expansion at school
Stafford departing after leading massive
expansion at school
By Sherry conohan
Staff Writer
Rebecca Stafford, who is retiring as president of Monmouth University, West Long Branch, arrived at the school 10 years ago, when it was Monmouth College.
WEST LONG BRANCH — When Rebecca Stafford arrived at Monmouth University 10 years ago, it was a small local college, but she could see the potential for bigger and better things.
"There was the sense of great expectations, that Monmouth was going to be a great university in New Jersey," she said in an interview looking back on the decade she has presided over the school. "Everybody was eager to work with me, to carry forth ideas, and it was a real sense of excitement. I felt it when I met all of the people. They were so eager to do things."
Stafford, who is retiring at the end of this month, has seen Monmouth grow to university status during her watch — it happened in 1995 — and considers its transformation to a regional university her greatest achievement during her tenure as president. She said it is a rare event.
"It’s only going to happen to me once in my lifetime," she said in her beautifully appointed Wilson Hall office. "It’s rarely going to happen at all that you are going to have a whole confluence of factors that allowed that to occur. It’s not one thing. It’s a whole bunch of things.
"But to have a hand in that transformation, who could ask for more?" she said with satisfaction.
Stafford’s introduction to Monmouth University was viewed with skepticism initially by her husband, Willard Van Hazel.
When a head hunter contacted her while she was still at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, where she had been president, she said her husband heard her on the telephone discussing the position and said "not New Jersey." But she knew the area because her first husband’s family was from Rumson. Back in 1958, she said, she had visited Asbury Park and Long Branch and thought it was a beautiful Shore community.
"My first impression of Monmouth," she said, was "that the people were so friendly, so receptive, so warm. That’s really different from the way you think of the New York area. I always thought people from New York were cold, always in a hurry and always angry. I found the New Jersey people were absolutely the opposite of [that]."
Stafford, who also formerly was president of Bemidji State University in Minnesota and executive vice president at Colorado State University, said that in "presidenting" since 1980 she had found no finer board of trustees to work with than at Monmouth University.
"It is hard to describe how rare our board is," she said. "I’ve worked with boards of five different universities and it is rare to deal with people who are so selfless, that have volunteered their time. I think they eat more meals with me than they do with their families.
"How much time they give, how thoughtful they are, how knowledgeable they are. How they will do anything for Monmouth. It’s just a privilege to know and work with these people," she said. "They were people from the area who cared very much about the university and were willing to give of their time and financial resources to make it a great college.
"I’ve known boards that were there because of the political clout they had or because of what they hoped to obtain for themselves," she added. "But I’ve never had this kind of board before."
Working in concert with the trustees, Stafford has wrought great change in the school’s physical plant.
New buildings were built, others renovated, and a pedestrian tunnel was put in under Cedar Avenue to make passage from the residence halls to the main campus safer. Now a new parking lot is being constructed near Boylan Gym to ease the parking pressure.
Stafford said Monmouth has moved from having about 700 students in college-sponsored housing when she arrived in 1993 to about 1,734 today.
"We would like to have [housing] for everybody who wants it," she said. "At the moment, we just can’t. So that’s an unfinished agenda item."
Stafford said another piece of unfinished busiess for her is construction of a new recreation center.
"This is a big project," she observed. "Now all we have to do is raise the money. It’s going to be very expensive. I have hoped to have it all raised before I retire, but I didn’t get there."
Stafford has seen total enrollment at Monmouth University grow by about a third, from 4,120 in the fall of 1993 to 6,032 in the fall of 2002.
Stafford said she would not like to see the university enrollment grow any more.
"I’ll tell you why — because we occupy a very important market niche," she said. "We are a small, convenient-sized university. If we get bigger, we … just won’t be able to have that kind of personal relationship with our faculty and our students that we have now. I think that’s a very important part of our culture that we would lose, and I wouldn’t like to see that happen. Then we wouldn’t also be that alternative, which is large enough to have the activities and facilities of a university, but small enough to still be a family."
Stafford said Monmouth has grown in ways beyond mere size.
"We grew in the number of full-time faculty. We grew in programs. We added a lot of new graduate programs. We added some new undergraduate programs. We grew in quality.
"It’s just been 10 years of growth and change," she said.
Stafford said she knew when she arrived on campus that the school had a curriculum that was too broad, that included too many programs and too many offerings for the number of students it had..
"I thought it would take a decade to get to the enrollment we wanted to get to," she said. "In fact, we got to it in six years. Then we had — both the luxury and problem — to try to develop the residence halls, try to develop the parking, try to develop a faculty large enough to comfortably accommodate the students because we didn’t expect ever to reach our optimum size until many years later. So we spent time trying to catch up."
Stafford said three-quarters of the university’s faculty has been hired since she arrived.
"That allows us to have a combination of really seasoned and mature faculty with a new crop of young and excited" faculty.
"It’s so rare," she said, "that a president has the opportunity to hire that many faculty."
Asked what she would consider Monmouth’s premier programs, Stafford laughed and said that would get her into trouble. When pressed, she allowed as how several programs are special in that they are different. For instance, she said, the social work program is one of very few with a concentration in international social work.
Another, she said, is the software engineering program, which was developed with Fort Monmouth and is one of the very few undergraduate software engineering programs.
She also cited communications, the largest undergraduate program, which has been enhanced with completion last year of the new Plangere center.
She also pointed out that the business school has received accreditation of the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business, the highest level of accreditation.
"I didn’t start that process," she hastily added. "Dr. (Samuel) Magill (her predecessor as president) started the process. I’m able to enjoy the fruits of his work."
Looking to what’s in the works for the future, Stafford said the Biology Department is very interested in developing a graduate program in marine biology and the School of Nursing is beginning to work on developing a program in forensic nursing.
"I can’t wait to see how the programs will shape up as they go on further," she said.
Stafford, who will turn 67 in July, said she has mixed emotions about leaving her job as Monmouth University’s sixth president.
"It’s been the capstone of my career," she said. "I have a love affair with Monmouth. It has been such a joy to be here and serve this great board and this great university.
"It’s going to be very hard to leave," she said. "It turned out to be a good marriage, a better fit than other places I’ve been. It just all worked out well.
"But," she continued, with a smile, "it’s time. I told the board when they asked me how long should a president stay when I was interviewed, I said not less than five years and under no circumstances more than 10. So now I’m stuck with my pronouncement. What happens is that you worry — or, at least, I worry — that I’m not thinking out of the box any more, that you get in a rut. It’s too easy to do the things you’ve done and have been successful at. You need new blood.
"It isn’t good for the university," she said. "It may be good for me, but it’s not good for the university. A university should never be comfortable."