Interviewee: Adam Herbert Interviewer: James Crooks Date: July 19, 2006 C: Today is July 19, 2006. This is James Crooks interviewing former president Adam Herbert. Would you start with a little background and what brought you to UNF in terms of your professional career before coming here in 1989. H: I came to UNF from Miami. I moved to Florida in 1979 as Dean of the School of Public Affairs and Services at Florida International [University] and became vice president there and was chief academic as well as administrative officer for the North Miami campus of the university. Prior to that, I had been a department chairman at Virginia Tech and had been on the faculty at Southern Cal [USC]. I was a White House fellow in Washington in the mid­1970s between two stints at Virginia Tech. C: And your collegiate background was public administration? H: Public administration and urban affairs. C: Which fits in very nicely with your kind of administration. H: Absolutely. I think it was the perfect background to serve as a leader of an urban campus. My career has been one in which I had worked in a number of settings where I was involved in developing new programs and addressing community needs, having to work in a land grant institution at Virginia Tech, and Southern Cal, although it was private, was still a university that placed a very heavy emphasis on community service, so that part of my background was relevant, I thought, with coming here as well. C: Were you invited to apply or did you see the ad to apply? How did that part work then? H: I knew, just being in the system, I was aware of the fact that the position was open. I talked with the executive vice chancellor about the search. I had been approached earlier, about a year or two before then, when the presidency at the University of West Florida had opened, but I didn’t think that was a very good match for my background and interest. Then this position opened and Roy [McTarnaghan] called me about it. The first thing I asked him was whether or not there was a bias against administrators within the university system. During some years, there’s a tendency to definitely want to go outside the system. That had been the pattern in Florida, but I was assured that there were no biases against the folks from within the system. Looking at Jacksonville, I concluded that it might be a very good match for me in terms of the strengths that I have and what I saw with regard to the future development of the community as well as the campus. C: What were your first impressions of UNF? H: Well, again, I had worked in the system for ten years, so I had a chance to observe the campus. I thought that the campus had very clear potential for further growth and development. It was regarded statewide as being sort of a sleepy institution. The campus was not very aggressive, at least that was the image within the state. The university was not asking for much with regard to Herbert – Page 2 new resources and had a very small freshman class. One of the realities was that a number of our universities were upper division only; this was one of those. At Florida International [University], we very quickly grew our freshman class. The freshman class at North Florida was very small, and the image or impression around the state was that this was not an issue of great priority to grow the campus. What I saw was an opportunity to develop a much larger, more comprehensive kind of campus in a community that was definitely going to grow. What I saw was significant upside potential for the campus. Given the fact that it had not been asking for very much with regard to resources, I just saw some significant opportunities. C: Do you remember roughly what the size of the student body was back then? H: There were about 7,000 students at that point in time. This was in 1989. First let me tell you that when I looked at this, my conclusion was that this was an opportunity for about ten years. I didn’t think that it was appropriate, and still don’t, for presidents to serve much more than ten years unless it’s in a steady state kind of environment. My sense was that, over a ten­year period, we could double the size of the student body, that it could become significantly more entwined into the fabric of the community. One of the things that also stood out, I noticed this reading the newspapers during the search process, was that the newspaper here provided very little coverage of UNF. To the extent that the newspapers focused on higher education at all, the articles were about Jacksonville University but not the University of North Florida. I thought that was very significant. On the athletics pages, there was constant reference to JU. You seldom saw much more than scores, if that, with regard to the small number of athletics programs that were on the campus. Again, there is very little with regard to academic programs. What I saw, again, was a significant opportunity and, really, an even greater opportunity here than existed in many other parts of the state. Those factors were very important to me in terms of making the decision that this was a significant opportunity. I came in with a very definite set of thoughts with regard to the vision for the campus, a sense as to an ideal mission and size. I had lengthy discussions with the chancellor, Charlie Reed was chancellor at the time, about some of the things that I thought were necessary for it. Even during the search process, I layed some of this out because I talked with members of the board. C: You mentioned vision and mission, what were some of these ideas that you brought to the campus? H: Well, first it’s important to understand that I did view this as about a ten­year opportunity for me. That was important because I think it takes that much time to implement some of the kinds of things that I will describe to you. I also felt that it was going to be a period of significant transformation. Just as a student of public affairs, one of the things I understand is that you can only maintain that level of momentum for a time period, definitely not to exceed ten years. You need to have [a] little time where you can begin to consolidate and then you can start over again. That was sort of a backdrop in terms of at least my assessment of how this ought to be approached. The first thing I wanted to do is, over a ten­ Herbert – Page 3 year period, double the size of the student body. I wanted to grow it from a little over 7,000 to 14,000. My view was that we simultaneously needed to prepare the institution over a longer time frame to grow to somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to 25,000. I think ultimately, as this community grows, that will be the ultimate size of the campus. That had implications as you deal with issues like land and acquiring additional land. It had implications with regard to the master plan and how that was laid out. It had implications with regard to facilities and how we would go about expanding enrollment in the near term to reach that doubling figure. That was what I was thinking about with regard to numbers of students. The second thing was the focus on the unique character of the institution and mission. In that context, my view was that you had to differentiate this campus within the community, from JU and the community college. We had to differentiate it within the broader context of the state. One of the things that I tried to [do] right away, I wanted to increase the size of the freshman class. It was just a few hundred students at that point. There was very little recruiting off campus. I remember my being very disappointed that we were essentially waiting for students to apply to us. With the limited number of freshmen that we had, it was clear that we, in order to reach a level of the number that I had in mind, about 3,000 freshmen, which obviously is very aggressive when you’re talking about 200­300. I didn’t know that we would necessarily get to 3,000 during that ten­year period. It was my view that that was a number that made sense given one other focus: what I wanted to do was to position UNF such that we would be one of the three or four most selective public universities in the state. It was my view then, as now, that quality is going ultimately to be the driver of enrollment. At that point in time, JU was focused more on survival than on trying to deal with that kind of issue. My view was that would definitely differentiate us in the context of the community, that we would get growing recognition for attracting and increasing the higher quality student body beginning with the freshman class, and then, from there, we would be in a position to recruit not just locally, because we were basically a commuter institution. I wanted this to become more of a traditional residential campus with a number of part­time students as well, but having at its core a traditional college aged student body, very high quality.