President Mark Lombardi’s 18-year tenure at Maryville University is bound to leave a deep impression on his community once he retires at the end of this academic year. Will he be missed? He’d like to believe so.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I like to push fast and hard, and sometimes [our staff] think we move a little too fast and that I push a little too hard,” says President Lombardi, who is also chair of the NCAA Governors Board for Diversity and Equity. “But I like to think it’s all for the betterment of the students.”
The stat line speaks for itself: Since taking the helm in 2007, the St. Louis, Missouri, institution’s enrollment has grown by over 200%, drawing students from every state and nearly 60 countries. This year, it welcomed it’s largest ever fall freshman class, a 20% increase over 2023, which, too, had spiked by 9% over the prior year. This fall marked the 15th consecutive year of enrollment growth.
From jumpstarting the private university’s cutting-edge digital infrastructure to spearheading a successful workforce development program, Lombardi’s only unfinished accomplishment is not being able to oversee the development of new residential halls to contain its expanding student body. But he should sleep well knowing that the $8 million surplus left over from fiscal year 2024 will go toward financing new housing.
“Higher ed is in my blood,” Lombardi says. “I taught my first class as a grad student at Ohio State in 1983, so I don’t ever want it to get too far away as a passion.”
Here are some of the biggest shifts Lombardi has witnessed over his 40-year career in higher education:
How social media has flipped communications teams on their head
Yes, AI is higher ed’s new frontier and investors are pouring billions into preeminent edtech tools. But over the past 15 years, social media apps like TikTok and Instagram have had the “single-biggest impact,” fundamentally changing how Maryville communicates with its students and the broader community, Lombardi notes.
“Students, having grown up in a digital world, intuitively understand if you’re being straight with them,” Lombardi says. “If you’re going to say you’re a cutting-edge institution, you’re not going to put up a bunch of billboards and send out brochures.”
One way Marville captures the attention of prospective Gen Z students is by pushing marketing materials seeded from enrolled students’ social media feeds. “Today’s young person, for the most part, is going to respond much more to what they consider to be organic [content] as opposed to what they consider to be manufactured marketing.”
For instance, an Instagram post by the College of Charleston documenting dads on move-in day recently became a viral sensation, garnering over 1.2 million views, much of which came from accounts unassociated with the college, according to its marketing team.
But as much as social media has revolutionized Maryville’s communications strategy, it’s also changed how they listen.
Diversified social media channels allow students to be “selectively engaged” in various social advocacy interests, Lombardi notes. But much can be intentionally manipulated when there’s limitless access to by-the-minute updates and information. “The challenge as educators is helping students sift through that which is factually accurate and that which can be manufactured.”
“Like a tsunami,” the speed at which misinformation and disinformation can spread and incite students can rock an institution, tempting leaders to try to control the narrative. However, Lombardi advises institutions to “let go,” and instead curate as much space for student dialogue. “Peer-to-peer communication can be some of the most positively powerful communication that can take place.”
More from UB: The new era of mental health counseling on college campuses
Maryville also hosts a first-year seminar on misinformation, and its full-time staff of life coaches provides related programming for each of their assigned students.
Listen to how Lombardi endures the social media tsunami by “letting go” and taking a “multi-generational approach”:
Embracing the ‘era of hybrid education’
Faculty around the nation suffering edtech fatigue, burnout and pessimism about the future of online learning in higher education may get sick discovering Lombardi has helped launch or upscale over 60 online degree programs at Maryville. However, Maryville faculty delegate the work of translating their instruction to an online format to its staff of learning designers trained in helping digital course materials “come alive,” Lombardi says. “It’s allowed faculty to do what they do best: be content experts—not technical experts or digital experts.”
By building an infrastructure centered around the student experience rather than faculty initiative, Lombardi interprets Maryville’s blend of on-ground and online classes as working hand-in-glove rather than in opposition.
“It’s not either-or,” he says. “It’s how you take today’s digital world and fuse it into an educational content curriculum so that the student gets the best education possible. If you look at it from that perspective, then you can do amazing things. But if you look at it as either sitting in class or an online learning course, you miss the entire point of the conversation.”
AI: ‘Just another tool’ to empower faculty
Lombardi’s interest in providing students with a mixture of online and in-person modalities derives from his commitment to diagnostic learning; in other words, providing students with a variety of pedagogical formats based on their strengths, weaknesses and learning needs.
AI, like the calculator and the internet once were, is “just another tool” that can empower faculty to deepen how they reach students, he says. “Like most things in life, it’s attitude, openness and willingness to adapt that determine the extent to which people are going to be able to not just change, but to harness these tools for real positive educational change and development.”
Listen to how Lombardi empowers faculty to harness AI:
