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Christopher Howard, who will be inaugurated as Robert Morris University’s president today, poses for a portrait outside the School of Business building.
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New president wants to keep Robert Morris' trajectory on the upswing

Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette

New president wants to keep Robert Morris' trajectory on the upswing

In 1921, what is now Robert Morris University began Downtown as a for-profit accounting school. Over the years it changed names and locations, including inside the William Penn Hotel, before settling in Moon on a Kaufmann family estate. This year, it cracked the top 200 American universities, qualifying for the first time as a “National University” in the influential U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Christopher Howard, who will be inaugurated today as the university’s eighth president, calls the school’s trajectory “a bit of an improbable but not impossible American story.”

It’s a phrase that could also apply to Mr. Howard, who grew up in a military family in Texas. His list of accomplishments is dizzying: Rhodes Scholar, graduate of the Air Force Academy, where he was a starting running back on the football team, Harvard business school degree, Ph.D. in politics from Oxford University, special forces intelligence officer and recipient of a Bronze Star.

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He came to Robert Morris from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, a small all-male liberal arts school where he served as president for six years.

Mr. Howard, 47, who has been on the job at RMU since February, sees his role as figuring out the next steps for the school to build from its university status. “We’re really a good school with a great future,” he said. “Not every university — as we say in the South, bless their hearts — is getting those questions about what’s ahead, where are you going.”

Mr. Howard said he is still “listening to the pulse of the organization,” but has begun a few major initiatives. One of his first acts was to sign the “Moving the Needle” pledge from the American Council on Education, to increase the number of women executives in higher education to 50 percent by 2030.

Empowering women is also the theme of his inauguration. A leadership symposium following the ceremony will feature speeches from women who Mr. Howard referred to as his “three big sisters” in terms of mentorship: Donna Auguste, a computer scientist and founder and CEO of technology companies; Suzanne Nora Johnson, a corporate executive and former vice chair of Goldman Sachs; and keynote speaker Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson, superintendent of the Air Force Academy and a former professor of Mr. Howard’s.

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Student government president Aveenash Kumar complimented Mr. Howard’s visibility on campus, from mingling with students at events like the Bobbymania orientation party, to connecting through social media. “He wants students to be involved and he’s asking students what he should do,” said the sophomore. “That’s nice to see from our new president.”

After earning his doctorate at Oxford, Mr. Howard served as a helicopter pilot and intelligence officer for the Joint Special Operations Command. He earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan in 2003 and served as the reserve air attache to Liberia. He joined the private sector afterward, working for General Electric and Bristol-Myers Squibb and considering a political career before joining academia. He was a vice president at the University of Oklahoma before taking the president job at Hampden-Sydney.

He is married with two sons — one who graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee this spring and one who is a sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Part of Mr. Howard’s mission is to find RMU’s place among the other “national universities” in Pittsburgh — the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University and Carnegie Mellon University. He is looking to capitalize on the university’s location, noting that “there’s not a similar player west of Pittsburgh and beyond.”

To best define RMU’s role, he has been meeting with CEOs of major local employers, trying to determine what skills are in demand and how the university can work to prepare its graduates to acquire them, noting that he’s heard of needs for students proficient in fields such as financial technology, health sciences and cybersecurity.

And he’s also hoping to raise money for a new event center in part for the basketball program that has done as much to market the university as its new ranking or its popular speaker series. He’d like to see a new 4,500 seat arena, practice gym and conference center. The current facility “has served us since the 1980s,” he said. “It’s time to upgrade it, to have a facility commensurate with the student athletes that wear the Colonial colors.”

Those athletes are perhaps best known for a basketball game on March 13, 2013, in which RMU beat top-seeded Kentucky in the National Invitation Tournament. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” said Mr. Howard. “I go around the country and people say, ‘Didn’t you beat Kentucky in basketball?’”

Small as it sounds, name recognition can go a long way toward getting Robert Morris on the radar of students not only on the other side of the country but across the world. More than 10 percent of the student body is made up of international students.

It’s all been part of his predecessors bringing the school to what Mr. Howard calls Robert Morris 2.0. His job, he said, is taking the school to Robert Morris 5.0.

Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1308.

First Published: October 7, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
Updated: October 7, 2016, 4:22 a.m.

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Christopher Howard, who will be inaugurated as Robert Morris University’s president today, poses for a portrait outside the School of Business building.  (Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette)
Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette
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