Cathy Ackerman: So welcome to Sweet Tea and Strategy, a podcast by Ackerman Marketing and PR, featuring business and community leaders throughout Tennessee talking about issues and trends of importance to our state and beyond. And sharing some of their best sweet tea recipes and tea sipping stories. I'm Kathy Ackerman, and we're delighted to have as our special guest today Randy Boyd, interim president of the University of Tennessee. So welcome, Randy.
Randy Boyd: It's great to be here with you, Kathy. And Go Vols, right?
Cathy Ackerman: Thank you! And Mocs and Skyhawks and all the others that you love.
Randy Boyd: Yes, we're fully representing the entire system of great University of Tennessee schools.
Cathy Ackerman: So how are your teams doing these days?
Randy Boyd: Are you talking about baseball teams?
Cathy Ackerman: Baseball, yes, it's baseball season.
Randy Boyd: Well, not great. Attendance is good, hot dogs are tasty, popcorn is hot and salty, the beer is cold, and the teams are worth seeing, but we're not actually leading in any place yet. However, the rookie league teams actually have just started, so there's still hope there. Smokies are going to have to have a strong second half.
Cathy Ackerman: So I understand that you're not a huge fan of sweet tea, but that you've had—you've been spoiled by the best sweet tea grandmother in the world, right?
Randy Boyd: No, so I am a huge fan of sweet tea. There was just only one lady that knew how to make it perfect, and that was my grandmother. Sadly, she passed away about 20 years ago, but I grew up drinking her sweet tea and any place else I order sweet tea, it's just not like hers, so I order unsweet and make it—sweeten it myself.
Cathy Ackerman: There you go. So as you have traveled across the state, which you've done extensively, both in a car and on foot, have you gone to any little fun diners along the way that have had particularly good tea that you sweeten yourself?
Randy Boyd: Hm, I wouldn't say that there's certain unsweet tea that I would recommend one more than the other. A lot of really interesting food to go along with your sweet tea, but the tea itself—no, I'm still spoiled.
Cathy Ackerman: So what about a unique Tennessee food?
Randy Boyd: Well, I was in Selmer about three weeks ago and I had a slugburger. If nobody's had a slugburger before, it's a—it's a partially meat product that has lots of different filler that's deep-fried and served like a hamburger, except it's really not. But those are—that's a famous thing from Selmer.
Cathy Ackerman: How fun. Okay, so the other burning question on the table is: how do you think the Vols are going to do this fall in football? Understanding that we're in a rebuilding program under our relatively new coach.
Randy Boyd: Well, I'm optimistic. We will be better, and we've got a great coach. He's done a great job recruiting. He's got a great supporting team, led by a great athletic director in Coach Fulmer. So I have ultimate confidence in their long-term ability to have a really strong program. It's going to be—but it's competitive, you know? We're in the SEC conference and I remember a few years back in which we had the fifth best recruiting class in the nation but fourth in the SEC East. So it's just a really tough conference to be a part of, but you know, if you can win your conference, you have a really good shot at winning the national championship.
Cathy Ackerman: So if you were a betting man, would you bet on us to win our conference?
Randy Boyd: Absolutely. I didn't say which year, but we will definitely be winning our conference. It's hard to say which year it will be.
Cathy Ackerman: So the Vol nation faithful loves to hear that.
Randy Boyd: The future is bright, but it may not be immediate before we're winning championships.
Cathy Ackerman: So we'll be seeing you a lot every Saturday dressed in orange and cheering them on?
Randy Boyd: Always.
Cathy Ackerman: So how did the university convince you to step in at the helm of this during such a critical time with a lot of leadership changes across the board? What made you say yes?
Randy Boyd: Well, so it started off about two days after the end of the gubernatorial campaign. I got an email from Joe DiPietro saying, "Sorry you lost, maybe we can get together for lunch." And you know, for my four years prior to that, either as a candidate or as Commissioner of Economic and Community Development, even with my business, anytime somebody would just say, "Hey, let's get together for lunch," I'd always really flippantly say, "Sure, I'll have my secretary schedule it." And then I knew that it would probably be like three or four months because I just have stuff—there's just always so much stuff to do no matter how much I might want to have gotten together with them. Anyway, so I said, "Sure, Joe, and I'll copy Hannah and ask her to schedule something." Sure enough, Hannah emails back and says, "Randy, you can see him next week. You got no stuff. Nobody wants to see you." So I got together with him the following week. We had a nice lunch and at the end of it he said, "You know, I'm thinking about retiring. How would you feel about being interim?" I said, "Well, I don't know. Should I?" He gave me some good reasons why, but at the end of the day, for me, it was about giving back to my alma mater. This university has given so much to me and my family and to my community, and if I could give back a bit, then I felt like this would be an opportunity to do so. What I have found since is not only do you give back to your university in this role, but you can have an amazing impact on your state. There's few organizations, if any, in the state of Tennessee that impact more lives and more people in more corners of the state than this university does. So it's been incredibly rewarding just being a part of this great enterprise working with so many dedicated, passionate, inspirational people.
