KRVN Chat with the Chancellor

Ronnie Green Author

05/31/2023 Added

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Ronnie Green talks about his decision to pursue the role of chancellor, what he's most proud of in the scope of his time as chancellor and the public-facing leadership aspect of the chancellor role.

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[00:00:00.480]Bryce Doeschot here on the Rural Radio Network.
[00:00:02.550]And it is time for our weekly
[00:00:03.727]"Chat with the Chancellor" program.
[00:00:05.550]This week we are joined
[00:00:06.383]by the Chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
[00:00:08.280]Dr. Ronnie Green.
[00:00:09.690]Well, Chancellor Green,
[00:00:10.523]this is gonna be our final installment of a series...
[00:00:13.170]A few of these as we have been looking back
[00:00:15.300]in your time with the university
[00:00:16.410]as you're preparing to retire coming up here in June.
[00:00:19.710]So we've got a few questions for you
[00:00:20.970]as we look specifically at your seven years
[00:00:23.100]serving as chancellor.
[00:00:25.080]Prior, of course, last episode,
[00:00:26.460]we talked about your role as
[00:00:27.450]vice chancellor of IANR. Sure.
[00:00:29.609]I guess who or what
[00:00:30.780]encouraged you to take that next step
[00:00:32.520]and become chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln?
[00:00:35.280]Oh, wow. Wow.
[00:00:36.330]That one's one I wasn't expecting.
[00:00:37.958](Bryce laughs) Yeah, well.
[00:00:42.180]In all fairness,
[00:00:43.710]it was a combination of a lot of people, right?
[00:00:46.920]When I went to IANR and the vice Chancellor role
[00:00:49.527]and I think we talked about this last time, Bryce.
[00:00:54.000]There were alumni and industry people
[00:00:57.030]that were encouraging me to look at
[00:01:00.270]the IANR vice chancellor role at the point in time.
[00:01:03.810]And not too many years into that role,
[00:01:08.010]I'll say maybe two or three years into that role,
[00:01:12.300]it was fairly well known that Chancellor Perlman,
[00:01:16.230]my predecessor as the UNL Chancellor.
[00:01:20.160]He had been chancellor at that point in time
[00:01:22.770]for 12 or 13 years,
[00:01:25.050]and was thinking about his retirement
[00:01:27.510]and ultimately when he would step away from the role.
[00:01:31.620]And folks began talking to me about that then, right?
[00:01:36.535]Would you be interested in,
[00:01:39.240]Or would you be interested in looking at the chancellor role
[00:01:44.250]for the university?
[00:01:45.390]And I dismissed them all immediately,
[00:01:48.540]and said, "No, not really.
[00:01:50.520]That's not something I would see myself doing
[00:01:52.950]or would've ever seen myself doing."
[00:01:56.670]And I was enjoying the IANR role certainly,
[00:01:59.299]immensely as well.
[00:02:02.580]And then that escalated maybe,
[00:02:05.010]I guess I'll call it over the course of a year or two.
[00:02:08.419]And actually Chancellor Perlman,
[00:02:11.610]I would say, he of course, was my boss at the time.
[00:02:18.870]And he kind of planted that seed heavily with me as well,
[00:02:23.190]and said that he saw me in that role
[00:02:25.860]and saw the opportunity there in that role
[00:02:30.030]for me to provide leadership.
[00:02:32.555]And I won't tell you what I said to him
[00:02:34.440]the first time he said that to me.
[00:02:36.090]I think that it was something along the lines of,
[00:02:37.987]"You're crazy."
[00:02:38.970]But you know, it was just, again...
[00:02:43.530]Not something that I ever thought about doing
[00:02:47.280]or felt destined to do,
[00:02:49.080]but others encouraged me into really looking at the role.
[00:02:54.750]Being in higher education at that point, I guess.
[00:02:57.000]What made you nervous about stepping into that?
[00:02:59.010]It's a...
[00:03:00.030]I see the job you do. Yeah.
[00:03:01.470]And it's grueling job.
