September’s Board of Visitors meeting marks “a big transition time”

The most recent meeting of Radford University’s Board of Visitors, held Sept. 11-12, marked the group’s second-to-last gathering of 2025, and it found the school at a key juncture in its planning processes for the future.

“This fall is especially important to me,” President Bret Danilowicz said in his report to the board, “because we are wrapping up the two-year strategic plan and we’re moving into our phase where we’re going to be approving a six-year strategic plan for the institution.

“This is a big transition time for us,” he said.

Danilowicz previously presented the school’s two-year plan in his 2023 homecoming address, during which he outlined the strategy’s four pillars: defining Radford’s distinctive nature, driving regional economic development, stabilizing student enrollment and repositioning resources.

Toward those ends, now roughly two years later, on Sept. 11, Radford announced it was following last year’s record-breaking new student enrollment levels with sustained growth across its undergraduate and graduate programs, which rose by 1% and 8% respectively. Direct Admissions and the Radford Tuition Promise were cited as central to those increases.

“Over 33% of our undergraduate students are benefiting from our Radford Tuition Promise, so that’s not a small number,” Danilowicz explained. “Of our incoming students this year, 65% were direct admits into the institution, exceeding our goal by 110%.”

Further, some 4,500 prospective student visitors have come to Radford over the past year, a figure that surpassed expectations by 80%, he said, adding that opportunities to showcase the campus’s beauty and close-knit community are “absolutely critical for maintaining stability in enrollment,” and he praised Enrollment Management for its work in that field.

Danilowicz also recognized Ruby Dowd, of Floyd, Virginia, who, this fall, became the first student to officially enroll at Radford through the Tartan Transfer program.

Other recent successes the president discussed included:

• The second Community Fest, a downtown street fair held in August as a partnership between the school and the city;
• The launch and popularity of CoWorks @ The HUB;
• A $600,000 grant from the Educating Character Initiative, which will support the founding of the Highlander Center for Character and Public Impact;
• The Virginia Board of Education’s approval of the creation on campus of the New River Valley Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities;
• Radford’s first Tartan Transfer Summit, set for Oct. 23;
• November’s hosting by Radford of the state’s senate finance and appropriations committee, during which Virginia’s senators will be guests of The Highlander hotel;
• The expansion of healthcare and nursing programs through Radford University at Carilion (RUC), for which $7.5 million has been approved to plan a new facility, currently slated to open in 2031.   

“Many of our goals [of the two-year plan] continue to be completed or at least met,” Danilowicz said. “Not all, but we’re making progress in all of them, so it’s been a really helpful plan in guiding the most important places for our institution to move forward.”

Planning committee co-chairs Sharon Roger Hepburn and Angela Joyner offered an eye to the future by presenting an update on the impending six-year plan, which, if approved, will commence early next year. That plan’s development began on Sept. 13, 2024, when Danilowicz convened the committee, which includes more than two dozen faculty and staff members.

“Three hundred and sixty-four days ago, our work really started,” said Hepburn, a Radford professor and the chair of its history department. She thanked the committee members and said the plan, called Shaping Tomorrow – Together, “is the result of many people, much input, considerable energy and a substantial amount of work.”

While they did not yet review the full plan, the co-chairs touched on its mission and vision and its six overarching themes and commitments.

• Themes: Culture of care; academic achievement and intellectual discovery; student success and experiential learning; strategic partnerships and community engagement; organizational excellence and continuous improvement; and communication and collaboration.
• Commitments: Guaranteeing experiential learning for students and supporting workforce needs; building and fostering a culture of care; becoming the premier destination for healthcare education and talent in Southwest Virginia; modernizing the university’s technology and business processes; expanding regional economic opportunities and partnerships; and building affinity for and pride in Radford University.

Joyner, Radford University’s vice president for economic development and corporate education, said that next month the committee will begin the budget planning development process, “which gives us the opportunity to start thinking about the initiatives and how those would align with the budget.”

They ultimately hope to establish online dashboards, both internally and externally, to communicate the plan moving forward and to illustrate for others how its initiatives and impacts are measured.

The Board of Visitors will now review the latest draft of the plan and provide feedback on Sept. 26. The committee will then refine it over the next few months before bringing it back to the board for final consideration and approval in December. It’s scheduled to launch in January.

