“Young and aimless.” 

Emporia State President Matt Baker used those words to describe himself at the start of his undergraduate experience at a flagship institution. 

The Topeka, Kansas native attended Kansas State University out of high school at his brother’s suggestion, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Bachelor of psychology. 

“I did okay in college,” he said. “Academically, I did well in the last two years. First two were not as positive. Only spent one semester on academic probation, but I lived and learned and grew through it.”

While at K-State, Baker worked as a resident assistant, which led him to consider a career as a residential director at a university. It was that or work at Garmin, said Baker, an upstart technology company at the time. He thought Garmin was too “flighty” back then, so he found himself at Northwestern Missouri State University

“I ended up going to Northwest Missouri State as a resident director as soon as I graduated from K-State,” he explained. “I will tell you, I did not have a job until a week after I graduated. And so, that stress of ‘I’m going to live at my mom’s house the rest of my life’ is terrifying as a 22 year old. But I got a job there, and after three years, decided I wanted to work in higher education.” 

Baker was no stranger to that arena. His father was a faculty member at Washburn University and his mother studied law there when Baker was a child. 

Baker then went back to school at the University of Arkansas to obtain a master’s degree in higher education administration. While at the University of Arkansas, he married his wife, whom he met at Northwest Missouri State. After he graduated, Baker returned to Northwest Missouri State in their residential life department and stayed for 28 years, rising up the ranks to Dean of Students, then to Vice President of Student Affairs.

“When I got done with grad school, we moved back to Maryville,” he said “…We thought we’d be there three or four years. And I ended up staying there until March.”

Baker’s time at Northwest Missouri State was the first time he experienced a regional public university. It was there he found that he is “built for” a school with a smaller campus like Northwest Missouri State or ESU. That’s what drew him to apply for the presidential position at ESU. He said that he is partial to his home state—particulary its small and rural communities.

“I’m a Kansan, and I will be forever no matter where I go…It’s a little pokey, maybe a little quirky, but in my heart, that’s who I am. I have been following the Emporia State story for the last four or five years, and it has been a very difficult time at Emporia State, but it’s also been a transformational time.” 

Baker is referring to the implementation of the Workforce Management Framework in 2022 under former President Ken Hush’s tenure. The move led to the firing of 33 faculty members, including tenured and tenure-track faculty, cut several academic programs and resulted in a complete academic restructuring. Hush retired in December. 

“I probably read The Chronicle of Higher Education every morning, and my eyes were the size of saucers. Wow,” he said. “But then you also understand, when you work in the industry, you know that every institution is facing reductions in funding from states. You know that there’s pressure on the value of a degree out in the world, ‘is a four-year degree necessary?’”

Baker said he recognizes that not every change at ESU in the future will be welcomed by every person, but his love for problem solving with diverse teams will drive those changes. He hopes that through authenticity and honesty, he can build trust with the ESU community.

“I want to be so trusted that people go ‘I don’t get it, but I trust him,’ at least for the first week, or however long that crisis is going to last,” said Baker.

As he begins his presidency, Baker is putting emphasis on data and metrics, saying “what gets measured gets done.” This not only includes lagging, or after-the-fact, metrics like retention, persistence and graduation rates, but also leading metrics such as how many student organizations students are involved in.

“The metric tells—it gives us at least an indication of the success of whatever it is we can measure,” Baker said. “And I’ve gotten pretty good, I think, at figuring out what’s measurable.”

Baker pointed to the number of students who engage in high-impact educational experiences as a standout metric. Not all students at other institutions experience them as early or as often as they do at ESU, he said.

“Our students get into the labs, biology and chemistry, much more quickly than at a large research one institution, but high school juniors and seniors don’t know that that’s valuable. They just assume you get it because you’re going to college,” Baker said. 

“So how do you convince a 16 year old that this is a big deal? … Those are metrics in my mind about, how do we tell our story? We get to decide what’s valuable … and then we’ll move to a system over the next year or so, where we report it out and in groups where people get to share their data.”

Budget, enrollment and persistence are the three data points that Baker is prioritizing for ESU. 

“(ESU’s leadership team) knows their data, and when they bring me something, they bring it to me — ‘Hey, we noticed this blip, and here’s our action plan.’… But that’s the data right now will be budget, budget, budget, and then enrollment, enrollment, enrollment, and then retention, retention, retention—persistence.” 

Under his leadership, students can expect the University to uphold the commitments it made to them when they enrolled, Baker said. He commits to upholding clear expectations, systems and processes so that everyone at ESU can execute their jobs precisely so that students can succeed.

“My job is to get barriers out of the way of the people doing amazing work on campus and make sure they have the resources they need to succeed,” stated Baker.

That job is also to “help students get a college degree.”

“Working on a college campus, you get to be with college students on the best day of their lives, and you get to help them on the worst day of their lives,” he said. “It’s a very interesting four years…If you’re the same person when you showed up in August of your freshman year as you are in May of your senior year, we didn’t do a good job.”

As Baker goes into his second month on ESU’s campus, he reflected on his first:

“Since I’ve been here, there’s just things I just love,” he said. “And I didn’t even know they were here, but like, every building has a Corky statue, I just think that’s so cool. You take it for granted.”

Despite a rocky start with a melanoma removal during his first week on campus, Baker said that his excitement to be here has only grown.

“I have loved every student I’ve interacted with, faculty I’ve interacted with, staff member,” he expressed. “The people at Emporia State care deeply about the organization—Want it to succeed. The community is behind the institution. We have opportunities internally, externally, to continue to grow and thrive. I could not be happier with the first month.”