Pamela Whitten is president of Indiana University.
As No. 1 seed Indiana prepares to face No. 9 Alabama in the Rose Bowl on Thursday, the Hoosiers are focusing on coach Curt Cignetti’s mantra that drove the team’s remarkable rise to the top in college football this year: Fast. Physical. Relentless.
It’s a standard defined by a clear vision, preparation and results — attributes that universities striving for success would do well to embrace. Public confidence in higher education has risen modestly from its recent low of 36 percent, but the measure remains far below the 57 percent recorded just 10 years ago. Many Americans continue to question whether universities are still capable of delivering on their core promises.
The best answer will come from institutions willing to prepare rigorously, execute decisively and measure themselves by results, as I work to do at Indiana University, the institution I lead. The goal for administrations in higher education must not be to reclaim trust for our own sake, but for how we drive talent and innovation to help solve tomorrow’s pressing problems and power the next decade of American ingenuity.
The headwinds are real. State budgets are constrained. Federal policymakers are making sweeping changes to how research grants are structured and awarded. And there are clear limits to what students and families are willing to pay in tuition and fees even as the pool of traditional college-going students is declining.
Recent decades offer examples of some of America’s most competitive companies facing similar moments of constraint and pressure, from postrecession General Motors to post-DVD Netflix. They emerged stronger by prioritizing performance in a new environment, without sacrificing ties to tradition.
Similar dynamics have played out at a small number of public universities, such as Georgia Tech and Arizona State, that have focused on streamlining and relevance to engage more directly with industry, establish reputations for innovation and deliver greater access at scale — increasing trust even amid disruption.
Universities that flourish in the coming years will see opportunity in this moment, not because they’re blind to the challenges but because they refuse to be paralyzed by the uncertainty.
Execution is ultimately a matter of culture. On the football field, success is rarely about a single play or star athlete — even one as hardworking and talented as Hoosier quarterback Fernando Mendoza, Indiana’s first Heisman Trophy winner. Instead, it’s about daily preparation and accountability. The same is true in higher education. Institutions that succeed will be those that build cultures where vision is matched by follow-through, and where performance is measured consistently and accountability is embedded in daily practice.
The best institutions will seek and generate investment that creates returns not just for the university, but also for the communities they serve. At Indiana University, that includes $138 million from the Lilly Endowment to create the IU Launch Accelerator for Biosciences, a bet on our ability to engage entrepreneurs and other partners to accelerate research initiatives that yield new cures and treatments. The test of such investments will ultimately be whether they effectively shrink the period from discovery to deployment.
Universities that succeed will unapologetically place a priority on student needs. They will align degree offerings with student demand. At IU, that means hard choices about consolidating low-enrolling degree programs — some with proud histories — while launching new offerings in microelectronics, business intelligence and data science, bioengineering and more. Universities should also ensure that graduates have been prepared for the workplace. That includes fostering creativity and judgment while teaching students to use technology such as artificial intelligence effectively and responsibly.
At the same time, the strongest educational institutions will become truly nimble research and workforce partners to industry, breaking down long-standing bureaucratic barriers and fostering productive collaboration that drives alignment with critical industries. Industry is — Cignetti-style — fast and relentless, with little patience for plodding timelines or duplicative processes. Universities must adapt accordingly.
Of course, public universities must also meet this fiscal moment, prioritizing affordability for students and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
And finally, the institutions that thrive will be clear-eyed about the rapid evolution in collegiate athletics. Alignment between university leadership and athletics has arguably never been more important. We must look past escalating spending and headlines to drive disciplined strategy that yields not only on-field success and alumni pride but coherence with our broader academic mission.
I see Indiana University as an institution working to put these approaches into practice. We are a work in progress. Our scale — nearly 90,000 students across nine campuses — is both a strength and a hurdle, particularly in building culture. We have work to do to further improve on-time graduation rates, reimagine general education requirements and broaden our sources of research funding.
But as the Hoosiers take the field in Pasadena, California, on Thursday, I hope observers see more than a football team that leveraged hard work and humility for IU’s first Rose Bowl appearance since 1968. I hope they see a public research university grateful for its historic strengths even as it is determined to build new ones.
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