'Battle-tested' Wintersteen faces big challenges as Iowa State's president. Is she ready?

AMES, Ia. — It was not yet 4 p.m. on Oct. 23 when Wendy Wintersteen’s cell phone rang.

She had completed her interview 3½ hours earlier with the Iowa Board of Regents for the job of president of Iowa State University, then nervously waited with her husband, Robert Waggoner, at their Ames home for the decision.

Wintersteen answered the call: The job was hers. Her celebration lasted only seconds.

"They told me they were sending a car, and it would be (at the house) at 4:20” to introduce her to the public, recalled Wintersteen, 61, who has worked at Iowa State for more than 35 years, the past 11 as dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“I only had a few minutes to get ready.”

A career dedicated to ISU has led Wintersteen to Monday, when she'll become the university's 16th president and the first woman to hold the position.

'I am a compelling candidate,' finalist for Iowa State president's job says at forum

But there will be no easing-in period for Wintersteen, who finds herself and her university immediately confronted by difficult issues.

The Iowa Legislature is warning to cut state spending at the three public universities when it convenes in early January. Iowa lawmakers are warning of cuts to state spending at the three public universities next year. Iowa State department chairs have already been told to prepare for budget cuts of up to 5 percent. And ISU students and their families are grumbling over expected cost increases.

Those cuts come even as enrollment has swelled nearly 40 percent in the past decade, with little to no increases in faculty and other staff.

And some continue to worry about the adequacy of steps ISU has taken to ensure all students feel safe and welcome.

In short, an environment exists at Iowa State that even the most experienced university president would find challenging, say many of the 15 people interviewed by the Des Moines Register.

Is Wintersteen up to the task?

Yes, said Elizabeth Hoffman, a former Iowa State dean and provost who worked with Wintersteen.

"I think if she was coming in as dean from some other college that might not necessarily be the case," said Hoffman, who led the University of Colorado system as president before returning as an ISU economics professor. "But as dean of agriculture and life sciences, she already knows how to deal with a lot of these things, especially the politics and fundraising."

Said Joe Colletti, who has worked with Wintersteen for about  20 years and will be interim dean of the agriculture and life sciences college: “She has the political acumen for the job. … She has the skills, abilities and overall approach to leadership that will do this institution well.”

Wintersteen’s biggest challenge, however, may be overcoming the perception that her decisions will favor the agricultural college and she will increase Iowa State’s relationship with agricultural corporations at the expense of family farmers.

A few of the anonymous comments in the feedback forms after her public candidate forum echoed those concerns:

• "There is a strong sense that she will move resources from elsewhere in the university to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, whether that is for the overall good or not," wrote one person.
• "Hiring Wintersteen would send a strong message that the future of agricultural research at Iowa State will be done under the control of big corporations," wrote another.

Interim Iowa State president Benjamin Allen acknowledged the difficult task Wintersteen faces.

"She’s going to have to work a little bit harder to make sure the perception is that (her decision) is being made for the good of the whole university,” said Allen, who appointed Wintersteen dean of the agricultural college when he was provost at Iowa State. “There will be some people challenging that.”

A love of bugs

Wintersteen's affinity for the earth started early.

She developed a love of insects as a child growing up in southeast Kansas, where she and her family often visited her grandparents’ farm. She recalls making a live insect zoo when she was 5.

“My mother was very accommodating, helping me paint a diorama from a cardboard box and giving me netting from her sewing box,” Wintersteen said, laughing. “I learned then who ate who” among the insects.

Her mother hoped she would become a home economist. Instead, Wintersteen studied crop protection at Kansas State University.

Frequently, she was the only female in class, she said.

In one class “one of my professors was talking about rangeland attributes — the landscape. He compared it to a woman’s anatomy,” she said. “You sit in a room like that and think, ‘Oh, great. This is the conversation in class today.'"

And yet, it was a male professor whom Wintersteen credits for pushing her to excel in agriculture.

“He taught me that … research was critically important to how we help farmers and how we innovate,” she said.

Wintersteen began working for Iowa State’s extension service in 1979 after graduating from Kansas State. She worked in southeast Iowa, talking with farmers about crop management and insect control.

“They taught me how to work with farmers and agribusiness personnel so that when you left a meeting they weren’t telling you ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,'" she said.

Growing the college

In 1988, after she had received her doctorate degree in entomology from ISU, Wintersteen became an assistant professor.

