Executive Insider: Johannes Strobel

A quarter-century after coming to America to study at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the professional path of Johannes Strobel has taken the native of Germany to Springfield, where he started work a couple of months ago as dean of the Graduate College at Missouri State University.

Aside from learning the day-to-day operations at his new employer, Strobel is planning new research doctorate programs for MSU.

His arrival at the university comes as legislation was approved and signed into law this year that allows the university to independently offer doctoral programs. The legislation removes the University of Missouri’s exclusive authority to grant research doctorates and certain professional degrees. The basis of the restriction came from MSU’s approved name change in 2006, when it agreed not to offer engineering programs and doctoral programs unless they were in cooperation with MU, according to SBJ archives.

It’s a busy time for the Queen City newcomer, he says.

“I’m meeting a lot of people and, in between, solving things that come to my desk and trying to find time for planning more vision parts and where we want to be in the next 10 years,” Strobel says.

When the MSU job opened up, Strobel says his familial ties to Missouri, which includes his two children, were a consideration. But he also was aware of MSU and its desire to expand its educational pathways through doctoral degrees, noting its public affairs mission also was an attractor. The mission’s three pillars are ethical leadership, cultural competence and community engagement, according to the university’s website.

“The vote didn’t happen yet when I signed my contract, but it was close,” he says regarding House Bill 419 and Senate Bill 160, passed in May. “But that was not the only reason I came here. I think it’s really an underappreciated gem. We are a large university for what we are. We are very broad, and the breadth of things that you can study here are huge. And the public affairs mission is unique. You don’t find many universities say, ‘Let us be in the community,’ and actually explore what that means.”

Strobel came to Springfield from the Lone Star State, where he previously served as associate dean of research and graduate studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. He succeeded Julie Masterson, who retired at the end of June from her role as Graduate College dean and associate provost at MSU. Masterson had led the Graduate College since 2015. Prior to Strobel’s Aug. 18 arrival on campus, MSU Graduate College Associate Dean Carrisa Hoelscher served as interim dean.

Strobel was among three finalists for the position, all of whom were external candidates. In his associate dean role at UTEP, where he was employed for three years, Strobel says he was a hybrid worker. He worked in both El Paso and Missouri, where he maintained a residence in Columbia to be close to his two children, Wolfy, 16, and Fritz, 11, who live there with his ex-wife.

Growing up in Bavaria, roughly an hour from Munich, Strobel says Missouri feels like a second home to him. He came to the state in 2000 to study at MU, where he earned a doctorate in information science and learning technologies.

Strobel’s career experience includes faculty and administrative roles at MU, Texas A&M University and Purdue University.

At the Graduate College, which has its offices on the third floor of Carrington Hall, Strobel says he leads a small staff of around 14. The work includes processing graduate admissions and recruitment audits, as well as documentation for graduate assistants hired off campus.

Clarenda Phillips, provost and vice president for academic affairs at MSU, is another campus newcomer. She began her new job a few weeks prior to Strobel but after being hired in March was able to meet the Graduate College dean finalists when they participated in open forums on campus in the spring.

Phillips says she walked away impressed after her meeting with Strobel, adding that feeling continues as she becomes more familiar with her new colleague.

“He is being very intentional about learning Missouri State and how our public affairs mission fits in with what we do in the community,” she says. “There’s not a meeting I have with him where he is not talking about what it means to serve this community, this region of the state.”

Phillips says Strobel, who describes himself as very process oriented and data driven, isn’t content to just rely on historical patterns of how best to serve students.

“He sort of has an outward way of thinking in terms of the graduate programs we have and our possible Ph.D. programs, ensuring that what we create is something modern as opposed to relying on those old traditional academic programs,” Phillips says, adding doctorate programs for the Graduate College is “part of his charge.”

Phillips says she expects Strobel to get three to five Ph.D. programs started within a five-year timeline.

P.K. Imbrie, vice provost for faculty effectiveness at the University of Oklahoma, says he’s known Strobel for almost 20 years. The two met when working in the same department at Purdue University, where Strobel was hired to serve as director for Inspire, a research institute for pre-college engineering.

“As we created a graduate program and it started to expand, the thing I saw about Johannes, he was full of energy,” Imbrie says. “He had lots of really cool ideas, especially in the K-12 arena, ways of bringing youngsters into the profession because part of our goal as developing a department of engineering education was to enhance our retention in engineering.”

Imbrie says he left for Texas A&M around 2012 and successfully recruited Strobel to come there to do similar work.

“If I was going to say it in the most blunt way, I don’t think there’s ever a challenge that he backed away from,” Imbrie says. “Creating something from nothing is not for everybody, but it’s something that I look at him as being particularly good at.”

A goal-setter by nature, Strobel wants to increase interdisciplinary programming for the various colleges on campus. He says an example could include utilizing artificial intelligence in hospitality tourism, which involves MSU’s College of Natural and Applied Sciences and School of Hospitality and Agricultural Leadership.

He’s also setting up structure for the doctorate programs.

“I am trying to choose a structure that makes us more agile,” he says. “For that, a lot of awareness of people has to change. PhD programs are expensive in this day and time when federal funding is declining for research.”

Graduate College enrollment at MSU dipped 8% this year from its 3,901 students enrolled in fall 2024, according to officials.

“A lot of our graduate students are international students, and so they didn’t get visas,” Strobel says. “We saw a dip, and that of course is then a dip in certain programs. Computer science, project management saw probably the bigger dips because they had a lot of international students.”

Strobel says building out accelerated master’s degree programs and increasing online programming is part of the goal to boost enrollment. Roughly half of the Graduate College students already take online courses, he says.

Strobel says he’s excited about the opportunity to create new doctorate programs at MSU, in keeping with the university’s strategic plan.

“We have doctorates here – practitioner-oriented doctorates, perfectly fine – but we didn’t have research doctorates,” he says. “Where else in the world right now in the U.S. can you find a place where no research doctorate exists, and you can actually be part of the design from scratch?”

What those programs look like and how they can work not just for MSU, but the community and even region, are questions Strobel is pondering.

“I sometimes describe myself as an academic entrepreneur,” he says. “I’m trying to do new things and that can be intrapreneur inside the company, making things better, but it’s also stimulating new things. I see an environment here that is open for new things.”