Big shoes to fill

Matt Bolch

May 1, 2008

Atlanta's higher education landscape faces the biggest shakeup in decades with the departures of three university presidents this summer, including the heads of two of the state's research universities.

Carl V. Patton, who has been president of Georgia State University since July 1992, announced his retirement last fall. G. Wayne Clough, who has led the Georgia Institute of Technology since September 1994, was named secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in mid-March, and will be leaving in early July.

And Clark Atlanta President Walter D. Broadnax announced in February his departure from the historically black private college, effective July 31. Carlton E. Brown, who served as president of Savannah State University for nearly a decade, has assumed leadership in the interim and is considered a front-runner for the permanent post.

Both GSU and Tech can count themselves fortunate to have retained dynamic leadership for more than a decade. According to the American Council on Education, the average tenure of a university president is 8.5 years, the highest recorded average tenure in the study's history.

Part of the community, not apart from it

A 20-member search committee composed of seven members of the State Board of Regents, a similar number of GSU academics and a half-dozen others with university ties, has met twice and conducted two community forums. Applications were being accepted through last month, and the committee has not set a timetable to name Patton's replacement, although Parker Executive Search, an Atlanta-based search firm working with the committee, believes a successor can be named by summer.

Laurie C. Wilder, senior VP of Parker Executive Search, did not return phone calls from Business to Business, but a Web site set up for the GSU presidential search sheds some light on the subject.

The firm expected up to 90 nominations from campus sources and planned to recruit another 30-40 candidates. The search committee will winnow those names down to 10 candidates to interview before recommending five unranked candidates to Chancellor Erroll B. Davis, who then will recommend a successor to the Board of Regents.

While Georgia Tech already has named an interim president, that might not be necessary at GSU because its search has been going on for some time.

Under Patton's tenure, GSU has been transformed from a sleepy commuter college that happened to be located downtown into a destination school for an increasing number of traditional students. An urban planner by education, Patton opened GSU's doors wide to the Atlanta community, creating a critical mass of student housing that has revitalized downtown.

Patton put all his college degrees to work at Georgia State, remaking the university into one of the nation's premier urban campuses. "When he became the school's president, he said he wanted the school to be a part of the community, not apart from it," recalls A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress and The Atlanta Downtown Improvement District. "That's why GSU is such an integral part of the fabric of downtown. Whoever takes the reins of GSU would do well to follow that path. That unique connection and partnership has been beneficial for all parties."

Patton received doctorate and master's degrees in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley; master's degrees in urban planning and public administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and a bachelor's degree in community planning from the University of Cincinnati.

Before joining GSU, he was vice president for academic affairs at the University of Toledo and had no prior experience leading a university. During his tenure, total enrollment increased from 24,102 to the current number of 27,137. The focus on student housing has brought the average age of the freshman class down from 22 to 18, and the overall age of undergraduate students from 26 to 24.

Meanwhile, GPAs have risen from 2.82 to 3.3, and the number of bachelor degrees conferred has nearly doubled to 5,947 over the last fiscal year.

Members of the search committee have kept the names of potential replacements close to the vest, but education experts believe someone from the outside will become GSU's next president, taking the reins of more than $1 billion in new construction projects that promise to cement the university's blossoming reputation as a school of choice.

By 2015, GSU expects to have a student enrollment of 36,000 and expects one-fifth of them to live on campus, which will require more student housing beyond the 2,000-bed University Commons facility on Piedmont Avenue that opened in time for the fall 2007 semester. Foundations currently are being readied for the $250 million University Science Park, which will open in 2010 at the corner of Piedmont Avenue and Decatur Street.

"The university will need someone, I hate to use the phrase ‘change agent,' but someone who can continue to manage the phenomenal growth, interact with the Board of Regents and be a visionary leader who knows how to attract both students and funds," says M. Shawn Arnold, president of Smyrna-based Trivium Educational Consultants.

Arnold's company counsels high school students as they make college plans, and Arnold has seen GSU's reputation grow on a national level. The recent announcement that the J. Mack Robinson College of Business' part-time MBA program was ranked the fifth-best graduate school by U.S. News & World Report is a testament to GSU's burgeoning prestige, says Arnold, who believes GSU's next president will have big school experience, although not necessarily in an urban setting. An ideal candidate would be a provost or second-in-command at another university, someone with development and/or operations experience.

Georgia State has the highest possible rating from the Carnegie Foundation as a "research intensive university," and Patton spearheaded GSU's first comprehensive capital campaign that raised more than $127 million for academic programs, professorships and endowed chairs, scholarships and facilities. The university made a move to the Colonial Athletic Association in 2005 and is studying the possibility of adding a Division 1-AA football team, which would raise its stature as a traditional university while opening up new avenues of support for alumni.