In 2006, Allen appointed her dean of the ag college. During her 11-year tenure as dean, the number of undergraduate and graduate students swelled to 5,333, with enrollment records set each year from the fall of 2012 to 2016.

The college is now the third largest of its kind in the nation, behind Texas A&M University and the University of California-Davis.

The college’s four-year undergraduate graduation rate of 63.4 percent outpaces the university-wide rate of 47 percent. About 690 faculty, staff and researchers work in the college, which in the last fiscal year had budget expenditures totaling $204 million.

Many similarities exist between being dean of a college and president of a university, said Allen, who was president of the University of Northern Iowa for seven years before retiring in 2013.

“When we hire a dean now, we don’t say, ‘Focus on the academics.’ We say, ‘Make sure you have strong academic programs, but you also have to raise money.’”

Wintersteen, in conjunction with the Iowa State University Foundation, has helped raise more than $247 million as dean, she wrote in her resume. The money has been used to help pay for endowed chairs and professorships, scholarships for students and new programs and facilities.

In addition, Wintersteen became the ag college’s first endowed dean after an anonymous donor gave $3 million to the program.

Iowa’s agriculture secretary, Bill Northey, had glowing praise for Wintersteen when she was announced as a finalist for the Iowa State president’s job.

“She’s managed the growth of the college very well,” he said.

Cody West, an ISU senior and student government president who served on Wintersteen’s dean’s advisory committee, said he was impressed with how she sought input from students.

"She doesn’t make decisions without getting everyone on board,” said West, who also was a member of the presidential search committee.

Ties to big ag corporations

Still, Wintersteen's tenure as dean has had its critics.

They grumbled when Wintersteen named a portion of Curtiss Hall the Monsanto Student Services Wing after the agriculture company donated $1 million for renovation. Curtiss Hall houses the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Some have also criticized her involvement in two other ISU controversies.

Wintersteen helped write the memorandum of understanding that eventually prompted then-Sen. Tom Harkin to move his public policy institute to Drake University over concerns about academic freedom.

Wintersteen also was the ag college's dean when ISU faced controversy over former Iowa Board of Regent member Bruce Rastetter’s purchase of land in Tanzania for a project he wanted help with from the university. The deal was never voted on by the regents, and ISU ended its official partnernship with the project.

Moreover, she was criticized after Iowa lawmakers voted last spring to defund Iowa State’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which has backed hundreds of research projects in the past three decades on ways to mitigate agriculture’s impact on water quality and the environment.

Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times and 2017 Pulitizer Prize winner in editorial writing, wrote an opinion piece published by several Iowa media outlets that Wintersteen “stood by and watched” as university officials and lawmakers attacked the center.

“The dean of the ag college should have laid on the railroad tracks to stop the freight train,” he wrote. "She waved as it went past."

In addition, Wintersteen is a board member for the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, which helped organize a fund that helped pay for the legal defense of three Iowa counties that were sued by Des Moines Water Works over high nitrate levels in the Raccoon River. The courts ultimately threw out that lawsuit.

Wintersteen will be replaced on the Agribusiness Association board by Colletti.

“Iowa State was the first land-grant university in the country, and it was the greatest,” Cullen said in an interview. “It’s not the greatest anymore — and that’s not Wendy Wintersteen’s fault.”

But, he said, Iowa State’s president needs to be visionary and engage all Iowans, not just those with ties to big agricultural corporations.

“I hope Wendy Wintersteen can be an agent of change and manage all that corporate money in a way that benefits Iowa and not harms it,” he said.

Barb Kalbach, a fourth-generation family farmer who lives near Dexter, was more blunt.

"I see a lot of commercial interest in our ag education university — land-grant colleges are supposed to be there for all the people, and not just for daggum corporations,” she said. “She’s already gone fairly far down the path (with corporate ag businesses). As president, she may be able to go even further.”

Wintersteen is aware of the criticism.

“It’s unfortunate that those individuals don’t know the facts,” she said.

About 12 percent of the College of Agriculture and Life Science’s revenue from external sponsors comes from agriculture-related businesses and corporations, Wintersteen said. The rest is from the state and federal government, commodity associations, foundations, and other universities and colleges.

Wintersteen said she was surprised when she found out lawmakers planned to slash the Leopold Center’s funding. Center backers had nine days to rally support, but “we just ran out of time,” she said.

