- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(bright music) - Once upon a time, a railroad and shipping magnate named Henry Plant built a luxury resort in a tropical no man's land.

The year was 1891 when Henry Plant's ornate Tampa Bay Hotel was built on the shores of Tampa's Hillsborough River.

The population of Tampa at the time was 5,500.

Today, the metro population is over 3 million, and that historic landmark has been transformed into one of the finest independent universities in the Southeast.

You're about to meet the man who played a leadership role in that transformation over the past 40 years, next on the Suncoast Business Forum.

- [Announcer] Suncoast Business Forum, brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

(dynamic music) - There are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the US.

For college administrators, it's a competitive challenge to attract quality students and faculty, as well as providing academic excellence and value.

University of Tampa has risen to that challenge.

When UT president Dr. Ron Vaughn joined the faculty in the 1980s, it was facing some tough challenges, but what he saw was a diamond in the rough.

Over the past 40 years, he's played a leadership role in revitalizing and reimagining the University of Tampa.

Ron, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

- Thank you, Geoff.

Pleased to be here.

- Now, a robust university, particularly in a downtown area, can be a very important economic engine.

How does University of Tampa play that role?

- It's a large business, where you're employing 1800 employees or so and thousands of students that are working off-campus and on-campus.

So all that economic activity is somewhere around a billion and a half annual economic impact, so that's very strong.

And it's also a talent attractor to the community.

And as you know from economic development conversations, the companies are frequently locating where the talent is.

Well, we provide quite a lot of that talent, not quite 3000 students a year that will graduate and in many cases stay right here in the community or in Florida.

- The main campus of the University of Tampa was a grand hotel starting from the 1890s to the 1930s, but then it turned into a university, turned into a educational institution.

How did that transformation occur?

- Well, the hotel fell on bad times with, I'll say, Henry Plant passing away in 1899.

And then the building was sold to the city for about $125,000.

And that was a place where events were held and so on.

And it was a struggle, even there, for the city to maintain that.

And the university was looking for a place to locate.

We started in 1931, but in 1933 we moved into Henry Plant's building to locate the university there.

So all the years since, that's been our main facility and where much of the activity is located, but of course now it's surrounded by about 110 acres of other buildings and facilities.

- 90 years ago, when the University of Tampa was started, there were only a handful of colleges and universities, in Tampa or in the entire state of Florida.

Now it's become a much more competitive environment.

Exactly how competitive is that and how do you view that competitive landscape?

- Well, you're right, the higher ed is very competitive.

It's become far more competitive in recent years.

And one indicator of how competitive it is, I'll just say over the last 15 years, approximately 700 colleges and universities have either merged or disappeared.

So obviously that suggests that there's intense competition and it's particularly harder for the smaller universities nowadays.

So for us at UT, you know, we've thrived, frankly, during this time period.

So we've grown and developed and built and expanded our enrollment.

Despite the competitiveness, we've done quite well.

- You came to the University of Tampa in the mid-1980s.

What was it attracted you to the University of Tampa and what condition was it in when you got there?

- Well, I did come in 1984 and actually it was about this time of the year, I came down during the winter from Illinois.

Really looking back at '84, I recall the paint was peeling on the minarets, and there were signs that the campus was not being well-maintained.

And it actually, I almost didn't come because of that.

And I thought, "Well, there's an awful lot to do here that's not being done."

But again, what I really saw was opportunity.

You know, UT had great potential.

And I could see that from, its location was a very good location.

I thought this could be much more, much bigger, much more well-developed.

I saw it in the heart of the community and started by community leaders and that indicates something as well that I liked.

I liked being at a university that was tied to and worked with the community and I thought that signified great opportunity.

- So when you got to the University of Tampa, 1984, there were 1600 students.

What was the annual budget of the university then?

What's the student population now and the budget now?

- When I got there in '84, the budget was, I'll say 20, 22 million, something of that sort.

10 years later, when I became the president in '95, it was 28 million.

So since then, we've grown to be about 430 million in our operating revenue.

And our students have moved from the, I'll say 16 or 1700 full-time in '84, only 1,420 in '95, so it actually shrunk for several years.

But since '95, we've grown basically every year, and now at over 11,000 students.

- Let's talk about your formative years.

Let's talk about your family, growing up in the Midwest, your parents, tell us about that.

- Well, I grew up in downstate Illinois.

Most people assume that you're in Chicago, but no, I'm down sort of in central Illinois, close to the Indiana border, in a little town called Paris.

Population about 8,500, then and now, it's 8,500.

But it was a good place to grow up, kind of a quiet community.

You know, I had, there were three boys in the family, so three brothers.

