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by Joe Sullivan

He’s not as charismatic as John Shumaker or as folksy as Joe Johnson, but in his low-keyed way John Petersen appears to be getting off to a good start as UT’s new president.

During his first month on the job, Petersen says his top priority has been, “Getting as acclimated as I can with all the facets of the UT system, because the more I know, the better job I can do representing the university in Nashville, in Washington, with corporations and with donors.”

The learning-curve motif is one that other UT officials find refreshing, especially in contrast with the styles of the other two “outsiders” who assumed the presidency in recent years. “Wade Gilley came in assuming nearly everything was broke and needed fixing, and John Shumaker hit the decks in a hurry to establish lofty goals that would bear his own imprimatur,” says one veteran UT administrator.

Both of them soon alienated many of those to whom they had to look for support. And there were fears that Petersen would represent more of same by looking to run the Knoxville campus just as he had run the University of Connecticut’s main campus in his prior post as chancellor there.

But Petersen has quickly quashed these apprehensions by making it clear that Chancellor Loren Crabtree is in charge of the Knoxville campus and won’t be subject to the kinds of interventions that Johnson sometimes made. “I’ve told Loren that I’m just a squatter on his campus and that I’m going to stay out of his way,” Petersen says with the caveat that, “I certainly want to have a continuing dialogue with him so I know what’s going on.”

Petersen’s initial appointment reinforces his orientation, both toward establishing good relations inside the university and toward stressing his role as its outside representative. For his executive assistant, he’s picked Lofton Stuart, a long-time UT alumni affairs operative. “I think he’ll be good for me because he knows so many people and because it sends a signal that much of what I’m going to be doing is external,” Petersen reckons.

To be sure, the new president sees his role as much more than just a goodwill ambassador, lobbyist and fund-raiser, though UT needs all of these in spades. “I’m looking at each of the campuses’ strategic plans to see where it’s appropriate to connect pieces and where the system administration may need to get involved because the whole may be bigger than the sum of the parts and there may be synergies,” he says.

Also, “The system’s role is to take priorities from the campuses and then establish and communicate a single set of institutional priorities to the governor and the legislature, so that we don’t confuse them with everybody having their own agenda.”

Petersen’s relationship with governor Phil Bredesen may be the single biggest key to his success, and he lavishes praise on Bredesen. “I think he’s the best governor who’s been in office in any state I’ve been in terms of his understanding of higher education and what it can do for economic development and quality of life.”

Bredesen is known to believe that UT needs to augment its research collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Petersen is marching to that drum. “One of the reasons my background [as a research chemist] is a good fit is because I’ve done so much research with the Department of Energy, and I’ve seen what national labs can do through partnering with other institutions,” he says. “I’ve already spent a lot of time in Oak Ridge, and I certainly see a major research collaboration with Knoxville and also with the Health Sciences Center in Memphis.”

More commercialization of UT research is another Petersen emphasis, again in keeping with Bredesen’s stress on new business and job creation in the state. “We have a fledgling research foundation that’s responsible for patents and licensing, and we’re working on a business plan to enlarge its role,” he says. “Also, some of it is cultural, making the faculty understand how important it is to get intellectual ideas out into the workplace, and then we need to facilitate that.”

Progress on these fronts should help the university regain state funding that’s been lost over the past two years of budgetary retrenchment. But much depends on an economy that begets strong growth in state revenues and on containing the cost of TennCare.

For the longer haul, Petersen espouses the same sort of lofty goals for UT that cynics will say they’ve heard too many times before. “My expectation is that UT will become one of a very few leading institutions in the southeast,” he says. “I believe that the governor and the legislature want to support higher education. But we’ve got to demonstrate that we’re good stewards of the money that we have, that we’re optimizing our other sources of revenue such as research grants and private gifts and that we can really justify the amount of state appropriations that should come into the institution.”

Petersen plans to bolster UT’s presence in Nashville by posting a full-time lobbyist there. In recent years, Nashville representation has only been a part-time responsibility of the recently departed vice president for public affairs, Tom Ballard, who left the university for a post at ORNL. Ballard doubled as director of UT’s Institute for Public Service, and Petersen intends to make that a separate job.

Might Petersen consider moving the president’s office to Nashville, as some have suggested, as a way both to distance himself from management of the Knoxville campus and to fortify the university’s statewide presence? The new UT president recoils against any such suggestion with a vehemence that borders on being impolitic. “Universities are in my blood, and I’d much rather be around 18-year-old college students than career politicians,” he asserts.

Amid a deadpan discussion of his outreach responsibilities, it was good to see this flash of passion and affinity for the university’s core constituency.

July 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 31 © 2004 Metro Pulse