Craig Owens: New Leader at The Harkin Institute
Craig Owens chalks up his “knack” for organizational leadership to his experience with community theater productions, starting in middle school and extending throughout college.
The small theater companies he was part of required everyone to do nearly every job on set.
“I got a sense [in] doing that of how important, in a complex project with lots of layers and lots of moving parts that are highly interdependent, how important collaboration is and how important working in a community of trust is to making that collaboration possible,” Owens said. “I think it also taught me to think about systems, about complex interlinked dynamic systems. That was partly what interested me in literary theory and philosophy of literature when I was in graduate school.”
Those lessons also informed his teaching when he came to Drake University as an English professor in 2003 and led him to raise his hand for institutional leadership roles.Among those, he co-led Drake’s institutional reaccreditation for five years, overseeing areas related to policy, integrity, budget and IT.
“What a learning experience,” he said. “You really get to no an institution when you have to write a 35,000-word report to the Higher Learning Commission. … It was really quite gratifying to see a discovery that we make in some corner of the institution mature into a material improvement in how Drake operates over the course of a couple of years.”
In 2020, Owens, 51, became the founding dean of Drake’s John Dee Bright College offering the university’s first associate degrees.
Owens hopes to bring his systems-level thinking to his new role as executive director of the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement. He was appointed in August after Matthew Reed resigned from the role in January 2025. The Harkin Institute was founded in 2013 by former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin and his wife, Ruth, as a nonpartisan policy nonprofit focused on labor and employment, people with disabilities, retirement security, and wellness and nutrition.
We recently caught up with Owens to talk more about his new role.
This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What did your involvement with institutional roles and the accreditation process teach you about Drake?
It showed me something about higher ed as much as it did about Drake in particular. What it showed me was that there’s a delicate balance between having a policy and process environment that ensures integrity, that protects its stakeholders, that guarantees quality, that advances reflective and deliberative decision making on the one hand, and having a policy or process environment that could impede the mission of an association as of its complexity, because of how multi-layered it is indeed, because of the number of individuals or viewpoints it brings into decision-making processes.So, I learned to ask the questions that would get at and help me discover where that balance is.When do you have a policy environment that allows those who are doing work in the institution to do their best work and gives them the freedom and autonomy to do it, a sense of agency and purpose without being so Byzantine that it stifles creativity or constrains the autonomy and the agency of the people who know what they’re doing? I took that viewpoint into the design and implementation of the John Dee Bright College, which took place in 2019 and 2020 with 11 other faculty members, another collaborative complex systems project launched in September 2020.
You served as the founding dean of the Bright College for six years before taking this role. What has been the biggest change for you?
If I walked into a classroom at the John Dee Bright College on Monday and then came back to the same classroom on Wednesday,I could see in just those two days the impact we were having on the lives of students in that room. They were more informed, more engaged, more self-confident. They were taking perceptible and meaningful steps toward big life goals for themselves, and we could see that happening on a day-to-day basis. When I took thi
Harkin Institute Focuses on Water Quality, Community Engagement
The Harkin Institute at Drake University is working to foster collaboration on critical issues facing Iowa, notably water quality, and is preparing to share research with state legislators as the 2026 session begins.
A key moment for the institute came with the release of a Polk County-commissioned report on Central Iowa source water quality, coinciding with a period of potential drinking water crisis due to nitrate pollution.According to the institute,proactive measures by the Des Moines Water Works and residents adhering to water use restrictions prevented a full-blown crisis.
The Harkin Institute capitalized on this timing by hosting a panel discussion and roundtable to unveil the report and initiate dialogue. The institute is now focused on building community engagement and convening diverse groups – including farmers, conservationists, environmentalists, healthcare advocates, and policymakers – to develop solutions.
“I have to believe that Polk County’s decision to fund water quality monitoring in the absence of state funding that has lapsed had something to do with the way the Harkin Institute was able to elevate and move this issue forward,”
The institute also noted Polk County’s funding of water quality monitoring, filling a gap left by lapsed state funding, as a crucial factor in their ability to address the issue.
As the 2026 Iowa legislative session approaches, the Harkin Institute plans to provide every legislator with details from their research. Further details on the specific materials being shared were not instantly available.