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Most new university leaders start their tenures with a new strategic plan, usually covering a period of five to 10 years. But John Nicklow is doing things differently. Rather than creating a “strategic plan that just sits on your bookshelf”, he has rolled out a dynamic, agile one.
“Our goal here was to create a living, breathing document that you visit every six months or year to make adjustments and reinvent,” says Nicklow, who became president of Florida Institute of Technology last year.
The world is changing too rapidly for a static, unchanging agenda, he says. “You create these five- or eight- or 10-year documents. But think back eight years – pre-Covid, people created these plans and then the pandemic happened, and for so many of us plans got derailed. In the higher ed landscape, the demographics of students, the economy – everything’s changed so much. So I can’t rely on a principle or a tactic that I developed eight years ago.”
Nicklow's agile plan has four pillars: building people of excellence; creating programmes driven by innovation; creating transformative partnerships; and creating optimised social and learning environments or spaces.
“Those aren’t likely to change. What will change are the specific outcomes and tactics under those pillars,” he explains.
For example, the first iteration of the strategy called for the creation of a calendar of all major events hosted on campus, because the university did not have one. Now that this has been produced, it will drop off the list of tactics at the six-month update.
It can take time to communicate information across a university: it is not unheard of for new leaders to spend six months touring a campus delivering talks about their strategy. How do you disseminate a brief that is constantly changing? “When we launched the plan, we did a lot of messaging internally and externally. So the campus is very much aware of it,” says Nicklow. “Through all that messaging, we’ve been very clear that some of these tactics are going to change. If I have 10 tactics under a particular pillar, I can tell you…six months into this plan…we’ve probably checked three of them off.”
As well as being available online publicly for everyone to see, the plan has key performance indicators that will be published as a dashboard. Anyone will be able to view the metrics, which will include things such as student enrolment rates, student retention rates, student graduation rates, grant proposals submitted and research dollars raised.
There is something very business-like about a dashboard, and Nicklow does not shy away from business language. “Not everyone would agree with me on this – what happens here in the classroom is not a business, that’s where we’re educating; but the way we run an institution actually does in fact need to be more business-like. That’s my personal belief,” he says.
“[We must] make sure that we’re financially stable and that we’re serving our clients properly. In this case, our client might be a student, it might be a government agency or research funding organisation, or it could be a business hiring our students.”
He added: “I know a lot of businesses talk about the need for flexibility and to be nimble. But truly, I think in a very fast-evolving higher ed landscape, those that are nimble and respond to demand will thrive.”
You cannot talk to the president of Florida Tech without bringing up space. The university was founded in 1958, the same year Nasa was born, and it shares a home with the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s “Space Coast”.
The institution, known as “Florida’s STEM university”, is educating some of the world’s future astronauts and rocket scientists. Students get internships and jobs at Nasa and the Kennedy Space Center, as well as at Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos.
In fact, when we speak, Florida Tech alumna Sunita Williams is aboard the International Space Station.
“I get excited. I feel like a kid sometimes when I think about the things we’re working on, from supermassive black holes to human space exploration, hybrid rockets, students building rocket engines, microgravity exercise equipment,” Nicklow says. “It’s all really cool.”
Space certainly captures the imagination, but does space research bring any unique challenges? It’s hard work, Nicklow admits, adding that there is truth to the old saying “it’s not easy to be a rocket scientist”. The good news is that those who do rise to the challenge should not struggle to find a job when they graduate.
“The industry is exploding right now,” Nicklow says. “The number of new businesses moving to the Space Coast every day is amazing. And they all need talent. And we have them coming and saying, we need more engineers, we need more scientists, we need more this and that. The students I talk to – many of them are leaving here with multiple job offers.”
Florida may be leading the world when it comes to space, but it has recently implemented some less than progressive laws related to diversity and inclusion in higher education. In 2023, three bills were signed into law that limit public universities’ efforts to diversify students, faculty or staff, including spending on diversity training.
As a private university, Florida Tech is not subject to the restrictions – and Nicklow is grateful for that.
“Florida Tech is very pleased in this respect to be a private, independent, technologically focused university,” he says. “What I would say is this: we deeply value diversity of thought and perspective. And most importantly, I see it as our job to foster a sense of belonging – for all of our students, and all of our employees.”
His support for diversity is not surprising perhaps, given that Sunita Williams, the Florida Tech graduate who has travelled the furthest – quite literally – is a female, second-generation immigrant. “I often tell students, some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my life are from people different from me. And that’s diversity.”
rosa.ellis@timeshighereducation.com
This is part of our “Talking leadership” series with the people running the world’s top universities about how they solve common strategic issues and implement change. Follow the series here.
