Q&A: President of Dillard University discusses her first year at the helm

Photos courtesy Dillard University’s Facebook page.

Dr. Rochelle Ford

In 2022, Dr. Rochelle Ford joined Dillard University as its eighth president. In her first year she has taken on many projects and initiatives, including the planned construction of new residential housing on Norman Mayer Avenue, which will house 200 students. CityBusiness spoke with her about her goals for Dillard, how the university’s history will inform its future and what made her decide to move onto campus.

How do you feel like your first year as president has gone?

I feel like it’s been a wonderful introduction to the community. We started the year saying that we wanted to activate on our commitment to excellence and we finished the year saying that we’re going to lean into our vision of being a ‘communiversity,’ and I think that this first year helped me to really understand a lot more about New Orleans, and to help to ensure that we could live our new mission.

So, the mission of our university was actually revised right before I joined the campus…we’re a historically Black college, historically Black institution that cultivates leaders who live ethically, who think and communicate precisely and who act courageously to make the world a better place. This year we’ve really been able to lean into that and learn the impact we’re making on our own students, but also nowhere in the mission does it say the word student, so it’s how are we making the impact on the community.

What is the timeline for the completion of the new residence hall?

I want those doors open in 2025. So, we’re pushing hard and fast. It’s a very aggressive agenda. We’re out of the conceptual phase, and we are now actually doing the more detailed architectural renderings of how that construction will happen.

We also have a grant from the Interior Department to redo Howard House. Howard House was a boarding home on campus. Dr. King, other Civil Rights leaders, when you couldn’t stay anyplace else in town you could come to Dillard and stay there. We’re restoring that back to being a boarding house.

How does Dillard plan to incorporate the local community with the new residence hall?

We’re breaking ground with local businesses on our new residence hall, which is right here in Gentilly…and we’re using minority-owned, women-owned companies to design and build that facility and as part of the Department of Education funding. So, bringing economic development. Buying and using local talent is something I’m really proud of this year, which helps us to have safer communities because it’s not going to be a vacant field, it’s going to be a living, learning, serving community.

As you spearheaded all these initiatives what challenges did you face and what challenges do you foresee down the road to complete your mission?

The new residence hall is an example of us helping to provide a new facility, because when students live on campus they tend to be more successful. We have had a lot of deferred maintenance that we are leaning into to fix.

It’s become extremely expensive for people to live in New Orleans. And so, when we’re trying to recruit talent, everyone is in a war for great talent. Dillard is no different. So, what can we do to incentivize people to come and thrive in New Orleans. We know how expensive it is for faculty and staff to live in the city, so what we’re doing is inviting staff to move on campus.

That was one of my most exciting moments at the end of this year: I moved back on campus. We sold our house on Bancroft that the university owned for the previous two presidents, and I am relocating to the 1930s house right in the center of campus where everyone from the 1930s until Katrina, where all the presidents lived. That bucks the trend of what most presidents are doing, most presidents are like ‘how do I move away from the students,’ but I recognize that this idea of living, learning, serving communities begins with me living that example. Because we know that a lot of the mental health challenges that a of our young people are facing is because they need an adult to talk to. They can see me walking across the campus, engaging with them, inviting them into my home for book readings, or just having those small conversations so that they can be seen and so that they know that the president knows who they are.

We can extend learning from the classroom into the residence halls, and other faculty and staff can begin to reside in these residence halls. Particularly, we’re building that into our new facility.

What led Dillard to decide to add a new masters in nursing program this past year and what part does this program play in the university’s larger goal for a healthier community?

We need more nurses and the highlight of that healthy initiative this year was launching our masters in nursing program. We got it approved, this is our first graduate program and it’s meeting an immediate need in our community. We are excited about healthy initiatives. We partnered with AARP this year to create community gardens to show how we can use food as medicine. We’re part of the CEO roundtable on cancer this year, and we were able to receive our gold certification to fight cancer. So, we’re part of the “All of Us” research agenda to get more minorities engaged in clinical trials. We are improving our own health and wellness on campus through what we do with Humana…and we were able to reduce our premium last year because our faculty and staff were having healthier lifestyles.

Do you have plans for other master’s programs in the future?

I do, the faculty are working through that. As we lean into being this ‘communiversity’ of having healthy, safe, more innovative communities, that’s where I want to put our emphasis. We do need to do more with mental health. We have a large physiology department, we have a strong undergraduate degree in social work, we have public health, we’re the first accredited nursing program in the state.

Not just master’s programs, but certificate programs. We have an urban water certificate and so now we’re going to be marketing our certificate programs to the community, so that you don’t have to be an undergraduate student to earn the water management certificate. That’s a program that nobody else has.

What kinds of new programs are you hoping will help attract and retain students?

We actually established a partnership with a university in Japan, so that our students can study semiconductors over there and their Japanese students are coming now to the U.S. this year to study English. It’s that kind of amazing exchange that helps to spur innovation and the exciting part of the result is we’ve had a higher retention rate this year. Job placement rate at the time of graduation was over 70 percent — can you imagine 70 percent of that graduating class walked across the stage with a job or off to graduate school; that’s exciting; that’s impact.

One company TrailRunner, which is a global PR agency — they paid for the students’ paid internship, gave them airfare to get to their internship, and paid for their housing. That’s accessibility.

What kind of support do you have in place for students and their families in terms of navigating the financial side of attending college?

The…challenge, and I think we’re seeing this with the Supreme Court rulings recently, is financing the future. How do we ensure that Dillard remains accessible for generations to come.? Over 70 percent of our student body are Pell Grant eligible. We are one of the least expensive private schools in the state. We are under $20,000 — that’s unheard of for private education. The cost of Pell is about $6,000, that doesn’t cover the full cost of attendance. We’re giving student aid to help support of student body, but we want to make sure that students have access to their education even if they’re first generation, even if they don’t have a high income. So, how do we continue to build out partnership that make that possible?

We are partnering with the financial community to create what we’re calling a student wealth and financial services unit, because our students, 40 percent of them, are first generation. Their families get them to the door but then don’t know what comes next. So, how do we prepare them with wealth management information, how do we build wealth? We know that the power of the HBCU, particularly Dillard, if you look at our rankings for social mobility, we’re at the top in the nation for social mobility. So, how do we help the students prepare to come to school, but [also] help their families, and then then how do we help them to learn about investments, how do we help them to learn about saving for a home, how do we help them learn about credit cards?

Instead of taking the traditional financial aid office over here, bursar over there, student work over there, career office over there, how do we merge those things together so they are getting financial wealth and literacy? How do I make it easier to get on campus work or internships in one stop? And then how do I prepare for life after college and so we’re instituting a family office so that we’re going to support families of our students…to help prepare them for today and tomorrow.

What sets Dillard apart as a university?

People say we punch above our weight class. We were founded right after the Civil War. We provided for the State of Louisiana, Dillard did, the first Black governor of the state during reconstruction, and we’re still here. We have to make sure that we have partners that come alongside of us who can meet that need, so that students have access, because I don’t want someone to say I can’t afford to go to school. The magic sauce of Dillard that remains, that was here during Jim Crow, that was here during the Civil Rights Movement, that is here today is that sense of belonging. We believe you are excellent and the expectation of you to remain excellent, that’s built in. Students have wanted that in the past, even when they had the choice to go to other places because segregation had ended, they’re still coming and we want them to continue to come.

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