Listening Session Summary: Alumni
Presidential Search Listening Session
Alumni — June 5, 2026
(AI-generated summary from event transcription)
Session-Level Summary
Attendees at this session most want the committee to hear a case for continuity: a president in the mold of Charles Steger and Tim Sands, people-centric and personally visible to every constituency, service-driven in the Ut Prosim tradition, politically astute without being partisan, and steady under pressure. Two participants summarized the room in those terms outright, one preferring an insider if possible, another asking for “a clone of Charlie Steger and Tim Sands.” The dominant strategic ask was greater recognition beyond football, framed nationally by some and globally by others. Attendees also called for endowment growth toward peer levels, innovation in how education is delivered as the sector changes, and holistic, interdisciplinary education. Those ambitions came with explicit warnings: preserve the tight Blacksburg culture, the lifelong Hokie bond, the Corps of Cadets, and affordability. Preferences on the next president’s professional background varied, spanning a higher-education professional, a business mind, land-grant experience, and a medical background as an add-on, with no consensus on profile but broad agreement on character.
Cross-Category Observations
The visibility thread is the session’s largest single topic, surfacing both as a strategic priority and as a challenge and raised by roughly five to six attendees. Attendees differed on scale: most who addressed recognition described it in national terms, while one saw the university as better understood as a global institution.
Continuity with the current era is the organizing logic of the qualities discussion. Beyond the three explicit continuity comments, participants repeatedly defined desired qualities by pointing to Presidents Sands or Steger as the working example: the embedding of the service motto, support for the Corps of Cadets, the common touch with staff, navigating politics, composure under disruption, and visible institutional pride. The room largely described the president it has had rather than a departure from it.
A tension between growth and preservation runs underneath the strategic asks. Ambitions for endowment growth, national or global recognition, and expansion sat alongside warnings about losing the Blacksburg culture, infrastructure falling behind growth, and undisciplined cost escalation that could price out future students. One participant bridged it directly, asking for an institution that respects its traditions without being held captive by them.
Finally, several attendees hold dual status as alumni who are also current faculty, current or former staff, or local residents, and some spoke explicitly from those vantage points. A portion of this session’s input therefore reflects employee and community perspectives carried into an alumni setting, which matters when comparing this session with other constituencies.
Theme Detail
Themes are grouped by category. Within each category, themes raised by multiple attendees appear first; themes raised by a single attendee follow.
Presidential Qualities
- Visible, people-centric leadership with a common touch
Several attendees want a president who is genuinely supportive of, and personally visible to, every constituency: students first, but also faculty, staff, alumni, affinity groups, and every college, not just football and engineering. One participant illustrated the point with anecdotes of Presidents Steger, Sands, and McComas acknowledging individual staff members in passing and the meaning that recognition carried, asking for “strong executive presence, with a common touch.” Another wants “a fan of the school, not just an employee of it,” bringing genuine spirit rather than treating the role as another day at the office. - Professional background sought in the president
Attendees offered distinct and partly competing preferences: a higher-education professional rather than a career mechanical engineer, career scientist, or other discipline-bound academic; a business mind able to “deliver more for less”; experience at a land-grant or major public university, since private institutions are an entirely different kind of institution to run; and, framed explicitly as a nice-to-have only, a medical background given the university’s growth in medicine in Roanoke, Northern Virginia, and Children’s Hospital. - Continuity with the Steger and Sands era
Three participants framed the ideal hire as continuity with roughly the last 25 years of leadership: someone who can “take the baton and run with it” rather than reset, ideally an insider who already knows and carries the community’s feelings, and, in one participant’s summary of the room, “a clone of Charlie Steger and Tim Sands,” gender immaterial. - Courage and composure under pressure
Participants paired value-driven character with steadiness. One named “courage under fire” alongside decency, service, and embodiment of the Ut Prosim motto; a later speaker picked up that exact phrase, crediting President Sands with navigating the political landmines of recent years; another cited his calm, respectful handling of a disruption at one of his State of the University addresses as the model of unprepared, in-the-moment composure. - Political astuteness without partisanship
Two participants, in explicit agreement, want a president who is not “too political on either end of the spectrum,” but who nonetheless understands how to deal with politics and politicians. The refinement was deliberate: not an apolitical figure, but a nonpartisan one with political skill. - Understanding the undergraduate character and the lifelong alumni bond
One participant emphasized that the university is a predominantly undergraduate institution, with roughly 30,000 undergraduates and 7,000 graduate students, and that the relationship does not end at graduation: “this is a 54-year school,” with Hokies staying involved for life, hiring each other, and returning to Blacksburg. The lifelong-community idea recurred in later preservation comments from other attendees. - Community-engaged presidency models (raised by one participant)
Building on an earlier town-and-gown comment, one participant offered two external models: the current president of Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, who transformed the college’s standing through community presence, and a Trinity College (Hartford) president around 1999 to 2000 who tore down campus walls, committed to neighborhood mentoring, and partnered with the city on a K-12 magnet school on campus. - Ability to recruit a top leadership team (raised by one participant)
One participant noted the job is too big for one person: the president must attract leaders of equal caliber, which typically requires being top-caliber oneself. - Honoring history while driving urgency (raised by one participant)
One participant wants someone who appreciates the university’s history, inspires the present, and commands an upward trajectory with visible urgency, conveying that the institution has to “get with it” and reach higher heights from its strong foundation. - Demonstrated fundraising ability (raised by one participant)
One participant wants proven capacity to raise funds, arguing the roughly two billion dollar endowment is not enough for what the university wants to be, noting that “the school up the road” has fourteen billion and that Carolina’s endowment is also far larger. - Openness to women in top leadership (raised by one participant)
One participant, self-describing as “hardly the paragon of feminism,” noted having lived to see a female Archbishop of Canterbury and a female Chief of Naval Operations and wanting more women in such roles.
