July 29, 2022
Ali A. Houshmand grew up very poor in Iran, and, even as a doctoral student in the United States with a wife and two children, he said his family was on food stamps.
But Houshmand eventually became a professor, then an administrator, and rose to the top at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, where he celebrated his 10th anniversary as president last month.
On his watch, enrollment and the number of employees have climbed dramatically, making Rowan the fourth-fastest growing university in the country in each of the last three years, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Now Houshmand has told The Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview that he wants to turn Rowan, a state-owned school, into a top research university with a Division I sports program and a student enrollment that would nearly double, mostly through online programs. And he’d like to do it by the time his contract is up in 2026.
“Maybe people think I’m crazy,” Houshmand, 67, told the Inquirer. “But what can I say? I’m crazy. I believe we always have to imagine the unimaginable. If you don’t, you will never give yourself enough confidence that you can achieve things.”
He said it’s a philosophy he developed through his hard-scrabble upbringing, which also taught him failure is a friend. “It makes me enjoy success more,” he said.
Fall enrollment stood at about 12,000 when Houshmand became president in 2012; in fall 2020, there were nearly 19,700 undergraduate, graduate and professional students. (Like other schools, Rowan lost some enrollment during the pandemic, falling to 19,100 last fall.) Employment rolls grew from about 1,600 to 3,900. Rowan has added two medical schools during his tenure, one of them osteopathic, becoming only the second university in the nation to have both. And it soon will open a veterinary school, the first in New Jersey and one of several new capital projects Rowan has in the works.
Houshmand has earned high marks from both student and faculty leaders, who say he has greatly raised the university’s profile. “It’s cooler to say I go there,” said sophomore Paige Bathurst, 20, the student government association president.
Current and former faculty leaders told the Inquirer they have great respect for Houshmand, citing his collaborative approach. Even when there were disagreements, solutions were worked out as amicably as possible, said Joe Basso, a professor of communications who is in his ninth year as president of the faculty and professional staff union.
But some faculty have concerns about the rapid growth and whether enough staff and facilities are in place to accommodate it, Basso said. Students have complained the university doesn’t offer enough mental health supports, staging a rally to call for more in November.
While giving Houshmand credit for managing the growth well, Basso said, “I still think there’s more to be done in terms of that infrastructure growth.”
Growing up in Tehran, Houshmand was one of 10 children. His parents couldn’t read, though they worked hard to provide for the family. His father sold water, crossing town to collect it in jugs where it was more readily available and walking it back.
Houshmand got admitted to the University of Essex in the United Kingdom where he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in statistics. He then went on for master’s and doctoral degrees in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“I had to put myself completely through college,” he said. “I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I cleaned floors and toilets.”
For a time, he worked as a staff analyst for United Airlines, but then joined the faculty at the University of Cincinnati, eventually moving to Drexel University in Philadelphia and then becoming provost at Rowan in 2006. The university already was on a path to becoming more prominent, having received a $100 million gift in 1992 from Henry Rowan, the university’s namesake.
Last year, Rowan became a Research 2 (R2) university, a designation by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education that means the school has “high research activity.”
But Houshmand doesn’t want to stop there. He is aiming for Research 1, connoting “very high” research activity. Drexel, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania are among others in that classification.
“We believe we have a very, very strong critical mass of excellence on our campus in the area of medicine, sciences, and the area of engineering,” he said.
While some schools have shied away from the designation because they want to continue their focus on teaching, Houshmand said Rowan’s emphasis on teaching will be no less rigorous.
Basso, the union president, said while exciting, the move presents challenges for faculty and would require more graduate assistants and tenure-track positions. Houshmand said the university plans to hire 50 new faculty over the next five years in the prime research areas.
He hopes to increase enrollment to about 40,000, mostly through online classes, which are growing dramatically and boosting revenue, he said.
Online education brought in $54.7 million this year, more than the university’s basic state appropriation and more than double what online classes yielded when he became president, the university said.
Houshmand has touted Rowan’s affordability, though it did raise 2022-23 tuition and fees 4 percent, leaving in-state students to pay $14,951 next year.
Asked if there was one thing he would have liked to do better, he said: “I wish I could have raised a lot more resources so that I could give a lot more opportunities to low-income kids.”
The university soon will launch a new fund-raising campaign for half a billion dollars, he said.
Houshmand also would like to rise from Division III sports to Division I. As part of that effort, he envisions the need for a 5,000- to 7,000-seat sports arena built through a public-private partnership. He had sought state funding for the project, but that fell through, he said. Now, he said he’s in conversation with private developers.
While Houshmand said he has no plans to retire or look for another job, he can’t guarantee all his ambitions for Rowan will materialize. But, he said, if they don’t, “it will not be due to lack of effort. I can assure you of that.”