The Stakes for Wake

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“Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” For a long time, Peter Rodriguez has lived by that mantra.

The saying—hidden in the back of his childhood encyclopedia in an entry about the religion Zoroastrianism—stuck out to teenage Rodriguez as “pure and clean and simple.” Later, he thought it represented the purpose of a liberal arts education: The university prompts “good thoughts” by letting students learn from great minds and start to think for themselves. “Good words” and “good deeds” follow.

Now though, Rodriguez is learning to adopt a new saying: pro humanitate. That Latin phrase, which translates to “for humanity,” is Wake Forest University’s motto, where Rodriguez took office as its 15th president this month.

Rodriguez comes to Wake Forest at a pivotal time. The university, which instructs roughly 5,600 undergraduates, is seeking to expand enrollment to bolster tuition revenue. That comes after the Winston-Salem school fell out of the top 30 in the U.S. News and World Report Best National University rankings in 2023 for the first time in almost 30 years. It was largely because of changes to the rankings’ methodology, but it was nonetheless a blow. And the university is trying to hang onto its position in a storied athletic conference with a smaller budget and alumni base than most of its competitors.

Meanwhile, Wake Forest has what associate professor of mathematics Jason Parsley calls a “leadership vacuum.” The school has an interim provost, and the acting dean of its business school is set to leave August 1. Susan Wente, Rodriguez’s predecessor as president, stepped down after only five years, the shortest tenure in the job in almost a century. The previous five full presidents held the office for an average of 18 years.

Wake Forest’s trustees emphasized Rodriguez’s business expertise when they announced him as the next president in May. They pointed out that as dean of Rice University’s Business School, he started an undergraduate business school, doubled master of business administration enrollment, and launched the university’s first online graduate degree.

Rodriguez told The Assembly he feels ready to take on Wake Forest’s challenges given his long history in education. His father was a professor at Texas A&M University, where Rodriguez also earned his bachelor’s degree. He attended Princeton University for his master’s and doctorate in economics, and he was a professor at Texas A&M and administrator at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business before joining Rice.

“Wake is at a time that it can be really optimistic about looking forward, but it will need to adapt as every university does to a changing landscape,” Rodriguez said.

Still, faculty, students, and current and former officials said in interviews that Wake Forest must maintain the small, student-focused culture they cherish, while also adapting to keep up with financial and athletic pressures.

“There is no guarantee any academic institution just survives,” said Rogan Kersh, a former Wake Forest provost who now works at New York University.

A Small School

Wake Forest’s size has always been both a selling point and a concern. On the one hand, staying fairly small allows for the emphasis on undergraduate teaching and the liberal arts that students and faculty say is the ethos of a Wake Forest education.

“We’re a smaller school, we’ve always been teacher-focused, classroom-focused in our work, and I think that enhances the university’s value proposition,” said Steve Virgil, chair of the Faculty Senate and clinical professor of law. 

But staying small is expensive.

Kersh said that compared to other private schools in North Carolina like Duke University, which has around 6,500 undergraduates, Wake Forest’s revenue depends more on students. 

In fiscal year 2025, around 51% of Wake Forest’s university-only operating revenue—excluding its health system—came from student tuition and fees. At Duke, tuition and fees made up 15% of operating revenue. (Wake Forest and Duke include somewhat different definitions of university-only revenue in their audited financial statements, which likely affects that calculation.) Duke’s health system also generates about eight times as much patient revenue as Wake Forest’s.

This reliance on tuition is a result of a few factors. For one, although Wake Forest was founded in 1834, it finished its move to Winston-Salem from its namesake town of Wake Forest in 1956. Kersh said that the move drained the university endowment’s coffers to “almost nothing.” 

Wake Forest’s endowment stood at $2.1 billion as of the end of June 2025, the last fiscal year in which data is available, while Duke’s endowment sat at $12.3 billion.

Also, Wake Forest is an R2 Carnegie-classified institution, which means that while it engages in a significant level of research, it does not bring in as much funding as peers at the R1 level, like Duke. In fiscal year 2025, the university and the health system received more than $430 million in government and private grants combined, compared to $1.5 billion for Duke. This number is also expected to decline, given federal cuts to research spending.

Finally, Wake Forest’s alumni base is smaller than some competitors’, making it more challenging to raise as much money through philanthropy.

So, Kersh said, if the university wants to expand its budget, it can either raise tuition—a challenge when the cost of attendance is already approaching $100,000—or enroll more students.

“The brute financial statistics of it make it difficult to be a small school the way Wake is,” Kersh said.

Jeanne Whitman Bobbitt, the outgoing chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, said Wake Forest is in a “very strong position.” Elon University, for example, which enrolls around 6,200 undergraduates and does not have a health system, relied on student tuition and fees for 64% of its fiscal year 2025 operating revenue and its endowment stood at $398.1 million.

Still, Wake Forest thinks it needs to enroll more students. The board approved a period of modest growth last year. Under the plan, Wake Forest forecasts an undergraduate population of around 6,200 students by the 2029-30 academic year, an increase of about 600 students in four years. Wake Forest simultaneously launched a capital campaign, set to conclude in 2034.

