With over two months on the job (and many meetings, events, introductions, discussions, listening sessions and decisions later), the new The School of Business dean, Dr. Qing Hu, sat down with us and discussed Portland State, his short- and long-term goals, his engagement with Portland's business community, and finally his love of hiking and travel.
Dean Hu, you’ve been in New York for quite a few years, what brought you to the PNW and Portland State?
I am a first-generation college student, and I come from a low income family in rural China. My life experience is an example of how education completely transforms lives and provides social mobility. It has become my top priority, my passion, and my pursuit, to do everything in my power to provide social mobility to students. I want to provide the highest quality, accessible and equitable education for all students, especially those first generation, low income and minority students - and that is precisely what PSU’s mission is, and is known for, and that's why I was attracted to this university.
Of course, the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, being one of the most beautiful places in this country with a well-preserved natural environment added that additional attraction that lured me from New York to Portland.
I am thrilled to be here to work in collaboration with our faculty, staff, students, and community to build this great business school to the next level of excellence, to serve the City of Portland, and also have a significant economic and social impact on the local community and the State of Oregon.
Now that you have been here a few months, do you see The School of Business working with other schools on campus?
To me, the most important advantage of The School of Business is the people who work here. We have an outstanding faculty with many world class scholars and excellent teachers with real world expertise, and we have an amazing staff who love our students and are passionate about what they do everyday. Being part of a comprehensive research university that is fully engaged with the local community gives us that additional leverage. That leverage is important, because no business school in today's environment can be successful without collaborating across campus, building interdisciplinary academic programs, and also building very close ties with local business.
The culture of Portland State being closely engaged with our community adds a tremendous value to our business school. The different schools in Portland State, for example, engineering, sciences, and arts have strong academic and research programs. Those programs offer great opportunities for us to collaborate, to work with, and to build innovative programs. Before I joined Portland State, because of my prior experiences in building cross campus collaborations, I asked myself, “Does this university have a comprehensive campus, and have other strong schools that the business school can work with?” I am thrilled that The School of Business enjoys the benefits of being at Oregon’s only urban research university.
You spoke about on campus collaboration, how do you plan on engaging and working with the business community, the alumni, the partners, Portland, and the broader external community?
Dean Qing Hu with DA Davidson partners
My goal here is to elevate the level of engagement. The school is already doing very well under our previous dean, Cliff Allen, in cross campus collaboration and community engagement. We have a great reputation with our business community, and I fully intend to carry on that commitment to our business community. Our connections with not only businesses in Portland, but beyond Portland and in the State of Oregon, provide better opportunities for our students and have a better societal, social, economical impact to our community.
Successful business schools, that I know, all have strong ties with the business community. Our alumni are hired into that business community and they come back to recruit our students. We provide the talented workforce and in return the business community comes back to support our programs and students.
Do you see yourself as a bridge between the community and The School of Business? Where do you fall in that engagement?
One of the things I have been doing and I will continue to do is to visit our local businesses and organizations and to present ourselves and The School of Business at the service of those local businesses.
I'm talking to business leaders to provide executive training, employment, and employee training to update and upscale their workforce, and to provide the most up-to-date business knowledge to people who are working in this organization.
For example, how is AI going to impact their business and transform their business strategies, models and processes? How can we deliver literacy to those hundreds of thousands of employees who may not have that kind of education while they were in school. We can make the Portland business community and Portland workforce much more competitive.
I also want to become a member of many of the business community associations, conferences and boards, so that we are fully engaged and are a part of our business community. I would like to host a series of conferences - making The School of Business the center of knowledge dissemination and exchange for our business community.
Some may say, arriving at PSU at this time isn’t ideal and there is a lot of work to be done. Can you tell us about your short-term initiatives for The School of Business?
In the short term, I would like to put a few initiatives on the board while we're working on the long-term strategic plan. I will share five of those goals.
I want to grow our academic enterprise, more specifically by opening up the 4+1 pathways to engineering and science students for the MBA and MSF programs. Right now, the four possible pathways are for business students - that will be expanded across campus. We are also looking at executive masters and executive doctoral programs.
Second, is to look at how AI will be integrated into our curriculum and look at new ideas for AI-centric business programs.
Third, I would like to elevate our brand. I’ve had conversations about our internal and external constituency. Our visibility is not as high as we would like to see, and our brand is not as strong as compared to Oregon State or University of Oregon. We have very strong academic programs, and world-class faculty. We could do an even better job to let the world know about the wonderful things we're doing, so that we can elevate the visibility of our student success.
