Before taking the ring against Mike Tyson in 1987, boxer Tyrell Biggs told reporters he had developed a bullet-proof plan for defeating one of the world’s most notable athletes.
Tyson, when prompted to respond, stared down reporters and offered one of sports’ greatest quotes.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” he said.
Tyson would go on to prove his mantra, landing hook after hook directly at Biggs’ head, splitting open his opponent’s lip and eventually taking the technical knockout.
The infamous quote would define Iron Mike’s legacy, becoming a well-known adage for those facing adversity.
In the early 2000s, eventual University of Idaho president Chuck Staben said he quickly experienced his own “punched in the mouth” moment after being diagnosed with prostate cancer at the age of 44.
At the time, Staben worked in the Biology Department at the University of Kentucky. As a longtime professor, Staben said he took the news as a wakeup call and an opportunity to start living a “more intentional life.”
Chuck Staben | Courtesy
“It entered my mind when I was that age — what are you going to achieve in the next couple years if that’s all you have left?” Staben said. “I started to take more intentional steps towards a higher level of leadership.”
At the time, the odds were not in favor of men below the age of 45 diagnosed with prostate cancer, Staben said, leading him to take a new approach to his career. From the University of Kentucky, Staben would continue to climb the ladder of academic institutional success, serving as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of South Dakota before being selected as UI’s 18th president.
After being named as the leader of Idaho’s land-grant university in 2014, Staben said he came into the job with a simple goal: making higher education more accessible for Idahoans.
And while enrollment, according to Staben, has remained somewhat stagnant during his tenure, he said he takes pride in the multiple ways an education at UI has become a more realistic opportunity for high school graduates in the state, from increased scholarship funding to aggressive recruitment tactics.
“Our students come here and they expect to graduate. They should, and they will, go out and make a difference in the world,” he said. “It’s led to a real spirit of success among our students and our graduates that is distinctively different. I’m not sure if students today, or even our alums of today, recognize how incredibly successful the institution has been.”
However, the success of the institution, Staben said, became overshadowed in recent years due to certain, what he called, distractors.
In 2017, reports surfaced that former Athletic Director Rob Spear mishandled complaints of sexual assault by UI athletes in violation with Title IX. In late January, UI professor Denise Bennett made national headlines after being placed on administrative leave, resulting in a now locally famous Vandal Alert. Staben did not mention specific incidents, but said emotions often rule when it comes to hot-button issues like athletics.
But while drama swirled around his final years as president, culminating in his mutual decision with the State Board of Education to step down last summer, Staben said student success has always been at the forefront of his mind when determining the direction of the university’s future.
“People are really easily distracted. They see either a shiny penny like a great football team or they see a problem and then accentuate that problem. They see an incident that has happened on campus and they say, ‘Oh, that’s what represents the institution.’” Staben said. “No, what represents this institution is the intellectual value that we have here and the quality of
the student that we put out.”
Looking forward, Staben said he hopes to remain at the university as a professor, as the opportune time to secure a presidency at another university has come to a close.
While his expertise remains in biology, he said there are many other philosophical questions he hopes to discuss with undergraduate students, from courses on higher education leadership to classes which discuss the future of the United States.
With his time at the helm coming to a close, Staben said he hopes incoming UI President Scott Green continues his student-first mentality, emphasizing how quickly time can fly in a leadership role.
“No one has infinite time, you have a window of time. It’s during that window that you try and do the best job you can and have the greatest impact,” he said. “If you have an institution that is clearly very successful for students, students will come to appreciate that.”
As for his off time, Staben said it will take a while to adjust to his decreased responsibilities. Aside from wanting to bicycle from Canada to Mexico, he said he looks forward to reconnecting with students at the faculty level, something his leadership role often did not allow for much of.
“Even as a faculty member, you can still lead by example and particularly by what you do in the classroom,” Staben said. “I always find it invigorating and refreshing when I do get an opportunity to spend time with students.”
Brandon Hill can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @brandonmtnhill