Mom and Dad were people that encouraged basic values.

You know, you work hard, you do your best, you have values and are regularly involved in church and in the community.

My dad had built a small business on providing artificial arms, legs, hearing aids, and things like that to people.

He himself had lost his legs at 16 working on the railroad.

The railroad didn't signal when they backed up, knocked him off, and ran over his, and so he lost his legs at 16.

And from my years in growing up, I was frankly inspired by him, 'cause I saw the good that he would do with people that had special needs and he did things that people didn't think that they could do and inspired them in their own lives.

So I learned lessons from him like that, and of course, lessons in building a business.

Anyway, my mom worked hard as well and was creative in crafts and things of that sort, so I probably picked up some of that as well, an interest in art and things, still today.

But we grew up near a lake and woods and so on in the area, so I learned to love the outdoors.

Spent a lot of time on the water, still have a love of fishing today as a result of growing up and learning how to fish.

And scouting was big.

Again, loved the outdoors, so I was a very active scout, from Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and even Explorer Scouts.

Much of my early life was in scouting.

- [Geoff] And work?

- During the high school years, I would normally just have one or maybe two jobs.

During the college years, I typically had one during the semester, but in the summer I might have three.

You know, I'd paint on weekends and work at the A&W and maybe work on the weekends as a lifeguard too, and bale hay and all sorts of things.

- [Geoff] After high school, you went to Indiana State University.

What did you plan to study?

- I planned to study business, but when I started, I thought I would become a major in accounting.

And after those first couple accounting courses, I didn't enjoy it quite so much at the time so I shifted to marketing and really enjoyed that.

I learned to like accounting even more later on.

But I stayed with my marketing interest from then on, actually.

- And after graduating from Indiana State, you went on and got an MBA.

- And what I discovered was, well, the MBA would be, you know, a great possibility to develop some well-rounded skills, maybe become a stockbroker or investment manager.

That's kind of what I was thinking at the time.

So I pursued that.

But I was also interested in becoming a consultant.

I had an uncle who had done high-level consulting and that attracted me 'cause it provided a variety of work and had some challenging problem solving that you could be involved in.

And so I thought I would pursue that, and that's what led me to the next step of working on a doctoral program.

- So after you got your MBA at Indiana State, you went to the University of Georgia, got your PhD.

Were you focused on entering business or more academia?

- At the time, I was thinking that I'm gonna pursue the consulting opportunity, but I thought a doctoral degree would be very helpful in that, you know, I was hungry to learn more.

Along the way, I also enjoyed working with students and watching them develop and grow and do things that they never realized that they could.

So I began to be very interested in teaching as well.

And that's really why I wound up going to Bradley University where I could be an instructor in the marketing department.

And at the same time I was doing consulting.

I did work for Caterpillar, you know, their world headquarters were there.

And I worked on, probably over the years, maybe 20 different projects with them.

I worked with ad agencies who had clients where they needed to do market research to maybe refine the product or get feedback on customer satisfaction.

I was using the services of a small marketing research company in the community, the test marketing company, if you will.

So I wound up buying them, you know.

I remember taking a second mortgage on the house, not something I'd recommend for everybody, but we thought we could do that and bought the company there.

So I had high-quality research data collection that would tie in well with the work that I was doing quite a bit of.

So that was the beginnings of growing that company.

And again, I like growth and development and making things better.

So that company grew by quite a lot, you know, maybe 20 times or so, and had offices in different places around the country and I was enjoying that.

Plus I was bringing the results into the classroom.

So I was, I think, a much better teacher when I was teaching classes on marketing or marketing research or product development, because I had done so many studies in all of those things, and I could make it very real and on-target for the students.

- So you were at Bradley University, you were chairman of the marketing department, you had a successful marketing and research firm, and then in 1984 you discovered the University of Tampa, left all that behind to come to a university that was struggling.

- Well, I'd been at Bradley for about 11 years, '73 to '84.

And, you know, I'd grown and developed quite a bit.

I think when I looked ahead in the '83, '84 time period, it appeared that universities were not gonna do so well in the Midwest because of demographic changes.

And I thought, well, you know, there's not gonna be a whole lot of growth and development going on here.

And I was looking for more opportunities and I really didn't interview anywhere, but one opportunity that attracted me in Tampa.

And they wanted somebody to develop a marketing program.

Well, that's easy for me.

And again, the attraction of building and developing a new program and helping to put it onto a path of contributing to a better business school as well.

So that was the attraction to come to Tampa.

- You are a strategic thinker.

You like to do extensive research, you like to do extensive analysis.

How did that play into your strategic thinking for redeveloping the University of Tampa?

- I knew that there were changes going on in higher ed because I was tracking many of them.

