Editorial
Front Page - Friday, March 12, 2010
It’s all in a day’s work for Chancellor Roger Brown
Erica Tuggle
Chancellor Roger Brown stands in front of his recognition for the Bank of America Award for Excellence in Teaching presented to him while he was a political science faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1994.
- Erica Tuggle
A day in the life of Chancellor Roger Brown of UTC can involve making decisions that affect the more than 10,000 students enrolled in the school.
Brown said the idea of having over 10,000 people depending on his decision-making is a feeling of great responsibility.
“It makes you worry, particularly if you feel there has been any threat to students’ safety or health, and you feel very concerned and responsible,” Brown says. “There is such a great network of administrators working on all of these challenges every single day that I never feel that I am doing it alone. I can’t imagine any other profession that has so much gratification in seeing young people develop into their potential.”
Brown, the 15th chancellor of UTC, was the first in his family to attend college. He grew up in Bristol, Tenn., on a little farm as the eighth of nine children to parents that had never finished high school.
“I got a lot of positive feedback for being in school, and I liked it so much that I never left,” Brown says.
Brown started out as most people in the state did, in factory work, which he did for two years, until he could start going to evening classes at East Tennessee State University that were offered at the local high school.
“Working in a large manufacturing plant was really good for me because I gained a better sense of what the real world looked like,” Brown says.
From there Brown attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1967 while working several part-time jobs to fund his education. Like many students, he changed his major several times before he decided on political science. He graduated from UTK in 1973, and became a middle school math teacher in Knox County. He returned to UTK four years later for a master’s degree, and then pursued a doctorate degree from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. His first teaching job after earning his doctorate was as an assistant professor of political science at Iowa State University.
“It was a real culture shock,” Brown says. “The weather was so extreme, I only lasted two years.”
After Iowa, Brown began at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he would remain for 15 years as he moved from the position of assistant professor, to director of the graduate program, to department head and then to associate provost. After a short time teaching at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, he was accepted to the chancellor’s position at UTC in 2005.
Brown says a typical day in the life of chancellor is divided into two main categories. The first is to work closely inside the institution on “the big picture” and the strategic goals for the campus, to decide where the university wants to be headed and how to get there. The second category is to work outside the university to foster and build support for the institution, Brown says.
One of the issues of vital importance the chancellor deals with on a daily basis includes the growth of the physical space of UTC.
“We have now grown to 10,500 students, and we believe in two to three years we will have come to the capacity of our growth with current facilities, and so we must look ahead.”
The university is doing this by looking for any properties available in areas surrounding the campus, such as the school’s recent purchase of the Bryan funeral home at McCallie and Palmetto Street. Brown says this purchase is set to become either a multiple story parking garage or student housing, both of which are much needed.
The chancellor says the university has talked with Blue Cross Blue Shield about purchasing the Gold Building, and continues to be interested in the possibility of offices or classrooms there.
Chancellor Brown says he encourages community involvement from private companies who have expressed interest in building shops, cafes and bookstores near campus to cater to students, as well as developing the university as a high visibility neighbor with the establishment of offices in the central business district.
“It is very important, symbolically, that we show we are tied to the fortunes of the city,” Brown says. “We have great opportunities and lots of space to purchase, but at the same time, we are being asked to cut our budget.”
The university also has plans to use the stimulus funds they received to build and develop a “Mathematics Mall.” This would consist of a large computer lab where students are taught in a self-paced method, starting at the level of their abilities, to learn math concepts. Brown says this will help with the growing issue of math proficiency in the United States and aid in lowering the rise of students who do not pursue math, science, engineering and business degrees because of math deficiencies.
It is not all work and no play for the chancellor, though. Brown says he and his wife, Carolyn, will be spending part
of their spring break in Charlotte, N.C. at the Southern Conference basketball tournament (SOCON) and visiting
old friends.
Brown says in his free time he enjoys listening to jazz and reading. His favorite books are murder mysteries, biographies of presidents and “the greats,” he said, like his most recent read, “War and Peace” by Tolstoy.
“It is a wonderful book; a great big soap opera of trials and tribulations,” he says.
Roger and Carolyn’s daughter, Caroline, is earning her doctorate in cancer studies at University of California at Los Angeles, and their son, Austin, is a third year medical student at East Tennessee State University. The couple also has an 8-year-old, rescued husky mix they call “Madeline Albright.” Brown says they may be adopting another furry friend as well.
Chancellor Brown says, in the end, the students measure the university’s success.
“The university will be the most successful if students learn to think critically, and to become capable of adapting to change, because the world our students are inheriting and will lead is going to be changing fast.”
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