Strategic Priorities
- Raising the university’s external recognition beyond football
The session’s most frequently raised strategic topic. Participants described public perception as dominated by football with engineering a distant second, said the institution thinks of itself as a Virginia school when “we’re a national school” unknown even a few hundred miles away, and imagined a future in which a Hokie walking into a meeting in San Diego, Seattle, or Boise is recognized for more than football. One participant tied this to President Sands’s own statement that higher education has a public relations problem, wanting the university to model the fix; another argued that “football is not a product of Virginia Tech” and that the other circles on the perception map grow only if the institution hangs its hat on top professors and outcomes. This framing was broadened in scope by the global-institution theme. - Innovation in how higher education is delivered
Three attendees want a president who changes what higher education itself looks like. Facing the demographic cliff, application inflation, and program closures, the university whose old tagline was “Invent the Future” should make education more accessible and marketable for jobs that do not yet exist; campus-based education is changing because people no longer have to be on a campus, and an institution once known as cutting-edge should lead again; and the shift from state-supported to state-assisted, at the precipice of the next industrial revolution, demands an innovator. - Holistic education and critical thinking
Attendees asked for continuation of the holistic-education direction set under President Steger, described as a “STEAM-H” vision adding arts and healthcare to STEM and largely continued under President Sands; insisted liberal arts not be forgotten despite the engineering and business identity, with genuine teaching of critical thinking and communication; and called for developing holistic students the university will be proud to have carrying its name in fifteen years. - Growing the endowment
One participant argued the university is radically under-invested in entrepreneurship relative to MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, and that growing the endowment from roughly two billion toward fifteen billion dollars requires producing wealth creators, not just technology creators, by tying engineering, business, and the rest of the university together. Another wants a much bigger endowment as the cure for many problems including affordability, and therefore “a president that people want to give money to, to support.” - A global rather than national institution
One participant, explicitly disagreeing with the national-school framing, holds that the university is bigger than national: a global, land-grant-mission-focused institution that needs to be recognized as such. Another asked for more global campus opportunities so students can engage other cultures through their disciplines, drawing the world into the university. - Interdisciplinary, anti-siloed education
One participant endorsed interdisciplinary education at length, citing E.O. Wilson’s Consilience and arguing real problems need mechanical engineers, entomologists, and sociologists working together, and wants the university’s current movement in this direction accelerated. The next speaker explicitly seconded the point. - In-state tuition affordability (raised by one participant)
One participant, whose child found Appalachian State’s out-of-state cost only about one hundred dollars per year more than in-state tuition at UVA or Virginia Tech, wants the next president to work with the Virginia government on better in-state tuition options. Affordability concerns also surfaced in the endowment discussion and in the cost-discipline challenge below. - The town and gown relationship (raised by one participant)
One participant, speaking as a local resident, described the relationship between the university and the town as fraught for decades, with pushback in both directions as the university grows, and wants a president who is serious about it. - Business-model discipline (raised by one participant)
One participant, speaking from a business background, wants the university to blend academics with a core, strict business model: define a handful of core outcomes, such as graduates who can get jobs and doctorates who go on to do great things, and eliminate non-value-added activity that only adds cost and confusion, balanced against political and educational necessities. - Accelerating the Pamplin College of Business (raised by one participant)
One participant noted the university is not known for business even though Pamplin is its second-biggest college, with finance alone graduating roughly 350 students per year, comparable to mechanical engineering, and hopes the next president “accelerates Pamplin, not ignores Pamplin,” warning that a president from a very technical background could be tempted to focus only on technical fields. - Welcoming students from all backgrounds (raised by one participant)
One participant wants education open and welcoming to students from all backgrounds, rural or urban, so that everyone feels welcome, supported, and appreciated. - Support for athletics (raised by one participant)
One participant, citing recent athletics decisions without specifying them, said the president should show support, within the university community, for a sound athletic program exhibiting excellence in both athletics and academics, while framing this as not mandatory.
