‘Inside UVA’: ‘We’re Just Getting Started.’ UVA Opens Northern Virginia Campus

Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia: 
So as you know, there are a lot of universities that have campuses or programs in the D.C. and Northern Virginia area. What do you think distinguishes UVA efforts from these other programs and offerings?

Greg Fairchild, dean and CEO of UVA Northern Virginia: 
Well, you know, Jim, we actually had a market scan to find out about that. It may surprise listeners, particularly if you’re not in Northern Virginia – there are 52 satellite offices for universities in the D.C. metro area.

Ryan: 
So it’s a little crowded. 

Fairchild: 
It’s a little crowded.

Ryan: 
Hello, everyone. I’m Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia, and I’d like to welcome all of you to another episode of “Inside UVA.” 

This podcast is a chance for me to speak with some of the amazing people at the university and to learn more about what they do and who they are. My hope is that listeners will ultimately have a better understanding of how UVA works and a deeper appreciation of the remarkably talented and dedicated people who make UVA the institution it is today. 

I’m joined by the incredible Greg Fairchild, who is a chaired professor at the business school, Darden, and the dean and CEO of UVA Northern Virginia. Greg played a crucial role in Darden’s strategic expansion into Northern Virginia, and he now leads UVA’s growing presence in that same area as our inaugural dean. Greg has received countless awards for his teaching and was named in 2018 as Poets and Quants’ MBA Professor of the Year. Greg’s research on community and economic development has gained national recognition and his work has been featured in outlets like The Economist and The New York Times. He’s also the co-founder of Resilience Education, an organization that brings high-quality educational programs to underserved populations, including those in prison. And finally, Greg is a great friend who I am honored to have as a guest. 

Greg, thanks a lot for joining me. 

Fairchild: 
Hey, Jim, how you doing? I’m great. Thanks. 

Ryan: 
So I do want to talk to you about Northern Virginia, given that the grand opening is happening later this week. But let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood and how you found yourself as a business school student at Darden?

Fairchild: 
Well, first, I’m a military kid, Jim. I was born in El Paso, Texas, and moved all my life and lived on military bases, including three different times in the state of Virginia, before coming back here to get an MBA. 

Part of the reason I chose to get the MBA at the University of Virginia was my mentor at a company called Saks Fifth Avenue, a senior vice president there, said, “You know, you’re thinking about going back to get a business degree. You could stay here in the New York area, but there’s a really good school in the state of Virginia. You probably know it.” 

And based on his recommendation, I added the University of Virginia to my path, and ended up the following fall entering in the class of 1990.

Ryan: 
And when you were at business school, did you ever think about becoming a business school professor?

Fairchild: 
I did not. I was a marketer. I was very interested in beauty. I had worked in couture dresses, and I had worked in mascara and I had worked in hair care, and was really strongly directed toward doing that as a career.

Ryan: 
What drew you to that industry in the first place? 

Fairchild: 
This is funny, I did not think I was going to work in that industry, and I was at a job fair, and a recruiter who was actually a UVA grad, McIntire grad, ended up talking to me in the lobby of a hotel. And a couple of months later, I was interviewing in the fashion industry and was headed to New York.

Ryan: 
So what drew you into academia then?

Fairchild: 
Well, you know, the question I’m often asked by my children is, what’s similar about hair care and mascara and learning about business? And I say to my kids that all of them are about trying to understand the journey that someone is on and how they think you can impact their journey and help them get there. And although people might find it odd to equate the wedding dress the bride is going to wear with the degree they’re going to get and the path they’re going to take, they’re still really, really engaged and involved in looking to you to help them figure out what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it. And it’s assistive. 

More specific to the question you’ve asked, I had no idea I would end up a professor. There are some professors that, at the Darden School, even now – Ed Freeman is one of those professors, and when I was a second-year student, he took me to lunch and he said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about getting a Ph.D.,” and I had not thought about getting a Ph.D. And he said, “You know, myself and a couple of other colleagues have talked about the way you ask questions in the classroom and your interest in furthering the discussion, and if it hasn’t occurred to you, we think it should occur to you.”

And so that’s how the seed got planted. I then, once the seed was planted, took a couple of years, but went back and got a Ph.D. and returned to the University of Virginia, where I knew the faculty. I knew what the pedagogy was like at this institution, and I believed in it.

Ryan: 
And how did you get interested in the topics you research?

Fairchild: 
Again, kind of funny personal story. My dad spent 26 years in the Army. I’ve mentioned that, but when he got out, he actually became a commercial banker. And he became a commercial banker here in the state of Virginia. What he ended up doing, not initially but eventually, was there was a field rising in banking called the community reinvestment movement, and my dad ended up doing that work. He ended up doing that for the bank. 

Now, at the time my dad was doing it, I thought banking was the most boring, elitist type thing you could do. I had no interest in it, and it wasn’t until years later that I learned there was a whole category of finance that was asking the question of how we can provide support to lower- and moderate-income people that are trying to achieve the same things in their lives that all of us are. They’re trying to find a home, they’re trying to find a way to send their kids to school, they’re trying to find a way to have a community center in their neighborhood, and all of those things opened a door to me to see that banking maybe wasn’t as boring as I thought it was. And that became the path I chose for my academic research career. 

Ryan: 
Tell me a little bit about resilience education. Where did that idea come from? And can you talk a little bit about the work?

Fairchild: 
I can do both, Jim. You know Bob Bruner. Bob Bruner was the dean of the Darden School, and he took me to lunch. 

Ryan: 
Sounds like there’s a lot of lunch going on. What’s going on over there?

Fairchild: 
He took me to lunch, and I’ll never forget this. He gave me a letter. He passed it to me, and he said, “Greg, I’ve received this letter.” 

I’ll never forget the letter, because the letter had been written on a typewriter, and I had not seen a typewritten letter in years. You can tell that they look different, and it had a man’s name and his number in the upper righthand corner. And he shared it with me, and the letter said, “Hi, I am currently in prison. I’m a father. I’m on my third time in prison, and I’m preparing for release, and as I get out, I’m interested in making positive changes, particularly around the areas of how I manage my finances, and I would like to run my own business, and I know that the Darden School of Business is one of the best business schools in the world. And I’m wondering, does Darden have an opportunity for me?” 

Now I say that because I think we all know the answer kind of was probably not, and how audacious of him, but the truth is that Bob Bruner gave me that letter, and he said, “Greg, I don’t know that there’s anything we could do, but I would like you to look into it and see if we can.” 

And through a confluence of conversations, including a visit to Richmond to the governor’s office, we ended up the following April teaching in prison, one facility here in the state of Virginia.

Since that time, I engaged my wife in this work. She’s a Ph.D. in education from the University as well, and that work continues now at the Darden School. Twelve years later, we operate in three facilities in the state of Virginia, but we’ve expanded that work to facilities in Pennsylvania and in New York, in conjunction with Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. And so the work is fundamentally about taking what we do best in business schools, which is helping people, again, navigate to that next part of their journey and bringing it to an audience that might not otherwise get it.

Ryan: 
So let me turn to Northern Virginia. For people who have not been following our efforts there, I wonder if you could start with a broad overview of what we’ve been doing, and what you’ve been doing in Northern Virginia?

Fairchild: 
Well, in terms of what we’ve been doing, we at the University of Virginia, we’ve been in Northern Virginia in various ways for decades. So many people will remember if they’ve ever driven on Route 66, there’s a sign that says the Virginia Tech/UVA Center. And by the way, we haven’t been in that center in years, but that sign is still there. 

That said, what we have done for some time is recognize that there was a learner in Northern Virginia who couldn’t uproot her life and move to Charlottesville and pursue the thing that she needed on her journey. And so we did that work for years. And then again, this is under Bob Bruner, I began working with members of the Darden faculty, members of the Darden staff, on the strategy to expand the Darden Executive MBA into Northern Virginia. And we did that. The Sands Family Grounds has been operating there in Roslyn in a beautiful facility, and it gave us a sense that there was still likelihood that other types of degree offerings and other types of non-degree offerings would also be robust and have fine demand in the market. 

That conversation and set of conversations led to the thinking within the University, with Terry Sullivan and others, about how we might go forward. And then you, Jim, re-endorsed that idea as we proceeded on to really thinking about workforce education, thinking about certificates, thinking about what types of things do we do here that would be valuable there, and what types of things do we currently not do here that we could do there? And I’m pretty excited about where we are right now as we prepare to open a facility, and I think there’s more to come. 

Ryan: 
So talk a little bit about opening the facility. The grand opening is going to be, like I said, at the end of this week on Feb. 28. What can people expect from the event? And what are you most excited about?

Fairchild: 
So, I’m most excited that we have nine different schools that are already engaged in one way or another in our Northern Virginia offerings. And I’m very excited that as we launch, we have such a broad base of opportunity for learners to come together, come together within their intact program, like systems engineering. But I’m excited that they’re all going to be in what I personally, non-humbly think is a beautiful facility in Fairfax, 55,000 square feet, classrooms, places for people to linger, places for people to have conference discussions, places for people to take private phone calls, places for people to have convenings. 

And I’m excited that we’ve already agreed to a series of, again, degree programs. We have non-degree programs with organizations like the Army Corps of Engineers, and we also are preparing to do certificates and things that, again, will come back to that insight we had years ago at Darden, which was, there’s a learner that might not be able to pack up and move right now, and they can get education from a high-quality university while they’re continuing on with their life in Northern Virginia.

Ryan: 
And these are exclusively graduate and professional degree programs. No undergraduate degree programs. 

Fairchild: 
There are no undergraduate degree programs, but we actually run what is now become a very robust summer program for K-12 learners, specifically, currently 10 to 12. And those programs include things like creative writing, forensic science. 

Northern Virginia is an education-oriented region in the United States; the educational attainment levels at the collegiate level, at the master’s level and the Ph.D. level, are actually quite high. And it should be no surprise to anyone who knows that area that many of the parents and families and young learners really are looking at the opportunity they have to sharpen the saw. And so two years ago, we started offering those summer education offerings, and quite honestly, they were far more robust than we imagined. That program has grown year over year, and we’re anticipating a great launch again this summer.

Ryan: 
So, as you know, there are a lot of universities that have campuses or programs in the D.C. and Northern Virginia area. What do you think distinguishes UVA efforts from these other programs and offerings?

Fairchild: 
Well, you know, Jim, we actually had a market scan to find out about that. It may surprise listeners, particularly if you’re not in Northern Virginia – there are 52 satellite offices for universities in the D.C. metro area. 

Ryan: 
So it’s a little crowded. 

Fairchild: 
It’s a little crowded. And in fact, I think that signals that this is a robust market for the demand for education. We’ve got schools coming all the way from the West Coast, so they clearly recognize that somewhere between here and USC, this is a good place for them to land a second campus. 

What I can also tell you is that when we looked at those schools and their offerings, we found a couple of things. Many of them were what I might call “solo offerings” – that is a single program offered by a single school. So you might find that it would be in, for example, international affairs, but would not offer other types of educational programs. Or it might be a program in cyber technology, but again, would not extend into adjacent areas. 

What I think we have the opportunity to do, and are doing, is that we have, again, shall I say, nine schools that are offering types of programs in Northern Virginia, and we are putting them all together in shared space. I’m envisioning that there’s this moment when somebody comes out of their systems engineering class and they rub shoulders with someone who happens to be a nursing student. And when they do, they end up talking about what each of them are doing, what each of them are learning, and what they come out with is something that’s bigger than what they would have found had they been purely talking to another nursing student. I think this is where we know it’s the interstitial areas, the places in between where new, novel ideas are created. And I think there’s a way that space does that, but there’s a way that we convene people in space to get to do that. 

You know, one of the things that we’re doing is we’re launching a series of talks that are going to be done by UVA faculty, often UVA alums. You know, one of these is going to be with Ken Ono, the math professor, and he’s of course going to come talk with an Olympic swimmer about some of the ways that his knowledge in math influences swimming. We’re going to do a series of those. We have three others set up to happen, and there’s this opportunity to pull in alumni, to pull in our current students, and pull in people from the community who are there because they all care about swimming or they care about math, but now they’re talking about something different and something new happens.

Ryan: 
So if I understand it correctly, I think we have close to 40 programs lined up or already going in Northern Virginia. Let me ask you a question that a business school professor might ask you: What does success look like in five to 10 years?

Fairchild: 
Well, you’re right about the number. Our count is also 40. I think that success means certainly growth in the number of those programs and the enrollment of those programs. 

We’re just getting started. There are people who don’t yet know that we’re there and don’t yet know why what we have to offer is attractive. We’re going to keep doing that work, and that should result in greater, again, attention and enrollment. 

But what I also think I see in our future is an opportunity for us to bring together people from main Grounds. You know, we have wonderful opportunities in January or in August or other opportunities to bring together our current students into Northern Virginia to do various types of focus programs that they wouldn’t have an opportunity to do otherwise. And we can bring together global leaders that certainly can come down to Charlottesville, but it’s a little easier trip to take the metro over to our facility. I see that what we’ll do as time goes on is there’ll be a greater degree of interaction with many of the businesses and organizations that people are interested in working with. 

We’re planning, right now, a job fair that’ll go on and will be an opportunity for many of the workers, the talent that’s in Northern Virginia, alumni talent, to come together in our space – to see it, but also to recognize that there are employers that are very interested in UVA talent that just haven’t had the opportunity to get down to Charlottesville. I see us having opportunities to do things, not unlike some of the investing groups that we have already running, that engage various types of UVA alumni with various types of ventures that are envisioned by UVA current students. And those are opportunities that we have, again, to really use the networking opportunities we have to pull people together. 

I also figure there are things I just don’t know, the pace of technology is happening so rapidly. Certainly everyone talks about AI, but let us not forget, Northern Virginia is a leading market for the media. Northern Virginia is a leading market for defense, Northern Virginia is a leading market for health care, Northern Virginia is a leading market for biotech. And it was true – all those things were true long before a company called Amazon ever thought about coming into Northern Virginia with a second headquarters. And so what I see is an even greater direct involvement with the practical world. 

One more on that. I mean, you and I have done the Hoos on the Hill events, which are great opportunities that remind us how many UVA folks continue to be committed to public service. And as one who’s been thinking about public service for a long time in my own career, I think what’s coming next is our opportunity to bridge those gaps for people that are interested in various types of public service work that they can do in Northern Virginia. 

Ryan: 
So, a couple more questions. One, how do you see our efforts in Northern Virginia influencing or shaping the identity of the University of Virginia? I mean, obviously our Grounds are iconic, residential-based undergraduate experiences at the heart of UVA. Where does this fit in the picture?

Fairchild: 
You know, this is one of the most common questions that we’re asked is, “Is this in some way a replacement? Is this in some way a substitute?” 

I see it as an auxiliary and I see it as a second opportunity for engagement. Many of the people who pursue some of our current work already have a UVA degree, and let’s not mention then that there’s another audience that didn’t have their opportunity at UVA, but has known us, has thought about us and knows our quality. We see a lot of opportunities for those individuals, but more particular to the question you’re asking, I think that we see the echoes of, again, the high-quality educators we have, the high-quality research opportunities we have, and we see that many of the places where that can play itself out, where people can test out their ideas, their hypotheses. 

