Dr. Brian McGuire has worked with Grand Canyon University and Grand Canyon Education for 31 years. Who better to ask where he ranks in full-time Lopes longevity, just before today’s last day and his retirement?
Data has always been his game.
He click-clicks away, rattling off retirees, such as Faith Weese and Keith Baker, eliminating some folks he remembered in theology who have since retired, before settling on theatre professor Claude Pensis, who outranks him with his 42 years.
McGuire smiles, saying he gets confused with Pensis a lot – “kind of like twins.”
They couldn’t be further apart in the way they tell stories.
“I guess I liked that I could tell a story with data that can help to improve the outcome of people around me,” said McGuire, 67. “We can make our programs better, we can make the food service better, we can make the dorms better, by having an understanding of data.”
As executive director in Institutional Research, McGuire was a key figure in compliance and accreditation reporting to state and federal education officials. He made sense of what they needed and where to gather the data to support it.
He realized the importance of the role early on.
“There was one time when we had a visit from the Department of Education, and they were taking exception to some things, and I ended up being one of the people to convince some of their staff that they were wrong and we were right in what we were doing,” he said of days early in his tenure. “That was back when we were struggling and buildings 1-3 were three separate one-story buildings, so that was pretty important because it kept us going.”
McGuire said he took a chance coming to GCU in 1994 as a chemistry professor at Northeast Missouri State University (now Truman State). Back then, GCU had fewer than 1,000 students, and the entire faculty and staff fit into one small lecture hall. Today, there is a combined ground and online student enrollment of nearly 125,000 on a 300-acre campus filled with buildings.
As the university began its growth, McGuire found an avenue to make good on a regret. As a young man who grew up in Wisconsin, he sought the sciences instead of going into computers. “I’ve always been a computer geek,” he said, using what was then new technology in his doctorate to support his thesis.
So by 2000, he transitioned to data analytics, and as GCU President Brian Mueller and others came aboard in 2008 to start what was even more profound growth, McGuire was busy gathering data for accreditations and other government requirements.
“It comes back to the single sentence that Brian Mueller said: What can we do to help the students achieve academic success? Academic compliance is a long way away from the immediate thing of helping students to graduate, yet it's right there, in the middle of all that. You can't do it if you're not accredited,” he said.
It could get tricky. Data can tell stories you don’t always like. Less ethical people find ways to massage the numbers, he said. But working with Grand Canyon Education Chief Technology Officer Dilek Marsh and Mueller, he knew GCU would do it the right way.
“Even if the data doesn't necessarily look good and favorable at the moment, we're still going to proceed with handling things in the correct fashion,” he said. “When push came to shove, they always stood behind what we did in business analytics.
“Brian (Mueller) has always been a role model. I never, ever, in a large or small meeting heard him talk about dollars being important. It was, ‘how can we help the students achieve their academic success? The money will follow.’ Knowing that that's what your leadership valued made the work much easier.”
McGuire became a leader in analyzing the data needed for regulatory agencies, and an excellent teacher, said Marsh. "He is patient; he is very, very detailed. He will teach you every single detail there is. He will question every outlier there, find every exception, and make sure it is absolutely perfect.
"Obviously, we are going to miss him, but I'm very happy for him."
Many days, McGuire took his data problems out with him on his road bicycle, and he became an avid long-distance cyclist, in 2023 completing the grueling 750-mile Paris-Brest-Paris among other long rides. “I could think through them on the bike, right?”
A couple of days before his retirement, he got up at 2:30 a.m. to pedal 130 miles around the Valley.
It’s no surprise he plans on doing more biking in retirement and travel with partner Sonja Talley, who encouraged him to get back on the bike two years ago after members of his biking club were hit by a vehicle, some killed and badly injured, as described in a 2023 GCU News story.
“I will do the next Paris-Brest-Paris and more, maybe one more after that,” he said.
“But I'm going to miss working with the business analytics team. There was a great team, and Dilek is a wonderful supporter.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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GCU News: Brian McGuire pedals clear of tragedy to a new year of goals
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