Why Should Delaware Care?
The president of the University of Delaware is typically the state’s best paid public official, but also leads an enormous higher education operation with more than 20,000 students statewide that also has significant impacts on workforce and economic development.
The University of Delaware announced Thursday that Laura Carlson, the school’s chief academic officer, would become the interim president, effective July 1, after the resignation of current President Dennis Assanis.
Assanis, who surprisingly announced that he was stepping down earlier this month just before the university’s Board of Trustees were due to begin considering the future of his contract that expires next year, has led Delaware’s flagship university since 2016.
In lengthy comments to the board Tuesday at its semi-annual meeting, Assanis noted that he does not have another role on the horizon and plans to spend time with his family.
The president has led a nearly decade-long burst of campus expansions and partnerships with industry while weathering the COVID pandemic and two Trump administrations that have been hostile to higher education. Assanis has also increasingly become the target of criticism by faculty, including over his tight control of administrative functions and a lack of transparency into university finances.
In selecting Carlson, who became the 12th provost of the University of Delaware in 2022, the board was perhaps signaling its commitment to the faculty.
“With her leadership experience and background in higher education administration, she is an excellent choice to take on this vital role. She and President Assanis will be working closely together to ensure a smooth transition,” said Terri Kelly, the president of the board of trustees, in announcing Carlson’s selection.
Kelly told Spotlight Delaware that while the board will consider other candidates for the permanent president role, it is their hope that Carlson will grow into the role in coming months and submit her name for consideration.
The board is not currently planning to hold a nationwide search as it did in 2015, when Kelly was among a 15-member committee that held an eight-month search that ultimately selected Assanis, who was then an administrator at Stony Brook University in New York.
She noted that trends in higher education have begun moving away from constantly seeking outside voices, and that more universities are now seeking to cultivate homegrown talent.
If Carlson were to be named the permanent president of UD, she would be the first woman appointed to a full term to lead the university in its 282-year history. Nancy Targett served as acting president of the university for several months in 2015 between the tenures of Patrick Harker and Assanis.
Who is Carlson?
Carlson came to UD three years ago to take over the role that oversees the operations of the university’s 10 colleges and schools, manages enrollment strategy and ensures student achievement and quality experiences.
In her tenure, she has created a multi-year strategy that integrates financial, enrollment and hiring plans and led cross-disciplinary teams to help expand pathways to a degree. Carlson has also developed a close relationship with the 10 deans and pushed for an environment that encourages faculty and staff to incubate ideas for the wider university.
“I am honored and humbled to be stepping in to guide this very special institution, and I thank the Board of Trustees for their confidence and support. I look forward to convening campus conversations this summer and fall to reaffirm our mission and identity and to together design a path forward that is uniquely our own,” she said in a statement.
Before coming to UD, Carlson served for more than 20 years at the University of Notre Dame, starting as an assistant professor of psychology in 1994 and ending as vice president, associate provost and dean of its Graduate School.
A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, she has received several teaching awards, including the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Carlson’s primary research interest is spatial cognition — how we mentally represent the places and objects around us — and her work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work, publishing with scholars across the fields of computer science, engineering, architecture and linguistics.
A cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College with a special major in psychology of language, she received a Master of Arts degree at Michigan State University and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
A difficult time to take over
The splitting from Assanis will mark a new era for the University of Delaware as it contends with difficult finances in recent years, an environment that is heavily reliant on now-embattled federal research dollars to back new work, and a national demographic cliff that will produce fewer potential applicants in next generations.
On Tuesday, the board of trustees projected that UD would end Fiscal Year 2025 on June 30 with a $25 million budget deficit. That is down from a projected $54 million operating deficit from a year ago, tempered primarily from reduced hiring and the cutting of faculty travel and supplies.
Combined with non-operating expenses, the projected change in fund balances will be a $48 million loss, reported Don Puglisi, finance chair for the board.
For the impending Fiscal Year 2026 budget, the university is aiming for a break-even operating budget, primarily through increased enrollment and hikes on tuition and fees, while being more discerning on future hires.
The board adopted a per-credit-hour tuition increase of 4% for both resident and non-resident students for the upcoming school year. That translates to a $584 increase to Delawareans, totaling $15,184 per semester, and a $1,567 for out-of-state students, totaling $40,757.
Additionally, first-year students will find an additional $220 fee in their first semester to support student life initiatives, while all students will begin incurring a $50 per semester fee sought by the City of Newark to support public services to the campus.
Differential tuition fees currently applied to the business, nursing and engineering colleges will also be extended to UD’s music and honors colleges. Finally, on-campus students will see a 4% increase in the housing rate and a 6% increase in dining plan costs.
Combined, Puglisi said the costs to on-campus students would rise about 5%.
UD will also take a 4% distribution from its billion-dollar endowment to contribute toward operating needs, totaling $71.3 million. However, 45% of that draw is restricted and designated funds, limiting how the university can spend it.
Puglisi noted that the FY 2026 budget would end a string of budget deficits, but it still would not produce the board’s intended goal of holding a 3% to 5% operating surplus, or $40 million to $60 million, to support program growth.
“So while considerable progress has been made, there’s still a long way to go,” said Puglisi, a retired UD business professor.
Some positive news for UD came Tuesday when Carlson reported that applications for the fall 2025 undergraduate class totaled nearly 41,000. The school hopes to matriculate about 4,400 next year.
So far, about 4,743 prospective undergraduate students have made an initial deposit – many will later choose to attend another school and refund that deposit. That total is up 12% over 2023 though and about a third of the students are Delawareans.
Similarly, more than 1,100 master’s students have enrolled compared to a target of 689 and 242 doctoral students have enrolled, surpassing a target of 200.
New autonomy for deans
Over the last academic year, UD has increasingly given new autonomy to each of its 10 colleges and schools in the system.
Budget decisions that were once made at the administrative and dean levels are now increasingly pushed down to department chairs, which gives faculty new control over their spending and insights into the university’s financial position.
Kelly told Spotlight Delaware that she was committed to increasing transparency in UD’s finances, which have long been cloaked by broad figures and little accounting for capital spending.
Deans have been encouraged to develop new degree programs that they believe students want and that the university can support. In the past year, UD has approved several new associate and bachelor’s degree programs, along with new 4+1 programs that add a master’s degree with a fifth year of learning.
Under the new framework, colleges and deans will increasingly be tasked with their own fundraising from alumni and donors, Kelly said. That will allow subject-matter experts to broach the requests rather than flowing through the president’s office.
According to Puglisi, UD aims to save $11 million in the first year of a three-year plan to rebalance revenues and expenses by giving greater budget controls to colleges. It will also save $8 million by enacting criteria-driven hiring, which will limit new staff and faculty hires to those that revenue can support.