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Dr. Gregory W. Fowler is President of University of Maryland Global Campus, the largest provider of postsecondary education in Maryland and one of the largest online public universities in the country. UMGC serves roughly 100,000 learners through a network of more than 100 locations across the United States, Europe and Asia, and about 55 percent of them are military affiliated: active duty servicemembers, veterans, spouses and dependents. The university has been teaching that population since 1947, when it began offering courses to returning GIs, and it was among the first American institutions to operate on overseas bases.
Fowler became UMGC's president in January 2021, and its first non-interim African American president, arriving from Southern New Hampshire University, where he was President of SNHU Global Campus after serving as chief academic officer of its College of Online and Continuing Education. Earlier he was associate provost and dean at Western Governors University and taught literature and American studies at Penn State Erie. His agenda at UMGC rests on three moves: an admissions and advising redesign built around a success coaching model that, in his words, wraps learners in a cocoon of support and resources; a rebuilt course development infrastructure for next-generation learning experiences; and new revenue streams and partnerships that put the institution's global footprint to work. He grew up in Albany, Georgia, one of eight children, and holds a bachelor's degree from Morehouse College, a master's in English from George Mason University, a PhD in English and American studies from the University at Buffalo, and an MBA from Western Governors University. He is a two-time Fulbright recipient and serves on the boards of the New England Commission of Higher Education, the National Cryptologic Foundation, and the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area.
UMGC began in 1947 with faculty flying to postwar Europe to teach American service members, and it never stopped moving: Asia by 1956, the Middle East in the 1980s, and today more than 100,000 students across all seven continents, including Antarctica. President Gregory Fowler, who joined as the university's seventh president in 2021 after leadership roles at Western Governors University and SNHU Global Campus, likes to say the sun never sets on UMGC. Roughly 9,000 people make it run, including practitioner faculty who work full time in the fields they teach.
In this episode, President Fowler lays out the architecture behind serving the working learner. It starts from a line he credits to Paul LeBlanc, that time is the enemy of the poor: if time is currency, every system should maximize the use of a student's time. That conviction shows up as Project Sherpa, a personal assistant that cannot climb the mountain for a student but climbs it with them. As Project Doppler, which treats student success like meteorology, ingesting every factor from military background to field of study to forecast who will struggle before they do. And as Agent 360, which greets every faculty member and success coach in the morning with the five students who need outreach first, so the human connection lands exactly where it matters.
He is equally sharp on what not to do. Chasing headlines is not a strategy. Sometimes the solution to a workflow problem is a better workflow, not AI. A tool is free the way a puppy is free. And the discipline that separates institutions that get ROI from those that get press releases is doing three things instead of twenty, then closing the circle two years later to ask whether it worked.
Key ideas from the conversation
- Time is the enemy of the poor. Every system UMGC builds is judged by whether it gives learners their time back.
- Focus on the applicant pool over the lead pool. A pile of leads that will never convert does nobody any good.
- The advisor remains the number one success factor students name, so AI's job is to strip the administrivia away from that relationship, never to replace it.
- A chatbot answers, a copilot augments a human who decides, and an agent learns and acts. Institutions should know which one they are buying.
- Build versus buy is a jigsaw puzzle assembled in reverse Jenga: place proven pieces as they become real instead of buying the picture on the box.
- Precision learning goes beyond personalization: the right intervention, at the right moment, for the right student, sometimes before the professor wakes up.
- Done wrong, AI widens the equity gap. Done right, it gives every student the real-time catch-up that used to be reserved for the lucky.
- AI should stand for augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence.
- The fastest growing population in American education is the adult learner, and nearly all policy is still written for an 18 year old.
- Learning is unbundling the way music did: nobody should have to buy the whole CD for two songs.
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