Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Mun Choi, President of the University of Missouri System

Episode Transcript

Jay Lemons:

Hello, and thank you for listening. I’m Jay Lemons. Welcome to Leaders on Leadership, brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. The purpose of our podcast is to share the stories of the people and the forces that have shaped leaders in higher education and to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the academy. I’m really delighted today to be joined by Dr. Mun Choi. Mun serves as the 24th president of the University of Missouri system and chancellor of the University of Missouri Flagship Campus in Columbia, where he oversees a four campus system that includes a healthcare enterprise and a statewide extension program as well. He has been there since 2017, so he has already far outrun the average presidential tenure for folks across American higher education, and I would doubly note, among R1 institutions, you are among the deans in that category these days.

He’s really done tremendous work at Mizzou, has created a collective vision that’s focused on advancing opportunity and wellbeing, not only for his campuses, but across the whole of Missouri and beyond through teaching research and engagement. At the University of Missouri, he launched Mizzou Forward, a $1.5 billion investment in faculty excellence, student success, and modern infrastructure, helping to drive record-breaking research expenditures and investments and strong student outcomes. Indeed, his leadership has positioned the university for continued growth as a flagship land grant research institution with notable gains in graduation rates, career outcomes, and national value rankings. Prior to coming to Missouri, he served as provost and executive vice president at the University of Connecticut and earlier as Dean of Engineering with additional faculty leadership roles at Drexel University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Mun earned his bachelor’s degree in general engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and took his master’s and PhDs in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. Welcome, Mun.

Mun Choi:

Thank you, Jay. It’s great to join you to have this conversation about leadership.

Jay Lemons:

We’re honored by your presence and grateful for your making the time. One of the goals of the program is to ask leaders to do something we as leaders don’t get to do very often, but to reflect, to think back and consider your own pathway to leadership with a hope that something you might say or share will lift someone else up, will inspire someone. And I’d love for you just to talk a little bit about your own human, personal story. Share with our listeners what you would wish and talk about some of the people, events, opportunities that have really forged you as a person and the leader that you have become as your journey in higher education unfolded.

Mun Choi:

Well, thank you, Jay. Let me start back to the beginning. I was born in South Korea in 1964. And South Korea in 1964 was still a very poor developing country that was coming out of, what, 11 years after the armistice during the Korean War. And my parents recognizing that they were not with means, they’re not of means, decided that they would immigrate to the United States. And so we arrived in Akron, Ohio in 1973 with the goal of providing the four children, me and my three younger sisters, an opportunity to get a better education and a better shot at success in life. And so because of the dedication and a commitment made by my parents, I really took education very seriously, that that was an opportunity for me to actually achieve the dream that my parents had for me and my three younger sisters.

So after about two years in Akron, my father’s business grew larger. His business was making karate uniforms and we decided to move to Chicago in 1975. And from there, I went through the public school system in the city of Chicago and eventually to Illinois and then to Princeton. So when I reflect back on my life, that commitment to education was always very deep, very foundational. And I also asked myself as I reflect back, I’m now 62 years old, who were the people that influenced me? Well, obviously my parents, my family. That’s critically important.

But I happened to meet incredible people throughout my life that maybe at the time I didn’t realize the kind of impact that they would have, but in hindsight, they’ve had tremendous impact. Whether it’s a faculty member at the University of Illinois that got me interested in research, the internship that I had at a company in Connecticut where I met graduate students that encouraged me to apply to graduate school instead of going to work for industry, and my PhD advisor that convinced me to stay beyond the master’s degree to pursue a PhD. Probably the most important person that had a professional impact on me was my first department chair when I started out at the University of Illinois Chicago, Selçuk Güçeri. And these people have been so generous in nurturing me, allowing me to grow, allow me to make mistakes so that I can be the person that I am and the leader that I am. So I have a lot of gratitude for these individuals, and if there’s a way that I can pay back so that I can serve that role of a mentor to others, I always explore those opportunities.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate that. Yeah, there is a really fuzzy dividing line between being a young person of promise and becoming a sage and a mentor for others, isn’t there?

Mun Choi:

Yes. And the gray hair shows it, yes.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. I often think about department chairs, and especially in the context… And I don’t know whether… I devoted most of my life. There was a significant amount in the public flagship R1 space, but most of it in the liberal arts college environment. And as the sort of tenure culture of these campuses is carried from one generation of faculty to another, most folks seem to enter with a belief that you really got to watch those senior administrators. And yet what I saw, and I’m just curious whether this was your experience, the vulnerability for junior faculty in the probationary period was all around, in my experience, the department chair. And if in that six year period of time there was a change in department chair, that was by far the greatest threat as somebody who has responsibility for guiding their cases, has a different idea or a different view. And that was the primary vulnerability. It’s same at the R1 space?

