Dr. Brian McGuire is retiring after 31 years of service at Grand Canyon University (GCU) and Grand Canyon Education. Over his tenure, McGuire played a significant role in the university’s growth and its compliance with state and federal education requirements.
Reflecting on his career, McGuire said, “I guess I liked that I could tell a story with data that can help to improve the outcome of people around me. 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 responsible for compliance and accreditation reporting. He recalled an early experience: “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. 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 joined GCU in 1994 after leaving Northeast Missouri State University (now Truman State), where he taught chemistry. At that time, GCU had fewer than 1,000 students; today it has nearly 125,000 ground and online students on a campus spanning 300 acres.
Dilek Marsh, Chief Technology Officer at Grand Canyon Education (GCE), praised McGuire’s attention to detail: “He will question every outlier there, find every exception, and make sure it is absolutely perfect.”
By 2000, McGuire shifted his focus to data analytics as GCU began expanding rapidly under President Brian Mueller’s leadership starting in 2008. On this transition he said: “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.”
McGuire emphasized integrity in handling institutional data: “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.”
Marsh described McGuire as both thorough and patient: “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.”
Outside work hours McGuire became an avid cyclist—he completed Paris-Brest-Paris (a demanding 750-mile ride) among other long-distance events—and plans more cycling adventures during retirement alongside travel with partner Sonja Talley.
“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.”
