After 10 years, Rowan University president Ali A. Houshmand is more ambitious than ever

Ali A. Houshmand grew up poor — very poor — in Iran, and even as a doctoral student in the United States with a wife and two children, he said, his family was on food stamps.

But Houshmand eventually became a professor, then an administrator, and rose to the top at Rowan University, where he celebrated his 10th anniversary as president this month.

On his watch, enrollment and the number of employees have climbed dramatically, making Rowan the fourth-fastest-growing university in the country in each of the last three years, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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The growth is matched perhaps only by Houshmand’s ambitions for what lies ahead. He wants to turn Rowan, a state school based in Glassboro, into a top research university with a Division I sports program and a student enrollment that would nearly double, mostly through online programs. And he would like to do it by the time his contract is up in 2026.

“Maybe people think I’m crazy,” Houshmand, 67, said during an interview this month. “But what can I say? I’m crazy. I believe we always have to imagine the unimaginable. If you don’t, you will never give yourself enough confidence that you can achieve things.”

He said it’s a philosophy he developed through his hardscrabble upbringing, which also taught him that failure is a friend.

“It makes me enjoy success more,” he said.

Fall enrollment stood at about 12,000 when Houshmand became president in 2012; in fall 2020, there were nearly 19,700 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. (Like other schools, Rowan lost some enrollment during the pandemic, falling to nearly 19,100 last fall.) Employment rolls grew from about 1,600 to 3,900. Rowan has added two medical schools during his tenure, one of them osteopathic, becoming only the second university in the nation to have both. And it soon will open a veterinary school, the first in New Jersey and one of several new capital projects Rowan has in the works.

Houshmand oversaw Rowan’s partnering with local community colleges, which have taken on the university’s name in part, though remaining independent. It has made the transition from one to the other appear almost seamless and allows students to earn a bachelor’s for $30,000. He’s also credited with leading the development of the $426 million Rowan Boulevard, which connects the Glassboro campus with downtown.

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Houshmand has earned high marks from both student and faculty leaders, who say he has greatly raised the university’s profile.

“It’s cooler to say I go there,” said sophomore Paige Bathurst, 20, student government association president.

Current and former faculty leaders say they have great respect for Houshmand, citing his collaborative approach. Even when there were disagreements, solutions were worked out as amicably as possible, said Joe Basso, a professor of communications who is in his ninth year as president of the faculty and professional staff union.

“His vision has been very aggressive and bold, and for the most part, I agree with many of the things he has done,” said Basso, who has a long history at Rowan, getting his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there in 1983 and 1985, when it was still Glassboro State College.

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But faculty have concerns about the rapid growth and whether enough staff and facilities are in place to accommodate it, Basso said. Students have complained the university doesn’t offer enough mental health supports, staging a rally to call for more in November.

While giving Houshmand credit for managing the growth well, Basso said, “I still think there’s more to be done in terms of that infrastructure growth.”

Growing up in Tehran, Houshmand was one of 10 children. His parents couldn’t read, though they worked hard to provide for the family. His father sold water, crossing town to collect it in jugs where it was more readily available and walking it back. Houshmand got admitted to the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in statistics. He then went on for master’s and doctoral degrees in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“I had to put myself completely through college,” he said. “I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I cleaned floors and toilets.”

For a time, he worked as a staff analyst for United Airlines but then joined the faculty at the University of Cincinnati, eventually moving to Drexel University and then becoming provost at Rowan in 2006. The university already was on a path to becoming more prominent, having received a $100 million gift in 1992 from Henry Rowan, the university’s namesake.

“I’m hoping to make this a place that is renowned,” he told New Jersey Monthly magazine in a 2014 interview.

Houshmand said he first had to earn the trust and support of faculty and staff and get them to embrace change.

“Without that, it’s really impossible to do major things at universities because the faculty simply won’t let you,” he said.

He did it, he said, through “honesty, transparency, openness, inclusivity, and determination,” bringing as many employees as he could “into the tent” to get their opinions.

“You would be surprised how brilliant some people are and they’ve been quiet all these years,” he said.

Karen Siefring, past president of the faculty and professional staff union, recalled those early days and how Houshmand’s ambitions have turned into realities.

“We would have conversations about how Rowan had so much potential that it just hadn’t reached yet,” said Siefring, assistant director in the Office of Career Advancement. “He’s helping us reach that potential.”

Last year, Rowan became a Research 2 (R2) university, a designation by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education that means the school has “high research activity.”

But Houshmand doesn’t want to stop there. He is aiming for Research 1, or “very high” research activity. Drexel, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers, and the University of Pennsylvania are among others in that classification.

“We believe we have a very, very strong critical mass of excellence on our campus in the area of medicine, sciences, and the area of engineering,” he said.

While some schools have shied away from the designation because they want to continue their focus on teaching, Houshmand said Rowan’s emphasis on teaching will be no less rigorous.

Basso, the union president, said that while exciting, the move presents challenges for faculty and would require more graduate assistants and tenure-track positions. Houshmand said the university plans to hire 50 new faculty over the next five years in the prime research areas.

He hopes to increase enrollment to about 40,000, mostly through online classes, which are growing dramatically and boosting revenue, he said.

Online education brought in $54.7 million this year, more than the university’s basic state appropriation and more than double what online classes yielded when he became president, the university said.

Houshmand has touted Rowan’s affordability, though it did raise 2022-23 tuition and fees 4%, leaving in-state students to pay $14,951 next year. Rutgers went up 2.9%; although tuition varies depending on school and campus, a typical arts and sciences undergraduate will pay $16,112 at Rutgers University-Camden.

Asked whether there were one thing he would have liked to do better, he said: “I wish I could have raised a lot more resources so that I could give a lot more opportunities to low-income kids.”

The university soon will launch a new fund-raising campaign for half a billion dollars, he said.

Houshmand also would like to move from Division III sports to Division I. As part of that effort, he envisions the need for a 5,000- to 7,000-seat sports arena built through public-private partnership. He had sought state funding for the project, but that fell through, he said. Now, he said, he’s in conversation with private developers.

“Even today, I have two emails expressing great interest,” he said.

Although Houshmand said he has no plans to retire or look for another job, he can’t guarantee all his ambitions for Rowan will materialize.

But, he said, if they don’t, “it will not be due to lack of effort. I can assure you that.”