‘Big dreams.’ Eli Capilouto reflects on 10 years at the helm of UK and a campus remade
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Man With a Plan
Eli Capilouto became the president of the University of Kentucky in 2011. In the 10-plus years since, UK has invested nearly $3 billion in campus improvements.
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On Oct. 18, 2011, Eli Capilouto took the stage for his investiture speech at the University of Kentucky.
It had been three months since he officially became president, and he had big goals for the University of Kentucky. The new president promised to grow scholarships, build new residence halls and update campus facilities. At the time, he estimated that the campus needed $1 billion in physical improvements.
“We have a 21st century faculty and student body,” Capilouto said then. “We can no longer be satisfied with 19th century living and learning spaces. We will build thousands of new residence hall beds to replace dorms whose average age is nearly 50 years old.”
Later that night, he sat at home with his wife.
“I turned to my wife and I said, ‘Why did I say all those things, and how are we going to do all these things?’” Capilouto recalled in a December interview.
Now, over 10 years later, UK has invested nearly $3 billion in campus improvements. The campus has physically expanded, with more academic buildings, residence halls and research facilities. Enrollment has grown to more than 31,500 students, with retention and graduation rates growing as well.
“Those were big dreams, and because of countless people, many of them became reality,” Capilouto said. “So, I’m proud of what we did. What that resulted in is incredible increases in student success, retention and graduation — our four year graduation numbers went up nearly 20 percentage points as an example — and our research.”
Capilouto’s time at UK, which began in 2011, has been longer than any other current public university president in the state. The next-longest positions are held by Timothy Caboni, who has been president of Western Kentucky University since 2017, and Jay Morgan, who has been president of Morehead State University since 2017. Additionally, he holds nearly the longest tenure of administrators within the Southeastern Conference.
Capilouto’s journey to Kentucky
Capilouto wasn’t looking for a job when he decided to apply for the position of president at UK. In 2011, he was the provost of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
He was happy at UAB, which was his alma mater and in his home state, but decided to come for an interview. After his first interview, Capilouto said he was impressed by the people he met, but didn’t think he made a strong impression.
“I called my wife on the way back to the airport and said ‘I didn’t do so well, … but I think I really like these people,’” Capilouto said.
He was invited back for a second interview, and he and his wife took time to tour campus while in Lexington. The more he saw, the more excited he got, and the more people he met, the more convinced he was that he wanted the job.
Even though Capilouto questioned how the interviews had gone, the board of trustees was impressed. Dr. E. Britt Brockman, who was chair of the board at the time, recalled how Capilouto stood out from the rest of the candidates. He had a vision to take UK in a new direction, Brockman said.
“It struck me at the time that he came in, not just telling us what we wanted to hear, but what we needed to hear,” Brockman said of Capilouto’s interviews. “And he didn’t come in an authoritarian, authoritative way, but he came in with a knowledge base that impressed upon us that he had done this. … He also let us know what we needed to do that we were not currently doing.”
Brockman has served on the board of trustees since 2008. After Capilouto was hired, Brockman went to his office and asked what his immediate plans were.
“I remember always being very anxious to get the president’s plan,” Brockman said. “I walked into his office, 30 days in, and said ‘Can we discuss what your plan for the future specifically is?’ And he said, ‘Give me 100 days to get my feet planted on the ground to understand what’s going on, and I’ll have a plan.’”
Brockman said while he was feeling pressure as the board chair, Capilouto was not wanting to rush into major decisions or changes. Looking back now, Brockman said that was the right decision.
“He was spot-on correct in that he could not rush this,” Brockman said. “He had to have the right plan. He is methodical. If anything in the world would describe him, he is methodical and not one to rush into a decision without understanding all the implications first.”
Brockman said Capilouto’s legacy at UK will be getting things accomplished.
“If we can dream it, and put in the effort, that it can be accomplished,” Brockman said. “His legacy is putting the word ‘can’ back in our vocabulary.”