Mun Choi:

Yeah, it is. It is. And so having an opportunity to work with a deeply caring department chair is so important, so important. And that person is going to determine course assignment, service expectations, perhaps even selecting external references. And so having a good relationship with the department chair is critically important. And I would say the majority of department chairs that I’ve worked with, whether it was as a faculty member or now as an administrator, have had that deep concern for really growing the junior faculty members so they can become scholars and teachers of repute in their own right. But I’ve also seen some cases, some cases, where department chairs did not put in the time, did not put in the time to really mentor junior faculty members, and that’s a shame.

Jay Lemons:

It is. I’m at the risk of maybe oversharing, but I’m considering the possibility that there might have been an intersection. One of the important people in my life was a distinguished, long, long-serving member of the engineering faculty in Urbana-Champaign.

Mun Choi:

Oh, really?

Jay Lemons:

I got to know him as a very distinguished alum of Susquehanna University who did a master’s at Penn State and a PhD at MIT and then went to the Midwest. Dr. Paul Coleman. Paul was just an incredible teacher and an amazing presence who lived… It’s likely that you’re too young to probably have crossed paths with Paul. I knew him until he passed. So I had the pleasure of knowing him for probably a 12 to 15 year period of time and eulogizing him at age 98, as I recall. And celebrated his 85th, 90th, 95th birthdays with big bashes of alumni that came back to honor this beloved professor. Paul had this theory and he would ask me the question with some regularity that he believes that so much of life and the zest of life and growing as a human being is bound up in curiosity and maintaining curiosity, and I’m just curious how you have maintained curiosity as a part of your own lifelong journey of living and developing.

Mun Choi:

That is so, so interesting. And the most interesting people and most successful people that I know are people with deep curiosity that they’re always learning, that the formal education is something that you go through, but that lifelong learning and the ability to say, “I can improve,” is so important and characteristic for all of these individuals. When I was growing up, English was not my first language, obviously in the United States, and so my parents bought me at the time, it was called Encyclopedia Americana. And encyclopedias that you can pull out of a bookshelf don’t exist anymore. Now it’s everything’s on the computer. But growing up in Chicago, I would always refer back to the encyclopedia to look up information. I may have seen something on television or may have heard something on the radio and I would look things up, and so I continue to do that, and I don’t use encyclopedia and I use Wikipedia for that.

But I want to know as much as I can that if I see something of interest, I want to dig in even deeper. And so that is something that I continued. And I believe I’ve instilled that in my three children, and I highly recommend that to anyone that aspires to be a leader, to be as knowledgeable in a variety of areas, because in our jobs, we’re not really… In my job right now as president, I am not discipline-specific. I need to be all encompassing in terms of having a knowledge of the various disciplines, but also understanding finances, athletics, academics, obviously. So that’s something that I highly recommend to aspiring leaders.

Jay Lemons:

I love that. Yes, and in a world where the pace of change seems to be accelerated, that ability to consume and to synthesize seems even more important. And speaking of good leaders, and by good, I don’t mean grade B. I really love the word good because I associate it with virtue and effectiveness and demonstrated success and moving an institution from where it was to someplace where it’s stronger and better and more impactful. What makes a good leader in your mind?

Mun Choi:

So there are characteristics that are essential in my mind. A good leader must have a strategic vision that it’s more about management. It’s about inspiring, and someone who can actually come up with an inspiring strategic vision is very important. They also need to know how to execute. I’ve seen many individuals that are considered to be great leaders and they have excellent strategic vision, but they can’t execute, or they leave an organization before they can see the full execution take place. So they would need not only great people skills with communication skills to be able to inspire people to believe in that vision and also execute on it. So strategic vision, a great communicator, someone that has authenticity, that people can see that they’re doing important things for an organization because it fits the mission and that it’s not just being done to pad a resume, and so that authenticity is truly, truly important.

And one who is able to develop a team of leaders in the organization that can continue the work after the leader leaves. I have another five years, I believe, at this university, and the thing that I think about frequently is how do I institutionalize the changes that we’re making that we don’t go back to what we used to do before and then have a new leader come in and ask the question, why are we doing things this way? Instead of always innovating and trying to make the organization better.