Later in the meeting, several board members provided overviews of the numerous committee meetings that took place Sept. 11. Some of these included:

• Academic Excellence and Student Success: Chair Betty Jo Foster ’69, Ed.D., said Provost Bethany Usher presented an array of recent accomplishments, including the full accreditation for Radford’s School Psychology (Ed.S.) program and the Jo Ann Bingham Clinical Simulation Center, as well as the university’s hosting of more than 400 high-achieving Virginia high school students with the Arts and Humanities Governor’s School in Radford and the Governor’s School for Medicine and Health Sciences in Roanoke. Usher also gave an overview of the Division of Academic Affairs, which, with seven colleges, 656 employees and a budget of $98 million, is Radford’s largest division.
• Business Affairs and Audit Committee: Chair Jeanne Armentrout ’81 brought forward the 2025-2026 audit plan, the 2024-2030 six-year capital plan; the six-year plan; the 2025-2026 operating budget and changes and revisions to the Administrative and Professional Faculty Handbook, all of which were voted approved by the board.
• Economic Development and Corporate Education: Chair Betsy Beamer ’81 reviewed key grants and initiatives, including an upcoming presentation on the cybersecurity track by the IMPACT Lab at the Roanoke Blacksburg Technology Council Emerging Technology Conference Oct. 29-31. Beamer also cited local patronage at CoWorks @ The HUB; expanded services of the Certification Center through new partnerships with the Virginia Department of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (VDDHH) and Certiport; and the contributions of interns Jonas Miller and Mary Paniagua-Ugarte.
• Enrollment Management and Strategic Communications: Vice rector and committee chair Jennifer Wishon Gilbert covered recent advances in enrollment as well as the Strategic Communications team’s push to assist academic and non-academic units in the implementation of their communication plans. She said Director of Strategic Projects and Client Support Cecelia Crow has already met with representatives from seven colleges and three divisions to begin planning this work.
• Student Affairs and Athletics Committee: Chair David A. Smith ’85, M.S. ’87, welcomed Student Government Association (SGA) president Owen Starr. Smith shared updates from Vice President for Student Affairs Susan Trageser that involved process mapping and highlighted workflow improvements, as well as survey results that reflected students reporting 80% clarity and 78% ease of use for processes they used or engaged with. He also recognized student-athlete Meredith Page, a women’s volleyball player who earned the 2024-2025 Big South Woman of the Year award, while noting that Radford’s athletes this year will wear VA250 commemorative patches on their jerseys to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Also: Athletic Director Robert Lineburg formally recognized women's golfer Macy Johnson of Salem, Virginia, who in April was named the Big South's Scholar-Athlete of the Year for women’s golf, alongside other numerous wins and honors over the past year and throughout her career.

A senior economics major, Johnson has also recorded a 4.0 grade point average and has been inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma, which honors the top 10% of the country's business undergraduate students. 

Lineburg said Johnson "truly epitomizes what it means to be a Highlander student-athlete."

In her remarks to the board, Johnson said she attributed much of her success as a student and an athlete to being able to compartmentalize her studies and her golf experience – to focus exclusively on one of the other, as needed – a process she said had been greatly facilitated by her rapport with her Radford instructors.

"Being a Highlander is absolutely not just being a student-athlete," Johnson said. "Being a Highlander is a community ... being a Highlander is a family.”

Toward the meeting’s close, this year’s student representative to the Board of Visitors, Dominika Butler, provided the first report of her term.

Butler, a first-generation student who’s majoring in middle school education-social studies, with a minor in special education, said she recently started student teaching in Blacksburg, Virginia. She is also a resident assistant in Floyd Hall, an Honors College liaison and a Highlander tour guide, among other roles.

She told the board her representative goals for the year ahead are networking, promoting campus resources and supporting the community, and said she’ll focus on student involvement, athletics and RUC, as well as linking up with other BOV student representatives across Virginia.

“If you want new students to join organizations, you want them to see what they’re actually doing in the community, which I think is so important,” Butler told the board.

“I love highlighting and connecting people to different communities, but I think showing them and allowing them to get involved is what is really important, too. Because that’s how I got involved as well,” she said.

Gilbert offered Butler encouragement in her new position.

“I’m struck by the fact that you came in as a first-generation student with some anxieties about that,” Gilbert told her. “And I love that now you’re a tour guide, and you’re going to train the next generation of tour guides, and I think that’s just a beautiful cycle.”

Radford University’s newest board members are Mary Anne Holbrook ’02, M.S. ’04, of Bristol, Virginia, and Anthony Moore of Richmond, Virginia. Each began their four-year terms on July 1. Tyler W. Lester ’15 of Abingdon, Virginia, was also reappointed to the board.

Copies of the meeting agendas and board reports are available online, and full video of the Sept. 12 meeting can be streamed through YouTube.

The next meeting of Radford’s Board of Visitors will be held Dec. 4-5.