People
Charles Steger, Virginia Tech’s President, to Retire
By JACK STRIPLING
CHARLES W. STEGER, whose legacy as Virginia Tech’s president will be forever
linked to the mass shootings there
in 2007, said last week that he will
retire after a successor is found.
Mr. Steger, who is 65, was
thrust into the national spotlight
on April 16, 2007, when Seung-
Hui Cho, a Virginia Tech stu-
dent, killed 32 people and him-
self on the campus. The shootings
spawned changes in how colleges
across the nation handle security
and raised troubling questions
about whether lives might have
been saved if the Virginia Tech
campus had been alerted of the
danger sooner.
“It was a horrible tragedy,” Mr.
Steger, 65, said in an interview last
week. “It’s part of our history. Cer-
tainly not the defining part, but it’s
something we’re cognizant of ev-
ery day.”
Mr. Steger, who was named
president in 2000, remains at
the heart of continuing litigation
stemming from the shootings. The
Virginia Supreme Court is expect-
ed to hear arguments in the fall
about whether Mr. Steger should
face a civil trial for his response
PERIOD OF GROWTH
on the day of the massacre.
The lawsuit was filed by the
families of two of the slain
students who did not agree
to a settlement offer from the
Commonwealth of Virginia
that was accepted by 28 oth-
er families.
On the morning of the
massacre, Virginia Tech of-
ficials waited more than two
hours after the fatal shoot-
ing of two students in a
campus dormitory to send
out a campuswide e-mail
that warned of a “shooting
incident.” Minutes after the
warning, the same gunman
responsible for the first killings,
Mr. Cho, opened fire in an aca-
demic building.
Asked if there was anything he
might have done differently know-
ing what he knows now, Mr. Steger
said last week that he had acted in
“real time” with the advice of law
enforcement.
“You do the best you can with
what you know at the time,” he
said. “And we did the best we could
with what we knew.”
The tragedy led to the develop-
ment of emergency-alert notifica-
tion systems, which allow campus
administrators to quickly send
cision maker,” Mr. Hall
said.
Charles W. Steger
e-mails and text messages to thousands of people.
In March 2012 a jury in Mont-
gomery County, Va., awarded the
parents of two students killed in
the shootings $4-million each. A
judge later reduced that amount
to $100,000 each, the cap in civil
cases against the state.
The two families are appealing
a judge’s decision to drop Mr. Ste-
ger as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Robert T. Hall, a lawyer who rep-
resents the families, said it was im-
portant for the president to be held
accountable.
“Ultimately somebody is the de-
Mr. Steger has a long
history at Virginia Tech.
He received a bachelor’s
degree in architecture
from the university in
In 1981, when Mr. Steger was 33,
he became dean of the university’s
Virginia Tech’s national profile
has risen under Mr. Steger. The
university, which brought in more
than $1-billion in private funds
during his tenure, created schools
of medicine and biomedical engi-
Alex BRAnDOn, Ap IMAgeS
neering. In 2004, Virginia Tech
joined the Atlantic Coast Confer-
ence, in which the Hokies won four
conference football titles in their
first eight years of play.
1970 and stayed on to earn a mas-
ter’s degree in architecture and a
ph.D. in environmental sciences
and engineering.
College of Architecture and Urban
Studies. He advanced to vice presi-
dent for development and univer-
sity relations, and ascended from
that position to the presidency.
TRANSITIONS
PeoPLe IN ACADeMe
A Vice President’s Rebranding Effort
Propels a University Into the Big Leagues
Submit ideas
to people@chronicle.com
or at chronicle.com/people
JOB MOVES
n Garrey Carruthers, who was governor
of New Mexico from 1987 to 1991, has
been selected president of New Mexico
State University. He has been dean of the
College of Business there since 2003.
In 2009 he also became the university’s
vice president for economic development
and director of the Pete V. Domenici Insti-
tute for Public Policy. The previous presi-
dent, Barbara Couture, resigned last fall,
and Manuel T. Pacheco has been serving
as interim president.
n Alex Johnson, presi-
dent of the Commu-
nity College of Allegheny
County, will become pres-
ident of Cuyahoga Com-
munity College in July. He
led its Metropolitan Cam-
pus from 1993 to 2003.
He will succeed Jerry Sue
Thornton, who will retire
on June 30 after 21 years at the helm.
n Arthur W. Toga and Paul Thompson,
along with 110 faculty members, re-
searchers, and others whom they lead,
will leave the University of California
at Los Angeles to join the University of
Southern California in the fall. Mr. Toga
is a professor of neurology who directs
UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging,
which will move to the new institution, and
Mr. Thompson is a professor of neurology
and psychiatry.
COMMUnITY
COllege OF
AllegHenY
COUn T Y
n Barry Pearson, vice president for aca-
demic affairs at Millikin University and a
professional play director, will become
provost and vice president for academic
affairs at the State University of New
York’s College at Purchase.
n Matthew A. Liao-Troth,
interim provost and vice
president for academic
affairs at Georgia College
& State University and an
expert in nonprofit man-
agement, will become
Hawaii Pacific Universi-
ty’s first provost on July 15.
HAWAII pACIFIC U.
Jason Cook, who is 39, was
Texas A&M University’s vice
president for marketing and com-
munications from 2008 until
April of this year, when he became
senior associate athletics direc-
tor for external affairs. He helped
the university enhance its image
tunity to share this information?
Outside of social media, our
first step was to really figure
out what our brand is. If we de-
velop a print ad or an institu-
tional commercial, we would ask,
Would this be any different from
another university if you remove
DEPARTURE
THE PROBLEM SOLVER
n Dennis D. Berkey, president and chief
executive of Worcester Polytechnic Insti-
tute, says he will step down at the close
of the academic year, after nine years of
leadership. Philip B. Ryan, chair of the
Board of Trustees, will lead the institution
as it searches for a new president.
IN MEMORIAM
n Kenneth N. Waltz, a political scientist
who wrote Man, the State, and War and
Theory of International Politics, died on
May 12. He was 88. He was a professor
emeritus at the University of California at
Berkeley and a senior research scholar
at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War
and Peace Studies at Columbia Univer-
sity, where part of his research focused
on the role of nuclear weapons in interna-
tional relations.
n Charles Dunn, who was president of
Henderson State University for 22 years,
from 1986 to 2008, died of complica-
tions from pancreatic cancer on May 5.
He was 67.
through athletics and early adop-
tion of social media. For his work,
he was named the “2012 Interna-
tional Brand Master” by Educa-
tional Marketing Group, and the
university was named as the most
influential college online by Klout,
a social-media ranking Web site,
in 2011. Here’s his story, as told to
Jake New.
we realize athletics is high risk,
high reward, but our recent transi-
tion from the Big 12 Conference to
the Southeastern Conference was
a means to increase the visibility
of Texas A&M not just athletically,
but academically as well.
There’s this saying that athletics
is the front porch of a
university. The hard
part is to get people
to go past the porch
and through the front
door. We’ve been very
intentional in how
we’ve used athletics
to create conversa-
tion about academics.
For example, this past
football season when
we played the Uni-
versity of Florida, we
identified similarities
between Texas A&M
and Florida. We high-
lighted collaborative research proj-
ects between the two universities
and our faculty in all of our media-
relations efforts and e-newsletters.
I look back at this five-year pe-
riod, and I’m proud of what we
accomplished. We now have oth-
er universities contacting Texas
A&M to learn more about what
we have done to rebrand our-
selves and elevate our social-me-
dia efforts. That’s the ultimate
tribute.
TexAS A&M U.
IN 2008, when I joined Texas A&M, we were still battling perceptions that we were a re-
gional, all-male military institu-
tion, which is certainly no longer
the case.
To change that, we decided to
jump into social media with both
feet. We looked at it as a way to en-
gage directly with our audiences.
With everything that we do from
a social-media standpoint, we ask,
How does this contribute to our
community spirit? How does it en-
gage people or give them an oppor-
Jason Cook
our name and logo?
We then went through an exten-
sive process to center everything
around one logo. We’re now one
of the few schools in the country
that has the same logo on the side
of our football helmets that also
represents the university and all of
our colleges. It’s a very corporate
branding approach from a consis-
tency standpoint.
Another big component is how
we leverage athletics. In academe,
