When he joined the University of Central Arkansas in 2006 as an assistant professor in management for the College of Business (COB), central Arkansas native Michael Hargis felt that it was an opportunity to rejoin the community after earning his graduate degrees in Michigan and teaching at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. What he couldn’t have predicted was becoming UCA’s newest appointed provost and executive vice president of Academic Affairs, a role he began on July 1, 2024.
“My wife and I are from Arkansas, so this was an opportunity to rejoin the community. Coming to UCA got us close to home. We had a connection with the university. My paternal grandmother attended when it was the Arkansas Normal School for teacher training. She always thought highly of this institution,” he said. “Back in 2006, when UCA was hiring an assistant professor in management, I knew that was what I wanted to do. So I applied, and luckily for me, they hired me.”
Hargis and his wife both grew up in Little Rock. He earned his bachelor’s in psychology from Hendrix College and a master’s and Doctor of Philosophy in industrial-organizational psychology from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. As an undergrad, he majored in psychology with a minor in economics. Discovering a new area of study materializing in psychology, he opted for that field of study in graduate school.
“I was an undergraduate psychology major with an economics minor, and I learned early on that the clinical setting for psychology was not going to be a place where I would thrive, but there was a relatively new area in psychology at the time that was emerging called industrial-organizational psychology. It’s a kind of psychology applied to the workplace,” he said.
As an assistant professor in management at the COB, Hargis worked to bring real-world problems to the classroom. His goal was to keep the classroom engaging while focusing on applying what his students learned in the workforce.
“My approach to all of the classes I teach, and I’m still trying to teach at least once a year, even now, is to try to make the classroom engaging and focus on real-world problems. I teach a wide variety of management courses, primarily in the organizational behavior or general management area, which lends itself to taking things from the headlines and moving them into classrooms. The focus is on application, and I try to add in a little fun as well.” he said.
After serving as interim dean of the COB, Hargis became the dean of COB in 2014. In that role, he saw many innovative changes, all of which he credits to the collaborative efforts of the college and its focus on student success. “I feel that there were a lot of changes in the college because of the team. Over the past ten years, the college has grown in a number of ways,” he said.
He continued, “Every degree program modified their curriculum meaningfully to help ensure students were prepared for whatever the future brought them. There was also a shared focus on experiential learning across the college and university curriculums. It is focused on ensuring that our students can relate to how they’ve learned something and why it’s important.” He further related that because of these changes, the COB has continued its success and increasing enrollment and will continue to have a bright future.
As provost, Hargis serves as the campus’ chief academic officer. He oversees UCA’s five academic colleges, the Graduate School, the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College, and other academic departments. He plans to take much the same approach as provost as he did while he served as dean.
Additionally, he plans to continue cultivating connections and relationships with the community and economic development within the business sector. With an interdisciplinary study background, Hargis also looks forward to working across the university to provide a holistic approach to serving students, faculty and staff.
“My approach to higher education is focused on providing a transformative education across all of the disciplines available at our institution. Our goal is to provide a transformative education for students; to do that, we have to facilitate a holistic approach. I believe we’ve got the means to expose our students to a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, leadership opportunities, and service opportunities to help them see how they can influence their communities,” Hargis said.
Hargis’ leadership style is based on working across disciplines to further UCA’s success. He reflected, “I hope that people would describe me as anything but a top-down leader. I’m a participative and collaborative leader of the belief that our fundamental role as leaders on campus is to help faculty, staff, and students chase their dreams. That means I have to listen and hear those dreams and then partner with everybody on campus to try to find ways to achieve those goals.”