Jay Lemons:

Boy, a couple things I want to pursue there. Let’s start with vision for a moment.

Mun Choi:

Mm-hmm.

Jay Lemons:

I was really mindful of your introduction includes the word collective vision, and I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about how you invited others in. One of my colleagues says all of us is better and smarter than any one of us.

Mun Choi:

Sure.

Jay Lemons:

Talk about how you create collective vision.

Mun Choi:

Well, it really does require that element of authenticity, that’s very important. It also helps when there is an event that occurs that would make people more likely to galvanize together for a collective vision. So two events that I can point to in the history of this university over the past 10 years was after the 2015 protests on our campus that resulted in the resignation of two leaders on the same day. At that point, there were many faculty, administrators, and board members asking probably in a shellshocked state asking, “Where do we go from here?” What the board decided to do was to really focus on becoming a stronger university by focusing on the fundamentals. As a university, what are messages? What are programs of student success and research and engagement that we can point to that define us as institutions, the four universities?

And then after COVID or during COVID, we were all in a state of shock as well. Where do we go from here? Our revenues have fallen dramatically because students are not here during that spring semester of 2020. And we decided during that period that we were going to reinvent ourselves once again to focus on student success, research and engagement. And in the midst of COVID, we launched the Mizzou Forward program, which required sacrifices because part of the 1.5 billion for this program came from reallocation, pulling from units, closing down units. We had a difficult period that we faced when we decided to close a long time college and redistribute, reallocate. But to say, in order for us to become that strong university that we all want to achieve, this is the important that we needed to do.

We also asked all of our unit leaders, find out in addition to reallocation, what are revenue generation opportunities through research, entrepreneurship, philanthropy? And we are now in the fourth year of that program, and we are a stronger university based on metrics such as student enrollment, graduation rates, and historic research expenditures. But that took about a year of discussions, not only with senior leaders, chairs, but also with the board members because we needed their full support for this program to go through. And so communication, communication, communication. Faculty and senior leaders do not always have to agree, but they can always say our thoughts were shared and the senior leaders listen. In some cases, if you can demonstrate as a senior leader that you modify the approach based on that input and be effective in communicating that, the more respect that that senior leader can receive.

Jay Lemons:

Completely agree. You referenced wanting to be sure to impact the culture over the long haul by in some ways inculcating in the people who will be there beyond your time. What about the people that you work with, and how do you think about… I believe that they talk about the president and the presidency and that strand that is your senior team is such a vital strand for determining the effectiveness and the strength of a presidency. What do you look for in the people who share in the leadership of the institution?

Mun Choi:

Whenever we do a senior hire, we look for people who have demonstrated experience of success in their prior institution. That’s very important. But during my tenure here, we’ve had to let some people go that I hired during my tenure, and when I look back at those situations to see, were there things that we could have identified earlier in the search process to say this person would not have been a good fit, there are a couple of things that do come to mind, and one is, what is their motivation? Is their motivation to elevate the university through their work? And there’s a result of that elevation, they get benefits, they get more recognition. That is something that I appreciate and try to find out during the interview process. Or is it I’m looking out for myself and I’m trying to pad my resume.

And it’s really interesting in some of the leaders that we hired, we could see a pattern of this individual moving from one institution to another after a few years. But there’s this mindset, well, we’re going to be different. We’re an R1. We’re an AAU. This person will be happy to stay where they can actually achieve their full objective. But past experiences I think need to be delved into very, very carefully. And doing very effective off-list referencing is going to be very important. But the qualities of people that we have now are people that are accountable, that are going to do the good work, that are going to do the hard things that are needed, even at the expense of their reputation among people that they’re working with going down. But they believe that they are fulfilling the mission of the university. I think that’s key.

And if a person is willing to do the hard things that are needed to elevate the institution, I can always work with that person if there are areas of deficiency that they have, but if they don’t have that core value, then it’s hard to work with that individual to see if they can move in the right direction if they don’t have those core values. So I really do look for the core values of accountability, doing the hard work, and really doing the work on behalf of the university.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you very much. Do you have advice for those who might aspire to leadership?

Mun Choi:

I would say take chances. I see many leaders at this university that are happy with where they are, and they’ll say, “Well, I don’t want to apply for another position because what if I don’t get it and my reputation within the institution goes down?” I would say take the risk. We can always use leaders that are going to benefit higher education in general. And I share with my deans, “If you are to become a provost at another university, while we will be sad to lose you from Mizzou, you’re going to help improve higher education in general.”

