Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs, Fred Volkmann, will be retiring this month after 31 years at Washington University.

During his time as vice chancellor, Volkmann has worked to make the University nationally and internationally recognized as an elite institution of higher education.

In honor of Volkmann’s 31 years of service, the University has named him Vice Chancellor Emeritus and established a scholarship in his and his wife’s names.

When Volkmann first began work at the University, he says the general public did not recognize the Washington University name.

In addition, he says that the public did not realize Washington University was in St. Louis, and that it was often mistaken for other universities. At the time, Volkmann says, there were about 15 other universities whose names included the word “Washington.”

“That was one of the first challenges,” he said. “How do you rebrand an institution that has already been confused with many other Washingtons? Reputations in higher education are very, very slow to develop…Higher education is amongst the slowest to accept newcomers…I knew that I had a really interesting challenge [to market the University].”

Volkmann addressed this challenge by reaching out to the media. He visited over 200 different news media outlets and spoke to editors and reporters to find out what they knew about the University. According to Volkmann, about 90 percent of the people he spoke to had never heard of Washington University in St. Louis.

“We didn’t have… name recognition in the news media,” Volkmann said. “If the media don’t know who you are, why would the public know who you are?”

To get the University’s name out, Volkmann lead the University in creating several news services that provided newspapers, news magazines, radio stations, TV stations and other media about news happenings at the University.

“Our approach was always that ‘We’re the best place you’ve never heard of,’” Volkmann said.

Within a year of Volkmann’s arrival, the New York Times ran a half-page feature on Washington University.

Volkmann expects that 90 percent of the original 200 newsrooms that he visited at the start of his career would recognize the Washington University name today.

“My job, as I always tell people, is to hold a mirror up to reality and reflect it…at the news media and say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ We also point that mirror at alumni, at the parents [and] at prospective students,” he said.

“This has been an institution that has built its profile on a global scale…It’s been a great ride.”