🔒From humble beginnings, new Quinnipiac President Hardin’s task is to bring university to the ‘next level’

Quinnipiac University’s new President Marie Hardin traces her path to the office all the way back to the school newspaper she joined as a fifth grader in a small Houston, Texas suburb.

College wasn’t a serious prospect for most in Oak Ridge North in the 1970s, Hardin, now 59, recalled. Her father, an HVAC technician, left home every morning at 4:30 a.m. Her mother was a homemaker with four children. Her brother dropped out of school at age 16 to bus restaurant tables.

But working with student newspapers in middle and high school ignited Hardin’s passion for learning.

“Journalism was the thing that lit the fire under me to want to go to college,” Hardin said during an interview on July 1, her first day as president of Quinnipiac University, a private school based in Hamden with over 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students. “When you are a journalist, you are constantly in learning mode, and there’s something beautiful about that.”

That passion led Hardin to Ambassador College, a small four-year school in Big Sandy, Texas. Now defunct, it was affiliated with the Worldwide Church of God, an evangelical branch of Christianity. Harding’s parents felt comfortable sending her to the university tied to their church.

Ambassador offered a handful of degree tracks. Hardin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theology and mass communication in 1988. She went to work in journalism, quickly rising to lead small newspapers in Texas. She also freelanced.

Hardin eventually earned a master’s degree from Georgia State University in communications and a doctorate from the University of Georgia in communications and journalism.

Equipped with post-secondary education, Hardin became an assistant journalism professor at Florida Southern College in 1998. Later, she joined the faculty at Pennsylvania State University’s school of communications. She worked her way up to dean in 2014.

Harding led the college’s rebranding in 2017, after securing a $30 million gift from alumnus Donald P. Bellisario, a television producer and screenwriter. She also gained the university’s backing for a new media center. Under Hardin, the college’s endowment tripled, with gifts increasing more than 50% in the past three years.

A big part of her success at Penn State, she said, came from her willingness to take on new roles and responsibilities. It was a lesson she learned as a young reporter researching a story about women who lead Georgia companies.  Again and again, Hardin recalled, these female executives noted their willingness to take on unfamiliar and daunting tasks as key to their rise.

“I told myself in my early 20s that I was going to be someone who said yes,” Hardin said. “So, when I got to Penn State, and they started asking me to do a whole lot of different things, I said yes. I ended up taking on all kinds of different responsibilities in my college and across the university. And that served me very well because it gave me lots of different experiences.”

Moving ‘great ideas forward’

Quinnipiac’s Board of Trustees named Hardin president in January. She has replaced Judy Olian, whose last day was June 30, after seven years leading the school. During that time, she was credited with overseeing a major campus renovation and expansion, among many other things.

Hardin said Quinnipiac’s board has charged her with bringing the high-performing university “to the next level.” That means strengthening partnerships with employers, industry, community leaders and the public, and ensuring the school’s offerings align with the state’s and country’s workforce needs, she said.

Literature issued in the year-long search for a president emphasized building on the university’s “strong foundation” to lead it to increased achievement and national recognition. It also spoke of pressures on revenue and expenses, requiring a president with a well-honed ability to raise money and the university’s profile.

Hardin said she will tackle these tasks using tools developed as a journalist and academic leader, sourcing answers from staff, local leaders, students and other stakeholders.

“The ideas for how to do that are not going to come out of my head as much as they will come out of conversations with faculty, staff, students, alumni and corporate leaders who have an interest in this institution,” Hardin said. “My job is to find talent, tap talent and move those great ideas forward.”

Strong brand

Hardin took the reins at a relative lull in the academic calendar year. It gives her time to cement relationships with her administrative team and learn the university. The campus will come alive again in August when students and faculty return for the 2025-26 school year.

“Our expectation is Marie will seek to understand the university in the first six months, and then come back to us with strategic initiatives and where she wants to lean in,” said Charles Saia, a senior partner at CPA and consulting giant Deloitte and chair of Quinnipiac’s Board of Trustees. “We hired her for her leadership capacity, and because she has been strategic in other roles.”

