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 know 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 organization because of its complexity, because of how multi-layered it is, 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 perspective 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 this job, I knew that I wouldn’t see that kind of impact day-to-day. I wouldn’t walk into the Harkin Center and see how a policy brief that we had published the day before had changed lives, so I had to orient myself to a conception of impact that is less immediate, less immediately apparent, but also had the potential to have broader effects. Our disability office has global outreach. Our retirement security policy office is taking on big pressing challenges that concern every American worker. The work that the wellness and nutrition office is doing now in agricultural economics and water quality, environment, the links of all of those things to cancer and other health outcomes could have massive impact on literally millions of lives. I’ve had to find a different way of orienting myself toward what’s gratifying. It’s been an interesting puzzle to solve in terms of a slight shift in perspective.

What initially interested you in this position?

I would say that one of the qualifications I bring to this role is one that I have brought to all of the roles, and that’s curiosity. I am, I hesitate to say naturally curious, but I’ve grown up having my curiosity rewarded, and I’ve been lucky in that way. My curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Partly, that’s maybe the disposition of the scholar, but I bring with me an impulse to ask questions, to find things out, to know more. It’s very difficult to bore me. I’ve learned to take an interest, and I think taking an interest is something you actively do. We often say, ‘Well, that’s not interesting.’ It’s not the thing itself that’s interesting, it’s whether or not you actively take an interest in it. I’ve learned to take an interest in most things that cross my paths, and I saw this as an opportunity to exercise my curiosity to learn something new. I’m not by any means a policy expert. I’m a news junkie. I listen interminably to podcasts from dawn till bedtime if I’m not trying to get work done. I read three or four newspapers a day, and I’m listening to Iowa Public Radio and National Public Radio a lot, so I have always been in touch with politics and policy and culture and world affairs, from the local to the global. But the nuts and bolts of the policy work is new to me. I’m very fortunate, and I think those whom the Harkin Institute serves are fortunate, too, that we have on our staff some really well informed, committed expert policy directors.

For someone like me? That’s like having a chance to go to college again. I get to major in retirement security policy, or environmental policy, or disability policy and outreach, and I’ve got these great teachers. That also means that because I can have that level of confidence in the expertise that the policy directors bring to the work we’re doing. I don’t have to worry about that. I can focus on the high-level or mid-level organizational matters. I can work on building culture, on structuring collaborative engagement in a formal and predictable way. When I took the role of executive director, I became the fourth person filling that role in one way or another in the three years after the director who’d been here the longest, Joseph Jones, left in 2022. 

There was work to be done in terms of building or reinforcing a sense of stability in the culture. I don’t mean to say that the Harkin Institute was saddled with dysfunction or anything like that, but when you’re in an organization where leadership changes that rapidly for whatever reason, one of the things you’re looking for in leadership is a sense of stability. The fact that I had been at Drake since 2003, so 22 years, I hope gives the staff and Drake leadership confidence that I’m all in when it comes to sitting in this chair or being out in the community and building those connections and really moving the institute forward.

What are some of your top priorities or goals as the director of the Harkin Institute?

A big part of my role is inspiring confidence in those we serve, inspiring confidence in donors and foundations who fund what we do, inspiring confidence in the organizations that we partner with and in terms of my main priorities are raising the profile of our work, expanding the scope of what we’re able to do within our primary policy areas, deepening our impact in the places that we’re working, and then ensuring long-term financial and organizational viability of the institute.

You said you are working to reframe how you think about impact. What is one example of an impact you have witnessed since starting this role?

The decision to host the panel discussion and roundtable discussion around the Central Iowa source water quality report that Polk County supervisors had commissioned two years ago, and it was only coincidence that that report was being released the same month that Central Iowa was on the verge of a drinking water and nitrate pollution crisis. It’s only because of the really good work of the Des Moines Water Works, and because of the general community-mindedness of Des Moines residents in obeying water use restrictions that we didn’t really get into crisis territory. 

But the confluence of those two factors — the release of the water quality report with a water quality near-crisis in Central Iowa — and our decision to host the unveiling of that report in that discussion, that opportunity kind of fell in our lap in that way. I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to do to take that opportunity and say, now, how can we build community engagement? How can we convene members, not just of the Des Moines community, but communities all over Iowa to talk about policy to figure out solutions to these issues to work across the so-called rural-urban divide to reach consensus solutions. We’re not there yet, but we are working with farmers and conservationists and environmentalists and health care advocates and consumers of water and breathers of air to host those convenings where the people in the community, members of industry, farmers, activists, advocates, policymakers come together to work on 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 2026 Iowa legislative session begins soon. What is the Harkin Institute’s role in engaging with legislators and policymaking?

Every legislator in the Iowa Legislature is going to receive from us the Harkin Institute’s 2026 Iowa legislative guide and it is going to draw their attention to live, urgent issues in the policy areas that we touch: labor and employment, disability policy, retirement security and long-term care, and wellness and nutrition. Our policy directors right now are working on the briefs that they will present as part of that guide for each one of their policy areas. The three primary purposes of that are to put the issues on the radars of our legislators. The second will be to give them access to reliable information and insights that they need to make informed decisions about how to move forward. That’s the extent of the advocacy. We desperately want legislators and policymakers to be working with reliable, unbiased, politically uninflicted data and information. So get the issues on the radar, point legislators in the direction of actionable, reliable information about them and then also to make it known to members of the public and the media that we have put these issues in front of legislators, so that members of the public, members of the media feel like they can hold legislators accountable to those issue areas.

What is your favorite podcast or one you would recommend to others and why?

Asking me to choose a favorite podcast is like asking a parent to choose their favorite child. I listen to hours of podcasts every day. For news and analysis, I rely on “The Ezra Klein Show,” “Interesting Times” hosted by Ross Douthat and “The Daily,” hosted by Michael Barbaro — all from the New York Times. Avery Trufelman’s “Articles of Interest,” which provides deep dives into the cultural history of fashion trends from PRX’s Radiotopia, Willa Paskin’s “Decoder Ring” (which investigates the origins of offbeat cultural phenomena, from Slate), and Alli Ward’s independently produced “Ologies” (which features interviews with experts on arcane subjects of all kinds) round out my cultural-literacy listening. And, for historical knowledge, I turn to “The Rest is History” with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook and “The History of English” with Kevin Stroud. And, of course, I highly recommend “Canary in a Cornfield,” the agriculture, environment and sustainable foodways podcast hosted by the Harkin Institute’s very own Adam Shriver, director of wellness and nutrition policy.

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At a glance:

Hometown: Shelbyville, Ind.

Resides in: Des Moines

Family: Wife Yasmina Din Madden, author and Drake University English professor; son Graham; and dog Augustus

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Latin and English literature from DePauw University; doctorate in English from Indiana University Bloomington

Contact: craig.owens@drake.edu