What changes are coming to Columbus State University under its new president?
She is the first woman among six presidents to lead Columbus State University in the institution’s 65 years, but Stuart Rayfield seems more interested in a different kind of history upon her return to the campus.
The history is the tradition of servant leadership in the Chattahoochee Valley and the productive partnership between CSU and the community.
While she was a faculty member at CSU (2006-16), Rayfield directed the William B. Turner Center for Servant Leadership. After leaving CSU to work as interim president at three University System of Georgia institutions and as USG’s interim vice chancellor for academic affairs, she has come full circle.
“I’m over the Moon about being back at Columbus State,” Rayfield said. “I truly am. I consider this to be my home institution. It is the institution where I’ve spent the most amount of time, and I think it’s also the institution where I have seen the greatest impact and connections between the community of Columbus and the Chattahoochee Valley as well as with the university. It’s just a great place to be.”
Here are excerpts from her interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, edited for brevity and clarity:
How do you define servant leadership and how will you incorporate it in your presidency?
“It’s really about being a servant first, then aspiring to lead. Then it takes it a step further because it really looks at the outcomes of your leadership. It’s not just that you held the title and produced the bottom line, but what is the impact of your leadership over time? I use (Robert) Greenleaf here. He coined the term. Do you help people to become healthier, freer, wise, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And is your impact on the least privileged in society, are you helping them up or at least not hurting?
“… I had the great fortune to spend a lot of time with (the late Columbus businessman and philanthropist) Bill Turner, and he talked about servant leadership in a variety ways. But I love this one particular story: He talked about how, in 1999, when Synovus was (named by Fortune magazine) the Best Company to Work for in America, he got a call from a reporter. She wanted to know what the secret sauce was at Synovus. He said, ‘Love.’ She said, ‘OK, I’m going to need a business term for that.’ And he said, ‘No, lady, it’s love.’ Then he went on to define what love means to him, and he used Scott Peck’s definition, which is accepting the unlimited liability for the growth and development of other people. From that perspective, that’s what we do here. … We couldn’t do it without the Columbus community. They have bought into servant leadership.”
You are the first female president in CSU’s history. What does breaking that glass ceiling mean to you?
“My answer to this may not be favorable to everyone. Let me preface it by saying I am so fortunate that I am of a generation where I have not experienced my gender in the ways that previous generations have experienced their gender. So for me, being the first female president is not that big of a deal, but I know it is to a lot of people. So I honor that. I’m just excited that I was the person who was selected to be the next president.”
What did you learn about leadership during your time away from CSU?
“I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly of 26 institutions. … To bring some of those best practices here and see what they look like at Columbus State as well as in our community, I’m really excited about that. … What I’ve confirmed and also learned being at each institution, it’s the people that drive the work. When good people are there, it is a lot of fun to do the job of higher education. … Students have to always be our top priority. The student experience and how they interact with our community, with our institution, is going to make or break their experience.”
What’s an example of an initiative for student success you want to bring to CSU?
“Georgia State has the National Institute for Student Success. They are a group you can engage with for your institution to come and do a diagnostic. … They look at all of your policies to see where are we artificially creating barriers for students based on somebody said 10 years ago that we were required to do this, but it turns out we’re not required to do this. How do we back off and make all of our processes and policies student friendly?”
What is your top priority during your first year as CSU president?
“My top priority actually is going to relate to almost every other priority. It’s really thinking about the relevancy of what we’re doing in higher education. … Nationally, the trends are people are questioning the value of higher education, and I think rightfully so because we’re asking you to pay a lot of money and invest a lot of time. So we need to make sure that what we are providing is relevant to the outcomes that they want to see for themselves.
“To that end, the priority is going to be ensuring that our academic programs, whether it is something as specific as computer science, or as broad as English and literature, that those degree programs have relevancy into what the student wants to do next, whether that is graduate school or whether it’s a career.”
CSU went through some painful budget cuts last year. Are you facing additional cuts this coming year?
“I wouldn’t say it’s behind us, but we’re in a very, very good place due to the hard work the entire campus engaged in. … The cuts were painful, but they also were strategic. They really did a deep dive into the data on this campus. With less students, sometimes you need less faculty in certain areas. You may need less people doing support staff functions. So how do we strategically align our budget to our current reality? And they did an outstanding job of doing that.”
Declining enrollment contributed to those budget cuts. Is CSU’s fall 2023 enrollment projected to show an increase or decrease compared to last fall?
“I want to champion Dr. John Fuchko, who was the interim president and really had a focus on enrollment management. So our spring semester was a really good semester, and our summer has been fantastic. We’re up almost 7% in enrollment for summer. As of today, we’re trending about 3% up year over year, but that can change.”
What other changes or initiatives can folks expect to happen at CSU this year?
“Back in April, Dr. Fuchko was still president here, and he invited me to a session we call Better Together. It was bringing some of the industry leaders from Columbus, about 12 of them, and 12 people within our academic affairs unit. … It was a great conversation around what does Columbus need in terms of education based on the workforce we have and the workforce we’re trying to attract. So you will see over the course of this year, we are going to deliver on really looking at some of our existing degree programs and how we adapt those to make our graduates career ready.”
What is CSU’s most significant weakness and its most significant strength?
“I think those two things are actually related. There’s no better town-gown relationship than what exists in Columbus, Georgia, with Columbus State. When I say Columbus, Georgia, I really mean the Chattahoochee Valley. … We’ve got a great faculty here, and we’ve got great students. … We depend on Columbus and the Chattahoochee Valley, and they depend on us.
“… I’m not sure we have leveraged that connection or told the story of those partnerships in a way that prospective students understand. … People will often refer to Columbus State as the best-kept secret — and that’s a bad thing. We don’t want to be a secret.”
What does sharing the CSU story look like?
“It is all kinds of vehicles. … We’re talking about news stories. We’re talking about social media stories. We’re talking about takeovers by our students to show prospective students what they’re doing.”
What makes the partnership between CSU and the Columbus area shine?
“This institution was founded in 1958, and it was really founded by the community … to be able to build a middle class and to create a workforce. The (homegrown) companies that exist today in Columbus, Georgia, would not exist in the way that they do but for the workforce that Columbus State has provided. I’m being pejorative when I say that. There are other institutions within our area providing workforce as well, but Columbus State has been a big piece of providing the coders to TSYS, providing the cybersecurity folks at Aflac. … If we are able to land somebody in the supply chain for chips manufacturing, it is going to be critical that we have a workforce that is able to support the work being done.”
When it comes to private investment, CSU punches well above its weight compared to other USG institutions. How can you put that in perspective?
“Across 26 institutions, and that includes Georgia Tech, UGA, Georgia State, we rank fourth or fifth in endowments, and from an enrollment perspective, we don’t come close. … There are six to eight institutions that are 20,000 (students) or above, and we’re at 7,500 (12th-most in USG last fall). I mean, it’s incredible what we’ve been able to accomplish with the support of this community.”
