Havidán Rodríguez is the 20th president of the University at Albany. That he would end up leading a university when his own path did not initially include college at all is, to him, evidence of why higher education remains one of the most powerful drivers of public good in our society. As higher ed faces scrutiny from many directions, Rodríguez spoke to us about why it's never been more important for universities to clearly make that case.
If you’ve heard Havidán Rodríguez speak publicly, odds are you’ve heard him say the phrase, “it’s always a great day to be a Great Dane.” It’s his thing.
But there’s another phrase he says a lot, often in connection with the story of how college transformed his life.
“And this,” he emphasizes as he concludes the anecdote, “is the power of higher education.”
The point of telling the story about his path from auto mechanic to disaster researcher to university president is not the singularness of his own success. The point is that when you look at the good that higher education — and especially public higher education — produces, his path is not exceptional at all.
It’s not: “Look what I did.”
It’s: “Look what you can do.”
That’s one of the reasons Omar Yaghi’s story also resonates so deeply with him. Born in Amman, Jordan, in a family of little means, Yaghi moved to the United States as a child, enrolled in Hudson Valley Community College and eventually graduated from UAlbany with bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Last year, he won the Nobel Prize.
Yaghi’s research on metal-organic frameworks has the potential to improve the lives of people across the planet by helping clean toxic pollution from water, or harvesting moisture from desert air.
That makes Yaghi more than just one of UAlbany’s most distinguished alums. It puts him at the convergence of two themes central to higher education’s case for why it’s still worthy of public support and investment: College changes the lives of individuals who go on to help make our world cleaner, healthier and safer for millions of others.
That is the power of higher education.
Nearing a decade as president of one of the most diverse public research institutions in the country, Rodríguez has made carrying that message to a broader audience a focus of his presidency.
As part of his work to increase understanding of the importance of university research, Rodríguez recently joined the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Presidents and Chancellors Council on Public Impact Research. Read more about the council's work.
UAlbany also consistently ranks among the top institutions nationally for the social mobility of its graduates.
If you want to hear more, you can register to attend Rodríguez’s Spring University Address, scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on April 14 in the Campus Center Ballroom.
Our first episode of The Short Version was about Omar Yaghi’s research on metal-organic frameworks and the message his Nobel win sends to UAlbany students. Listen to it here.
MIT Technology Review also published an excellent explanation of his work. [Subscription required]
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photo by Patrick Dodson
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:18] Host to guest, Havidán Rodríguez: In an alternate timeline, you're not sitting in this chair, you're not the president of the University at Albany. You're probably not in an operating room. You're probably not repairing cars. What would you be doing?
[0:29] Havidán Rodríguez: I am doing disaster research. That work is incredibly important. It exposes you to another part of life. There's an opportunity there to improve the lives of our communities. So I'd probably be back in the field. I'd be in full force engaged in public impact research.
[0:51] Host: If you wanted to be diplomatic about it, you would say that it's not an uncomplicated time to be a university president. Between the so-called enrollment cliff, cuts to federal research funding and sagging public confidence in higher ed, there are plenty of what might charitably be described as headwinds.
But if you're looking for doom and gloom, you won't get it from University at Albany President Havidán Rodríguez. Nearly a decade into his tenure here, Rodríguez remains an earnest and enthusiastic champion of the possibility that college empowers.
That is, the possibility for a young man from Puerto Rico to start as an auto mechanic, abandon a career in medicine and wind up a university president.
The possibility for an immigrant from Jordan to study chemistry at his local public university and eventually win a Nobel Prize.
The possibility that research happening on campus right now will one day give comfort and hope to families suffering from terrible diseases.
To Rodríguez, these are not just possibilities. They're facts. They are things that have happened or are happening at UAlbany today.
That's why he's so excited about the upcoming visit from Omar Yaghi, UAlbany's first alumni Nobel Laureate. It's why he recently joined a national campaign to celebrate the public good achieved through scientific research. And it's why he hopes UAlbany students can look at his life story and see in it their own zig-zagging path of possibility.
Before he was a college president, Rodríguez was a scholar of how disasters impact society — the ways communities adapt to the storms that rage around them.
Witnessing the very real suffering in disaster zones helped ground him on why public impact research matters. But to the extent that disasters are caused by both natural events and human choices, his work also highlighted the power of human agency, the power to learn from experience, the power to change. To not simply sit at the mercy of the storm.
Rodriguez told us about the moment he realized he would not become a doctor, how a mentor's encouragement altered the direction of his life, and why — headwinds be damned — universities like UAlbany remain committed to changing the world for the better.
Here's our conversation.
[3:17] Host to guest, Havidán Rodríguez: How did you end up here in Albany doing this job? Your academic path, your professional path could have led you in a lot of different directions. So how did you end up here?