“Modest enrollment growth will provide immediate funding to deploy in service to our priorities; the campaign will extend our reach and ambition,” Wente said in a press release at the time. “Together, these sources of funding will position Wake Forest to act with both good judgment and vision.”

The university has already started to up its enrollment. The class that entered last fall is its largest ever, at 1,545 students. Wake Forest is also set to provide free tuition to all North Carolina residents from families making less than $200,000 beginning this fall, which could help the school appeal to a broader range of applicants.

Although Rodriguez was not president when the planned growth was approved, he said he supports the move as a means of expanding offerings and financing new investments.

“I do think we would be better if we were a little bit bigger,” Rodriguez said.

‘Drastic Drop’

Kersh noted that this is Wake Forest’s third period of planned enrollment increases since 2000. However, he said there is more unpredictability this time about whether the university can meet its goals. 

Like other schools, Wake Forest is monitoring what higher education experts call the “demographic cliff,” which refers to projections that the U.S. has reached its peak traditional college-aged population, and the number of college-bound 18-year-olds will decline over the next few years.

As a result, “there’s five or six or eight institutions that are competing fiercely” for college students that Wake Forest might typically have seen enroll, Kersh said.

“I do think we would be better if we were a little bit bigger.”

Peter Rodriguez, Wake Forest president

That makes the hubbub over the drop in the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings more significant. Last year, Wake Forest was ranked No. 51, its lowest ranking ever.

In 2023, U.S. News reworked its ranking methodology to exclude factors where Wake Forest had success, like small class sizes and instruction by faculty with a terminal degree. It also added new considerations related to faculty research, first-generation graduation rates, and graduate income. Robert Kelchen, a higher education professor at the University of Tennessee, said Wake Forest’s drop was largely a result of this methodology change, which also affected many similar private colleges.

In the short term, the rankings did not affect enrollment numbers; Wake Forest received a record 21,000 applications last year.

“I don’t think we’re the least bit concerned about reputation. We haven’t sensed any reputational damage,” Whitman Bobbitt said.

But longer term, a lower ranking might affect how prospective students view the university, Kersh said.

“All of us in higher ed decry it, deplore it, lament its power, and yet if we’re ranked high, as we did for many years at Wake, we emblazoned it,” Kersh said.

He added that international students in particular care about the U.S. News rankings. That’s a problem because they generally pay full tuition. In fiscal year 2024, international student tuition and fees revenue comprised around 11% of the university’s total, despite making up around 8% of the total student population. This problem will only be exacerbated by federal immigration restrictions, with The Assembly estimating that Wake Forest could lose up to $8.8 million a year in revenue as a result.

Harper Lindsay, a rising junior and speaker of the house in Wake Forest’s student government, called the shift in the rankings a “drastic drop.” Although she personally does not give much weight to them, she said other students do.

“A lot of people could feel almost cheated, like you apply to an institution, you decide to go, you pay, and then stuff seems to be downgrading,” she said.

Lindsay also said that while she supports boosting enrollment, some students are concerned that Wake Forest can’t accommodate the growth its leaders are planning.

This spring, Wake Forest’s Student Government passed a resolution opposing further enrollment increases after hearing from students about overcrowding concerns in housing, dining, and other campus facilities. For instance, the resolution says that the main dining hall on campus, the Pit, currently holds 700 seats, more than double its intended capacity of 300.

“Continued enrollment growth without timely expansion of facilities risks eroding the intimate, student-centered undergraduate experience that defines Wake Forest University,” the resolution says. 

Lindsay said students raised concerns about housing in particular, with some first-years unable to live in South Forest, the section of campus where new students historically resided. This year, juniors returning from semesters abroad as well as seniors expressed frustration with the housing process, with seniors being placed in a lottery to access on-campus housing.

In an April 29 statement to the student newspaper, The Old Gold & Black, Matt Clifford, associate vice president for campus life and dean of students, said that all students who requested on-campus housing in 2026 were accommodated, even if the process felt different.

“The brute financial statistics of it make it difficult to be a small school the way Wake is.”

Rogan Kersh, former Wake Forest provost

Rodriguez told The Assembly that he dealt with similar concerns at Rice, which is also expanding enrollment.

“I did not read the student message as growth is bad because we don’t want more classmates. I read it more as growth has to come with making Wake better for every student,” he said. “I totally get that.”

Whitman Bobbitt and Kersh both said they think the fears that Wake Forest will lose itself by increasing enrollment are somewhat overblown. Whitman Bobbitt said that Wake Forest is “never going to be a huge school.”

Kersh recalled reading about how a previous period of enrollment growth at Wake Forest had elicited horror from faculty and alumni. But that was in the early 20th century when the plan was only to grow to around 750 students.

“There’s a way to scale that keeps the essence of Wake,” Kersh said.

Rodriguez agreed, hypothesizing that what community members really value is the small culture the school has built, not maintaining a specific size.

“Clearly, they’re related, but I worry a little bit less about just adhering to a particular target,” Rodriguez said.