And I also share with leaders that are chairs or deans, “Don’t apply for the sake of applying, but if you do have genuine interest, you can learn a lot about yourself, your ability to interview, and you can learn about another organization in which you may bring back some of the things that you learned from that experience only, but only if you have a genuine interest in seeking another position.” Because we don’t want leaders wasting other people’s time. I mean, that’s not an effective use of anyone’s time. But I would say explore, take risks, and also think about what is it about their experiences and their characteristics that would be a good fit for a leadership position, whether they decide to apply for another position or not, because it’ll help them better understand their own leadership journey.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. We’re living through really challenging times. What are the most critical challenges facing leaders today in higher ed?

Mun Choi:

In higher ed, we have strong, strong headwinds, especially in the Midwest related to the number of high school graduates, obviously that’s critically important, but also a challenging set of circumstances presented by funding agencies for Research One university like us. There’s also the uncertainty of how universities need to evolve in the age of AI. And the fourth one is the low reputation that we have in the public mindset. And so all of these things are weighing on the minds of many presidents, and when I get together with my president colleagues, they’re the topics of discussion. It’s very difficult right now. But I also am comforted in knowing that higher education has faced challenges throughout the centuries. I mean, we are a university that started in 1839, and in the state of Missouri, there are not many businesses that are older than University of Missouri.

So one way or the other, we’ve been able to navigate difficult, challenging periods. And so I do believe in the resilience of the university, but we need to be more proactive in avoiding pitfalls and also navigating the university to leverage AI, to find new ways of growing enrollment in a downward demographics that we face.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you so much for every bit of that. There is no question. I don’t know. I sometimes worry about being a little bit of a Pollyanna, but I look back over the course of history and know without question that you can go back to the challenges our colonial colleges faced, those that were born during the Civil War era, and that was an incredible time of the growth of the denominational colleges and the Morrill Act. But wow, in the 20th century, same thing. So higher ed has been adaptive. We are always criticized for being deliberate, slow to change and conservative with regard to change, and yet somehow these are resilient places, just like you said. And I think that’s probably… That’s a really nice lesson and a reminder for folks earlier in their careers who wonder if there’s going to be a future in higher ed. There will be.

Mun Choi:

I’m confident there will be, yes.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, and there’s got to be. There’s got to be. I want to move into a little bit of a lightning round. Shorter questions is all that means. You get to answer with whatever length you’d like. Who has had the most influence on you?

Mun Choi:

Aside from my family, it’s Selçuk Güçeri, who was the chair at UIC. He moved to become the dean at Drexel and then hired me as an associate dean, and he is someone that truly believes in mentoring young people. A true visionary and a kind and generous person. He is now a faculty member at WPI and he’s approaching 80 years old. But after stepping down from the deanship, he went back to teaching and he’s one of the most popular faculty members at WPI. So truly a marvelous person.

Jay Lemons:

Love it. Oh, that’s spectacular. How about a book that might’ve had great influence for you?

Mun Choi:

I though about this and I would say it’s The Iliad. I read that when I was in Korea, obviously in Korean, and I’ve always had a fascination about The Iliad because I though it was so unfair that in my mind, the hero, Hector, was killed at the end. But rereading The Iliad, I realized that the human condition has not changed very much in the 2,500 years and that heroes like Achilles are fallible and imperfect. And I’m really enjoying revised versions, translations of it. I just got a book recently from Emily Wilson who has written a more, let’s say, direct translation into English that is less verbose and more to the point, and so I look forward to reading that.

Jay Lemons:

That’s awesome. Thank you for that. Do you have a fondest memory of your undergraduate days?

Mun Choi:

As an engineering student at Illinois who graduated from the Chicago public school system, I was very concerned about failing out, and so I would study, study, study. And I used to also play video games on the Plato system, and Illinois at the time was a leader in using computer-aided learning. And I would always get up very early in the morning after a physics test because they would post the grades on Plato and try to find out how I did, and the physics exams were ranked based on what place you finished in the class, and always tried to figure out early if I got into the top 10. So I remember those very vividly.

Jay Lemons:

Well, you were training in engineering. If you hadn’t become an academic, what other pathways did you imagine your life following?

Mun Choi:

I always thought in high school that I may have an interest in studying history, but one can appreciate and enjoy history without being an historian, and so now I have the best of all worlds. I get to do important work in leading a university and impacting students and people of Missouri through our extension programs, but at the same time, I have the luxury of reading any history book that I want on my Kindle. And so in many ways, the access to information that I have is better than kings of the old days. It’s right at my fingertips.