[3:29] Havidán Rodríguez: You're absolutely right. My path to the presidency was not linear by any way, shape, or form. I started out as an auto mechanic because my teachers didn't think I was college material. And so it's quite interesting that you go from being an auto mechanic to then deciding you want to go to college and deciding that I wanted to go to pre-med — because if you are from a poor community really across the world, either you want to be a lawyer, an engineer, or a doctor. And so I said, “Hey, why not? I want to become a medical doctor.” And I went to a community college, transferred to a four-year college, went into pre-med, dropped out and went into the United States Air Force, where I worked as an emergency medical technician. And there I learned thanks to working in the emergency room for close to four years that I really didn't want to become a doctor.
And so I completed my bachelor's degree. My faculty mentor there encouraged me to pursue a PhD. He said, “Havidán, you're going to be really successful if you do this.” And so I had someone who really had faith in me and encouraged me to do my PhD, and that's what I did. And then I became a faculty member and my goal was to teach and do research until the department chair at the University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez asked me to become the associate chair of the department. And from that point on, things continued to evolve.
This experience really reminds me when I work with the students here at the University at Albany, over 40 percent are students of color, one third first generation, one third low-income students. They come from the same background that I came. When I talk to the students, I talk about the possibilities: what's out there for them that they haven't even thought of, that they haven't even dreamt of. But it is a possibility if you continue to work hard and continue to pursue your dreams and finish your degree.
[5:23] Host: And this seems to get to the point of why we're talking today, which is this notion of possibility and what higher education enables and the opportunities it creates in students' lives. It seems to me that higher ed right now is in a position of having to justify that possibility and sort of defend the value that it creates.
[5:45] Havidán Rodríguez: As I navigate my 30-plus year career, we've seen some ups and downs in terms of how the community in general refers to higher education and the impact of higher education. But all we have to look at is stories such as mine, stories such as the students here at the University at Albany. And every time I tell a story like that, I like to conclude by saying, “And this is the power of higher education.” And so while we talk a lot, and you look at national surveys and they talk about the diminishing importance and questioning the value of higher education, but education as politics are local. And so when you talk to your local elected officials, when you talk to your community members, when you talk to organizations, when you talk to those officials that have been elected at the city, at the state, and the federal level that represent your particular region, in this case the University at Albany, their desire, their passion and their support for higher education is strong.
And so while we see these national surveys talking about the devaluation of higher education, when you come at the local level and you speak to the people that benefit from higher education, that help support higher education, they are strong supporters. And so while yeah, we look at the national figures and the national polls, our focus should really be at the local level. What is it that our communities are thinking about? How do they see institutions of higher education, and more importantly, the work that we do to support our communities. The vast majority of UAlbany students are from the State of New York and remain in the State of New York doing work to impact their communities. And so I think there's an educational process here that we have to engage in about the value, the impact, the importance of universities like the University at Albany to really transform our communities economically and otherwise.
[7:49] Host: The value of public universities is at least two dimensional. There's the educational social mobility impact where students are coming in from all different walks of life and many of them are getting educations that put them on trajectories they would not otherwise be on after they graduate. And that's enormously important and valuable. The other part of it is the research side of it, which is you Albany, like many public universities, is a research institution. We receive a lot of publicly funded research money to do research that helps the public. I'm interested in your perspective on what we can do differently or how we can better articulate the impact of the research side of our existence.
[8:34] Havidán Rodríguez: And this point brings us back to the national surveys because while the national surveys indicate the value of education or the impact of education is diminishing, it does show that the overwhelming majority of the respondents support the impact or the research of the universities, institutions of higher education. And so it seems that the public out there places a significant value on the research that we do as institutions of higher education. And so here at the University at Albany, particularly in the last three or so years, we have really honed in to convey to our communities that the research that we do, whether it be in the RNA institute, whether it be in the School of Education, whether it be in the College of Integrated Health Sciences, that it has an impact on our communities. If we're doing research on forever chemicals in the rivers, the waters here in Albany, in the Capital Region, in the state of New York, we're contributing to the public good. We're trying to develop research that's impacting the day-to-day lives of individuals.
[9:45] Host: So there's another point that you have devoted a lot of time and attention to over the last decade or so, which is internationalization. And I think it is connected here because one thing that this kind of research highlights is that there is this interconnectedness here where there are things we can learn about the Indian Ocean tsunami or hurricanes in Honduras that can help make people in the Pacific Northwest or southeast United States safer. But conversely, there are things we can learn about hurricane impacts on the Gulf facing parts of Texas that can make people in other countries safer. We want to do research that helps our community, the city of Albany, Albany County, the capital region, upstate New York, but we also want to do research that helps people on the other side of the planet. Why is it important to you and why have you insisted that that be something that UAlbany is committed to?
