Iowa State University’s outgoing president Wendy Wintersteen is busy in the last days of her tenure – so busy in fact she doesn’t have time to think about her retirement, which is coming in January.
But she does know this much.
She’s going on a vacation to the Caribbean with her husband, Robert Waggoner.
“It’ll be fun to go on vacation [and] not get a phone call that says, ‘What are you going to do about this?’” said Wintersteen, 69, in a recent interview. “So somebody else will have that opportunity.”
She said during her travels, she’ll have time to “think about, what is it that I really want to do? Because I certainly don’t have time right now to think about the future retirement days.”
Wintersteen became the first woman and second ISU alum to hold the university’s highest office when she was named the 16th president of ISU in 2017.
Wintersteen began her career at ISU as an extension field specialist in integrated pest management. After completing her doctorate in entomology, she rose through the ranks to become a professor and held several leadership roles.
Prior to becoming president, Wintersteen served eleven years as the inaugural endowed dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and director of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station.
The Iowa Board of Regents has named David Cook the 17th president of ISU.
Cook, president of North Dakota State University, succeeds Wintersteen who will retire in her ninth year as ISU’s president. Cook, who is an alumnus of ISU, will take office on March 1.
The following is an edited conversation Wintersteen had recently with the Business Record.
Why did you decide to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship at the university?
I was the dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and did that for 11 years. And really, before I started as dean, the Underwoods, Roger and Connie, had given a gift to the college for ag entrepreneurship, and we hired an individual into the Department of Economics, Kevin Kimle, and he led the ag entrepreneurship initiative in the college. And I watched that grow, and it was so extraordinary. And wherever Kevin Kimle went, students were all around him and just following him like the Pied Piper. Kevin taught courses in the Department of Economics about entrepreneurship, and he helped students build businesses literally that they would take home and grow in Iowa. And they could be something very substantial, or they might be – and not that these weren’t substantial – but they might be taking an enterprise home to the farm. So they might go home to the farm, where it was a corn and soybean farm, and add a livestock enterprise. And that’s no small feat. And so it was really impressive what he was doing, and I decided that as president, that needed to grow bigger at the university.
At the same time, I was watching what Judi Eyles was doing in the Pappajohn Center. Now that was great, but it wasn’t as big as it could be in the university, and it was primarily associated where it was housed, which was in the Ivy College of Business. And so as president, I had the bully pulpit to lift that up in a big way. And so in my installation address, I said that we were going to bring innovation and entrepreneurship across the university.
And then another factor was that we were building the Student Innovation Center, which is 146,000 square feet of creativity. It was something that was invested in by the state legislature and by donors. Donors paid for a little more than half of that $84 million building. It opened in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 and we were still able to open it virtually. And now when students come to visit campus, they walk into that building, and they literally turn around in a circle, and they look up into the ceilings, which are way up there, and they are just amazed. So now students actually come to Iowa State University, and they come here because of what the options are, the opportunities are for them to be engaged in innovation and entrepreneurship. Every semester, somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 students are taking a class related to innovation and entrepreneurship. So every college now has a Start Something program. We wanted to have a common name across the university. So a student in engineering could say, ‘I’m in the Start Something program at Iowa State,’ and a student in ag could say, ‘Me too, I’m in the Start Something program in the College of Ag and Life Sciences.’ And then they can all be part of what’s going on in the Pappajohn Center.
And so all across the nation, people are saying what’s happening at Iowa State University? Just recently, Texas A&M, which is a very well funded university down in Texas, they asked our team at Iowa State to come and tell them, how were we doing it? Can you imagine? And they said that we were doing it better than many universities they had visited. So my response was, ‘Don’t tell them our secret.’ No, seriously, we should tell everybody our secret, because the more students we can graduate that have an entrepreneurial mindset, that think differently, regardless of whether they start a business or they take that entrepreneurial mindset to the job that they will have when they graduate from college, the better off our economy will be, the better off Iowa will be, the better off the nation will be.
Looking forward, what do you think are the biggest challenges that will face your successor, David Cook?
David Cook will have to look at how the university can be more efficient. Every day we work on efficiencies. How can we be more efficient for the benefit of our students and our faculty and staff? Right now, we’re very efficient. For every dollar we spend on instruction, we spend 11 cents on administration. So that’s pretty efficient, but we have to strive to do even better, so that we can put the dollars we get from the legislature and from our students, tuition and other sources of funding, that we can spend more on delivering a greater value to our students and to the work of our faculty and staff. Efficiency, the drive to greater efficiency, will always be a challenge, because we have to do better. We have to have more resources to be able to run this great university. I think we also have to continue to be strong in our enrollment. This year, we’re very proud of our enrollment. Our first-year class was up significantly. We had 6,160 students in our first-year class. We feel good about where we were with our enrollment this year. That is strong. We also need to be continuing to think about new initiatives in our research program. We do very well. We’re in the top 3% for research universities without a medical school, but continuing to have a strong research program. This year, research was looked at closely by the federal government. We did OK under that scrutiny, but we need to have a strong research funded by the federal government. It’s how we move the country forward and how we address critical issues in science. Iowa State is a STEM university with strong research. We have the Ames National Laboratory here, one of the 17 [Department of Energy] laboratories in the nation. The president will have to look at all of these things and how we maintain our strengths and teaching, research and extension, serving the state [and] all the 99 counties of Iowa.
When you started as president of ISU in 2017, what was the best advice someone gave you?
The best advice that I received was to listen. It’s advice I’ve been given my entire career. When I started, I went out and tried to do a listening tour about what people had to share with me, and I listened all over campus. I listen to students, I listen to faculty and staff, and we actually did a little funny thing called Send in your Cydeas. And I think the first, I don’t know how many, probably 100 ideas were, could you improve parking? So parking is always an issue on campus, but listening to everyone all the time is important. I think that’s how you can improve. If you listen honestly and openly, then you’ll hear about things. My husband and I, we lead the President’s Leadership Class with 30 freshmen during every academic year. It’s a wonderful experience. Through those freshmen, we get to know: What is it like to be freshmen on campus? We see the university through their eyes. We always do a Shark Tank with the freshmen. How can we improve life in the residence halls? And one year, one of our students said we don’t have enough of the machines that are life-saving machines, to restart somebody’s hearts [defibrillators]. And so I said, really? And so we went back and talked. We had a committee that actually worked on that. This student had a family foundation on that particular issue, so we ended up having more of those placed around campus in critical areas.
At a glance:
Where she will reside in retirement: In a suburb of Des Moines
Family: Husband, Robert Waggoner
Education: Bachelor’s of science degree in crop production from Kansas State University and PhD in entomology from ISU
Email: wwinters@iastate.edu
Read more:
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David Cook named president of Iowa State University