“We pulled out every stop we had in the college. We contacted farmers of all sizes to contact their legislators. We were very visible” at the state capitol, she said.

At the time, Iowa State was in a transition. Then Iowa State president Steven Leath had resigned, and Allen hadn’t yet been named interim president, Allen said.

“That is something university presidents have to take the hit for, not the college of ag dean,” Allen said. “The Leopold Center is a university asset we lost.”

Improving student relations

In early February, after the Trump administration issued a travel ban from seven majority-Muslim countries, Wintersteen sent a letter to students, faculty, staff and others outlining steps the agriculture college had taken to listen to concerns of students from other countries and to ensure they felt safe on the campus.

In addition, Wintersteen acknowledged that the college lagged behind the university in graduation rates for multicultural students.

“We must do better,” she wrote.

Vivek Lawana, 31, ISU’s Graduate and Professional Student Senate president and a member of the presidential selection committee, said he was impressed with the letter. He also was impressed that Wintersteen’s college had an associate dean of diversity and inclusion on its staff.

“She knows up front what is the meaning of diversity — but not just diversity, but inclusion,” he said.

All of the finalists for the president’s job were asked how they would address concerns about campus climate, he said.

“She said that if you don’t acknowledge the problem, you can’t solve it,” he said.

If Winstersteen can promote inclusivity campuswide “more people will be interested in letting other people hear other points of views,” said Shaihan Brown, a sophomore psychology and philosophy major who is chair of outreach for ISU’s Pride Alliance.

Fighting for funding

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Wintersteen is anticipated budget cuts.

It helps to have someone in the president’s job that already knows lawmakers and can sell the university’s mission as a land-grant institution, Allen said.

Wintersteen will need to explain her vision for Iowa State and apply pressure to get the funding she believes is appropriate, Allen said.

In addition, Wintersteen will need to effectively communicate Iowa State’s accomplishments and mission to the public and decision-makers while also planning for worst-case scenarios, said Mack Shelley, Iowa State professor and chairman of the political science department.

“It’s not a skill set everyone has,” he said. “But she’s been battle-tested. I would think that she’s had about as much baptism under fire as you could hope for.”

Wintersteen said she expects one of her roles will be delivering the message of Iowa State’s importance to all Iowans.

“It’s just so important to be communicating so (Iowans) know why they are proud of us, why they think their tax dollars should be invested here,” she said.

Wintersteen, who with Waggoner will move into the president's house in December, said she expects her first weeks on the job to be hectic.

Sometimes, when she lies awake early in the morning, she thinks about the responsibilities she faces.

“Even though I know a lot about Iowa State — and I love Iowa State University — I have a lot to learn,” she said.

Wendy Wintersteen

• AGE: 61
• EDUCATION: Received bachelor’s degree in crop protection from Kansas State University (1978); doctorate degree in entomology from Iowa State University (1988).
• ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE: Named an assistant entomology professor at ISU in 1988; became a professor in 1996.
• RECENT ADMINISTRATION EXPERIENCE: Has been dean of Iowa State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences since 2006; senior associate dean of the college and associate director of Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station (2002-05); director of extension to Agriculture and Natural Resources at Iowa State (1997-2000).
• ISU PRESIDENT: Begins the job on Nov. 20. Her five-year contract includes a first-year annual salary of $525,000 that  increases to $550,000 her second year and to $590,000 her third year. She'll also receive a deferred compensation package. 
• FAMILY: Husband, Robert Waggoner.

What Wintersteen has said

The following are comments on various topics during a Register  interview with Wendy Wintersteen: 

On working with farmers in the late 1970s in southeast Iowa:

“It was a great experience. The farmers welcomed me; they wanted to help me. They looked at me maybe like a daughter — here’s a 21-year-old out of college, who brings some knowledge but also needs some experience.”

On what she learned from athletic director Jamie Pollard, whom she talked with before applying for the president’s job:

“What I found is that he wanted to talk to me like I would talk to another dean. The same issues that a dean faces at a university are the issues that an athletic director faces.”

On a possible 7 percent hike in tuition:

"I think 7 percent is a jarring number to many Iowans... But 7 percent is a realistic number when you look at what the true cost of education is and when you look at the quality of education we deliver."

On communication:

"The best communication happens face to face. And the best communication happens when you're listening more than talking."