As he sets off for retirement, Dooley proud of time at URI - The Independent

KINGSTON, R.I. — It was important, David M. Dooley said, to leave the University of Rhode Island in a better place than when he arrived.

Looking at URI today, that made Dooley’s decision to retire as its president next month easier.

“I felt that we had a magnitude of momentum and success and newfound prominence, and I think a much better reputation, a much broader global footprint,” Dooley said. “I thought, ‘I could step down now and feel good about what the university’s done,’ … the university accomplished this, I didn’t.”

Dooley is departing after more than a decade as head of the state university, a time when URI made strides in multiple areas, from visible and dramatic infrastructure improvements at its campuses to expanded academic programs that have driven international recognition and an inflow of not only students, but donor dollars.

The 11th president of URI made his decision last year, his 11th at URI. It revolved around three main factors. The first was a desire to spend more time with his wife, the Rev. Lynn Baker-Dooley.

“She has given a lot of time and energy to the University of Rhode Island, as have I,” he told the Independent recently at his office in Green Hall. “It was time for the two of us to be able to spend time together without a calendar that drove our schedule 365 days a year.”

Dooley also said he wants to avoid the biggest mistake university presidents can make, which is to stay too long.

“Universities really benefit from having periodic changes in leadership that bring in a vision of leadership that may not be substantially different, but that has a different perspective and different ordering of priorities.”

New ideas and new perspectives to share with faculty and students are a benefit, he said.

“At the time I’d been here 11 years and thought, ‘Well, I’ll serve one more year, but it is time, in my judgment, for a transition that would be good for the institution as a whole,” Dooley said.

He can feel good, he said, about what’s been accomplished and not that there were things left “undone.”

Arriving 12 years ago from Montana, where he was provost and vice president for academic affairs at Montana State University, Dooley was excited about the promise of URI — a public institution —  becoming a leading economic and social driver of progress in the state.

“There are relatively few opportunities like that, where you have an institution that can have such a dramatic impact on the state it calls home,” he added.

Dooley also took up a mandate from the state’s Council on Post-Secondary Education to build strong relationships with state government.

“The relationship just wasn’t what it should be,” he said. The final directive was to build relationships with the entire state — towns, communities, and nonprofits.

“I found all those to be very exciting,” he said.

Dooley singled out the international engineering program as a model for where other areas of URI would improve over his tenure. The program allows students to learn a foreign language, spend time abroad and major in another discipline.

“We hadn’t really capitalized on it. We had good relationships with a handful of institutions within the program, and very few outside that,” he said.

He knew at the time that URI had been a major global player in environmental science and within its Graduate School of Oceanography.

“I thought, that’s a huge opportunity and we need to capitalize on that immediately,” he said. “Globalization is irreversible. Information that used to take months to get around the world and then weeks, days, and then hours, now gets around in seconds, and it has huge consequences.”

URI set out to establish strong partnerships with like-minded universities throughout the world. Students and faculty could find common ground around shared research and interests.

“We went way beyond engineering,” Dooley said, pointing to $100 million in work done in Western Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere with USAID funding or other major funding around a host of areas of common concern to maritime nations.

“We’re a big player now in working on those kinds of questions globally,” he said. “The students love it, they come back differently than when they left, in good ways.”

The model has expanded outside of engineering to include areas such as international pharmaceutical science, for instance.

Cultivating alumni relationships also played a critical role in Dooley’s tenure. It’s led not only to millions of dollars in donations from prominent alums such as former CVS chief executive Thomas Ryan, but also inspired current students to retain lifelong strong ties with the school.

“I say to (alumni), ‘One of the best things you can do for our university is just come back and share your stories with our students,’” he said.

Much of those alumni donations, along with more than a decade of statewide bond approvals for tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements, have led to the URI that exists today.

Dooley credited former president Robert Carothers with setting the stage by initiating key renovations of areas such as Green Hall and Lippitt Hall and construction of the Ryan Center.

It’s continued with milestones including the cutting-edge Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering, which opened in 2019. The school’s Fine Arts Center and the Graduate School of Oceanography are next on URI’s road map for improvements, Dooley said.

“The students now have an enormous sense of pride in their institution when they walk around it,” he said. Those improvements also helped drive increases in student enrollment over the decade. That was important as the amount of state funding decreased significantly over the same time, Dooley said.

“Over the last 10 years, we have graduated 10,000 more students than we would have graduated than if we’d just done what we did in 2008-2009,” he said. “That’s a huge achievement.”

Educationally, the university took five years to remake its general education curriculum during Dooley’s time. The move was one that earned praise from URI’s accreditation team a couple of years ago.

“That was a big lift. But at the same time we were also rebuilding our financial aid model, doing infrastructure improvements, expanding global programs,” Dooley said. “Everyone was multitasking.”

Over the past year, Dooley credited URI’s decision in 2010 to build a reserve fund with helping the school to get through the COVID-19 pandemic. He also credited state legislators and governors with not tapping or reducing the fund over that time. It tided URI through COVID until federal funds were allocated.

“We lost $22 million overall. But we had it to lose,” he said. “Some projects will be delayed, like rebuilding the Memorial Union, but we’ll get them started in the next year or two because we are in a good position financially.”

Since his announcement last year of his pending departure, Dooley has focused on sustaining the momentum and growth of URI, including assisting the new Board of Trustees, working with the URI Foundation and Alumni Engagement to sustain the progress of the university’s comprehensive campaign, and facilitating a smooth transition for the next president of URI, Marc B. Parlange.

Dooley was happy to offer encouragement to Parlange, who begins Aug. 1 after serving as provost and senior vice president of Monash University in Australia.  

“I would say come in and take advantage of the culture that exists here of collaboration, cooperation, of shared governance, of a faculty that is energized and a great partner in the institution’s leadership in driving URI forward. There is a great sense of common purpose and shared goals among the entire university community right now. That’s a great foundation to build on for whatever new opportunities that come URI’s way.”

Looking to his next year, Dooley said his plans are “to do nothing. I’m going to go hiking, get out and enjoy the countryside of Montana and Tucson, where we split our time. I’ll spend a lot more time with my wife and my kids, who both live in Montana … and do what I want to do, not looking at my phone for what’s next.”

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As he sets off for retirement, Dooley proud of time at URI - The Independent
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