Challenges
- Marketing and communicating value amid skepticism toward higher education (raised by one participant)
One participant said the university falls short on marketing itself: it was just announced as seventh nationally in undergraduate return on investment, yet amid headlines about graduate unemployment, skepticism toward higher education, and an approaching demographic cliff, the institution is “just not out there.” This is the challenge-side framing of the visibility priority above. - Cost discipline and the long-term affordability of the campus experience (raised by one participant)
One participant argued higher education is one of the few industries that raises prices indiscriminately year after year with no discipline, questioned whether all the new buildings are needed, and warned that in fifteen years very few people will be able to afford this education or the on-campus experience. - Infrastructure and support keeping pace with growth (raised by one participant)
One participant, speaking as a university employee, said infrastructure, including technology and support staffing, is not positioned to support the university’s growth: departments are being asked to cut already bare-bones budgets, and state funding will not fill the gap. In fifteen years, support behind students, faculty, and staff should be keeping pace rather than perpetually catching up. - Internal admissions gatekeeping (raised by one participant)
One participant, drawing on a family experience in which a student was admitted to the university but could not get into the business college because calculus is used as a filter, questioned whether every program needs that requirement and wants the issue addressed from the top, suspecting similar situations exist in other colleges. - A gap between students and decision-makers (raised by one participant)
One participant relayed a student comment from a leadership meeting the previous day: students want a bigger bridge between students and decision-makers and feel a gap. The participant noted the comment drew visible agreement at that prior event, while also observing the complaint “hasn’t changed in 50 years.”
What to Preserve
- Ut Prosim, the Hokie bond, and the culture of community
Multiple attendees named the culture as the thing to protect. One said the Ut Prosim service motto is now genuinely ingrained, crediting President Sands’s emphasis, and that unlike at other schools, people here actually know and live it. Asked by the search firm representative why alumni loyalty is so strong, a participant attributed it to an underdog mentality and the rural location that keeps students in Blacksburg on weekends and forges lifelong friendships. Looking fifteen years out, another said “what you want preserved is the culture”: the friendliness, the worldwide Hokie bond encountered as far away as China, South Africa, and Turkey, and people’s desire to come back. - The Corps of Cadets and presidential support for it
A participant expressed gratitude for the visible support President Sands and his spouse have given the Corps of Cadets, represented at the university since 1872, with Army ROTC commissioning more second lieutenants last year than anywhere except West Point, and asked that the next president, and spouse if there is one, be similarly supportive. The Corps was also described as a spectacular leadership-development institution, valuable even for students with no interest in the military or a commission. - The tight-knit culture through growth (raised by one participant)
One participant called notoriety and growth a mixed bag: even as the university grows with new dorms and larger classes, the president must preserve the tight Blacksburg culture rather than lose it in the pursuit of growth, citing Austin, Texas, as a place that lost sight of what it used to be, and noting the personal, professional, and even marital connections formed here. - Traditions respected, not captive (raised by one participant)
One participant wants the university in fifteen years to still respect its traditions, including its military history, without being held captive by them: moving forward, trying new things, trailblazing where other schools will not, and updating traditions to match the community and students of that time.
Process
- Candidate interest
One attendee asked whether prominent people are showing interest in the position and whether names are flowing in, explicitly not asking for names and acknowledging confidentiality constraints. The search firm representative responded that nominations are definitely flowing in, that the search is at the learning stage, and that the firm will proactively reach out, since most top candidates in such searches do not raise their hands and need to be recruited. The search firm representative also encouraged attendees to submit ideas and nominations through the firm’s website, reachable via the presidential search website. - Community access to finalists
One attendee asked whether finalists will come to campus to speak. The search committee chair responded by precedent that confidentiality protects the candidate pool: during the search that selected President Sands, everything remained confidential and he did not come to campus, but search committee members hosted identical private dinners with each candidate couple and then compared impressions. The search firm representative added that the listening stage is important precisely because later stages must be confidential, since the search will likely involve recruiting sitting presidents and others in major roles.