Eli Capilouto didn’t aspire to leading a major land-grant university. Originally trained as a dentist, Capilouto had served as dean of the University of Alabama-Birmingham School of Public Health and provost of UAB.
So when a headhunter called him about the president’s job at the University of Kentucky, the Alabama native initially said he wasn’t interested in moving. But looking back on the experience now, Capilouto says he was impressed with outgoing UK President Lee Todd’s business plan for the school and the acclaimed Bucks for Brains program to attract top research talent to the state’s public universities.
So Capilouto agreed to an interview with UK. He thought he did poorly, but did come away from the meeting with admiration for the people he met in Lexington. Then to his surprise, Capilouto learned he was a finalist for the job.
“I’m an accidental president in many ways,” he says.
Capilouto became the 12th president of UK in 2011. During a decade of his leadership, the school has more than doubled its annual operating budget, which now stands at $5.6 billion. He has also overseen $3 billion in building projects and infrastructure improvements to the Lexington campus.
“If we want strong living-learning experiences, you’ve got to have places to learn,” says Capilouto. “If you want to build community, you’ve got to have good dining facilities where people can have healthy meals, break bread together, get to know one another.”
As a result, UK welcomed more than 6,100 freshmen to school this fall, a new record for incoming students. Of those, about a quarter are first-generation college-goers. Individuals of color now represent more than 16 percent of the student population.
“It’s not about the buildings, it’s not about the bricks and mortar,” Capilouto says. “We knew we had to have infrastructure in combination with our remarkable talent to move the things that were important to Kentucky.”
Capilouto says his goal is to create a healthier, wealthier, and wiser commonwealth. To do that, he says, requires great educators and researchers working within a modern infrastructure.
“Any success we’ve had at the University of Kentucky has been because of an enormous collective effort,” he says. “We built an even stronger foundation on top of an incredible tradition of service.”
COVID-19 and Other Public Health Issues
Even with the challenges of a global pandemic, Capilouto says the school community rallied to find innovative ways to maintain academic instruction while developing a public health response to COVID.
“There was no playbook for this,” he says. “This is what the University of Kentucky does best: Tackles a question that nobody has answers to and comes up with the best one we think will work.”
That includes developing testing protocols, implementing rapid response teams to address positive cases, and establishing mass vaccination clinics to deliver 250,000 COVID shots to Kentuckians.
Beyond the pandemic, UK continues to work on a range of health problems that plague the commonwealth. In 2019, the school received $87 million – its largest grant ever – from the National Institutes of Health to find ways to reduce opioid deaths in 16 central and eastern Kentucky counties hard hit by drug addiction. Capilouto says it took 20 faculty from nine different colleges at UK collaborating with representatives from state government and local organizations to land the massive grant.
Once they started the four-year project, they faced the onset of COVID and the rise of deadly new forms of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine.
“Those faculty and community representatives and government leaders were undaunted,” says Capilouto. “They came up with creative ways to still deliver what they thought would curb this.”
Data collected in Kentucky from the HEALing Communities Study will be combined with research from Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio to determine which interventions work the best, according to Capilouto.
University Investments from Black Studies to Wage Increases
In response to the 2020 deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, UK created a Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies to explore a range of topics from the history of slavery in central Kentucky, to race in sports and the African diaspora. The school has also launched a five-year, $10 million initiative to examine racial disparities in health care.
Capilouto says the nation has come a long way from his college days at the University of Alabama, where Gov. George Wallace resisted integration efforts.
“The progress has been halting and slow and discouraging at times, but I do believe that it moves forward,” say Capilouto.
As the university has invested more in its programs, research, and facilities, it’s also pumped more money into its people. For example, Capilouto says UK was the first school in the area to raise its starting wage to $15 an hour, and he says that other wages have been boosted four times in recent years.
But Capilouto has also drawn fire from some quarters over his own compensation. Late last year, the UK Board of Trustees increased the president’s base pay to just over $1 million, making Capilouto one of the nation’s highest paid public university chief executives.
The school has invested in other supports for students, including a new financial literacy initiative to encourage saving and investing, and new mental health services to improve student well-being. Even as state funding to higher education has suffered multiple cuts, Capilouto says UK has been kept tuition and fee increases to lower than the rate of inflation. The university has also invested more in scholarships, grants, and other assistance.
“When I arrived, I think we spent about $50 million on financial aid. That’s up to $160 million,” he says. “I have worked hard and will work even harder to raise those resources that improve access and affordability.”
