Oregon Tech’s Nagi Naganathan Arrives With Transformational Ambitions

This article was in Thursday’s (April 27th, 2017) Portland Business Journal 

Written By: Matthew Kish 

New Oregon Tech President Nagi Naganathan wants the university to emphasize getting “students ready for life,” not just for technical careers.

Nagi Naganathan recently met some Oregon Tech students who wanted to build a butterfly trail on campus. He also met a retired doctor with an interest in butterflies since moving to Klamath Falls.

Cathy Cheney – Portland Business Journal

He connected the two. The project got a boost.

That simple story illustrates why hopes are high for Naganathan (Naw-ga-naw-thun), who became the university’s seventh president on March 31. While his house is still a “tornado zone” of unpacked boxes, Naganathan already has met with legislative, business, civic and student leaders as he seeks to tear down the traditional walls of the university, weave it more into the fabric of the state and possibly expand the Oregon Tech brand beyond Oregon.

‘Constructive collision’

A mechanical engineer by training — he holds a doctoral degree from Oklahoma State University — Naganathan once worked alongside architects. He advised them to forget the hallways and add more open space to buildings, arguing it would enable “constructive collision among people.” Naganathan figured chance meetings between accountants and marketers would improve any firm’s operations.

“Even if you leave some usable space out, build corridors so people can take different paths to where they are going and run into different groups of people every day,” he said.

It’s still Naganathan’s core philosophy.

It stands out in higher education. Universities are prone to sometimes harmful silos. Competing disciplines often have their own buildings and campuses, preventing random encounters between faculty and students in different disciplines.

The approach makes it easy to stamp out diplomas, but Nagantahan doesn’t see much of a benefit.

“When you go to work, nobody cares if you’re a mechanical engineer or you have a marketing degree. You’re part of a team working on a deliverable. We should be willing to think beyond whatever our discipline is.”

‘Get a student ready for life’

While Naganathan sees a great foundation at Oregon Tech — graduates have among the state’s top starting salaries and 98 percent have jobs or enroll in a graduate program within six months — he wants to raise the bar higher.

And he wants to do it by placing more focus on cross-discipline studies, or those “constructive collisions.” For example, he wants all Oregon Tech students to learn basic financial literacy and how to write a brief business plan, even those studying for a science degree. He also wants to drastically increase internships.

“You do not just get a student ready for a job,” he said. “You want to get a student ready for life.”

He calls the process part of the “Oregon Tech difference” and the delta between the school’s graduates and those from other universities.

Naganathan worked for the University of Toledo for the previous three decades. He served in various leadership positions, including interim president and dean of engineering.

While serving as dean of engineering, Naganathan said the school’s internship program grew from 200 students in 2000 to 2,500 by 2017. It now offers internships in 44 states and 37 countries. The increase coincided with improved retention. In the early ’90s, he said 50 percent of students didn’t return for a second year. Eventually 90 percent of students returned.

Naganathan’s approach parallels current thinking in higher education. While the needle swung towards vocational education in recent years — employers wanted programmers, not programmers who could discuss Chaucer — it’s started to swing back a little.

“Businesses are saying that a lot of people don’t have the softer skills,” said Shawn Daley, chief innovation officer and associate professor of education technology at Portland’s Concordia University. “They want people with professional skills who can listen to divergent thinking. People are more aware of the need to be well rounded than ever before.”

Tear down the walls

The walls inside the university aren’t the only ones Naganathan wants to tear down. He also wants to rip down the university’s exterior walls and embed it more within the community, another departure from the traditions of the ivory tower.

Oregon Tech’s largest campus is in Klamath Falls. It also has a campus in Wilsonville.

Simple gestures have already materialized, like moving Oregon Tech’s foundation and its 10-person staff to downtown Klamath Falls. He also wants to build a Center for Excellence on campus that would be anchored by a maker space and serve as a place to bring industry and students together, a space for more “collisions.” The building is on the governor’s list of recommended capital projects, Naganathan said.

Naganathan has been zipping around the state meeting with business, legislative and civic leaders to build connections.

While he’s only been on the clock since March 31, by mid-April he had joined the board of the Portland Business Alliance, dropped by Portland’s Arlington Club and met with legislative leaders including Gov. Kate Brown, Senate President Peter Courtney, House Speaker Tina Kotek and budget writers Sen. Richard Devlin and Rep. Nancy Nathanson.

He also flew to North Carolina to meet with the CEO of Jeld-Wen, the biggest employer in Klamath Falls, and talk about how the university could work more closely with the door- and window-maker.

In February, Naganathan took a trip to the University of Sheffield, in Sheffield, England, to learn about Boeing’s ongoing partnership with the university. The partnership is the model for the new Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center in Scappoose. Oregon Tech is the host university and landlord for the center, which is a partnership between Boeing, other industry groups and Oregon Tech, Portland Community College, Portland State University, Oregon State University.

“It could be a model for the state in terms of the combination of economic and workforce development,” said Portland Community College President Mark Mitsui, who described Naganathan as “very approachable.”

“I just feel like I can pick up the phone and call him and we can have an honest conversation.”

Naganathan eventually wants to grow Oregon Tech’s reputation beyond the state. MIT is an international brand. Why can’t Oregon Tech be?

“Our mission has to be geographically constrained,” he said. “But the brand can be bigger.”



Matthew Kish

Staff Reporter

Portland Business Journal

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