Cathy Ackerman: So you're here for a relatively short time. What do you hope to accomplish most in the time that you're here? What's your number one priority?
Randy Boyd: Well, we have six objectives, and we're making some great progress on each of them. The first objective was to put great leadership in place. We've got a great leader at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. We had an interim chancellor in Wayne Davis who did a great job, but he wouldn't do it forever, and so we managed to get a lady named Donde Plowman who's going to be just terrific in this job. Our second objective was to do a better job of increasing our graduate output. We are in charge of providing talent for the state. We want to do a better job of that. Earlier this year we announced the UT Promise, which now makes it possible for every student in the state of Tennessee with a family income of under $50,000, as long as they're academically qualified, to come to UT free of tuition and fees. We want to improve research. We just passed at our last board meeting something called the Oak Ridge Institute, which is going to really provide a fantastic foundation for our relationship with Oak Ridge National Lab and take it to a whole another level and make us a global leader. We want to make a huge difference in engagement, and we do so many things across the state, but what if we all worked together across the University of Tennessee system with our partners at the state government to make an impact on a major challenge for the state? We picked opioids. We have resources and we're putting all those against those. So those are some of the big things that we're working on.
Cathy Ackerman: So you've talked a little bit about making education more accessible, and certainly the Promise programs do that. How does our state fund that? How can we afford to send kids to school free?
Randy Boyd: Yeah, let me talk about that mission first for just a moment. So, you know, we are the land-grant university, and maybe for some of your listeners that might not know, the land-grant university was a concept that Abraham Lincoln came up with and was passed in a bill called the Morrill Act in 1862. And the mission was to be a ladder up for the working class and the middle class. Before the land-grant universities were created, most post-secondary education, most university education, was the elite universities in the northeast—the Yales, the Harvards. People went there to become politicians and ministers. And the idea of creating a university for the average person to get a skill in agriculture or industry was totally novel and new. And unfortunately today there are a lot of those elite universities still in the country that measure their success by how many people they can keep out. That's not who we are. We are here to be a ladder up to let more people in. We're not going to measure our success by our exclusivity, but by our inclusivity. So the UT Promise allows us to do that. And it's actually very affordable. As a percentage of our overall aid, it's only 1.2%. So it's a small amount. The second way, though, in which we will actually even cover that 1.2%, is to create an endowment. So we're creating a UT Promise endowment where donors who want to make a difference in their state, want to give other young people that are academically qualified the opportunity to go to college an opportunity to go, they can donate to this UT Promise. And we're going to be making an announcement and kicking it off at the UT Knoxville-UT Chattanooga football game this fall and announcing the target. I'm not going to say the target today. A wise person told me you've got to get a pretty high percentage of your target before you announce it, but I can tell you that the early fundraising is going well. People get the idea, people want to—you know, there are some people that want to donate to build a building, but there are a lot of people that want to donate to help other kids succeed. And so we're finding we're getting a lot of interest from alumni and others that want to help other people have the same opportunity that they did here at the University of Tennessee.
Cathy Ackerman: And you were involved in an exciting announcement last week with the Knoxville Promise program. Tell us a little bit about that.
Randy Boyd: Yes, that's right. So one of the challenges that everybody has all across the country—and we do too in the state of Tennessee with the Tennessee Promise and with students at all levels, regardless of which way they get into college—is to make sure they graduate. So at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, we have the best graduation rate in the state in public universities; 72.5% of our kids that come will graduate in six years. At UT Martin and UT Chattanooga, it's 47.7%. That's good—some of the best in the state. If you think about it, that means that one out of every two that go to those schools fail to graduate, and in Knoxville one out of every four fail to graduate. For every one that fails to graduate, that's a dream of a better job, a better career, a better life that we've failed. So we want to do a better job with that. Jim Haslam believes also that we need to make it more likely more students will succeed, so he donated $6.2 million. Another organization that I chair, Tennessee Achieves, is going to administer the program over the next two years in Knox County, and it's going to consist of providing extra mentors, extra financial support in the form of an extra $250 per semester for textbooks. It's going to include a bridge program between the freshman and the sophomore year so more students can transition successfully for that first to second year, and all sorts of other wrap-around services to make sure that more students from Knox County when they go to college will graduate from college. If it does well, which it should, then we're going to use that model to roll out across the state.
