A nice surprise that shouldn’t be!

Friday, July 25, 2025

Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday!

“For the first time in a decade, Americans grew more confident in higher education,” the headline read. I was nicely surprised when I saw the report, and then I thought: how did we ever get to a point where a title such as this is a nice surprise?! I know many readers of this message will respond and highlight all the reasons why the public confidence in higher education had dipped so low. Of course, we know all the stated and unstated reasons. Nonetheless, the public distrust, to some extent, has to do with perceptions as well as reality. And perceptions are reality in the minds of the beholders and that’s what matters.

The truth is that, like all things in life, universities and the education they provide cannot be viewed monolithically. Not all colleges and universities are created equally or deliver their mission according to a homogeneous ideological manner! Here at S&T, as an institute of technology, our mission and supporting curricula are focused on physical sciences, engineering and technology. All integrated with humanities and social sciences to ensure an educational experience broader than just “heat and beat” hardcore engineering. We, like many of our peer and aspirational universities, are focused on nurturing possibility thinkers, graduates who are enlightened and capable of delineating fact from fiction. 

To this end, our rigorous curricula and disciplined experiential training are designed to create highly functional technical workers, not those who peddle in conspiracy ponds. At the same time, our humanities and social sciences education ensures that our graduates understand responsible development and use of technology in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and fuzzy logic! We don’t “indoctrinate” our students; we expose them to technology and different perspectives on it. We highlight innovation, business opportunities and human behavior as it relates to a technological world. We don’t take sides in our classrooms but prove that thermodynamics and structural stability, or chemical processes and electrical power transmission, or manufacturing process and system science, to name just a few, work according to the laws of physics and chemistry and biology and materials science, regardless of any ideological leaning. In short, we work to expand our students’ minds, so they won’t offload all their decision-making processes to robots.

So, you can imagine how delighted I was to read that the public is beginning to better understand and view our mission. It is up to all of us to address our own shortcomings in order to prevent false perceptions. We must work to ensure the public awareness of higher education’s mission before they throw the baby out with the bath water!

To all my colleagues in higher education, I say, let’s not lose the newly gained momentum of public trust. I also ask you to please broadly communicate the value and impact of our higher education mission. After all, communication is leadership, and without sound, readily available information, people usually create their own images of our mission that might not map into the reality of the higher education system writ large. 

Finally, it is easy these days for all of us in higher education to become entrenched in all the negativity and let the moment get the best of us. We must, however, focus on our bigger vision, continue with our mission and work to elevate our horizon. Then and only then will the tide turn in favor of education and higher education – all education. 

Warmly,

-Mo.

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Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu