The sudden departure of former President Doug Baker in the summer of 2017 gave NIU’s governing board a strong sense of urgency about finding a new leader. Not only was the timetable short, but NIU’s next president would have to move quickly in repairing damage from the just-ended state budget impasse.
Fortunately the trustees had developed a strong relationship with and trust in the university’s chief academic officer, Provost Lisa C. Freeman. With a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Cornell and a second doctorate in pharmacology from The Ohio State University, Dr. Freeman had spent 16 years at Kansas State University in a variety of teaching, research and administrative roles, including as associate vice president for innovation at K-State Olathe. She was recruited to NIU in 2010 as the university’s vice president for research and was promoted to the provost’s role four years later.
When she agreed to step in as acting president, Dr. Freeman made it clear she would not be a candidate for the permanent presidency. “I’ll be making tough budget decisions and want to do so in the best interests of the university, not as a candidate for the presidency,” she said.
However reluctantly she accepted the challenge, Lisa Freeman threw herself into the job and quickly addressed areas that had been damaged by the budget stalemate – including a long-overdue pay increase for faculty and staff.
Working from a new business model that emphasized collaboration, Freeman and her staff engineered a number of money-saving partnerships: the Huskie Line bus merger with the City of DeKalb; a contract with Folletts to run the university bookstore; an agreement with Northwestern Medicine to provide student health care; and a partnership with Discover Financial Services to offer an on-campus internship program for students.
Meanwhile, the Board of Trustees empaneled a presidential search planning committee to advise them. The group spent several months identifying the attributes NIU needed in a new president. In the end, both the search committee and the Board came to the conclusion that the best person for the job was already in it.
Lisa Freeman became NIU’s non-acting 13th president in September 2018, the first woman to hold the position.
President Freeman wasted no time putting her mark on the university.
In addition to tackling costs, Freeman and her administrative team quickly started work on a strategic enrollment management plan (SEM) that incorporated new realities and established achievable goals. Working to eliminate equity gaps and barriers to attaining a life-changing degree, the SEM that emerged included such changes as eliminating test scores for both admissions and scholarships, creating the Huskie Pledge and Rockford Promise programs, and strengthening NIU’s distinctive identity. Beyond that, she used the SEM process to engage campus and community in a larger discussion about NIU’s near-term future as an 18,000-student university focused on access and opportunity.
She also led the university through an exercise that resulted in new mission and vision statements, firmly reiterating commitments to equity and inclusion, ethics and integrity, curiosity and creativity, and service and stewardship. NIU’s vision is to be “an engine for innovation to advance social mobility, promote personal growth and transform the world through research, artistry, teaching and outreach.”
Never far from her identity as a scientist, President Freeman has embraced and encouraged NIU’s research mission. Just two years into her presidency, she has worked with other Illinois universities on a series of joint sustainability projects; garnered state support for planning and construction of the Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability (NICCS) on NIU’s far west campus; and pushed forward a long-stalled capital project tentatively known as the Health Information Technology building.
In August 2020, NIU ranked third nationally for “innovation impact productivity” in a report from the George W. Bush Institute. The first-of-its-kind ranking measures the impact universities have on the U.S. economy and society based on their innovation.
Faced with the unprecedented challenges of a two-year budget impasse, a steep enrollment decline AND a world pandemic, NIU President Lisa Freeman remains optimistic and charged with a love for her adopted home.
“When you live and work in places with a lot of young people, it makes you young and optimistic about the future,” she said. “You reach a certain age and you’re focused on how things used to be. Well, young people focus on how things are going to be, and I think that’s so much better.”
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