On Wednesday, Feb. 17, the University community will welcome a special guest, one who will become N.C. State’s 14th chancellor in a matter of mere months. This guest, of course, is none other than Chancellor-elect Randy Woodson. For that reason, Technician will provide students with a proper introduction to the future chief executive officer at NCSU along with some background information on many of his beliefs and goals for the University.

Randy Woodson is no stranger to hard work. In fact, growing up in the South, the 52 year old said he quickly learned the importance of education and a good work ethic.

“Both of my parents were teachers. My dad was a counselor and my mother a teacher,” Woodson said. “They felt very strongly about higher education. I certainly had a good sense from my family of the importance of education.”

Adding to this was the opportunity to work with one of his father’s friends, Ray Moseley, in a nursery that he ran.

According to Woodson, this very job is the reason that he became interested in what ultimately became his career in horticulture.

In Woodson’s eyes, Moseley had quite the green thumb. He had a real interest in the science of horticulture as a whole and the growing of plants. This wasn’t all that he had, however. He had something else that would change Woodson’s life. He had a true interest in Woodson’s future.

“I guess I just asked too many questions while working there, and he took an interest in my interest behind the science of what we were doing and encouraged me to continue my education in the field,” Woodson said.

So that’s exactly what Woodson did. He attended the University of Arkansas, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1979. His education didn’t stop there, as he completed his postgraduate work at Cornell, receiving a master’s degree in horticulture and a doctorate in horticulture and plant physiology as well.

“For a long time, I thought my career would be going back to that nursery and using my education to improve my career there,” Woodson said. Once Woodson got to the university and got hooked on science and research, however, things took a turn.

In 1983, Woodson became a member of the faculty of Louisiana State University as an assistant professor of horticulture, a capacity in which he would serve until 1985. In 1985, Woodson made his way to Purdue University.

“I came to Purdue because of the quality of the faculty and the students,” Woodson said. Until 1998, Woodson served in a number of faculty and administrative roles, before getting the nod to become the associate dean for the agricultural research programs at Purdue.

Quickly ascending the ranks, Woodson became Dean of Agriculture at Purdue, a position that Woodson contends is unlike many others.

“The Dean of Agriculture at Purdue has broader responsibilities in serving the state because we don’t have a state department of agriculture that oversees regulatory programs, so I had a lot of state responsibilities legislatively and politically to support the regulatory environment for agriculture,” Woodson said.

In addition to all of these added responsibilities, Woodson was also responsible for collaborating with the College of Sciences to start a research center and for dramatically increasing the grants received by the college.

“It was a time when we were able to identify some new areas that would position the college well for many years to come, so we had a lot of exciting things,” Woodson said. In 2008, Woodson got more exciting news.

After more than 20 years of service, Woodson was promoted to provost, the chief academic officer at Purdue. Serving in the post, Woodson has done a number of things. Perhaps the most notable is his weathering of the troubling economic crisis that is affecting schools across the nation.

“We’re in a more fiscally constrained environment now, so we had to do a lot of restructuring of the budget to address the concerns of the ability of the state to fund higher education,” Woodson said.

“Even in spite of that, we’ve been able to do some very strategic things like launch a College of Health and Human Sciences.” According to Woodson, this was done by bringing a lot of departments together from across the university and providing them with more structure, visibility and academic synergy to support the students.

“While we’ve been more financially constrained than we might’ve been a few years back, we still have been able to make investments to move the university forward,” Woodson said.

For reasons like these, it’s no wonder that when it was officially announced on Jan. 8 that Woodson was the official choice of the UNC Board of Governors for chancellor at N.C. State, Purdue University officials — and even Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels — did all they could to keep the administrator from making the cross-country trip to Raleigh.

The efforts didn’t work out for Indiana. To read more about Randy Woodson and his goals for the University, see the second installment of this profile in Tuesday’s Technician.