Tech achieves top-tier status

Clough is taking on perhaps the most complex engineering challenge he has faced, heading the Smithsonian's 19 museums, 156 affiliated museums and nine research centers. The venerable institution has come under fire under the leadership of Lawrence M. Small, who was forced to resign from the Smithsonian, which attracts 25 million visitors annually and has a budget of $700 million. Clough also will have to deal with $2.5 billion in building repairs and improvements that threaten some of America's most-valuable artifacts.

The search for Clough's replacement also will be handled by the Board of Regents, but a committee had not been named by press time. Parker Executive Search also is handling the Tech search.

In the meantime, Gary Schuster, who has been with the university for 14 years, was named interim president shortly before Business to Business went to press. Schuster, Georgia Tech's provost and executive VP for academic affairs, takes the position July 1. He also is professor and Vasser Woolley Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Previously, he served as dean of the College of Sciences.

Like Patton, Clough left an indelible mark on the university he's led for more than a decade. The first alumnus to head Georgia Tech, Clough has raised the national stature of the university, which ranks seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities.

"Clough is without a doubt one of the top university presidents in the country, if not the world," says Joe Evans, vice chairman of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association and managing principal of the private equity firm Bankers' Capital Group. "The mark of a great CEO is that he builds an organization that outlives his tenure, and that's exactly what Wayne has done," says Evans, a 1971 industrial management graduate.

Georgia Tech has more than 18,000 students enrolled in its colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. During Clough's tenure, graduation rates have climbed from 69 percent to 78 percent, as SAT scores have risen from 1280 to 1345.

Additionally, Clough has helped raise more than $1.2 billion during two capital campaigns and increased annual research expenditures nearly 150 percent to $373 million annually.

Clough, Tech's 10th president, earned bachelor's and master's degrees in civil engineering and a doctorate in the same subject from UC-Berkeley, where Patton also attended. The new leader of the Smithsonian is one of a handful of engineers to have been twice-awarded civil engineering's oldest recognition, the Normal Medal, in 1992 and 1996.

Georgia Tech's incubator program launched 75 new companies during the past decade. In 2006 alone, 10 start-up companies were launched and another 18 were in formation. The number of patents awarded increased 193 percent during the decade.

Technology Square is another testament to Clough's leadership. The four-block area across the Downtown Connector from the Tech campus has become the commercial center of the university. It also houses a number of research development labs, including the Georgia Electronics Design Center, VentureLab and the Advanced Technology Development Center.

It remains uncertain how long the process will take to pick a successor to Clough, or whether Schuster has an inside track with his recent appointment. Tech alumni and business leaders says it's too soon to speculate on who the university's next leader will be.

"Tech has a tradition of going outside the organization for its leaders, and I hope we get someone who understands the DNA of Georgia Tech," says Stephen Fleming, a Tech graduate who returned to his alma mater in 2005 as chief commercialization officer. "Dr. Clough has been a strong supporter of Tech's commercialization efforts, and I trust that will continue under new leadership."

Clark Atlanta reinvents itself

Walter G. Broadnax's six years as president of Clark Atlanta University saw the elimination of a large deficit and the return of accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

But many of the changes he pushed through to achieve those goals, including the closing of the library services and engineering programs and successive tuition hikes, angered students and parents.

Broadnax announced his retirement, effective July 31, during the university's winter meeting in mid-February. Broadnax and Executive VP Carlton E. Brown are working together during the transition, with Brown becoming interim president on August 1. Brown served as president of Savannah State University for nearly a decade before joining Clark Atlanta in last year.

The outgoing president joined the university during a time of turmoil, with an operating deficit of between $7.5 million and $25 million (depending on how it was calculated). He gets credit for erasing the debt and helping raise $135 million in federal and private gifts, grants and contracts, but Broadnax took hits from faculty, staff and students for eliminating the library services program in 2004 and announcing the closure of the engineering department.

Broadnax worked a year past his initial five-year contract but faced increasing calls for his resignation, which culminated in a no-confidence vote among faculty members in May 2007.

In his state of the university address last spring, Broadnax touted receiving $2.6 million in grants for student recruitment and the business school. He also outlined the university's strategic plan that calls for five centers of excellence around computational intelligence for national security, mass media, business administration, urban education and cancer research and therapeutic development.

With accreditation secured for nearly another decade, the university plans to embark on a fundraising campaign, with a goal topping $100 million.

Broadnax is the second president of Clark Atlanta University, formed in 1988 by the consolidation of two historic institutions, Atlanta University (1865) and Clark College (1869). The United Methodist school is the largest of the United Negro College Fund institutions with an enrollment of more than 4,000.

The university is ranked on the Washington Monthly's 2008 list of "Best Colleges and Universities" and the U.S. News & World Report list of historically black colleges and universities (No. 24 out of 34 best).