Below is a transcript of our conversation with CMU President Neil MacKinnon
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty.
A special edition this time, I'm sharing a longer conversation than you typically hear. Dr. Neil McKinnon began his tenure as CMU's 16th president in 2024. Last month, a formal launch to the most ambitious fundraising campaign in school history. A soft start got underway in 2021, and today, as you join us, the university has raised $237 million.
President MacKinnon joined me to talk about the effort called Forge the Future.
Neil MacKinnon:
We do have a target. It's 500 million, so half a billion. But we are...
DN:
Well, that's just between you and I. Nobody else. Oh, yeah.
NM:
This is going to go viral now! But no, and we have certainly our advancement board knows that, and the board of the university, but what we are trying to focus on more is like what impact will it make, right? What your gift, what impact will make on student success, on faculty success, on infrastructure or the big buckets? And so again, yes, we have a target and yes, we want to always, raising more money is always better. But in this case, really it's focus is on the impact versus a number.
DN:
Are the buckets kind of in the same definition as the labeled pillars, 4 pillars that money raised to support those four. And can you then just kind of briefly describe what each of those four are?
NM:
Yeah, right. So, there are four buckets or pillars for this campaign. You know, there's different, and I would say there's no surprises there, right? If you think of most universities, the things that they're looking to do, one would be around student success. So how do we recruit more students to university once they're here, make sure that they cross the stage and shake my hand and get the diploma. That's a big bucket. Certainly, we know there's a bucket around just faculty support. That would be programmatic support, endowed chairs, those sorts of things as well. We know that there's different infrastructure needs on campus as well. And then I would say that we have some specialty campaigns. So even among that, included among that 237 million, we've had really kind of two, I wouldn't call them mini campaigns, with subcategories, one around athletics and then one around the new medical education building in Saginaw. I think the buckets, those four categories, are broad enough that we're probably going to find a match, but then also it allows in those conversations, because often donors will know, like, President McKinnon, what's important to you? What's important to the university? And it gives me an ability to share that. So, donors, sometimes it's a bit of give and take, and sometimes if they're more open to it, we'll direct them to our areas of specific need.
DN:
We are not alone in this, but our sister institutions, significant declines and sort of a roller coaster when it comes to enrollment. With numbers moving back now in a positive direction, is there a number or percentage that you might point to as it pertains to enrollment by the time the campaign would wrap up in 2031?
NM:
Yeah. So really concurrently with this, we have developed a strategic enrollment management plan, a SEM plan for short, that really is that roadmap for growth. So, my board approved that last November. That plan takes us to 2030. We knew that this fall kind of two things would happen. We'd be down in international because of some federal pressures as well as really kind of treading water on domestic. So, it's really our third year in a row of kind of holding steady. but we are projecting growth. So, the plan actually has 34 strategies in it, and that, we are projecting growth up to 2030. Obviously, there's sometimes things that are unexpected, good or bad, that might impact that plan. I know Dr. Rowe, who does a lot of our data crunching, is kind of updating the current numbers, but really, we're hoping that will take us somewhere, probably around 16,000 by the end of the plan. Again, sometimes there are factors that are out of our control, but (but) realistically, we figure that we are, we feel that we are entering a period of growth, at least domestically. International is a different story.
DN:
Circling back just a bit to your first year as president, you made as a priority an acceleration of CMU's 2023 through 2028 strategic plan. How do you see the fundraising running in tandem with the strategic plan?
NM:
When I started in fall of 2024, the plan was only one year old. And to go through a planning exercise again, that's, to be honest, painful for everyone and kind of unnecessary. So essentially what we did is look at the existing plan. Within that plan, there were four strategic priorities, one of which is around sustainability. And that would include, of course, financial sustainability is one piece of that sustainability. So, this really fits in that bucket around making sure that we have the resources to make sure we're efficiently using resources at the university, we're generating new sources of revenue, and certainly part of that would be development and giving as well. I would say at the same time, we've actually, the last board meeting, they decided to extend the current strategic plan to 2030, and that really matches our enrollment plan, which goes to 2030, because a lot of the meat in our university strategic plan is related to enrollment and retention of students.
DN:
The groundbreaking for the Saginaw campus for the College of Medicine. At this point, are any of the dollars projected to be raised in the Forge the Future campaign being earmarked or committed to further development of that project?
NM:
They are indeed some of the 237 million that's already been raised. About 90 million of that actually is related to the new medical school. The medical school is about $100 million project, so we've raised about 90 million exactly. Fundraising efforts continue. With the groundbreaking, now we're focusing on naming rights within the building. And so, the building will open in two years, and summer of 2028. So we are, so certainly there is a relationship there as far as continuing fundraising efforts, making sure we hit that $100 million figure and perhaps even go over it. Here in Mount Pleasant, though, there's also something that's happening at the same time that's being very thoughtful and intentional. And that's what we call the backfill plan, because this is actually a dream for a university president. We're going to have a really relatively new building that's suddenly going to have open spaces in it as the College of Medicine essentially moves the Saginaw permanently. So, what that does is our College of Health Professions, that dean is working with our provost now, looking at what current programs could be expanded, perhaps things like physician assistant and PT. What new programs could we start? And indeed, some of that already started. In fall of 25, we started a bachelor's program in nursing. Two cohorts of 30 a year, 30 start in August, 30 start each January. Well, this fall, we actually had more than 30. I think we accepted 36 or 37 students end up starting. The deans already applied to the accreditation body to increase the class size for next fall. So that's a great success story where we're not even waiting until those medical students leave. We're already backfilling them with nursing students I'm very confident that we will have more health professional students, new health professional students here by 2028 than what is leaving and going to Saginaw.
DN:
Very significant plans tied to very significant dollars being raised. It's called Forge the Future. And we have heard about that from CMU's president, Dr. Neil McKinnon. Thank you so much, President McKinnon! It's been great to get the update and best of luck as the efforts continue.
NM:
All right. Thank you, Dave. Fire up chips!
