He will be president, but he doesn’t have all the answers, nor will he bluff them.
This quality that endeared Dr. Jim Borsig to the Mississippi University for Women campus earlier this week is the same quality he exhibited in a meeting with The Dispatch editorial board Friday afternoon.
The state College Board named Borsig the new president of The W on Wednesday afternoon. He will take office in January.
Borsig showed signs of his busy week in Columbus meeting with campus and community constituents. After a full day of meetings Wednesday Interim President Allegra Brigham spent Thursday and most of Friday introducing her successor to his new hometown and its civic leaders.
“I don’t know everything I need to know,” Borsig admitted. January will mark the beginning of the journey to learn and shape that vision.
Make no mistake. His hiring does not mark the end of the community’s work.
He repeated Friday the university’s success rests with all its constituent groups, and he will ask everyone to take part. “This is more than a team sport,” he said. “This is a family event.”
In a nod to Brigham, he credited her with easing the transition.
“I am fortunate to follow Allegra, who has made the way for whoever would have been president a lot easier,” he said. “This is the start of a conversation. We have to get pretty good at the conversation. We have to imagine what The W will look at in the 21st century. That’s the focus.”
Borsig was asked more than once about applying for the MUW presidency before he decided he might be a good fit for the university.
“I was not looking for this job. I was not looking for a job. I enjoyed what I was doing,” he admitted. “My first reaction was ‘I don’t think so.'”
He spent the next week to 10 days thinking about it.
“Looking at what I knew about the institution and thinking about my experience, I came to the realization that I didn’t know if I was the best, but that I should listen,” he said. “I’m convinced this institution has a bright future. I have a passion for The W and for its potential — one that I discovered in this process.”
Name change, athletics
Borsig said he won’t shy away from the big issues, and he knows name change and sports are among them.
What others interpret as controversy, he sees as evidence of passion.
“You gotta have the courage to walk to the other side of a conflict.”
The discussion about changing MUW’s name “is likely to get messy,” he said. “I think the conversation is essential. It’s not necessarily the most important thing to me at this moment. … I don’t have the answer, but I’m not afraid to have the conversation.”
MUW was founded as the Industrial Institute and College in 1884 and was the first state-supported college for women. In 1920, II&C became Mississippi State College for Women. And in 1974, MUW adopted its current name. The college has been accepting men since 1982.
Restoring the college’s sports program is another important consideration, he said, since sports can be an important part of campus life.
But he doesn’t yet know enough about the university’s financial situation to decide whether reinstating the sports programs is feasible.
Student retention
Borsig plans to focus on student recruitment, retention and graduation.
“Those are the critical factors,” he said, rattling off a series of statistics: One-third of the 10,000 students who graduate annually from the eight state-funded universities enter college as a freshman and attend one school all four years. One-third of those students transfer from a community college into a four-year institution. The last third is everyone else, including students who take an extended time to graduate or have attended more than two colleges.
“We will compete, I think, for those traditional students,” he said, noting he will encourage a “plug and play” transfer program for community college students.
Mississippi is at the top of states helping nontraditional students finish their degrees, and “that is the market for students.”
Without in-depth research, he declined to put a number on how many students would be optimum for The W, not committing to the 3,500 figure he has heard repeatedly.
“I know it’s more than what we have enrolled today,” he said.
Alumni relations
Past MUW President Claudia Limbert spent much of her tenure in a tug of war with a faction of the university’s alumni. Eventually, it led to the disaffiliation of the college’s more than century-old MUW Alumnae Association and the creation of a new alumni group.
Under Brigham’s interim presidency, the disaffiliated group agreed to joint bylaws with the Limbert-formed group, and the two became one.
In his comments, Borsig recognized the importance of university-alumni relations, though he doesn’t expect everyone to always agree.
“Relations with our alums are critical,” Borsig said. “It’s a love relationship; it’s a passionate relationship.”
Building consensus will be a part of his job, he added.
“It probably would alarm me if everybody agreed about a single issue. I think you can find understanding in a place where it doesn’t seem to exist through a conversation.”
Town and gown
Another part of the conversation is the community. And Borsig plans to be very visible in the community.
His approach to fostering a better relationship between The W and the community is two-fold.
The first is to be visible in the community. Universities can become isolated from their communities and think people automatically know what is happening on campus, he said. The second is to be a consistent, welcoming participant in the community.
“Universities can be somewhat insular … The campus has to welcome the community, and at the same time the community has to do the same thing,” he said. “From what I’ve seen, this community is very supportive of The W.”
Decompressing
Outside of work, look for him in a kayak, at the gym or somewhere outside.
He hopes to get a chance to use his golf clubs for more than office decor.
Borsig already seems to have a rigorous schedule laid out in front of him. But, as he noted, he also has had 30 years of balancing work and time for himself.
He uses “circuit-breaker weekends” to decompress, and he is not a worrier, he said. He loses more sleep from excitement than worry.
Borsig’s only immediate family is his mother, who lives in Rankin County.
“She has been ecstatic about all of this.”
She and the cousins in the “family mafia reporting from all over the state” have kept up with the headlines better than him.
His immediate focus is to get moved into the president’s house.
“Everything feels right about this opportunity for me.”
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