Cathy Ackerman: And you work closely, too, with the community colleges and the technical colleges throughout the state as well, it sounds like. Closer than ever?
Randy Boyd: Yes. So Tennessee Achieves is administering the Tennessee Promise, so there's the money, which is an endowment that the state created. But someone has to actually recruit the students, make sure they fill out the FAFSA, recruit the mentors, train them, match them all, oversee all the service—the community service projects—and that's Tennessee Achieves. So they've got a staff of about 26 working 93 of the 95 counties, have been doing it for 11 years, and working with all the community colleges. They also have counselors at each of the community colleges to help the students when they get there their first year.
Cathy Ackerman: And you've been involved with this personally for years.
Randy Boyd: Yeah, I was along with Mayor Ragsdale, Tim Williams, Rich Ray, and at the time Mayor Haslam, we started this back in 2008. And so yeah, I've been the—I guess you could argue the founder and the chairman and definitely a champion. I like to say that Mike Ragsdale, Krissy DeAlejandro, I'll give them the credit for most of the idea. Krissy DeAlejandro today and her team do all the work. I'm just the guy that brags about all the great work that they do.
Cathy Ackerman: Well, that's a fun job to have, right? It's a good job to have. So how do you think UT ranks these days? And I know that there's sort of an overemphasis on rankings from U.S. News & World Report. Is there anything that is coming down the line in terms of recognition for the university that you have on your radar screen that you hope to make happen?
Randy Boyd: Well, so first off, two things. One, I don't put a lot of stock in U.S. News & World Report rankings. One of the things that they measure you on is how many kids you keep out of school. That's not who we are. So just some of the premises in which they use to rank you are not things that we subscribe to. But if we happen to appear well in one person's rankings, that's good. One ranking that we do care about and we're working hard to change is our research ranking. As of the last time they did a ranking, the University of Tennessee Knoxville was 107th out of 131 research institutions in research. The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture was 170th. Turned out that we were the only university in the country that was a land-grant that had agriculture and their flagship separate. Last Friday our board agreed to unify them. By doing so, rather than 170th and 107th respectively, combined we're now 55th in public universities in research. But the second thing that we did last Friday was create something called the Oak Ridge Institute. We think it has the potential to add another 500 graduate students, another 120 faculty members, and another $200 million in additional research, and by doing so, in research only, we'll be in the—we could be arguably in the top 20 or top 30 and a global leader in research. Oak Ridge National Labs is such an incredible asset—other universities would kill to be able to have a partnership like that. And we've done a good job of working with them, but we can do a far better job. So Director Zacharia and I and my team are extremely eager to really do much, much more.
Cathy Ackerman: What would that look like if you had your way in terms of what that collaboration could really be?
Randy Boyd: Well, the plan is to find three key areas of national interest—things that are critical to the national security and the national scientific community that the federal government's willing to fund and that we have competency in and the resources to be a world leader in. Three at least that we've identified would be bioinformatics, would be quantum communications, and artificial intelligence. With the world's fastest computers right next door, we think that combination of assets would allow us to be a leader in those. And to make that happen, we would need again about another 120 faculty, total 500 graduate students. But I think that's a vision that we can accomplish, hopefully in the next five years. And so we're actually beginning to develop plans to do exactly that.
Cathy Ackerman: And very exciting. You know, we've talked for a while in this region about how interesting it would be to put the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in tighter communication and tighter collaboration with each other, but it sounds like this is a real step forward.
Randy Boyd: Yes. So even if we don't—we're not able to raise the funds and be able to do all the things that we just said that we were going to do, even though I have a high degree of confidence that we will be able to, just creating the Oak Ridge Institute and putting a wrapper around all the other things that we already do will allow more coordination and alignment with the existing activities. And it'll also help with our brand. You know, as you travel around the nation and even around the state, even here in Knoxville, I'll talk to people about the fact that the University of Tennessee manages, has a contract to manage with the DOE, the Oak Ridge National Lab and—people don't realize it. Half the people in the audience always look stunned that that's a fact. But we already have a good relationship. So this will if nothing else help us build a stronger brand around that relationship.
