Trib: Judy Genshaft at USF: 5 more years to finish the job?

[USFishin]

Judy Genshaft at USF: 5 more years to finish the job?

By LINDSAY PETERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Judy Genshaft stood before an image filling the wall behind her: a blue-tinged Earth, golden sun blazing, and the words "USF 2020."

She lauded the expansion at the University of South Florida since her arrival as president in 2000, then turned her speech toward the future. Imagine, she said, a university city, stretching from Sarasota to Lakeland, with high-tech partners to spur innovation and lead the country.

Taking charge when USF was barely a force in Florida, Genshaft has pushed it so far in research that the vision she described on that stage in October seems more possible than preposterous.

USF would use its branch campuses to reach well beyond Tampa, where it already operates something akin to a small city: 40,000 students, 14,500 employees and most of the system's $1.8 billion budget.

Along the way, Genshaft said, she plans to move USF into the ranks of the elite â the American Association of Universities. The invitation-only group counts 63 members from among the nation's 4,400 institutions of higher learning.

The woman who helped get USF to this point is the daughter of a Russian immigrant who built a meat-packing venture into a major corporation. She chose education as a career and studied how children learn. And she so deliberately pursued administration that one fan said it seemed as if she had spent her life working toward this job.

At 62, Genshaft turns her planning and persistence to a new kind of expansion for USF, one that will define the university of 2020 and her reputation as its leader.

Creating research center

From the start, Genshaft set out to boost the university's profile as a research institution. Today, among Florida's public universities, it trails only the University of Florida in federal research spending and ranks 33rd among public universities nationwide.

Last year, her national peers named her chairwoman of the American Council on Education, a Washington-based industry group that represents 1,800 higher-education executives.

She cheers the USF Bulls on the volleyball court and the football field, promoting athletics with such passion she was chosen this year to chair the board of directors of the NCAA's Division I.

Genshaft also was named to Gov.-elect Rick Scott's education transition team.

Sporting a USF lapel pin and downing Diet Coke, Genshaft works morning, noon and night, attending a program in Panama one day and ringing up an employee the next to see why new promotional banners haven't been installed on campus.

"We're a dynamic, innovative, fast-moving institution," she said.

But there are problems.

USF failed in its latest bid to create a chapter of the prestigious honor society Phi Beta Kappa. Reviewers said the university had improved, but faulted it for crowded classes and a low six-year graduation rate.

Genshaft's response: "We'll get there."

"I'm a fighter," she said as she leaned forward in her chair during a recent interview in her office, where she keeps a collection of miniature bulls from around the world.

"I'm a fighter, and I'm persistent, and I'm very goal-oriented."

She has been through four research vice presidents in her 10 years, hiring former Ohio State University President Karen Holbrook for the key position in 2008.

This summer, there was a shake-up in the provost's office with the creation of an Office of Student Success to boost the flagging graduation rate.

Genshaft fired veteran head football coach Jim Leavitt in January, after a university review determined he had abused a player in the locker room during halftime.

"I want to see this place, this great institution, move forward," Genshaft said. "When there are disappointments, we have to go back and see what we can do to regroup and try again."

In March, Genshaft spoke at a symposium on women's health, saying people like to think things fall into place on their own.

They don't, she said. It takes planning and persistence â a word she frequently uses.

She explained how she got to be a university president, how she decided early on she wanted the top job and sought out a mentor for advice.

"She told me exactly what I needed to do to move up the ladder â to start out as a department chair, to take the committee assignments no one else wanted, to move up to dean, then provost and then seek a presidency."

Learning from a meat-packer

Genshaft's earliest lessons, however, came at home in Canton, Ohio, as she and her brother watched their father build his meat-packing company.

He worked day and night, as his daughter does now, and sometimes took her along to business meetings. When she was a young teen, he let her do secretarial work.

Her brother, Neil, is CEO of the Ohio company, called Fresh Mark.

Genshaft said her father wanted her to go into the family business, but that wasn't the only family direction she was getting.

In a profile in Jewish Woman magazine two years ago, Genshaft repeated her grandmother's words about the value of higher education: "Money has wings, but your degrees can never be taken from you."

Genshaft started her career in the late 1960s in Canton. She had a degree in social work and psychology from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and became a counselor in a mental health center. She switched to public-school counseling and started graduate classes at Kent State University.

With a doctorate from Kent State, she went to work at Ohio State University in 1976, where she taught and continued researching how children learn.

Soon, she began climbing the administrative ladder.

She left Columbus in 1992 to become dean of education at New York's University of Albany and quickly gained the trust of its president, Karen Hitchcock, who promoted Genshaft to vice president for academic affairs, the university's top academic office.

Hitchcock remains a fan. What impressed her, she said, was Genshaft's ability to switch perspectives.

As a dean, she focused on one college. But she quickly broadened her view to see the whole university.

Genshaft shared her view of what makes an effective administrator at a January meeting of aspiring university officials.

"I always felt that part of my job was to be the eyes and ears of the president on campus and, if need be, put myself in the line of fire if something was going wrong."

Hitchcock said she and Genshaft also became friends.

"She's very warm, personally, very caring," Hitchcock said.

They traveled to Israel together with their husbands. "She was a great tour guide."

But Hitchcock knew Genshaft had higher aspirations and wasn't surprised to see her apply for the USF job in 1999.

