New UCF President Cartwright starts Monday
Alexander Cartwright will take the helm of an eerily quiet UCF campus on Monday, the first day for the new president of the second-largest university in the nation.
April and May are usually filled with 20-hour dance marathons for charity, end-of-year music recitals and theater performances and arena-filling ceremonies to honor more than 8,000 graduates. But all of those, like events across the globe, are canceled to try to slow the spread of coronavirus. Most students have moved back home and classes aren’t scheduled to meet in person again until the fall.
Cartwright, too, will begin his first week on the job from home. But state and university leaders instrumental in his selection hope his arrival during this unusual time will also mark the beginning of a new era for the school and the end of a turbulent couple of years marred by controversy.
The last president, Dale Whittaker, resigned in February 2019 in the middle of a state investigation into the school’s construction spending, after holding the job for less than eight months. Other problems have surfaced since then. Provost Elizabeth Dooley, who had been on paid administrative leave and under investigation since early January, stepped down last week. And earlier this year, the university fired two faculty members and reprimanded a third in connection with a report that found a student fraudulently obtained a Ph.D. The current interim president, Thad Seymour, is leaving
the university.
Cartwright also was met with challenges when he became chancellor of the University of Missouri-Columbia. He arrived in 2017 after his predecessor resigned in the wake of protests over the treatment of black students. He wasn’t available this week for an interview, a UCF spokesman told the Orlando Sentinel.
Some of those who worked closely with Cartwright at Mizzou described him to the Sentinel as a personable academic who consistently showed concern for faculty and students. A native of the Bahamas who was raised by a single mother, Cartwright received a G.E.D. before starting his post-secondary career at a community college. He went on to earn a Ph.D in computer and electrical engineering from the University of Iowa.
“He’s a classic, self-made scholar,” said Berkley Hudson, associate professor emeritus of journalism at Mizzou.
Hudson, who chaired a campus-wide race relations committee, said Cartwright is an “artistic administrator” who’s a creative problem-solver. He remembered how, shortly after Cartwright arrived at Mizzou, he met with small groups of faculty members and listened to their concerns.
“It wasn’t just a publicity thing,” Hudson said. “It was authentic, it was real.”
Cartwright also was accessible to students, said Alex Fulton, an editor at The Maneater, the student-run newspaper who transferred to Mizzou this year. That
was a refreshing change from the top administrator at his previous school, who was “very, very hard to interview.” The chancellor also hosted an open house at his university-owned residence during family weekend, Fulton said.
“I think he did a lot of outreach events that allowed students to get to know him,” he said.
Cartwright, the highestranking person on the Columbia campus, was hired in 2017. Mizzou is much smaller and less diverse than UCF. The Columbia campus has approximately 30,000 students. Roughly 8% of them are black and 4% are Latino, while the Orlando school has nearly 70,000 students. More than a quarter are Latino and 11% are black.
Cartwright arrived at Mizzou almost two years after the protests. Following the unrest, the number of incoming freshmen dropped by more than a third in a couple of years. Those classes included smaller percentages of black students than previous years had, the New York Times reported.
The lost tuition dollars and a decline in state funding resulted in deep budget cuts, the paper reported.
“The echoes of 2015 were really powerful when he took the helm here,” said Clark Peters, the chairman of Mizzou’s faculty council.
Things have improved, Peters said. Mizzou enrolled more than 5,400 first-time freshmen this past fall, up from about 4,100 in fall 2017.
“It’s not like we’ve solved racial tensions on this campus at all,” Peters said. “I think we’ve made some progress and definitely Alex Cartwright had a hand in that.”
Members of the Legion of Black Collegians, Mizzou’s black student government organization, and the now-graduate who was the president of the Missouri Students Association in 2015 couldn’t be reached for comment this week.
Cartwright’s record as a leader who had guided other institutions through crises appealed to UCF’s Board of Trustees, including Vice Chairman Alex Martins, who said he’d met the chancellor several times. Like Mizzou, UCF needs a leader who can spur a transformation, he said.
“We all know that’s the kind of situation we find ourselves in today and we need someone who’s going to be a great leader for us,” Martins said. “We need someone who will bring this university community together.”
Cartwright became an official candidate for the UCF post late in the process; he submitted his application less than 72 hours before trustees selected him to take on the role. But members of a search committee, including Martins and board Chairwoman Beverly Seay, had courted him for weeks beforehand.
Like most university employees, Cartwright will be working remotely during his first week at UCF, which includes meetings with university administrators, students and trustees. He’s still finalizing his move to Orlando but plans to be in town by his second official week on the job, a UCF spokesman said.
His contract comes with a base pay of $600,000, about 20% richer than the one he received at Mizzou, as well as Whittaker’s.