‘You can make magic happen’: NU presidential finalist makes pitch to campuses

LINCOLN — During his first fall semester as dean of a medical university in Ohio, Dr. Jeffrey Gold recalls a first-year student seeking to return her iconic white coat hours after receiving it.

It was late on the Friday evening before classes began, Gold said, and the student tearfully explained how her financial situation had crumbled after her father lost his job and the family learned her mother had cancer. She didn’t submit her financial aid request in time, either.

Gold tried to call multiple people, but after receiving no responses that night, he offered her his credit card to buy her textbooks. He told the student they’d get her financial situation worked out later, and she returned Gold’s card when classes started that next Monday.

Four years later, she graduated top of her class, and her father handed Gold an envelope containing his daughter’s textbook payment — $164.23 — in cash, including three pennies.

“That was an incredibly powerful moment for me because it conveyed that for $160, you could change somebody’s life,” Gold said Monday at one of the public forums he has attended at the university’s various campuses. “But the even more powerful message to me is that if you treat our students like you would treat your own child, that you can do anything you want to do, and that you can make magic happen.”

Next steps in presidential search

The University of Nebraska Board of Regents unanimously selected Dr. Gold on March 20 as the priority candidate for NU’s ninth president. Gold is undergoing a 30-day vetting period that requires campus forums in Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney, which Gold completed this week.

Gold has served as chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center for 10 years and concurrently as NU’s chief academic officer since 2021.

One of the priority candidate’s goals is for every high school student “across this great country of ours” to wake up at least once, at 4 a.m., and say, “If I could only go to Nebraska to go to college.’”

“We would have to earn that,” Gold said.

State law allows the regents to take a final vote on Gold’s candidacy as soon as Saturday, if they so choose. Regents will meet Friday, but it will be day 30 of Gold’s public review period.

Regent Tim Clare of Lincoln, who chaired a committee that assisted the latest presidential search, said Monday that Nebraskans shouldn’t “read into it” if regents don’t meet Saturday. He said a final meeting might come next week.

Regent Rob Schafer of Beatrice, board chair, told the Nebraska Examiner that regents are working out logistics for another meeting, and he wants to move forward. Schafer does want to get Gold to gatherings in other areas of Nebraska, such as Scottsbluff, North Platte and Beatrice, which could be scheduled in the next week.

Asked whether he would vote in favor of Gold as president, Schafer said: “I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but I’m excited where we’re at.”

‘Going to go to great places’

Many NU community members similarly expressed optimism in the past week with a hint of caution with the internal pick of Gold, who is 71 and has been UNMC chancellor for a decade. He concurrently picked up the Omaha chancellor’s role from 2017 to 2021 and then the top academic position of executive vice president and provost right after.

Across the forums, some of Gold’s commitments included welcoming all students and addressing their needs; improving mental health outcomes for NU community members; treating faculty and staff as family; protecting academic freedom; advancing Nebraska Extension and agricultural research and listening to all stakeholders, particularly students.

He also stated that should NU consider structural changes, such as merging campuses — as former NU President Ted Carter suggested in a departing memo last year — it would be done with “total transparency.”

Dean Richard Moberly of the Nebraska College of Law was one audience member who said that he was thrilled for Gold’s candidacy and that he had watched Gold’s achievements at UNMC.

“I’m confident that if you can do the same thing for our system and our university (as you did at UNMC), we’re going to go to great places,” Moberly said.

Moberly asked Gold to explain how he approached centralization in NU’s central administration, and Gold said there is no question that more power has been centralized in the NU president’s office, largely due to budgetary concerns in the last decade.

However, Gold added, it’s important to consider whether budget margins drive NU’s mission or if the mission drives its margin.

“If you have a solid mission and everybody is clear on the mission, on the aspirational goals of where we’re going, the margin will follow,” Gold said.

Growth during ‘financial blues’

Across the last decade, Gold has been no stranger to budget cuts, and one of his first tasks if confirmed will be facing a continued $58 million shortfall, largely resulting from inflation and declining enrollment.

Gold told his UNMC community that many universities are facing similar “financial blues” but said NU’s budget deficit also came because leaders continually expected new revenue that didn’t materialize. Leaders then used one-time money as a bailout instead of finding new strategic sources of revenue or making cuts.

In 2023, UNMC was the only NU campus to grow enrollment, and it has continued with large infrastructure projects, including a partnership with Kearney’s campus for a rural health complex.

The medical center was also front-and-center during the COVID-19 pandemic and is continuing world-class research on some of the most notorious diseases, including pancreatic cancer.

Gold, a cardiac surgeon who is licensed to practice surgery and medicine in four states outside Nebraska, said he has not stopped his own health research with colleagues around the country while he has been chancellor. His research revolved around epidemiology, health outcomes and disparities. If selected as president, Gold said, no one could take that work away from him.

Asked Tuesday whether he has ideas that could transfer to the rest of NU, Gold said simply, “Yes, absolutely,” and said one idea is adding exciting programs rather than cutting. He said that’s one of the factors that led to growing enrollment at UNMC.

Association of American Universities

In the past year, Gold and other NU leaders have been lauding a goal to rejoin the Association of American Universities. Members voted to kick out the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2011 after 102 years as part of the organization.

NU is seeking to defy history as the first ex-member invited back, with first steps by reporting UNL and UNMC research expenditures as one, which immediately boosted NU’s rankings.

Gold said again this week that the AAU is more than a “merit badge” and will unlock more opportunities, similar to what happened after UNL joined the Big Ten, which provided new research capabilities to UNMC. 

An invitation to rejoin the AAU would require NU to improve certain metrics, including graduation and retention rates as well as faculty awards and memberships in academies.

“We are definitely rowing upstream in a rapidly moving river of competition,” Gold said.

The mission has left some in the NU community, particularly at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and University of Nebraska at Omaha, worrying that doing so could weaken other parts of NU, but Gold said the AAU goal can “uplift the entire university system.”

“UNK just needs to be at the top of the game,” Gold told one UNK audience member last week. “UNK needs to be a campus serving not just a community but as an exemplar to the rest of the country of what success looks like.”

Making an impact each day

Across the forums, Gold shared many of the same stories, including the one about the first-year medical student, and connected those to his prospective vision should he be confirmed as the successor to former NU President Ted Carter.

Gold outlined many moments that led to his presidential candidacy, ranging from how he grew up in near poverty and went to college as a first-generation student on an engineering scholarship, to what he learned during his service in New York following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

During his time at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Gold served on the Faculty Senate, where he learned about shared governance and collaborating with all stakeholder.s But in 2001, another lesson taught him the value of each moment and ultimately led him to become a medical dean in Toledo, Ohio, before coming to Nebraska.

Beginning at sunset on Sept. 11 and lasting for five days, Gold volunteered for triage and search and rescue near where the World Trade Center Towers once stood.

“You could literally reach out and you could hold the air in your hand,” Gold recalled.

He dug through the rubble of what was once the Twin Towers and recognized that for the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks that morning, all they ever did was get up, kiss their kids goodbye and go to work. Yet they never came home again.

“That was a message to me that if you really wanted to do something, if you really wanted to have impact, you never know when your card is going to get punched,” Gold said. “You never know when that impact is not going to be possible.”