New Tennessee president wise to emphasize existing strengths

The Jackson Sun

During his first 60 days in Knoxville, UT’s new president, John Petersen, has refrained from articulating a grand vision for the state’s flagship system.

Unlike former President J. Wade Gilley, who pledged to make the university one of the top research institutions in the nation, Petersen has chosen to keep a lower profile.

He has chosen instead to focus on the university’s existing strengths and find ways to capitalize on them. That’s the right approach.

Petersen hasn’t gotten people’s hopes up with pie-in-the-sky visions that might never happen. Instead, he has chosen to make campus visits, talk to his constituents and cultivate important relationships with government leaders across the state. Those relationships, and continuous, open and honest communication with constituents and leaders alike, will be vital if Petersen hopes to be effective.

Visiting the system’s campuses has allowed Petersen to get an idea of what UT has to offer. Those offerings are quite extensive.

Petersen’s idea to forge a partnership between UT Health Science Center and St. Jude’s to focus on cancer research, for example, should be seriously pursued.

So should his idea to partner UT Chattanooga’s SimCenter computational engineering center with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Or his idea to create a new material sciences center in Knoxville.

Focusing on the university’s strengths just makes sense. If done well, it will have the added bonus of raising the entire system’s national profile in a way Gilley’s lofty dreams never could.