'She is famous': CSU's Amy Parsons is a new kind of university president

“Hey, Amy, good to see you,” a student shouted.

“Welcome back,” Amy Parsons said, smiling and waving back.

Parsons, who just completed her first year as Colorado State University’s president, is in her element as she walks through the student section in Moby Arena at halftime of a men’s basketball game against Air Force the night before the weather-delayed start of the spring semester.

Another student shouts, “Over here, Amy. Can we get a picture?”

“Of course,” Parsons responds as she moves into position for the student and his friends to get a selfie with the group, her own social-media specialist in tow and taking video and photos to post on the CSU president’s accounts on Instagram and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Parsons, CSU’s 16th president, is unlike any of the 14 men and one woman who have preceded her. She still spends much of her time in meetings with her cabinet members, faculty and staff, student groups, legislators and others, receiving feedback and setting priorities for the university moving forward, she said.

But she sees her role as so much more.

She’s the university’s primary ambassador, promoting its land-grant mission, accessibility, academic excellence and research strength wherever she goes. Her closet is full of green blouses, jackets and dresses, with a little bit of gold as well. And she makes a point of wearing CSU-branded clothing or accessories every day, hoping people notice and have a question for her or story to share.

“I learn something from everybody I meet,” she said during a recent interview in a conference room on the third floor of the recently renovated north end of the Lory Student Center. “… And whoever I meet, I try to figure out what it is about CSU that connects them to the university — what they love about it, how they’re involved with it. I invite them to something. I learn something about them.

“That’s a big part of my job is just to get as many people as possible reconnected or connected in the first place to CSU in a way that they love.”

And she’s able to do it in a way few others could.

Parsons, 49, is a Colorado native who grew up just across the border in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science at CSU in 1996 and returned eight years later to work as a lawyer in the general counsel’s office after earning a law degree at the University of Colorado. She later served as CSU’s vice president for operations under then-president Tony Frank, now the CSU System chancellor, then worked as executive vice chancellor for the CSU System out of its Denver office.

Her daughter is an undergraduate student on campus, halfway through her sophomore year.

Parsons “loves CSU, and she’s been a part of CSU since she was my age,” said Nick DeSalvo, president of the university’s student government, the Associated Students of CSU. “It’s hard to replicate that passion if you aren’t that closely tied to the university.”

Those ties are difficult to ignore.

Parsons saw her daughter’s freshman-year roommate at a recent women’s basketball game, she said, and went up into the stands to sit down and catch up with her. She reminisced about her own college days while walking into Parmelee Hall, her freshman dorm, during a “sticker drop,” one of a handful of events she has done to connect with students. She hands out unique CSU-themed stickers at various sites around campus while promoting upcoming events and talking to students about their individual experiences.

On a visit to the Foundry, a cafeteria-style dining center for students in Corbett and Parmelee halls, Parsons handed out decals featuring a smiley face on a basketball. She urged students, along with a few staff members, to attend the women’s basketball game the following day against San Jose State and the men’s basketball game four days later against San Diego State. Both drew sellout crowds of more than 8,000, including more than 3,000 students apiece.

“She’s very interactive,” said Ahmed Adam, a freshman from Sudan who was eating lunch with two friends when Parsons stopped by their table. “She cares about her community and just wants to be involved.”

Most of the students in the cafeteria knew who Parsons was as soon as she walked in, with several pointing her way to a chorus of oohs and aahs, much like a celebrity sighting.

“We see her all over the various CSU Instagrams,” student Adam Lawrence said. “She is famous. We just saw her. She did some acting on the basketball court, getting ready for the game. I didn’t watch the full thing. It was funny, though.”

The video he was referring to featured Parsons, wearing a CSU T-shirt over a gold women’s basketball uniform, in the weight room working out alongside players and in a team meeting in the locker room participating in a strategy session with coach Ryun Williams.

It’s one of a many videos featuring the CSU president participating in various activities alongside students. She held a trumpet while practicing on the field with the marching band in August, received tips from softball coach Jen Fisher before throwing out the first pitch at a Colorado Rockies game last summer, launched a weather balloon, chatted with preschoolers from the university’s Early Childhood Center in the Office of the President’s conference room and interviewed a Ph.D. recipient at his December graduation ceremony.

She shared 319 posts on her “CSUAmyParsons” Instagram account in her first year on the job, attracting 8,428 followers as of Jan. 31. She sent out 687 tweets under the same handle on X and had 1,668 followers there.

Those posts include pictures with various student groups, faculty members, alumni, prominent citizens, coaches and athletes, and people she encounters and interacts with at various activities and events across campus and throughout the state.

“She’s got her own style, and it’s more 21st century,” said Rick Miranda, a longtime professor and administrator who served as the university’s interim president from July 1, 2022, until Parsons’ official start Feb. 1, 2023, and is now senior vice president on her cabinet. “She’s more adept at using social media tools and other modern methods to connect with the campus community and beyond the campus community, with all our external stakeholders, too.

“People notice that part of the way she operates, but believe me, that’s just a small part of what’s going on around here.”

