Oct 25, 2018 3 min read

CALIFORNIA – The new chancellor of the state System of Higher Education started his morning Thursday in California Borough taking a 6.5-mile ride on a bicycle in 30-degree weather.

Chancellor Daniel Greenstein was joined by 16 others, most of whom work at California University of Pennsylvania, an institution that was at the heart of his visit to the Mon Valley.

“I am forever an optimist,” Greenstein later said during an enthusiastic speech he delivered at Cal U., one of 14 state-owned universities that he oversees.

“I will work tirelessly for our students,” he said.

Greenstein, a former director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success program, was named the state system’s fifth chancellor in May.

He arrived in Harrisburg at a time when the state system is facing enrollment and funding issues as it studies ways to consolidate services.

Earlier this month, the state system announced the combined enrollment of the 14 universities had dropped 4.1 percent this term over the previous year in a trend that was expected to continue. The drop to 98,094 students was largely attributed to a decline in the number of high school graduates, especially in Western Pennsylvania.

“We’re struggling to deliver quality education to our students,” he said.

He said Pennsylvania’s state-owned universities have similar issues that most public colleges face in the nation in figuring out how to reach sustainability while providing affordable educations.

He said one of the most profound issues is changing academic cultures that have “dug in for decades.”

“We can control how we behave,” Greenstein said.

He said he wants to “engage in civil” conversations to determine what to expect from the universities and better define their students.

“How can we work together to improve the productivity of the staff and faculty?” he said. “This is not going to be easy.”

He said the goal over the next year at the state system will involve establishing enterprise management tools and coming up with a strategy for reaching goals.

The steps over the next two years will involve focusing on the retention of students and doing a better job of leveraging money.

The speech in the university’s performance center in the student union ended with time for the school’s journalism students to ask Greenstein questions.

Angel Funk, who is opinion editor at the university newspaper Cal Times, asked him how he plans to address mental-health issues and drug and alcohol addictions at the universities.

Greenstein returned to the word “retention” as being key to having the money to invest in students and create a place where they want to be to receive the support they need.