during the worst times is leading up, we talked about World War II earlier when the Island of Great Britain was under-
- Under attack.
- Under attack, or under threat of attack. And he inspired his people by saying, "We'll never surrender. We'll fight on the landing beaches, we'll fight in the air. We'll fight in the sea, we'll fight in the cities, and in the streets, we'll never surrender." And I get goosebumps thinking about that. But that song, that concept of "Never Giving Up," has always inspired me. So I guess that would be a theme. "Never surrender," how about you? Do you have a theme?
- To me, I think it's something similar that there's opportunity always at the end of the rainbow.
- Yeah.
- That I'm a very positive person in general. And the fact that in every challenge there's an opportunity.
- Yeah.
- And I try to view it from that lens in a broad context that everything passes, and there's an opportunity always around the corner. So when the difficult times like, you know, we are living in difficult times today, it'll pass. And then we'll move on, and we'll do good things, and create opportunities for our students.
- You know, when I was in graduate school, I remember reading a paper about how people deal with challenging times.
- [Pranesh] Yes.
- And there are some people like that something really hard might happen to them, and they think it's the end of the world. And how they'll respond to it is pretty, it can be really challenging. But the truth is that when they look back on it 10 years later, they go, "Damn, why was I so stressed out about that thing? You know, it all kind of worked out in the end and I kinda kept going." And so, I think the themes are very similar. That, you know, we are gonna face challenges, there's mechanisms to deal with them. Mostly by not trying to do it by yourself, by leaning on other people and taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us, but also just kind of plowing forward, and not giving up on it. And that's something that I hope our students who listen to podcasts like this, who are, you know, maybe it's midterms, and they're worried about their grades, and so on, to not just, sometimes they just will go on, they'll stay in the dorm room for a month. They won't leave because they're so stressed out.
- [Pranesh] Yeah.
- That you just have to keep going. You have to get up every morning, gotta go to class, you gotta go to work, you gotta do your job, and keep working away. And then, 10 years from now, you'll be glad you did, and you'll, I think there's something beneficial about surviving something very challenging. It actually gives you courage to face the next challenge because-
- Exactly.
- Life is full of challenges, as you well know.
- Very much so.
- Thank you for coming in and chatting with me about, first off, you're Texas State story, but also the future of Texas State University. I feel like the academic division is in good hands with your leadership.
- Well, thank you.
- And you brought in some great leadership here as well. We had great, you know, numbers this year on enrollment numbers, setting records in almost every category of things. And then, I think you'll start to see, four years out from now, that success layout in graduation numbers and six years, and so on about our, we haven't even talked about research, about how our faculty are engaged in research as well. So, thank you for your leadership. Thank you for coming to the podcast. And thank you all for joining us on "The Current," for this edition of learning about things that are happening at Texas State University. Until next time, States up, everyone.