It wasn’t the way an interview usually begins. In fact, when I reached Westfield State University’s (WSU) interim President Dr. Roy Saigo, by telephone, he turned the tables on me, asking permission to ask me a few questions first.
“I always want to understand how people get to where they are,” Saigo said candidly as he asked me if I was a Western Massachusetts native, and a bit about myself, my family, schooling and job.
“That’s so Roy,” remarked WSU senior Sam Tsongalis, president of the college’s student government, when I reached out to ask him about his experiences working with the 80-year-old temporary college leader, and told him how my interview started out. I was a little surprised that Tsongalis referred to Saigo by his first name, but he assured me that the informality, and inquisitive nature, was just part of the way Saigo did things.
“He’s always been “Hey what’s your name? What’s your major?” with students on campus, Tsongalis said. “When he sees me it’s ‘Hey Sam how are you doing?, How’s the family? He knows I have three siblings; he probably knows all their names.”
It’s not everyone who will come out of retirement – for a second time – to take on the challenge of leading a college where a faculty has had little confidence in its former administration and students have faced various issues including previous incidents of racism. Fewer, still, who will do something like that on the cusp of a pandemic. But that’s what Saigo chose to do when the WSU Board of Trustees came calling last spring.
“It wasn’t that bad until we got here,” Saigo joked when asked about accepting the position of interim college president in the midst of a pandemic. When the role was offered – his fourth turn at the helm of a college during his 50-year career in higher education – Saigo said he and his wife looked at it as an opportunity to not only make a difference for faculty and students one more time, but to visit the Northeast while doing so. His term at WSU ends in June.
“We finally got the chance to visit the Cape for a few days, working while we were there,” Saigo told Prime when we spoke in early March. The pandemic, he admitted, has curtailed some of the sightseeing he and his wife Barbara had hoped to do during their time in the Northeast. Instead, he said they’ve been “making a lot of trips to the Big Y and doing a lot of cooking.”
But the pandemic didn’t derail Saigo’s plans for his time at WSU entirely.
“Every university I’ve been president of, starting at St. Clair and at Auburn,
and here, I live in the dorms for a few months,” he said, adding that he used the same approach at Westfield despite the delay to the start of the fall semester because of COVID-19. Listening and observing – skills that seem to carry over from his scientific training for his first degree, a bachelor’s in biology – Saigo used the time, he explained, to get to know students and their concerns.
“I was building relationships, they didn’t know who I was,” he shared. “We had a fire alarm [at one point] and we all came outside, and they thought I was a visitor.”
Tsongalis said the way Saigo chose to engage with students by living in the dorm was an apt illustration of how he’s approached leading the school through healing from the recent faculty strife as well as the pandemic.
“When I [first] met him, he looked at me and said, ‘This is our last rodeo. I don’t get another year, you don’t get another year, let’s work together and make the changes we need to,” Tsongalis, who will graduate this May, explained. “When we do have challenges he will really listen to us, if not empathetically then systematically with a ‘hey, let’s get this thing done.’”
Saigo understands prejudice – one of the issues that had surfaced at WSU in the recent past, with racial slurs written on dorm walls in 2017 during the previous president’s term – all too well. As a child, he and his family were among the Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in an Arizona detention camp during World War II.
“One day you’re sleeping in a bed, the next you're waking up in a barn with the smell of horses and manure,” Saigo recalled. The incarceration is something he’s talked about with groups consistently throughout his academic career. Recently, he shared the experience with local students from Chicopee High School, at the invitation of a WSU alum.
“I asked them to transform themselves, place themselves in a different skin, different eyes, different language, eat different foods, different culture, and a different time,” Saigo said, explaining the way he presents that experience to others. “We were American citizens, no one spoke up for us.”
That early experience was just one of the things that seems to have shaped Saigo and how he approaches life.
“It's been my strength and my weakness,” he shared. “People don't like to be reminded of uncomfortable times; people don’t like people who stand up against those [ in power]
“I’ve given speeches on leadership – oftentimes those who have core values and stand up are pounded down,” He continued.“ In Japan they say that the nail that stands up gets punched down,” Saigo said. “It happens all over the world.”
But the detention camp isn’t the only experience Saigo brought to the table when he came to help lead WSU out of its recent strife. The son of a dairy farmer who went to college because “I told my father I didn’t like the silage, and he told me, then go to school,” Saigo decided early in his career that academic thinking needed changing, too.