For example, show our great outcomes on employment, and elevate visibility for faculty in terms of the research and publications. I would like us to intensify our marketing promotion through our channels.
I would like to expand our reach, and our footprint across campus. I want to look at the delivery modality and to make sure we have a full range of delivery on campus, online, and hybrid. Some programs are completely online, and we should look at the possibilities of those also being on campus programs, or some programs are on campus and we should look into possibilities of those also being online. It's all on a program-by-program evaluation. The bottom line is I want to work with our faculty to identify the most effective way of delivering our education program to the students.
Another area of reach is global collaborations. Prior to the pandemic, The School of Business had great international collaborations. The pandemic caused tremendous damage to those programs. It's our time to restart this effort, and build high quality collaborations. Have international students come to our school to study and have our students go to study in high quality institutions across the world.
Number four is community engagement. We mentioned that this is such a unique opportunity, and there is also a unique culture of Portland State. Our relationship with the community is tight - and our motto, Let Knowledge Serve the City, means we can always do a lot more in terms of getting our students out into the community and getting the community back to our campus. For example, hosting more events, having more students engaged, and having more speakers and executives from our business community engaged.
Finally, grow our resources. There are financial challenges at the university level, even though The School of Business is doing very well - and that is thanks to our former dean for his very good conservative financial management skills. He left a very stable financial foundation, and I also want to give thanks to the tremendous support from our donors who provide scholarships and endowments for our Career Center. But that's never enough!
We need to continue and I will continue working hard with our fundraising team to reach out to our donors to continue to get funds. I think one of the important aspects of any successful business school is that they have to be an entrepreneurial organization. We have to look at market opportunities and then pursue those opportunities, even though we may not have the current resources to fully engage. For example, identifying the markets offering different programs to capture those opportunities and generate the financial revenues that we need to support our strategic initiatives.
It’s a long list, but I believe all of them are closely tied with our existing mission - and they will help us accomplish our long-term goals.
Speaking of long-term goals, can you talk about them?
The long-term goals are dependent on our strategic plan. I have asked our faculty to start a task force and they are working on the strategic plan that is set up until 2030. That will be an interactive, engaging process. Our faculty, staff, and student task force representatives will reach out to a broader community to set a long-term minimum of 5-to-6-years’ plan to guide our school moving forward.
The mission will be fundamentally the same - The School of Business, as a part of Portland State University, is here to provide a transformative, high quality, accessible education to low income, first generation and minority students. That mission will stay relatively stable, but for specific strategic priorities during the next five years - those strategic initiatives will be developed based on a 360-evaluation of what we're doing, what our community needs, what our students need, and what is aligned with our university's overall strategic plan.
You’ve been on the job for a few months, how is it going?
I am thrilled I am at such an outstanding organization - The School of Business and Portland State University. Meeting with the people here, I feel energized every day. Our faculty and staff are so dedicated to their work, they have so many ideas to serve our students and the outcomes are clear. Our student retention rate and job outcome placement rate are up. Given the financial situation - and this very challenging enrollment environment - our school is stabilizing and has started to increase in terms of our student credit hours. That is a tremendous demonstration of the excellent work of our people. That is very exciting.
The people who have met you, know you as the dean. Can you share something that humanizes you?
If I think about myself, I do spend so much time on my work. However, I do love to travel, so whenever I get a chance and have vacation time, I just want to travel far away to the places that people rarely get to.
For example, 20 years ago during my sabbatical in Norway, I had a ten-day break in the semester. I asked my Norwegian colleagues, “What do you recommend that I cover in the ten-day break?”
Faroe Island
They said, see the polar lights. So I packed up and traveled to the most northern place I could go. That was Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean with a latitude of 80 degrees. It's the closest island to the North Pole. I flew onto the island during the wintertime. There was no sunlight for my entire trip. Completely dark! Initially it felt strange - eating breakfast in the darkness, eating lunch in darkness and eating dinner in darkness. I truly enjoyed it.
Travel to me is a chance to learn about people and culture, so I make it a point to talk to people on the street and I definitely eat and enjoy the local food.
I also hike and walk to keep myself healthy. I have hiked in the rainforest of Kauai Island, and I hiked quite a bit in Norway. Last year, my wife and I went to Faroe Island which is a small island in the Atlantic Ocean, between Iceland and Denmark.