I knew that there was a move to, for families to go to increasingly larger universities.

I saw that as a very important trend.

People were going to larger private universities because they thought they could get more of their expectations met.

Now they had various expectations, but in common was they thought that they could get more of their expectations met at a somewhat private university.

So looking at that trend that was happening, you know, I was reading research from a consultant that did 10,000 surveys every year of college-bound students and parents.

And I knew it was important for UT to move in that direction.

And now we are.

You know, we're in the top 4% of private universities by our enrollment size.

So that's quite a change from too small, to now, one of the largest and well-developed comprehensive private universities in the country.

Now, I'll say this year's class, we have 40,000 applicants for 3000 seats, 40,000 applicants from all over the US, all over the world.

But it's just step by step in getting stronger and getting better every single year, adding more academic programs, improving quality, providing it at a good value, building the co-curricular opportunities for students, beefing up their support, in effect, becoming a better and better university and now becoming one of the best.

- [Geoff] Over the past 25 years, the University of Tampa has greatly expanded its campus and its physical plan.

Tell us about that growth and whether, what's the master plan?

- All told, that campus improvement master plan, I know it's got over 100 things on it, but I'll say roughly 70 major buildings or major facilities that we've built since those early years as president.

Al Austin carries his name on the first residence hall, and that opened in '98, you know.

And then we did Brevard Hall and the College of Business and the Vaughn Center over the next few years.

And it just, we have rebuilt the entire campus.

All of the old buildings that were maintenance problems and had various issues with them are all gone.

And we've been building new ones, including buildings that are underway now and more that are planned for the future.

So it's about a billion dollars worth of facilities that we've built over these past two and a half decades.

- How has UT expanded its academic programs as well as its research?

- Every budget year, The first thing I do is I'm focusing on academics.

It's the first major thing that we take care of in every budget, so always start there.

What do we need to build a better academic program, maybe to support new academic programs that we were going to add, to pursue the most challenging accreditations, which were marks of quality.

Anyway, so we have done that every year.

So that's what we've focused on, how to build a vibrant campus community, one that has lots of learning opportunities for students.

Rich in learning opportunities.

In many respects that's a key advantage.

It's great academic programs, but there's so many other ways of learning at a university, one that's got 10,000 events during the course of a year, that has right now around 16,000 internship opportunities for students who wanna pursue that kind of learning.

You know, so you make it such a rich experience, you know, it helps them to be so successful and to adapt well and adjust well.

You know, we do experiential learning about 30 different ways at the University of Tampa.

Internships is one.

So what else do you do?

Well, you do projects with businesses.

We do, we've, I think done seven or 800 projects as capstone projects for our undergraduate business school and our MBAs, they all are signed on consulting teams, where they get tough cases.

They're real, real people, real things.

And they work harder on those kinds of projects than they might any Harvard case.

So it's good for the businesses, you know, it's good for students, and for the university.

So again, I love that relationship.

You know, more recently we've been investing heavy in technology, 'cause we can see our community needs the talent there.

So we've put, I don't know, we've put 20 million of investments into expanding our technology.

We built a new technology building.

We've hired dozens and dozens of faculty in every area of technology, from cybersecurity to other things.

And that's helping to support the development of those facets of our economy.

- What lessons have you learned as president of the University of Tampa that could be applied to running any business?

- People often ask, you know, "How did you do all this?"

And of course, it's not an individual, it's many people involved.

But the normal thing I tell people, you learn to develop a culture of constant improvement.

You know, so even when I was stepping in and things were very challenging, the immediate thing I was working on was how, what improvements could we pursue that would help to turn around things?

Well, with the senior staff at the University of Tampa, they know that every year, they're gonna be asked about what improvements.

And sometimes we're searching for improvements that are focused on a specific goal.

And it may involve one or two people, or may involve many.

But developing a constant rhythm of improvement.

Again, we get better at the University of Tampa in dozens of ways every single year.

And the amazing thing is, if you do that over 30 years, you actually get someplace.

So that's one of the keys to success for an individual or for almost any business.

Focus on constant improvement.

Of course, which ones, which ones will have the greatest benefit?

All of those kind of questions, you have to work your way through.

Learn to facilitate change.

Again, the challenge for all leaders are how do you facilitate positive change?

So you know, I was always a student of change management.

You know, how do you do that?

How do you know that you're not moving too fast or too slow?

Things of that sort.

So it's, learn about change management and how to facilitate positive change as a leader.

- Ron, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

It's been great having you.

- Thank you, Geoff.

Appreciate it.

- You bet.

- Been a long time.

- Long time indeed.

If you'd like to see this program again, or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

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