Parsons acknowledges that much of what she does as president is no different than those who came before her. Her job, after all, is to run a university with more than 33,000 students, almost 10,000 employees, nearly $500 million in research funding and expenditures and an annual operating budget of more than $1.5 billion. The bulk of that work, she said, doesn’t lend itself to social media posts.

Despite concerns raised by faculty, staff and others over her lack of significant experience in teaching or research —the two primary functions of the university — she seems to have appeased many of her critics.

Although university employees overall were equally divided on the selection of Parsons as CSU’s president, based on responses to a December 2022 Faculty Council survey, faculty members were overwhelming opposed, with 233 of 394 saying she should not be hired or sharing concerns about her qualifications that clearly indicated a negative opinion, a Coloradoan analysis found.

Melinda Smith, a biology professor who chairs the Faculty Council, said she hasn’t heard those concerns since that initial backlash. Parsons hired Marion Underwood, who had been dean of the College of Human Sciences at Purdue, as CSU’s provost — the chief academic officer — and executive vice president and filled several other positions on her presidential cabinet through extensive national searches that yielded well-qualified finalists, Smith said.

Underwood and Cassandra Moseley, the university’s new vice president for research, began their new jobs at CSU last month, joining a leadership team that added several other key members over the past nine months.

“She has been wise in building a team that has the expertise needed for the roles they’re filling,” said Smith, who served on the search committee for the provost. “… It was very reassuring to see that we could attract such strong leadership.”

Smith acknowledged that there are probably some faculty members who bristle at Parsons’ approach to the university presidency. Two of the more outspoken critics at the time of her hiring did not respond to phone calls or emails for this story.

Most faculty members, though, seem to appreciate the efforts to reengage the broader university community following the COVID-19 pandemic and the abrupt and unexplained forced resignation of her immediate predecessor, Joyce McConnell, in June 2022. McConnell, the university’s first female president, held the job for just three years.

In an effort to juggle concerns students had over rising tuition costs and faculty and staff had over wages that weren’t keeping pace with inflation, Parsons did her best to address both by raising tuition 4% — 1% below the state legislature’s 5% cap — and increasing pay by an average of 5% across the board. Most who had been earning less than $50,000 a year were given higher raises to reach that level.

She also eliminated undergraduate application fees for in-state students and formally adopted Miranda’s proposal to phase in the elimination of mandatory fees for graduate students working for the university as assistants in teaching, research and support.

She has attended four of the eight Faculty Council meetings that have been held since she became president, Smith said, and has been actively involved in the university’s commitment to shared governance, working closely not only with the faculty but also with associations representing the university’s administrative and state classified employees, as well as ASCSU.

Parsons’ primary focus, though, is student success. It’s Nos. 1, 2 and 3 on her list of strategic priorities, Miranda said.

“Student success starts with getting them in the door, making sure that we are recruiting students from all around the state and that they know we are here for them,” Parsons said. “That they can come here, we have financial aid available for them, we have programs for them, and that there’s tremendous value in a four-year undergraduate degree.

“That’s step No. 1. But then once they’re here, it is student success all the way to graduating and graduating with a degree that is setting them up for success in their life and success in their career. And so much of that from A to B is that one-on-one interaction with their faculty members. Developing that relationship with faculty members who invest in them, who believe in them, who work with them to transfer that knowledge in a way that makes sense to them that they can then apply.

“That’s the most important thing.”

It’s why she gets out and about among students, faculty, staff and alumni as much as possible.

Parsons has even attended a handful of undergraduate classes, sitting alongside students in political science, journalism, and design and merchandising courses to get a better feel for their educational experience.

“For all the change that’s happened since I was a student at CSU, when I go and sit in a classroom, it is still the value proposition of a faculty member, who is expert at what they do, transferring knowledge to students and getting them talking and learning from each other,” she said.

“Some things like that don’t really change. The technology hasn’t changed that type of interaction in the classroom. Whereas a lot of other things have changed, that one-on-one experience between a faculty member and a student is still the most impactful thing that’s going to happen here in learning.”

As state funding continues to dwindle (Colorado ranks among the bottom three states in funding for higher education), the population of typical college-age students continues to decline and the number of educational options they have grows, Parsons’ student-centric approach to the presidency might soon become the norm in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

For Parsons, though, it’s simply who she is and how she operates.

“I think she does see that these things work for energizing the campus and for getting people excited about being here, whether you’re a prospective student or parent who wants to be part of this community or a current student and want to feel good about being here,” Miranda said. “That’s not the only reason she’s doing it, and it’s not the only thing she’s doing.

“We know that enrollment is important, and there’s a lot of attention being paid to making sure that we’re an attractive and an affordable option for students with the motivation and the talent to succeed here, and we think we’ve got that value proposition here; we’ve got it in spades. And we want to make sure people know it.”

Parsons wasn’t interested in becoming president of a university, she said. She only wanted to be president of CSU, a university she has been closely connected to throughout her adult life.

“I’m in this job because of CSU, because of my love and belief in Colorado State University,” she said. "So, I think what you’re seeing is just the effect of who I am and having been around Colorado State University for a long time. I’m really comfortable around the students. I love the students.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Colorado State University President Amy Parsons focuses on connection