‘A Fundamental Moment’

A key piece of that culture is Wake Forest’s place in the Tobacco Road firmament of college sports. But that, too, is experiencing upheaval.

Since 2021, student athletes have been able to profit off their name, image, and likeness (NIL), and starting last year, schools could begin sharing revenue with athletes. Schools are now allowed to offer scholarships to all players, though roster limits also took effect.

Wake Forest has the smallest student body of any school in the Power Four athletic conferences, with the smallest football stadium as well. It had the lowest total athletic revenue of all 18 Atlantic Coast Conference schools in the 2024-25 academic year and received the lowest distribution of money from the ACC that year, except for four schools that got partial shares. The funds are partially based on postseason success and TV viewership. 

Karen Weaver, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and expert in college athletics, described having to balance a smaller budget with the demands of the NIL era as “a fundamental moment” for Wake Forest. She said that the school will have to figure out whether it can realistically compete with its smaller alumni base and less-prominent national brand. 

At the same time, the specter of conference realignment looms. In 2025, the ACC settled lawsuits with Florida State University and Clemson University after they challenged the conference’s control over media rights. As part of the agreement, the fee to leave the ACC drops over time from $165 million this year to $75 million in 2030-31, right around when other conferences’ media contracts come up for renewal. 

“There’s opportunities to grow more revenue, but it takes a lot of creativity.”

Karen Weaver, University of Pennsylvania college athletics expert

If the big football schools leave for wealthier conferences, Wake Forest could be left behind, Weaver said. Wake Forest’s athletics program was valued at $405 million by CNBC in 2025, the third lowest in the ACC. Parsley, the math professor who is the chair of the Faculty Senate’s athletics committee, said Wake Forest has already begun contingency planning in preparation.

Lindsay said that being in the ACC is a draw for prospective students, with Saturdays and social events structured around sports. In an April statement, Wente said a 2022 study found “competitive Division I athletics” were a factor for both prospective and admitted students in why they chose to enroll at Wake Forest.

The university is already taking steps to enhance sports revenue and upgrade the fan experience with a new mixed-use project near the school’s major athletic stadiums. Known as The Grounds, the 100-acre development will include a pedestrian-friendly “retail village,” with shops and restaurants, residential living, and office space expected to be leased by Wake Forest. It will connect to the main campus via a walking trail. 

Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said the project will be a boon for the city and he was glad to work with state Rep. Donny Lambeth, who represents Forsyth County, to secure $35 million in state funds and $4 million in city funds for the project. The first phase of construction is expected to finish in August 2027.

Mixed-use developments have become a popular tool for universities. UNC-Chapel Hill is also exploring a project that could include a new basketball arena, and the owners of the Lenovo Center, where NC State plays men’s basketball, plan to add housing and retail nearby.

Weaver said Wake Forest could also try to lean into less conventionally popular sports to build its brand. The Demon Deacons have won six national championships since 2002, with consistent success in men’s tennis, men’s soccer, baseball, and field hockey. 

“There’s opportunities to grow more revenue, but it takes a lot of creativity, and it does take investment up front,” Weaver said.

Rodriguez told The Assembly that under his leadership, Wake Forest will not abandon its commitment to competing at the Division I level but will “be as competitive as we can with the resources we have.” 

He cautioned that he “can only feel so good in this environment. I think you sort of wake up every day and wonder what will be the future.”

‘Amazing Bones’

Despite the challenges, the prevailing feelings Wake Forest community members expressed in interviews were hope and optimism. Kersh said that Wake Forest has “amazing bones” that can carry it through difficulties.

“We’ve groaned and moaned a lot together about Wake’s small size and what that means financially, but it also means you can try things that are almost impossible to do in a giant institution with big bureaucracies,” he said. 

When Rodriguez first got to Rice, he told the president at the time, David Leebron, that he wanted to launch the business school’s first undergraduate program. But Leebron was skeptical and told him to wait until he built up his reputation. 

A few years later, Rodriguez launched an undergraduate business major, then created the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. In fall 2021, only three Rice students majored in business, but by fall 2024, that number grew to 503. 

Whitman Bobbitt said the search committee wanted a president who could engage in that sort of strategic planning. She said his “enterprise mindset” will serve Wake Forest well. 

“One of the things that’s true about presidencies is they have a very large economic role in addition to the academic role,” said Rodriguez, an expert in international trade, economic history, and public finance. “So that background really helps you think about how to get the most out of the resources that you have for the mission we’re pursuing, and that’s really how I frame it.”

Lindsay said she believes Rodriguez will be the type of president who meets students in the dining halls and around campus. Virgil hoped that Rodriguez would continue Wente’s tradition of attending every Faculty Senate meeting, while Joines called on Rodriguez to make himself available to the broader community. 

“Different leadership styles can all work very well at Wake. What feels essential to me is to steep oneself in the essence of the institution,” Kersh said.

As Rodriguez takes the helm, he’ll need to combine his original focus on cultivating “good thoughts” with Wake Forest’s action-oriented motto of pro humanitate.

As he put it in a lecture at UVA, “the sum of your actions will become who you are.”