“I was teaching [biology] at the University of Wisconsin at St. Clair. I had been working extremely hard in doing research and had published a paper,” Saigo stated. “I was making $8,200 a year, and thought I was pretty well off, but I’d had paper published in this prestigious journal and I needed $400 for reprints.”
Saigo went to see the college chancellor to ask for the funding. ”My heart was just jumping. He was a magnificent man, 6’2”, white hair, he looked like an American eagle. I said, “I need $400 for reprints of my article’. He said, ‘Well, Dr. Saigo, if I did that for you, I would have to do it for everybody.’
“And I said, ’with due respect sir, if you did it for everybody, you would have a hell of a university.’ That’s when I decided to become an administrator, because I felt the emphasis [in education] was being put in the wrong place,” Saigo said.
He set out to start to change that dynamic during his 17 years at University of Wisconsin St.Clair where he served as an assistant dean and then dean of the School of Arts and Sciences for nine years before taking the position of dean of the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Northern Iowa. He followed that with the positions of provost, and vice president of Academic and Student Affairs, when he moved to Southeastern Louisiana University. He later served as chancellor of Auburn University, Montgomery, AL, and president at St. Clair State University, MN – the latter where he not only increased diversity among the student body, but was also nationally recognized for addressing the issue of racism in the use of nicknames, logos and mascots in NCAA athletics.
After two years of retirement, he answered a search committee request and returned to academia as the interim
president of Southern Oregon University, where he was named president for the second year.
“We got enrollment numbers up, got them into a financial situation where they were positive and left them with reserves, and they named a multi-cultural center on the third floor of the library after me.”
He retired again, and then Westfield came calling…
“He has been the change that Westfield needed for a long time, Tsongalis said of Saigo’s time at the helm of WSU. “It’s like night and day, just being able to communicate with him. Because of him, we’ve been able to meet with the rest of the cabinet too, which is refreshing.”
Working with his cabinet, the Board of Trustees, student government and an eight-person subcommittee, he’s tackled the challenges the university was facing before he arrived, as well as the new obstacles presented by the pandemic.
Saigo said he did his homework before coming to the school, not only looking into the history of Horace Mann, who established the college in 1859 – “he welcomed students of all races and creeds” Saigo noted – but also taking a look at the credentials of the faculty and staff he would be working with.
“I looked at every faculty name before I decided to come,” Saigo said. “I was very impressed, all universities have PhDs, this institution has superior faculty [to] many, many institutions.”
Saigo also said he’s never seen a more dedicated group of individuals at an institution.
“I never found staff that works so hard,” he shared. “I have an assistant that has reported to me that people are working 12-15 hours a day, they are responding back to questions even over the holidays and New Year’s. Your readers should be aware and appreciative of the way [the WSU] faculty and staff have worked above the call of duty, especially in this COVID situation.”
It’s a situation that’s often called for Zoom meetings over Saigo’s usual face-to face in many cases, and a shift to more online classes rather than the regular hum of campus life at the universities Saigo has helmed in the past. Still, he’s pleased with the progress WSU has made during his time as interim president.
“I think we have pretty much set the parameter for communication, trust, respect and developing change all into a system where everybody is informed and has input in WSU,” Saigo said. “You just cannot do just one part of the institution. We have a regular meeting with faculty, with Sam Tsongalis and the student government. I know those students almost like they are my own children.
“I’m very, very proud of where we've come in a very short time,” Saigo said. “What we are trying to do at Westfield state is be welcoming to students of all stripes, and treat them like they are family. If we do that we will be the finest institution in New England.”
“I’ve been at the university for three years, so I know how it was before,” Tsongalis said, adding he’s “a little bummed, but not as bummed as other students” that Saigo won’t be leading the college after June.
As for Saigo, he’ll be heading back into retirement when June comes, though he said he’s been asked to stay on until the new president is chosen.
“At my age, we want to make a difference. We’re here for a year...and I think we have,” Saigo said. “Communication, respect, change, and working together is so important – we can't forget that.”
Tsongalis admitted he’s “sad that I don’t get the chance to work with him [in the future], but I’m glad [Saigo] has come to Westfield State.”
Saigo, he said, “gets it.”