Campus grows, changes under Capilouto
As president, Capilouto has spearheaded the physical expansion and improvement of the campus.
New facilities have been added for research and UK hospitals. Multiple new dorms have been built, updating the on-campus experience for students. Currently, UK is updating classroom buildings on campus to help modernize Frazee Hall, White Hall and the Chemistry-Physics Building.
Capilouto said he loves touring college campuses, and often stops to visit campuses when he travels with his wife. The state of university structures represent what organizations care about, he said.
“If you want students to know that you value their education, if you want faculty to inspire, you need to invest in facilities that they’re going to call home,” Capilouto said.
Capilouto’s salary raised to more than $1 million
In December, the board of trustees approved a 24% raise for Capilouto, bringing his base salary to $1.035 million. He was the highest paid executive of a public university in the country in 2020, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. With bonuses and other pay, Capilouto’s total compensation was more than $1.7 million in 2020, according to the report.
Along with the raise, the board also approved a contract extension through June 30, 2025.
The board’s two faculty trustees voted against the raise, saying they had concerns about creating a greater wage disparity between the university’s administrators and its staff.
Lee Blonder and Hollie Swanson, the faculty trustees, both referenced the Chronicle report. The trustees’ vote came two days after deadly tornadoes and storms hit Kentucky, leaving dozens dead and thousands of homes and businesses damaged across the state.
Blonder said a pay increase at this time “would send a poor message,” and is “likely to be perceived as exorbitant.”
“I think this is a very trying time for our state,” Blonder said. “Our students, faculty and staff have been struggling.”
“I mean no disrespect to our president, but the ever-increasing, widening gap in compensation between our executives and faculty and staff is sending a negative message,” Swanson said.
United Campus Workers, the union for higher education employees, called on Capilouto to refuse the raise, saying the money should have been reallocated to UK employees.
Marion Rust, an English professor, said she was shocked when she heard of Capilouto’s raise.
“I really don’t understand the motivations behind it,” Rust said.
Rust said she knows of university employees who have taken second jobs to help make ends meet. To hear that Capilouto received a raise of more than $200,000 left her feeling “somewhere between disbelief and despair,” she said.
Those funds could have gone toward university employees, like teaching assistants or groundskeepers, she said.
“There’s a disconnect between our rankings as an institution and the salary he’s receiving at the very top of the heap for public universities,” Rust said.
Capilouto, speaking to the board after it approved his raise, praised those he works with at UK.
“I would be totally remiss if I did not say that anything we do at the University of Kentucky is a collective effort,” Capilouto said. “And while I have the honor of serving as your president, I take no solace in thinking that I do this alone.”
‘Commonalities rather than differences’
Capilouto has faced criticism for how he has handed issues related to diversity and equity on campus.
There has been much discussion around the mural in Memorial Hall at UK, which depicts slaves harvesting tobacco. The student government association passed a resolution calling for its removal in 2006, and more students called for its removal in 2015. Since then, the mural has been covered, uncovered, and covered again by UK. In 2018, artist Karyn Olivier was commissioned to create a piece contextualizing the mural.
In 2020 after the death of George Floyd, Capilouto announced that the university would remove the mural. UK was sued by author Wendell Berry and his wife, Tanya, for attempting to remove the mural. The lawsuit is currently ongoing in Franklin County Circuit Court.
Khari Gardner, a 2021 UK graduate, founded Movement for Black Lives UK when he was a student, an organization focused on bringing racial equity to campus. Despite several attempts to meet with Capilouto during his time at UK, Gardner said each one was canceled. At times, he was told to expect an invite to meet with the president and his administration, but the invites never came, he said.
Gardner said he met with other members of the administration, but had hoped to speak with Capilouto eventually.
“I was hoping for a little bit more open communication, even just having the meetings, so we could have that communication,” Gardner said.
Gardner said he wishes UK administrators would have focused on “substantive change” at UK, not smaller things. Topics like the mural in Memorial Hall, instead of complaints from marginalized students, took priority and “distracted everybody from real change,” he said.