[00:03:02.880]Demands a lot. Well, yeah.
[00:03:06.450]I suppose for me...
[00:03:10.380]A couple of things I would say.
[00:03:12.810]One is transcending where you're from, right?
[00:03:16.710]So I'm an agriculture person, an agricultural scientist.
[00:03:21.210]You know, that...
[00:03:22.206]So transcending your own area of expertise
[00:03:25.950]and to lead a comprehensive university,
[00:03:29.220]a comprehensive university campus, that would be one, right?
[00:03:33.510]So we're a university that covers tremendous number of areas
[00:03:38.040]and a tremendous number of fields.
[00:03:39.600]And so that would've been one.
[00:03:42.090]Honestly, I wasn't too worried about that.
[00:03:46.230]I was, I would say,
[00:03:49.734]wondering about athletics and the role
[00:03:52.920]of oversight of athletics in the chancellor's role.
[00:03:57.327]And not in terms of, you know, being successful in athletics
[00:04:03.330]or winning in athletic, not that.
[00:04:05.700]But just having the oversight
[00:04:07.770]of what is a big, big thing in Nebraska.
[00:04:11.430]And Husker athletics, as we know,
[00:04:13.470]is a huge, huge thing here.
[00:04:17.550]And having the ultimate responsibility
[00:04:19.830]for that as part of the role also,
[00:04:22.410]probably was something that I did kind of
[00:04:25.890]breathe a time or two to think about, right?
[00:04:29.040]And not having hit a lot of experience
[00:04:31.140]directly in oversight of athletics
[00:04:34.380]or in working directly with athletics.
[00:04:36.810]So those would've been the two big things.
[00:04:39.660]I will share with you that as I thought about this role,
[00:04:44.070]and then ultimately looked at the role
[00:04:46.920]and went through the process of looking at the role.
[00:04:51.570]I did have lots of conversations with our family
[00:04:56.010]about the public level of the role, right?
[00:04:59.760]So you are a public figure,
[00:05:03.360]you're in the public eye a tremendous amount.
[00:05:06.660]And in Nebraska, that's an even bigger public eye, you know,
[00:05:11.220]if that makes sense.
[00:05:13.740]So, you know, just thinking through those kind of things
[00:05:15.960]I would say were part of the discernment
[00:05:20.850]that we went through as a family.
[00:05:23.910]But looking back on it now,
[00:05:26.010]I mean, it was really the drive for that,
[00:05:29.220]for me, would've been being able to serve this institution
[00:05:34.080]and what this institution does,
[00:05:36.060]and what its mission really is,
[00:05:38.100]and the importance of that
[00:05:41.340]overwhelmed all of the rest of those kind of things.
[00:05:45.390]Right.
[00:05:46.290]Seven years serving as the chancellor
[00:05:47.660]of the University of Nebraska,
[00:05:48.930]as you alluded to a lot of decisions
[00:05:50.670]and things that have gone into that.
[00:05:52.800]You've been part of the hiring process
[00:05:54.840]and the dismissal process.
[00:05:55.800]A lot of high (laughs) Right.
[00:05:57.030]Ranking people in the state of Nebraska.
[00:05:59.250]Opened a lot of new buildings. Right.
[00:06:00.420]I guess as you look back on,
[00:06:02.040]on your seven years,
[00:06:03.140]can you pinpoint I guess just a few things
[00:06:05.430]of the areas you're most proud of,
[00:06:07.350]if you look at buckets
[00:06:08.640]A lot of things.
[00:06:11.010]I suppose the thing that I am the proudest of
[00:06:14.700]for the institution,
[00:06:16.350]this isn't necessarily me talking,
[00:06:18.720]but of the institution itself.
[00:06:23.160]The education that we are delivering here
[00:06:26.370]at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
[00:06:28.350]and the level at which we are doing it
[00:06:32.700]and successfully doing it.
[00:06:35.010]That's probably my single biggest point of pride
[00:06:38.730]in the last seven years.
[00:06:42.090]You know, we're celebrating commencement.
[00:06:44.490]You know, here effectively as we speak,