[10:35] Havidán Rodríguez: Studying disasters no matter where they occur is critically important. We're going to continue to have earthquakes, tsunamis, different changes to our climate. These disasters will continue to be prevalent, so we know we should take that as a constant. We also know that overwhelmingly these types of disaster events disproportionately impact low-income communities, communities of color, more vulnerable populations. That's the case in China. That's the case in India. That's the case in the Caribbean. That's the case in the United States and throughout. And so knowing these two things, the question is what can we do to improve the circumstances of these communities to better prepare and better respond to these disaster events? These things that we study in one region of the world certainly apply to many other regions of the world. And so the global impacts of what we do locally are clear. What is also critically important for us to do is the interdisciplinary work that involves studying disasters.
The reason I got into disasters was because an electrical engineer called me at the University of Puerto Rico — Mayaguez saying we're doing this research on hurricanes in Puerto Rico or in the Caribbean, and the National Science Foundation is asking us what are the societal impacts of these events on our communities? And since I was a sociologist and a demographer, they called me and invited me to be part of that research. That's how my career in this started. But I've been working with meteorologists with electrical and computer engineers, with civil engineers, and with other scientists in the social sciences and other sciences to better understand at all levels the impacts of these events. And this is what characterizes research at the University at Albany: it's interdisciplinary nature, our ability to bring people together to understand local problems, local issues with worldwide impacts.
[12:39] Host: So you just mentioned National Science Foundation, and I know your work has also been funded by FEMA. And for 60 years there's been this strong tradition of the federal government investing in university research, both to ensure that the United States remains at the leading edge of technology and biotechnology developments, but also to ensure that we're learning what we need to learn to keep our communities healthy, to keep them safe. But over the last two years, that funding environment has become much more challenging. What is your perspective on that, and what is your hope that the public understands about the value of federal investment in university research?
[13:18] Havidán Rodríguez: The connection between federal funding and the research that we do in universities and colleges across the country is critically important. We're seeing that we have to do more and more work to justify the impact of that research. Whether we're developing new chips for a cell phone or we're developing new treatments for cancer, or we're developing new treatments for myotonic dystrophy, or we're developing better strategies to better predict, detect, and follow severe weather, we have to show that this has an impact. And we know that for decades we have done that. If we disinvest in research at institutions of higher education, then we're disinvesting in the health and wellbeing of our country. It is imperative if we aim to increase life expectancy, if we aim to diminish the impacts of devastating diseases on our communities, if we expect to increase disaster preparedness and mitigation and response, if we aim to reduce inequality and the impacts of these diseases on our communities, we need the federal government to continue to invest in our research so that we can continue to have impacts on our communities. You will see that the majority of progress we have made in many areas in the sciences and the arts and the humanities has been thanks to the work that goes on in a lab, in the classroom, in the field. Due to our research scientists at colleges and universities, the federal government needs to continue to fund these types of initiatives.
[15:05] Host: Later this semester, Dr. Omar Yaghi will visit the University at Albany, his alma mater. Dr. Yaghi this year shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on metal-organic frameworks. And he began his academic career here in Albany, in the Capital Region, at Hudson Valley Community College, continued at UAlbany, got a degree in chemistry, and he is our first alum ever to win a Nobel Prize. He's another person whose life could have gone in many different directions. And he's spoken extensively about this. And I wonder from your perspective, having lived a different version of that, what is it that you hope that current UAlbany students or prospective UAlbany students and their parents and families can take away from Dr. Yaghi's experience and what he has managed to achieve having started right here at HVCC and Albany like so many students do?
[16:05] Havidán Rodríguez: Dr. Yaghi in so many ways represents our students in terms of their socioeconomic background. An immigrant from Jordan with very, very modest financial means came to the Capital Region to complete his associate degree at Hudson Valley, transfer to the University at Albany, completing his degree here, and then going on to do amazing things in the field of chemistry. We recently talked about the public impact of research and the public impact of higher education. Well, we also need to transfer that to the individual level. The impact that an education at the University at Albany had on the personal and professional life of Dr. Yaghi — he reminds me so much of the experiences, the background, the social and economic characteristics of our students, and also reminds me of my journey, what I had to go through in order to get where I am. And so that for us speaks very clearly to what we can do as an institution of higher education. Every place I go, I refer to Dr. Yaghi and his experiences because I want him to be a model. I want him to be an inspiration. I want him to be a path that our students can follow as well — and maybe in the future become Nobel Laureates or become individuals who are engaged global citizens using the power of education to transform their communities, transform their disciplines, transform their organizations, transform their lives, so that it can really have a public impact on our communities and in the work that they do.
[17:55] Host: That was Havidán Rodríguez, UAlbany's 20th president.
To learn more about the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Presidents and Chancellor's Council on Public Impact Research, which Rodriguez mentioned, be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes. And if you want to hear more, don't miss his annual Spring University Address on April 14th in the Campus Center Ballroom.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including for this episode audio production and editing by Scott Freedman in UAlbany's Digital Media Studio — our little shelter from life’s storms deep inside the Podium tunnels.
We'll be back next week with another conversation about something interesting.
I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.