When the Florida Board of Regents hired Genshaft, Chairman Tom Petway marveled at how well she fulfilled the job requirements.

"It was like she spent her whole life preparing to be USF president," he said.

At 52, Genshaft moved to Tampa with her husband of 11 years, Steven Greenbaum, and two adopted sons, 6 and 3.

Greenbaum was a marketing consultant and the children's primary caregiver. The couple had planned it years earlier, Genshaft said in her March address, so she could maintain her 12- to 14-hour workdays.

"I grew up in a household where my father worked all the time," she said, "but I never doubted for a second that he loved me less because he loved to work."

Genshaft chose not to live in the on-campus residence, the 9,000-square-foot Lifsey House, moving within two years into a gated section of Tampa Palms. She wanted a wall between her family and the public â determined, associates say, to give her sons as normal a life as possible.

The Energizer bunny

Private about her personal life, open and engaging about everything else, Genshaft began to carve an identity as a university president.

At first, some alumni were skeptical, said lawyer and former USF trustee Steve Burton. She had never been a university president. She had no connections to Florida.

But she won them over with her enthusiasm for USF and willingness to spend time on community projects, he said.

People called her "the Energizer bunny," said lawyer Rhea Law, a longtime USF trustee, chairwoman of the law firm Fowler White Boggs and a woman Genshaft considers a mentor.

Less than two years into the job, the new president faced a buzz saw.

Weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, USF came under scrutiny for employing a computer science professor, Sami Al-Arian, who had ties to a Palestinian terrorist group.

Initially, Genshaft resisted calls from the community to fire him, but pressure intensified. The university received threats against Al-Arian, and Genshaft put him on paid leave.

The head of USF's board of trustees, **** Beard, wanted Al-Arian out. Faculty leaders argued there was no proof he had done anything wrong. But when Al-Arian was arrested in 2003, accused in a federal indictment of leading the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in North America, Genshaft fired him.

Many faculty members raged. The American Association of University Professors condemned USF, saying the move violated Al-Arian's rights as a tenured professor.

Acquitted of most of the charges in 2006, Al-Arian later pleaded guilty to lying and aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in nonviolent ways.

The Al-Arian crisis at USF was a dark time, Genshaft said.

Former faculty senate President Greg Paveza observed her through those years.

"She was very good at masking over the strain," said Paveza, now dean of the School of Health and Human Services at Southern Connecticut State University. "It appeared at very rare moments, just as a flash."

She wasn't a rock, but she didn't crumple, either, partly because she had a long-term plan for herself and the university, partly because she's tough, Paveza said.

"She can play hard ball when she needs to."

Faculty members who blasted Genshaft's Al-Arian decision, who think she caved to community pressure, have mostly gotten over it, said Sherman Dorn, USF faculty union chief and education professor.

But since then, Dorn said, Genshaft has kept her distance.

"She doesn't really have too much contact with the faculty, and I think that's a mistake."

Limited faculty interaction

Genshaft works through her executives â nine vice presidents on the Tampa campus who report to her on everything from information technology to medical services, and three branch campus chiefs.

She gives them wide latitude, but expects big results, she said in her remarks to higher education officials in January.

"I don't need a mirror image of myself or someone to parrot back what they think I want to hear," Genshaft said. "I need someone who will be an independent thinker and bring to the table ideas about how we can do things better."

She talks to them by phone and in person, wary of the state law that makes e-mail a public record.

But in the view of some faculty members, she neglects the concerns of the rank and file.

"Many faculty believe they're not being heard," said Gregory McColm, associate professor in mathematics.

Among their concerns:

• Untrained graduate students teaching languages and other courses that require the expertise of a professor.

• Programs starved by state budget cuts.

• Top professors getting little support and recognition, leaving USF vulnerable to recruiting by other universities.

"We have more and more of these advisory committees, but no one really wants to hear about the problems," said Harry Vanden, government and international affairs professor. "It's onward and upward, unstoppable USF."

Although Genshaft may resist beefs with the faculty, she trusts numbers, including the ones that reveal USF's problems.

The provost, Ralph Wilcox, recently presented a report to USF trustees showing its weakness in a half-dozen areas key to eligibility in the American Association of Universities.

The trustees didn't like what the numbers showed, especially about graduation rates.

"We need to know more about what's going on," said John Ramil, trustee chairman and Tampa Electric Co. president, whom Genshaft also considers a mentor.

Something else equally concerns Ramil: that another university will hire Genshaft away.

The solution: Offer Genshaft a contract that would "keep her a USF Bull for the rest of her career," Ramil said.

A board of trustees committee is working on it.

Genshaft, who makes $395,000 a year, said she doesn't know what the proposal will look like. But she would be thrilled to have a chance to stay at USF for about five more years.

She thinks that's enough time to meet AAU's criteria and set the foundation for her "university city."

"We didn't get here by accident," she said. "It's planning and consistency of message. But you can't convince people of what you're doing if you're not feeling it.

"I really, really, really care about this institution."

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[SRQ]

$395K and CSH makes $1.7M.  academic institution, huh?  too funny. and we wonder why our country is full of ignoramuses.

[DELdaBull]

She is a GREAT University President!!!

[Stier]

She is a GREAT University President!!!

+1

[jaym]

Judy rocks. I can't tell you how many times I have seen her out on planes, road, etc representing USF.