Jay Lemons:

That is so true. Knowledge is much more readily available than it ever has been, and AI is going to accelerate that and yet it is those who understand how to make use of these tools will be the ones who will find success and fulfillment, I think, in the future.

Mun Choi:

No question. We have to educate our students to be comfortable in using AI in various forms, generative or agentic, so that they can be successful regardless of the field that they select.

Jay Lemons:

One of the things that I think separates institutions of higher learning from most other worlds, and one of the things that connects generations of people is the role of tradition. Would love to hear you share a favorite tradition that you’ve experienced at someplace you’ve served or attended.

Mun Choi:

Well, the tradition that we have that is very strong at Mizzou is homecoming. Mizzou is the birthplace of homecoming. It started maybe about 120 years ago, and the homecoming parade is a spectacle to see. We have tens of thousands of people lining the routes. We have about 50 to 60 floats that celebrate fraternities, sororities, but also our international programs, local businesses, and also politicians that are running for office would also participate. And it’s just a fun event and we take a lot of pride in it. We say we’re not only the oldest, but the best homecoming in the United States. So I enjoy that very much.

Jay Lemons:

Fabulous. I did not know that. I appreciate knowing it and I’ll bet you all know how to throw a homecoming.

Mun Choi:

Oh, we do. You should come and visit us, Jay.

Jay Lemons:

I’d love to do that. Well, one of our traditions here on Leaders on Leadership is I like to invite our guests to close by talking a little bit about the distinctiveness of the institution you serve, why it has a place and a hold on your heart and your head and your time. And so talk about the special sauce or the organizational DNA of the University of Missouri.

Mun Choi:

So the University of Missouri has a deep commitment to serving the region and the state. We are a land grant university that began in 1839. So we did not become a land grant until later in our history. But the values of a land grant were important in the founding of the university to provide opportunities for sons of toil at the time to get an education in the agricultural mechanical arts, and that has carried through since 1839. And I see it vividly when I travel throughout the state and meet with farmers or residents in rural parts of the state that are getting broadband access through the university, that are getting planting advice from the university, and they really feel that their extension office is the University of Missouri and they appreciate what we provide for them.

And that has continued, whether it’s in our ROTC programs or our nuclear research reactor where we generate radiopharmaceuticals that treat 500,000 patients each and every year, that commitment to improving the lives of individuals that live in our region and the state continues. And so I feel a very strong attachment to that mission. So it’s not just educating students, it’s improving the lives of Missourians that’s at the core of our mission.

Jay Lemons:

That’s so interesting. Of course, the Morrill Act named for Justin Morrill of Vermonter, as I recall, and yet way out in the West, just beyond Lincoln Land is Missouri. And because what you describe, you wonder what influence those people in your state might have had on the development of this distinctive mission now shared across all of our land grant institutions. That’s fascinating.

Mun Choi:

It is fascinating. But a deeper look into the history of the land grant movement, there’s a person of note named Jonathan Baldwin Turner, who back in the 1830s and ’40s really championed agricultural and mechanical arts education. And so that is why there are so many Turner buildings in Midwestern universities to honor him. He’s not getting his full due credit for his movement, but the Midwest had a big role in the land grant movement that became the Morrill Act.

Jay Lemons:

It surely did. Missouri and Michigan State and the Wisconsin idea, this notion that there’s a commitment to serving the whole state. Mun, I just want to say thank you for joining us. We’re so glad to have had you. I’ve appreciated every minute of this and the wisdom, the insights that you have shared, and I’d love to have you share a parting word as we get ready to close.

Mun Choi:

Well, Jay, keep up the important work. I believe that your series will bring important insights to aspiring leaders or to have leaders that are in presidential roles to reflect and determine how they can become better mentors to others. But keep up the great work. I look forward to seeing you at a homecoming game followed by a football game. Just let me know when you’re available.

Jay Lemons:

I appreciate that invitation so very much. Listeners, we welcome your suggestions and thoughts for leaders we should feature in upcoming segments. You can send those suggestions to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcast wherever you find your podcast. It’s also available on the Academic Search website. Leaders on Leadership is brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. Together, our mission is to support colleges and universities during times of transition and through leadership development activities that serve current and future generations of leaders in the academy. It’s been a pleasure to have Dr. Mun Choi on our program today. Thank you again for your leadership, Mun, not only at Mizzou, but as a national leader in this important common cause that has been the energy and the fuel for each of our lives. So thank you.

Mun Choi:

Thank you.