Monica Lounsbery believes that everybody plays different roles throughout their lives.
“You go to work, you play a role. You have a relationship. You play a role. You’re a mom, so you play a role,” Lounsbery said. “But I decided, ‘I want to invent this role of this entertainer.’”
When she takes a step away from her role as Wichita State’s new provost, Lounsbery enjoys performing.
“And you know what happened? I thought I was having a midlife crisis, and people were like, ‘I like you more now that I know this,’” Lounsbery said.
While she left her band, Higher Ed, along with her last role as the dean of the College of Health and Human Services at California State University, Long Beach, she has hopes of revisiting her music in Wichita, too.
Lounsbery said she’s been talking with other faculty about potentially putting on a show for faculty, students or both.
Lounsbery has to keep her creative side somewhat quiet. Since moving to Wichita, she lives in an apartment and doesn’t want to bother her neighbors, which makes practicing difficult. Despite that, she said she doesn’t want to stop performing.
“We haven’t figured it out,” she said. “That’s okay.”
While Lounsbery hasn’t figured out when her first Wichita performance is yet, she has been thinking about her goals for the future of WSU.
Lounsbery started training in January and moved into her position officially throughout the summer. She said she really admired Wichita State’s applied learning model, calling it “the most extraordinary thing (she’d) ever seen.”
“Not because you do (applied learning), but because the volume of which we do it and the opportunities that we, therefore, afford our students – to meet people that will eventually employ them, to build real workforce skills and skills that are going to be helpful to them,” Lounsbery said.
The applied learning model puts the focus on real-world experience paired with education to connect students with companies in their industry before they graduate. Lounsbery said she felt that WSU doesn’t brag about that enough.
“I’ve been in a lot of institutions before, but I’ve never seen this,” Lounsbery said. “People who are in our own system make it seem like it’s kind of common.”
She said the applied learning model puts WSU above other universities.
“It is something that’s very special and something that I think puts Wichita State at, really, the top of the food chain,” Lounsbery said.
Despite her admiration for the applied learning model at WSU, Lounsbery said she’s also focused on looking forward and asking, “What’s the 2.0?”
For Lounsbery, part of WSU “2.0” is the new biomedical campus under construction in downtown Wichita, set to open in summer 2027. She believes that she brings a type of experience to this project that many others at WSU may not share: she worked on a very similar project during her time at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Holding multiple positions — vice provost, associate vice provost, department chair and associate dean for faculty affairs in the School of Medicine — she was a part of building UNLV’s School of Medicine.
“Having that experience and learning about Wichita wanting to build a biomedical campus, I was so excited about that because I kinda felt like I’ve been through some of those things,” Lounsbery said.
She said her climb through higher education administration came from a drive to do better than the ones currently holding those positions.
“I guess as a faculty member, I always felt like I could do a better job than that person is at being a department chair,” Lounsbery said. “And then when I became a department chair, I was like, ‘I can do a better than you as a dean.’”
As she rose through the ranks, she learned more about the inner workings of a university, like the pressures universities and their administration face.
Despite that pressure, she doesn’t let the role of a higher education administrator keep her from her hobbies and family.
“It’s kind of fun,” Lounsbery said. “I love it.”
