Mohammad “Mo” Dehghani, who has been chancellor at S&T since 2019, discusses what he believes lies in store for the campus.

Audio transcript

In my assessment, the campus of S&T has the engine, the reputation, the history behind it to expand itself, both here on site as well as reaching out. You know, the campus has to take itself to the world. In the era of distance learning and online education and all that. We can provide the level of education, the rigor of curricula that S&T has offered for decades, a century and a half, essentially, we ought to be able to provide that education to a bigger cross section of Missouri citizens and beyond. So our longterm rise in goal is for the campus to be a campus of 12,000 students. I envision it to be 8,000 undergraduate and 4,000 graduate students. We need to expand and enhance our research so we will get to the R1 category of universities. This is the Carnegie R1 category. Which essentially means we need to double plus our research activities. That will come through the expansion of the campus as well as the enhancement of research that goes on here. Faculty of the future will be much more research focused. This campus has always had a wonderful reputation of doing world-class research here. Particularly in the area of materials and manufacturing and infrastructure and design of systems. But we can . . . the faculty of the future will do much more of that. So our mission of educating the Missouri young men and women will remain the prime challenge for us to continue providing that caliber of education. But at the same time we have to enhance our research as well as our ranking. Ranking is a reality of life; students look at it, parents look at it, and we need to get ourselves to the point where we are recognized as a research-intensive university, as well as a full . . . the reputation that we have been providing education, classroom education, online education, distance learning and all of that. So, I think the campus of the future will have a massive presence in cyber physical space. Cyber informatics will have to expand. The campus itself will have to expand. I believe this is one of the crown jewels of American engineering and science education. How do we expand? As I said, we have the reputation. This past year’s class of freshmen’s average high school GPA was 3.95. Okay. So we do have excellent students, we have excellent faculty, we have excellent staff, and we need to enhance our infrastructure so that we will have excellent infrastructure and services, and those are the four main ingredients for an excellent university. So I am highly, highly optimistic about the future of S&T. In the next 150 years, we’ll see S&T continue its growth in reputation, in size, in quality, and if we are successful, in our research initiatives, in our philanthropic initiatives, in our capital campaigns that we have ongoing, I think this will be a campus where the Missouri kids will be proud to consider themselves having been educated at Missouri S&T.