[00:06:47.550]you know, we're celebrating the commencement
[00:06:49.710]for our graduates this year for the university.
[00:06:54.300]And we'll have another record graduating class.
[00:06:57.960]All time record,
[00:06:59.220]in the history of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:07:02.580]Four of the last six years,
[00:07:04.800]we have had record graduating classes,
[00:07:07.410]which is just unbelievable.
[00:07:10.170]Almost to me for that to be the case.
[00:07:13.110]And not only that,
[00:07:15.210]but these students who are graduating with degrees
[00:07:19.320]are the most capable, they're the most...
[00:07:22.112]They're the best classes of students we have ever graduated
[00:07:26.280]in the history of the institution
[00:07:28.590]by both academically and where they're going
[00:07:31.590]and what they're doing with that education,
[00:07:34.650]that's what I look back on as just a point of pride
[00:07:41.160]above all, above everything else.
[00:07:44.040]In a position like yours,
[00:07:45.240]you're publicly scrutinized
[00:07:46.770]for every decision you make. Sure.
[00:07:48.360]That has to be challenging, that's my comment.
[00:07:50.040]Here's my question now.
[00:07:51.420]You referenced to it when you announced your retirement,
[00:07:54.120]a term public facing leadership.
[00:07:56.130]Yeah.
[00:07:57.120]What obstacles does public facing leadership bring
[00:08:00.120]to yourself, your family,
[00:08:02.460]that the rest of Nebraska might not be familiar with?
[00:08:05.070]Well, you know...
[00:08:07.590]I think it's fair to say that...
[00:08:11.640]I did say when I announced retirement
[00:08:13.890]that I was really looking forward
[00:08:15.210]to a return to private life and being out of the public.
[00:08:19.080]You know, the public sphere, so to speak, in that way.
[00:08:23.291]And there's just a lot of gravity to those decisions, right?
[00:08:27.270]That's one, that's part of the job, part of the role,
[00:08:30.480]is the gravity of those decisions
[00:08:32.370]and being able to make those decisions.
[00:08:34.770]But you know, it is true
[00:08:36.570]that this has been a tough number of years, right?
[00:08:39.420]It's been a tough from a pandemic perspective,
[00:08:43.110]it's been tough from a lot of other issues perspective,
[00:08:45.793]you know, a lot of discord that's in our society currently.
[00:08:56.160]It does have a lot of gravity associated with it.
[00:08:58.410]I'll give you an example.
[00:08:59.790]An example of that would be,
[00:09:02.070]when anything bad happens to one of our students,
[00:09:06.060]and even if it's things that the university can't control.
[00:09:09.962]The death of a student.
[00:09:12.030]Tragic death of a student in an accident, for example.
[00:09:15.030]Those things happen. They happen in the greater world.
[00:09:17.640]That's something that you feel in this position
[00:09:20.610]and you feel very deeply in that kind of public position.
[00:09:24.840]Or when there's something that happens societally.
[00:09:29.400]So there's been a lot of attention
[00:09:30.690]on sexual assault on college campuses.
[00:09:33.030]We have had, you know, our fair share of that here as well,
[00:09:37.230]not any greater than anywhere else,
[00:09:39.660]but we've had our share of that here.
[00:09:41.880]Those are really difficult things
[00:09:44.760]and really difficult things to handle publicly, right?
[00:09:49.200]And to deal with publicly.
[00:09:51.660]So there is that element that is a challenge for leaders
[00:09:56.567]in the public sphere, I think.
[00:09:59.610]That is the voice of the chancellor
[00:10:00.720]of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:10:02.280]Our guest this week on
[00:10:03.169]the "Chat with the Chancellor" segment
[00:10:05.280]here on the Rural Radio Network.
[00:10:07.140]I'm Bryce Doeschot reporting.

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