Tanuja Singh, the new president at the University of Indianapolis, has a snappy way to sum up her feelings about the private southside college: “UIndy: Wow!”
Singh may be new to Indianapolis and to the university, which has about 3,600 undergraduate students, but that slogan encapsulates her enthusiasm and energy surrounding her new role, which she started last July.
Singh, who immigrated from India, is the first person of color to lead the University of Indianapolis in its 122-year history. Before coming to Indianapolis, Singh was most recently the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Loyola University New Orleans. She’s no stranger to the Midwest, though — she earned her doctorate from Southern Illinois University and worked for 13 years at Northern Illinois University.
Mirror Indy sat down to chat with Singh about how to support today’s college students and how higher education is changing both in Indianapolis and nationwide.
Here is the interview, edited for clarity and brevity:
Higher education needs ‘more people that look like me’
Question: Can you give me an overview of how you got into higher education? Why did you choose this career path?
Answer: Higher education, from the very beginning of my career, was something that I’ve thought about as having possibly the most impact with the skill sets that I have. I was a halfway decent professor. I got good evaluations. But more importantly, what I found was that people were coming to me for a lot of the advice and mentorship and what they might want to do next in their life. And that, from the very beginning, convinced me that higher education needed to see more people that look like me that cared about the impact of education.
As I continued to grow in that in that path as a department chair and then a business school dean, I always noticed that I was sometimes one of the only few women in those leadership roles, one of the very few women who was brown, and I felt that I had almost an obligation to encourage people to seek these opportunities.
Q: As the first woman of color to lead UIndy, what are some things that you feel like you bring to the table?
A: When I am leading an organization, I always pay attention to different ideas that are coming from different people. And I believe that an organization that’s diverse in everything — diverse in how they think, if they are from another country, if they are of a different ethnic origin, if they are of a different race — that the richness of those ideas is something that drives an organization forward. So in this role, we are very fortunate — UIndy is very diverse. We have student diversity; that is quite possibly one of our biggest strengths. We have students from about 80 countries on campus, which for a small university like us is a big strength.
The ability to look at the world from a different lens is important. That enables me as a leader who looks different, comes from a different background, speaks other languages than English — that helps a lot.
Showcasing the need for higher ed
Q: Something that comes up a lot when you cover higher education is Indiana’s challenge with the college-going rate. Not having lived in the state before and hearing that discourse, how are you thinking about UIndy’s role in getting students to go to college and how are you addressing those barriers that exist?
A: Higher education is obviously important if you look at everything that’s going on in the world right now and how the world is evolving over time. The skills that students develop when they are in college, I consider them higher order skills, thinking skills. So these skills are going to be absolutely essential for the competitiveness of a state.
At the same time, we as academic institutions need to make a better case for and need to showcase more; what is it that you get when you go to college? So at UIndy, the fact that we are able to talk about these very tangible skill developments while they are learning the fundamental skills of reading and writing and being analytical, those are combined with something that’s very translatable into these very higher order skills. It’s our job as academic institutions to tell those students why they need it.
Helping people learn new skills
Q: With the state of higher education in Indianapolis evolving — obviously, I’m thinking of the (IUPUI) split, but there are lots of other things on a smaller scale — what do you see as UIndy’s niche or role in that bigger higher ed system?
A: We have a very strong niche in the health care space. We are known for it. We are evolving in that area. We are constantly building new programming there, and that’s an established space for us.
The evolving space, as I talked about the changing need of the workplace, that people will need to get all these skill sets that we are talking about. As education evolves, people may not want to come back to a university for yet another degree. One of the biggest growing markets in the country is people who are trying to upskill and reskill their skills.
We need to be in that space. Reskilling and upskilling is going to be a key part of our strategy going forward, which requires partnering with companies, which requires partnering with governments, which requires partnering with hospital systems. That’s an area where we are going to make significant inroads going forward.
Improving access to higher education
Q: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges or barriers facing today’s college students, and what are some things that you feel like are important to do to support them through those challenges?
A: Students, wherever they go, they need to feel a sense of belonging, no matter where they come from. Of course we welcome our students, but the fact that they belong, that their background is appreciated here — they are respected and welcomed here as an individual. The sense of belonging is one of the biggest factors when students come to a university.
At a very tangible level, (it’s) the services and the support systems. So we have a lot of incoming students that are coming in with perhaps mental health challenges. Students who might need a little more assistance in preparing for those foundation classes, whether it be mathematics, it might be reading or writing. The level of preparedness might be not as strong.
Obviously, (there’s) the one that we are constantly talking about: access to higher education, access to financial resources. Our goal is to work on all those areas. So when we invite students here, the financial packages that we offer our students are obviously to provide affordability to the students who might not otherwise be able to go to college. That’s obviously a challenge, and we work every day to make sure that that’s not a big limiting factor to them.
Our support services are wraparound services and they start from the day (students) say, ‘We are coming here,’ to the time they graduate and actually well beyond.
How the COVID-19 pandemic changed college
Q: Do you think that the pandemic has changed the way that people think about college?
A: Here is my big thing about education. We as academics need to think about how people learn, not how we teach. That’s a really important distinction. Some people prefer a modality that might be completely online. Some people prefer one-on-one. Some people might say, ‘Look, I want flexibility in modality, maybe I want to do some classes online. I want to do some in-person.’ The fundamental premise though, is we need to be responsive to the preferred mode of learning for the student, and that’s the space that UIndy wants to be in.
That traditional model is not going anywhere. But we also need to be mindful that some of our students might say, ‘Look, I don’t want to get a degree right away. Maybe I take six years to finish’. Our systems are still very traditional, and they still think about the way we used to think about higher education back in the day.
What she hopes to achieve this year
Q: What is one goal, or just some things that you are really hoping to accomplish, as you continue in your first year of being here?
A: This is a line I’ve used before, but we want to be empowering, engaging and enriching our students. We want to be their source of knowledge to go anywhere, anytime, for life. That’s where we want to be. In the very first year, we will be investing resources into developing this post-traditional student model that makes it possible for us to do that.
UIndy is, as you’ve heard me talk about now, we are doing a lot of work that’s very relevant. It’s very experiential. I just want more people to know about UIndy.
I wish I had one tagline, I don’t have that. I will use the one tagline as “UIndy: Wow!”
Claire Rafford covers higher education for Mirror Indy in partnership with Open Campus.
Are you an Indianapolis college student, faculty or staff member? Contact higher ed reporter Claire Rafford at claire.rafford@mirrorindy.org or follow on Twitter/Instagram @clairerafford.
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