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GM News: Give us some context about the University of Connecticut and the School of Business.
Emeritus Dean Thomas Gutteridge: Storrs [the main campus] is very rural, but it is only 25 miles from the state capital and three hours from New York. UConn is really a rural/urban university, with regional campuses in Stamford, the tri-campus area (Waterbury, Torrington, Hartford), and other locations. A good proportion of students attend these campuses. Our business school has about 3,600 students, with 2,000 in Storrs and 1,600 on the regional campuses.
GM News: What kind of challenges did you face in your first years as dean?
Gutteridge: We were content until the 1990s to be a good but not outstanding public university. I have watched the Michigans and Indianas and Purdues [advance], but we didn’t have that [mind]set until a decade ago. Now we want to be a nationally prominent, top-20 public university.
I was hired to bring about a change in the [business school] culture. While we were this match of rural and urban, we really were not engaged by and large with the business community in 1992. It was particularly challenging here because public institutions in the Northeast do not have the same perceived cachet as in the Midwest and South. We’re home to a number of Fortune 1000 and Fortune 500 companies, but they could and did go [for expertise] everywhere in the Northeast and beyond: Hartford, MIT, Duke. We were an afterthought after 30 years in Hartford.
Now 10 years later, we haven’t won the battle but we are on the radar screen.
GM News: What helped jump-start the change?
Gutteridge: UCONN 2000, an investment that took place in 1995, issued [U.S.] $1.25 billion in bonds over 10 years for new buildings and a technological infrastructure. It passed within months of our women’s basketball team winning the national championship. We had never achieved that before. It put us on the map, and people said, “That’s not Yukon, it’s UConn.” That was an impetus for the legislature and the governor to say, “We’re now on the national map in athletics, and we want to achieve that in academics.”
One of building blocks for that [reputation] is infrastructure. We are not quite through those 10 years of UCONN 2000 and now, added to it, is 21st Century UConn, which represents a [U.S.] $1.3-billion investment.
Another piece of the change is, we were a back-burner university [in the early ’90s]. Over 50 percent of students graduating in Connecticut were going out of state; we were second only to Alaska up until this point of time. The state had been through very traumatic times, with heavy industry being outsourced. Our focus now is high tech and high service, which is why we needed to stem the out-migration of knowledge workers. We couldn’t allow this brain drain to go on.
GM News: How did you transform people’s perceptions?
Gutteridge: When I first arrived, we didn’t believe in marketing, or branding, or external fund-raising. Now the culture is one of engaging the business community in Connecticut, the Northeast, and globally around research and teaching related to very targeted areas.
Stakeholders, like alumni and trustees, had never been asked [for donations] before, and now they are giving at the level of the Michigans.
You’ve got to strengthen your curriculum and faculty. We’ve not expanded in a huge sense, but that is also true in terms of student body. The University of Connecticut is currently at 22,000 and will grow probably to 25,000 total, but much of that will occur on the regional campuses. Now we also have a much higher-quality student body.
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