FAU President John Kelly (left) speaks with Dennis Gallon
and Bill Berger during a recent event.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Thom Smith
John Kelly could have worked in a cotton mill or driven a tractor under the hot — much hotter than Boca Raton — South Carolina sun. Folks in Easley, originally a town of cotton mills in the foothills between Greenville and Clemson, are anchored in the soil. They tend to stay put. Kelly, too, has spent most of his 59 years in an area smaller than southern Palm Beach County, but the new president at Florida Atlantic University, is anything but typical.
“Luckily I had a dad who had gotten an education — GI Bill — and no way would he let me go to work in the mill,” Kelly said. “I could do anything else, but I could not go to work in the mill.
“At least half of the guys I went to school with dropped out. The mill strategy was designed to get young people, pay them lower wages and keep ’em. The more education you got, the more likely you were not to work in the mill.”
Yet, except for a couple of little trips, Kelly’s life wasn’t much different from those old schoolmates.
“When I was 9 years old, I went to work for my grandfather, pumping gas in his little grocery store on the road between Greenville and Clemson. I think there were four businesses on that road.”
He co-captained Easley High School’s state championship football team, then headed just a few miles west to Clemson to earn his bachelor’s in horticulture. He did take off … to earn a master’s and doctorate at Ohio State and to teach for three years at Texas A&M.
But ultimately he returned to Clemson, only 20 miles from Easley. Professor, department head in 1991, and six years later vice president for public service and agriculture.
With Kelly at the forefront, Clemson was soon playing with the big boys as South Carolina began attracting investment by international giants BMW, Michelin, General Electric and Boeing. During his tenure as vice president, Clemson rose from No. 78 among U.S. public universities to 21.
In 2000, Kelly was offered the job at Murray State University in Kentucky but declined for family reasons. He was thought to be in line for the presidency of Clemson when Jim Barker resigned last summer, but he never was approached by the board. That job went to James Clements, then president at West Virginia University, so Kelly began to look around.
“FAU was the most appealing,” he said. “My wife and I had a new baby and we wanted to be together more than my travel schedule at Clemson allowed.
“Plus I felt I had the skills to be a good president.”
And the school’s trustees were looking for someone with that kind of confidence, who could provide resuscitation after a series of missteps, most notably a substandard graduation rate and a series of blunders by President Mary Jane Saunders. Those issues involved actions by two faculty members and the aborted deal to name the school’s new stadium for GEO Group, a controversial Boca Raton-based for-profit prison company. Saunders resigned in May 2013.
Despite his credentials, Kelly was not a shoo-in, as the trustees initially split, 8-5, between Kelly and former one-term U.S. Sen. George LeMieux. Trustees acknowledged that political pressure to name LeMieux was smothering, but ultimately Kelly’s record at Clemson prevailed, especially his experience in dealing with large corporations and research institutions.
Kelly reported to work March 1 with a 100-day plan focused on getting to know faculty, staff, students, alumni and business leaders. He’ll use his second 100 days to formulate a strategic plan.
He wants to develop aggressive research programs that bring in research dollars and aggressive development programs to attract private giving for new offerings such as the medical school.
Athletics also needs an expanded donor base — “You’re not gonna get legislative money for that!” Clemson is famous for IPTAY (I Pay Ten A Year), its grass-roots booster program that started in 1934 with a $10 donation. Clemson was the first college to raise $1 million for its athletics program; despite much greater competition for donor dollars in South Florida, Kelly expects similar success.
Above all, he says, FAU must make a name for itself:
“We have to differentiate ourselves. For example, we’re sitting between the Everglades and the ocean, two environmental hotbeds of great importance to the state — water supply, potential flooding problems, the tourism resource. Ocean engineering — we’re the only university in the nation that has an offshore leased site for testing in the Gulf Stream. So how do we use that 1,000 acres to build partnerships with companies and other universities to use that test bed?”
The first 100 days were hectic 18-hour marathons, Kelly concluded, but he’ll back off now that his wife, Carolyn, a marine biologist, and their two younger children, 11-year-old Carly and infant Stella, have moved into the president’s mansion. He also has two grown children from a previous marriage.
True to form, Kelly first came alone, driving a rental truck filled with household goods but mostly plants. He remains, after all, a man of the soil but …
“They’re still in their pots,” he conceded. “It’s gonna take more than a day, just like the school. So much in academia takes a long time to get results. If you love nature, you can see results real fast. In a weekend, you can see something transformative and in a year, you’ve got something magnificent.
“I’m not the most patient person in the world. I like results and I love being responsive, getting things done, a sense of urgency. That’s what I hope I can impart to the campus. Urgency, but not panic. Urgency lets you look at things and say let’s get this done. Let’s don’t talk about this for five more years.
“A lot of things around here we’ve talked about for too long. Are we gonna do ’em or not? If not, let’s quit talking about ’em. That wastes time.”
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