Let’s say it was social science research working with people who had autism as an example. We currently do some of that work in Northern Virginia. This is an opportunity that we can have to use this large, sizable, rich market to do, in real time, some of the things we try to do in Charlottesville, but we might be burdened by dint of location and population size. 

I also see that what we will always do is echo. One of the great things I like to remind people of is that the Jefferson Memorial is not far from where we sit, and that we are a part of a larger discourse in the nation’s history. I don’t mean to be audacious, but I do think of the University of Virginia as being part of that larger national history, and so I see that as we continue to progress and the schools and the deans and the faculty think of new things that they’d like to do, I see this idea of echo and amplification. When you and other people come into the new facility in Fairfax, they’re going to see a lot of echoes of Grounds; they’re going to see visuals of Grounds. We have a library already, and that library has books of the faculty at the University, and so I think most people will see books they didn’t know about. I think we’ll continue to echo in so many ways, so that no one will be mistaken that these are in some way disconnected from each other. 

One more piece of that some of these satellite offices that we examined, frankly, they have entirely, shall we say, distinct faculty that do the work in their satellite campus relative to their main headquarters campus. I’m not saying that we wouldn’t draw from the local talent that we have in Northern Virginia to do teaching an opportunity. We’ve always done that. But I also think our proximity and our interest of our faculty and their engagement that they already have presently in Northern Virginia means that we’re going to not offer folks something that is different, that is a different set of learning opportunities. From the faculty standpoint, in many cases, it’ll be the same person doing something with a tweak attached to it.

Ryan: 
Well, this is an exciting moment, and I want to thank you for everything you’ve done to bring us to this moment. I don’t think it would have happened without you. 

I have one final question for you. I understand you’re very fond of bees, and I’m wondering where that came from.

Fairchild: 
So you heard right. And a little commercial: We like to give out jars of honey at UVA Northern Virginia, because we have two beehives that are at the Fairfax facility.

Ryan: 
Have you run that past our general counsel?

Fairchild: 
We have not run past the general counsel. We have given people on the staff honey, though, and one of those hives is the orange hive, and one of those hives is the blue hive. And we have opportunities for people from the community to come do learns at the hives, and we think it’s just a great thing. 

Personally, though, you’re right. I am. I’m an outdoors gardener-type guy, and yes, I do have a bee suit, and I have beehives, and I have lots of things that are pollinated by bees. I’m that guy.

Ryan: 
I don’t know that we ever talked about this, but we have that in common to a certain extent. Years and years ago, I had a job in Australia as an assistant beekeeper. 

Fairchild: 
Oh, no.

Ryan: 
I did, yes.

Fairchild: 
Oh, wow. Well, if you have bees, you’ve been stung before.

Ryan: 
Yes, I was gonna say, that’s why the job is temporary for me.

Fairchild: 
Well, the very first day that the hives were installed at the Fairfax campus, I was so excited. I go out and I run over to the hives, and, of course, promptly, one of the bees flew up my nose and stung me. 

Ryan: 
Nice, right? 

Fairchild: 
So, but the good news is, I’ve been stung before. It wasn’t a big deterrent. 

Ryan: 
They’re great, yeah. No, I was – I learned a lot, and was fascinated by it, and have been a huge fan of honey ever since.

Fairchild: 
Well, I think you’ll see some honey at the grand opening. 

Ryan: 
Great. Well, Greg, thanks a lot.

Ben Larsen: 
“Inside UVA” is a production of WTJU 91.1 FM and the Office of the President at the University of Virginia. “Inside UVA” is produced by Kaukab Rizvi, Benjamin Larsen, Mary Garner McGehee, Matt Webber and Jaden Evans. Special thanks to Maria Jones and Jane Kelly. Our music is “Turning to You” from Blue Dot Sessions. 

You can listen and subscribe to “Inside UVA” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back soon with another conversation about the life of the University.