One goal, Saia said, is for Quinnipiac to better leverage the high demand for its law and medical schools. The medical school alone had 10,000 applicants for 90 spots this year. And the university is seeking approval from regulators to take in classes of 125 students, he said.

With a series of recently completed building projects, a strong endowment ($770.2 million as of the 2022-2023 academic year) and in-demand law and medical schools, Quinnipiac garnered hundreds of candidates for the president’s job, Saia said.

“Quinnipiac’s brand is at an all-time high,” he said. “It was a very attractive job for many.”

Executive leadership consultant Spencer Stuart and the university’s search committee narrowed the pool down to nine candidates who were interviewed over Zoom for 90 minutes; then three were chosen to interview in person for another two hours.

“Marie rose to the top,” Saia said. “We were not just going to hand the keys over to anybody. (Former President Olian) did such a tremendous job. The next leader is going to elevate the trajectory of Quinnipiac.”

Not without challenges

Hardin acknowledges she arrives at Quinnipiac as the higher education industry broadly faces a spectrum of challenges.

President Trump’s administration has cut higher-ed funding, particularly for research. Hardin said the impact has been blunted at Quinnipiac, which is not a research-intensive school.

The university said it has lost a National Institutes of Health grant that was pending. Some faculty and staff have been hesitant to apply for federal grants in the current climate, noted Provost Debra Liebowitz.

The school is also keeping a close eye on its enrollment, which officials acknowledge is on track to dip this September. Hardin blames recent economic uncertainty, as well as increased questioning of the economic returns yielded by higher education.

Like other colleges, Quinnipiac’s enrollment trended lower immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, dropping from 9,746 undergraduate and graduate students in the fall of 2020, to 8,788 students in fall 2022. Numbers subsequently trended upward, reaching 9,424 in fall 2024.

There is also pressure from population shifts that are yielding fewer high school graduates, a trend that is expected to exacerbate in the years ahead and is especially acute in the Northeast, Hardin said.

Hardin is also keenly aware of the potential for a “digital disruption” in higher education. Alternative digital learning options could increasingly challenge traditional institutions. Quinnipiac will have to be prepared to embrace technology and evolve, she said.

The school, Hardin added, also must adapt to more students seeking skills and credentials rather than degrees.

“We need to understand and leverage the power of digital tools,” Hardin said.

Spending for the future

Quinnipiac, which has two campuses in Hamden and a third in North Haven, reported revenue of $542 million and expenses of $501 million in fiscal 2023, with assets near $1.89 billion and liabilities at $537 million.

The university has invested significantly in facilities in recent years.

In 2023, the university opened a renovated and expanded 157,000-square-foot athletics and recreation center.

A new 415-bed residence hall opened on its main Hamden campus last fall. A new 79,000-square-foot headquarters for the business school, and a new 137,000-square-foot science and technology hub are slated to open this fall, also on the main campus.

The four buildings collectively cost $350 million, according to Quinnipiac.

Quinnipiac currently holds about $405 million in debt with a Moody’s A3 stable rating. It recently moved to bond $228 million through the Connecticut Health and Educational Facilities Authority, a quasi-public state agency that allows not-for-profit organizations to access tax-free debt financing.

Mark Varholak, Quinnipiac’s chief financial officer, said the new borrowing would be used to refinance existing debt, but the university has not determined exactly how much to borrow, or when to finalize a financing package.

“We are waiting for market conditions to improve before moving forward, so there is no news to report at this point,” Varholak said.

With strong annual operating cash flow, the university is able to finance a “substantial” portion of its capital plan without incurring additional debt, Varholak said. Meanwhile, the university is monitoring financial markets for refinancing opportunities that would free up cash, he said.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, some universities paused capital spending, wary of a perceived push to digital learning, said Saia, the Board of Trustees chair. Today, Quinnipiac’s main Hamden campus is far larger than when he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in the early 1990s.

“We doubled down and made investments when many others were not because they were fearful of higher education being disrupted in terms of online learning,” Saia said. “So now, when you walk onto campus, it is sort of unrecognizable.”