“It’s more just trying to focus on things of subsistence,” Gardner said. “It was really trying to focus on how can we help people, what can we do to make our campus more inclusive? It’s not just superficial stuff. How do we get to the core root of things?”
In recent years, UK has launched several initiatives to address diversity on campus.
At the start of the 2021-22 school year, UK hired Katrice Albert as its new vice president for institutional diversity. UK has launched UNITE, a research priority area which focuses on research surrounding racial equity. UK has invested $2 million per year for five years, $10 million total, in UNITE, which includes over 100 participants, Capilouto said.
Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, a research institute, received permanent funding through the Office for Institutional Diversity. The institute “serves as a think tank for Black studies,” and hosts more than 50 researchers, according to UK.
“I think we’re assembling some of the best scholars in the country,” Capilouto said of the institute. “And a synergy from a family of scholars, I think leverages what we can do at every point of this campus. But what I hold the greatest hope for is the relationships that evolve through all of this.”
Capilouto said he has taken the time to listen to Black students and employees on campus, while also reflecting and learning more about history. He hopes UK will be a place where commonalities are found between students, and where each person feels they belong, he said.
“To have a common humanity over a common cause, in a country built on its commonalities rather than its differences, we need to have a common understanding of what happened before us and what we’d like to happen after us,” Capilouto said. “There’s such interesting family histories. This is a place where the descendants of slave owners and slaves come to school together.”
Beau Revlett, a 2019 UK graduate, helped organize a basic needs campaigns that led to a hunger strike at the university after a UK task force found that 43% of 2,000 students interviewed experienced food insecurity on campus.
For six days in 2019, a group of students, including students from the Basic Needs Campaign and the Black Student Advisory Council, refused to eat until Capilouto’s administration met their demands, including creating a Basic Needs Center with staff and funding to help low-income students.
Leading up to the hunger strike, Revlett said he and several other students met with Capilouto multiple times. However, it rarely felt like they were being taken seriously until there was public pressure for change, Revlett said.
“(Capilouto) always operates interpersonally, kindly and calmly,” Revlett said. “I’ve only had good personal interactions with him. But what we found was that time and time again, he would only respond to students’ demands for change with substantial public pressure. Students making their case alone wasn’t enough.”
During the food strike, Capilouto and other administrators agreed to meet with protesters, eventually meeting their demands. Revlett said while he wishes the group would have been taken more seriously from the beginning, and at times it felt like the administration was treating them “with kid gloves,” getting their demands met was a huge win.
“To make a substantive change from the community level feels just powerful,” Revlett said.
Pandemic brings changes, challenges
COVID brought additional changes to UK. In the spring of 2020, the entire campus moved online. The UK HealthCare system had to prepare for a pandemic.
UK created a system that would allow COVID-19 testing and vaccinations, not just for the students and employees, but also for the general public.
“It’s not just preventing disease or eliminating disease or preventing emotional challenges — anxiety or depression — it is our wellbeing,” Capilouto said. “Finding that optimal health and wellness. We realize as the flagship research university, we have to set a standard of integrity and that involves trust and being accountable to the state, and acting with responsibility.”
UK has administered more than 271,000 doses of the COVID vaccine, as of January 7. Though Capilouto received pushback for not issuing a vaccine mandate on campus, the university reached a vaccination rate of more than 90% by the end of the fall semester.
“COVID is hanging around,” Capilouto said. “There will never be a full post-COVID, I think for a few years.”
Capilouto said there are “some silver linings” from the pandemic, including the university’s use of technology and how the university set up its testing and vaccine clinics and records to serve the university and the general public.
“You really can’t do great things alone, and this place answered the call,” he said.
For Capilouto, what has been most important is giving students a sense of purpose, along with the relationships he’s formed along the way. Those two things are what will set the future of Kentucky, he said.
“Those matter most in life, and anything I’ve done to facilitate people being able to carry out their mission to advance Kentucky, I’ll be satisfied,” Capilouto said.
