In an exclusive interview with The Triangle on Wednesday, July 3, current Drexel University president and incoming Temple University president-elect John Fry expanded upon his decision to leave Drexel. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Sophia Mattia: Why are you leaving your position at Drexel?

John Fry: This has really been agonizing. I love Drexel. I just started my 15th year on Monday and there’s a time where you feel like you’ve given everything you have to give. The average tenure I think for a University president now is five and a half years. I think I’ve been able to do much better than that and do so with so much commitment and energy. I really do love the place. I’ve never had a bad day at Drexel. But, personally, I’m 64 years old. I would like to be able to have one more institution that I impact and if I’m going to do that, the time is probably now. It’s for very personal reasons. 

I can tell you this was really not an easy decision. I spent the last three days, I probably talked to over 250 people from Drexel, just thanking them for their incredible work and their support and their friendship and it was really hard to do. The way I think about this is Drexel has been so compelling to me and now I look at another compelling institution like Temple. I feel like I have one more opportunity to do something meaningful, running a university that is also in my hometown, and that has a lot to do with it. We all love Philly. I raised my kids here. We’re so happy here. The opportunity to be involved with yet another Philadelphia institution — and beyond Drexel I used to work at Penn — just feels like a great next step for me. 

SM: What are your goals for Temple during your presidency?

JF: I’d say there’s short-term, the things that I would want to do right away, and there are long term things. The first short-term goal is to really get to know the Temple University and Temple Health community and the neighbors in North Philadelphia. Just to really sort of understand at the university, in the health system and in the neighborhoods, what are people’s priorities? What do they care about? What do they think Temple as a whole can do for them individually, but for the community collectively? I think always the best way to start one of these jobs is just to listen and get to know people and to absorb what the environment is all about. 

The second thing would be to focus immediate attention on campus and neighborhood safety and Temple has commissioned a report from former Police Commissioner Ramsey, it’s called 21CP. That’s his company and they went through an extensive analysis of all the things that Temple could do to improve campus and neighborhood safety. They’ve implemented many of those things — enhancing the police force and lighting, making sure there’s good feedback and advisory groups in place from students. 

I’m familiar with this because we did this in the summer of 2020. We also hired Charles Ramsey at Drexel. He also provided a 21CP report. We’ve implemented those recommendations. We hired Chief Singleton to help lead us forward and I think we’ve had really good results. I think Temple was incredibly smart to do what they did and what I want to do is really sort of get to know not only the strategy, but the people, the officers, the security guards, the people who support campus safety administratively, especially the Vice President for Public Safety and really see what I can do to support their work. 

The third would be to begin to work with the enrollment team to look at their plans for both stabilizing and enhancing enrollment and maybe to bring some of my experience in that regard to the table, not only the undergraduate freshmen recruitment, but also graduate recruitment, online, and their international strategy. Also domestically, how do you spread the word about Temple? Those would be some of the immediate things that I would do.

Longer term, two things in particular. One is once I understand the institution better, making plans for investing in academic excellence, in student success, in employee development. How can we enhance this university in terms of what its people do and how do we give them the optimal amount of support to do so? Those kinds of investments. Also an emphasis on philanthropy. Temple in 10 years will be 150 years old. That’s a perfect way of creating a context for saying,  as we approach 150 years since the founding, what are the types of investments that Temple deserves from its alumni, its friends, its foundations, corporations and others who support it?

SM: How do you think Drexel and its future are going to be affected by you leaving your position? 

JF: I think that if I pride myself on one thing it’s that I’ve spent so much time building an amazing team so I’d really like to think and I think this is a fair statement that when I do go over to Temple — and we haven’t determined that date yet — it will be sad for me and my colleagues who are also my friends, but mostly it’ll be smooth. We have such capacity and depth in our administration. We also have an amazing board who I’ve worked so closely with and who my team works so closely with and between the depth and talent in the administration and the depth and the commitment of the board I feel like yes, they will miss me initially, but it is such an amazing institution. It will be so attractive to people who want to be its next president. I feel like all is going to go well. I’m already preparing my team for that transition. 

SM: Are there any new candidates in mind for who will fill your position that you can speak about?

JF: No, it’s so early. I’m honestly still digesting all this news and I think what’s going to happen is our chair Rich Greenwalt is going to identify a search committee. I know he’s working on that right now. He’s also going to select a search firm and I know they’re working on that right now. I suspect this effort will start up very soon so we can get a jump on the recruitment season. It’s always good to get a jump because you tend to get the better candidates that way. I think this search is going to start quickly. I think it’s going to move very expeditiously and there’s gonna be a ton of people who are going to be interested in competing to be Drexel’s next president. Obviously no one knows better than me what the benefits of that job are and so I’ll of course be on hand if they need me to help in any way. I don’t think there’s going to be any shortage of great candidates. I am sure that the next president of Drexel is going to be an absolute star. 

SM: What do you feel is your biggest lasting impact on Drexel?

JF: I think I’m proud maybe of two things. The first is that early on in my tenure at Drexel, almost from the start, I wanted to prioritize student success. I felt like we were recruiting classes, but I’m not sure how well we were supporting those classes from everything from financial aid, to advising, to counseling, to better spaces for them to live and all the other things that make for a well-rounded student experience. Also, really trying to make it easier for students to do the things that they wanted to do and to make it not burdensome administratively. I don’t think we’ve succeeded on all those fronts completely, but I do think that the Drexel we have today versus before is much more focused on the success of students, and taking barriers out of their way and being much more generous with financial aid, and really trying to do everything we can to make the campus experience and also the co-op experience much better. I’m really proud. I’m proud of that, how we’ve leaned into that and I hope we’ve made some real progress.

The other thing I’m really proud of is the way we’ve really engaged in meaningful ways with our neighbors around so many issues that they really felt were lacking at Drexel in terms of the civic work that is now in place through the Dornsife Center, through the Lindy Center, through the new Powel Science Leadership Academy Middle School. All the things we’ve done to try to make our neighbors really feel part of our university and in doing so to create an environment for our students especially and our faculty, to also work with neighbors on really complicated challenges, particularly urban challenges. If you take a look at the level of engagement between Drexel students and faculty with our neighbors in Powelton Village and Mantua and West Powelton, it’s been very very significant. It’s something I’m really personally proud of because Anthony J. Drexel didn’t set up Drexel to be a sort of institution like an ivory tower. He set it up in the middle of the city and wanted it to have extensive connections to surrounding neighborhoods and to the city of Philadelphia. I feel like in many ways we may have realized some of those aspirations during my time at Drexel and that work will carry on. It’s strong. It’s significant. It’s meaningful, and I think it helps a lot of people. 

SM: Do you have any last parting words for the student body of Drexel?

JF: You guys are so talented and so amazing and so humane in terms of the things that you do. I will really miss you dearly. It’s always been the best part of my experience at Drexel just watching what our students do with the things that we’ve given them, but especially with the things that they’ve just started themselves and just sort of figured it out. They’re just so resilient. 

The other thing I would want to convey is, thank you for being so constructive. In all my office hours and all the things I’ve dealt with students over years, very rarely did I get a complaint without a recommendation. Drexel students are unfailingly constructive. They have criticisms. They think we can do things better and they’re right. But, they always have a proposal along with the criticism and I can’t tell you how much that means to me because I always feel like after a conversation like that, I walk away having a pretty good idea of what I need to, as opposed to just being criticized. That’s important. That shows their level of maturity and I think as a result our university has gotten better because we’ve had so many students working constructively to help us do so.