Cathy Ackerman: So talk about if you could create the perfect perception for the University of Tennessee, the messaging. What would your elevator speech be?
Randy Boyd: Well, we are the state's land-grant university. We are the state's leader in talent development. We are the state's leader in engagement making a socio-economic impact across the state in all 95 counties. And we are a world leader in research and that's growing at an even faster rate.
Cathy Ackerman: You've talked a little bit about a students-first culture that you're interested in doing more about here. What does that mean to you? What would that look like?
Randy Boyd: Well, we want to make sure that more students that show up here graduate here. And that's again the key focus. And so we're looking at a lot of ways to support them. You know, the UT Promise not only will bring students in but it'll help keep students here because they are less burdened by financial stress. And then they'll also graduate with less debt. You know, one key myth that I hope to dispel is that you go to college and you end up saddled with debt and you can't get a job. Our students get jobs. They get great jobs. And 46% of the students that come to UT Knoxville graduate with zero debt. About another 25% graduate with under $24,000 in debt. The idea that you come to University of Tennessee Knoxville and walk off with all this debt and can't get a job is just totally false, and we've got to correct that.
Cathy Ackerman: Got a track record to prove it.
Randy Boyd: Yes.
Cathy Ackerman: So what about greater transparency and accountability? You've talked about that a little bit too in terms of easier access to information about what's happening at the university.
Randy Boyd: So there's a few things—most of the things I would say that I've learned on the job here by listening to all the great people. There's a few biases that I came to the job with, and one of those biases is the value of transparency. I think the more you can share and provide information to your associates and to your stakeholders, the more effective you are. I always said in my business, the corollary to empowerment is information. If you want people to be empowered, you have to give them information. And so immediately on day two, we created the UT Transparent UT initiative. And the idea is put everything possible that we can share out on our UT Transparent UT website. And you know, in most cases—actually in nearly every case—the reporters, the public, could ask for this information anyway, and so I said, rather than wait for people to ask, let's just proactively go ahead and put it out there. And I think it's also helped with our culture. Not only is it helping share information that the public deserves to have and that the employees need to have, but it also just changes the way we think about things. When people are having a conversation about a variety of things here at UT, now the first question is, "Hey, shouldn't we put this up on Transparent UT?" We just think about being a more open culture, and I think that's a good thing.
Cathy Ackerman: What's the biggest surprise you had when you walked in these doors?
Randy Boyd: I think the biggest surprise has been the impact that we have across the state. I mean, I grew up in South Knoxville, in the shadow of UT. I was actually born at Baptist Hospital in the shadow of Neyland Stadium. I've been involved in the university as Commissioner of Economic Development, with my business, on the Dean's advisory council for the College of Business, as a donor, so I kind of thought I knew UT. I had no idea. Just all the ways in which we impact the state. You know, the Health Science Center produces 70% of all the dentists and doctors in the state. You know, UT Martin has five satellite campuses in rural places like Selmer, where the slugburger is, where students in rural counties that might not otherwise have access to education, they're providing it. You've got the Space Institute in Tullahoma doing amazing work, creating new technologies around nuclear propulsion to get us to destinations in space six times faster. You've got that relationship with Oak Ridge National Labs, building a new computer that'll be the fastest in the world—it's the third time having the fastest in the world. And there's extension offices in every one of the 95 counties, leading 4-H clubs. You know, we manage all the 4-H members in the state.
Cathy Ackerman: Did not know that.
Randy Boyd: Another little bit of important trivia, but it's important. We have 186,000 4-H members in the state of Tennessee, which makes Tennessee the largest club membership in 4-H in the country, more so than Texas. And the University of Tennessee extension offices manage all that. Everywhere you turn, UT.
Cathy Ackerman: So what's next for you? When you leave here, what will you be doing?
Randy Boyd: I don't know yet. Jenny hasn't given me my instructions yet. But I just want to continue to find ways to give back. You know, my company's in good hands with a great team and while I'd love to help them, they're not really asking for help—they're kind of happy with me doing other things, and I'm happy as well. God's blessed me with a—the opportunity to find ways to give back, so whatever I do, just wherever I can find the best way to give back is what I'll choose to do.
Cathy Ackerman: We are so lucky to have you, and thank you so much for talking to us today. This has been great. You've got an amazing list of priorities on your plate, but you're handling them with a lot of enthusiasm, and you're the right person to be here right now. So thank you.
Randy Boyd: Well, thank you, Kathy. I appreciate the time and opportunity to visit with you.
Cathy Ackerman: Absolutely.