| |
Posted Oct 9, 2017, 7:05 PM
|
 |
Moderator
|
|
Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Philadelphia
Posts: 18,367
|
|
A campus transformed: Rowan's groundbreaking $100M gift, 25 years later
Quote:
When Rowan University students returned to school this fall, the campus was a familiar site. The mix of new, shiny buildings and mid-century edifices are still just a few blocks away from downtown Glassboro, home to a packed Barnes and Noble, and specialty restaurants that serve grilled cheese sandwiches and deliver cookies late at night — a typical college town.
If the same students walked onto campus 25 years ago, however, it would be unrecognizable.
This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the university's most galvanizing year, when a surprise $100 million gift from a successful South Jersey businessman transformed the small public university then known as Glassboro State College. Tucked amid peach farms and graduating mostly teachers, the college's operations cost well below $100 million. Now, Rowan is a rapidly expanding, nationally ranked research institution churning out engineers, medical doctors, MBAs and yes, still teachers, with an operating budget that exceeds $550 million.
“Transformative, it was revolutionary,” said Rowan President Ali Houshmand. “How else do you describe it?”
Henry "Hank" Rowan was a MIT-trained engineer who designed an industrial furnace for melting metals in his garage in 1953 and over five decades, grew his Westampton, N.J.-based business Inductotherm into a global company with 40 plants around the world.
He built up significant wealth in the process, so when a university administrator came asking for $1,500 donation in the early 1990s, Rowan opened up his checkbook. But when that administrator, Phil Tumminia, came back asking for a bigger gift to support the college's struggling business school, Rowan had a better idea.
“He pushed that for awhile and I said ‘Phil, I have zero interest in your school of business. What this world needs is more engineering, how to make things, we have to produce. Phil, what would you do with $100 million?’ and he nearly fell off the chair,” Rowan recalled from an interview with former University President Donald Farish.
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell included audio excerpts from that interview in an episode of his podcast, Revisionist History, that explores the effects Rowan’s pledge — the largest ever given to a public university at the time — had on the school in contrast to the massive gifts given to already immensely wealthy institutions.
“Rowan’s gift made headlines around the country, it set a new standard,” Gladwell says in the episode, “My Little Hundred Million.” The phrase comes from Rowan himself, who said that sum would've been a drop in a bucket at his alma mater, MIT, but at Glassboro State, it could make a real difference. He was right.
“At that time Rowan had, at most, 1,000 employees and staff,” Houshmand said. “Today, Rowan has 4,000 employees. Think about the impact that makes, 3,000 additional families are receiving a paycheck and sending kids to college. These are impacts that are going to keep on getting bigger and bigger.”
The gift transformed Rowan's hometown of Glassboro just as much, having spurred more than $400 million in public and private investment into its now-bustling, and still growing, downtown.
The vast changes at the university itself since 1992 are almost too long to list. At the time of the gift, the university's endowment stood at less than $787,000. It's about $208 million today.
Over the same time period, the total student population swelled from about 9,500 to more than 18,500 today, tracking well ahead of the university's ambitious goal to enroll 25,000 by 2023.
The university is also the driving force behind the South Jersey Technology Park, built down the road from campus to house 1.5 million square feet of both public and private research on 188 acres.
In 2013, the shift in Rowan's academic focus became official when it was designated a comprehensive public research institution and opened the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University. Outside funding for research has reached $34 million. It 1992, it had brought in just $400,000. It's developed the campus itself rapidly, with more than $700 million worth of new construction going up in the past five years, more than any other public institution in the state.
It even acquired a local fossil park, of global importance to paleontologists, and received a $25 million gift from alumni Ric and Jean Edelman last year to turn the park into an world-class destination.
The university's metamorphoses has its roots in Rowan's "little hundred million," his daughter Virginia Rowan Smith said, but it couldn't have gotten to where it is today without the leadership of the three presidents who have run the school since the gift. In 2014, his family foundation donated another $15 million to its engineering school. Now named the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering, it’s ranked the 19th best undergraduate engineering program in the country by U.S. News and World Report.
“I have to salute the people at the college who took the bull by the horns and said, ‘Okay, well let’s do it right. Let’s transform the university,’” Smith said. “That’s what they’ve been able to do.”
Its current leader, Houshmand, has even bigger plans for the next 25.
"I honestly believe in 25 years, Rowan will be the next Carnegie Mellon University," he said. "It will be comprehensive, very well-recognized, efficient, largest, and we'll really be a model for higher education in this country in terms of business model, efficiency, creativity and inclusivity by bringing others into the fold."
Rowan died on Dec. 9, 2015, at age 92. The next day, hundreds of students gathered around the 7-foot bronze statue of him that was unveiled on the 20th anniversary of the $100 million gift.
“He was proud til the day he died of [Rowan] and he’d be even more proud now,” Smith said.
Despite his burning desire to make a difference, Rowan’s gift didn’t come with the expectation Glassboro State would take on his name. That decision was all up to the school that was first founded as a two-year teacher training school in 1923, the same year Rowan was born.
|
https://www.bizjournals.com/philadel...niversary.html
|
|
|
Prev
Linear Mode
