If there’s one word that TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini would use to describe how TCU has changed over his 21-year tenure at the university, it’s bigger.
“I think the biggest transformation would be the size of everything,” said Boschini, sitting on the balcony of TCU’s Brown-Lupton University Union, overlooking the campus commons. “The student body is much, much bigger. It’s much more diverse in every way. The campus is bigger geographically.”
Change is in the air at TCU, which announced this week that Boschini will be stepping down from his role on June 1. Current TCU President Daniel Pullin will assume the role of chancellor. TCU does not plan to hire a new president.
Within days, news also broke that TCU Athletic Director Jeremiah Donati, who led the university to further national prominence, plans to head east to lead athletics at the University of South Carolina.
While these changes are afoot, Boschini will continue to fundraise, work on enrollment and teach. The TCU board of trustees plans to ratify the chancellor succession plan at their spring meeting.
For Boschini, his tenure as the head of the university has been marked by a “joy of a lifetime” and “millions” of different challenges.
“You’re basically the chancellor of a small city. You have hotels, you have a hospital, you have a police force, you have restaurants. The only thing you don’t have that a city would have is a fire department, and we have one right next door to us,” said Boschini, who was wearing a purple scarf and a knitted ski hat with holiday ornaments.
“I think the hard part about being a university chancellor is that you have so many different constituencies, and people forget about that.”
When Boschini came from Illinois State University in 2003 to run the “small city” off of South University Drive, he didn’t know what was ahead of him two decades into the future. But the administrator, with a doctorate in higher education administration, had a plan.
In a 2005 PowerPoint presentation, included in the TCU history book “A Remarkable Story to Tell,” his specific goals were outlined. Become ranked near the top for Tier II national universities, have a strong residential presence, seek modest increase in graduate programs and work to increase national visibility.
In the two decades since Boschini set out to lead the small purple city, a lot of those goals have been met, and there’s more things getting “bigger.”
Full-time enrollment has nearly doubled. The university was ranked in the top 100 of universities in the U.S. News & World Report for 14 years in a row, though TCU slipped this year and landed in the 105 spot.
This year the school celebrated the opening of its Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine building, which enrolled its first medical school class in 2019. And across the university, the number of full-time graduate students has more than quadrupled. TCU athletics also graduated from being in the mid-major Conference USA to the Big 12. Just last year, the university reached its target of $1 billion in fundraising as part of its “Lead On” campaign.
James Riddlesperger, a longtime TCU professor who came to the university in 1982, describes Boschini as a man with “exceptional vision and boundless energy” who was able to execute on all fronts.
“Victor has been the embodiment of ‘everything, everywhere all at once’ on the TCU campus. The physical campus has been transformed, the student body has doubled in size, and the dynamic force of growth has taken off,” said Riddlesperger, a professor of political science. “Victor has left a huge imprint on TCU, one that will prepare it for growth into the future.”
That future now rests in Pullin’s hands. Pullin, who will become chancellor on June 1, told the student publication TCU 360 in September that his priorities are creating a stellar campus environment and putting TCU on the map as “Fort Worth’s place to be.”
Pullin, who has a master of business administration from Harvard Business School and a law degree from University of Oklahoma, also has his eyes on academics.
While the university as a whole slid in the national rankings, he said they could learn from of some of their top performing schools, such as Harris College of Nursing & Health Sciences and the Neeley School of Business to look at what resources they can put into the core academic program — or what Pullin refers to as “enterprise.”
“At the end of the day, as you look over the next 10 years, academic prominence, academic impact, thought leadership and the broader difference we can make in the communities that we serve, both here in Fort Worth and beyond, is going to be a forward priority of Texas Christian University,” said Pullin, who became president of the university in last year. Prior to that, he was the dean of the business school.
Growth should be prudent, thoughtful and metered so the university can continue to “dream” but be “practical” on how to execute those dreams, Pullin said.
That growth, he said, will stem from the foundation that Boschini has built. But in some ways, Pullin is already following in Boschini’s footsteps.
In 2003, when Boschini was selected as TCU’s next chancellor, he told the student newspaper The Skiff that he planned to manage by “walking around” and coming “with a pen and paper, not with a sword.”
That’s an ethos that Pullin has brought into his leadership so far.
“I reserve two hours of my week every week to walk the campus, and I have no agenda other than to say, ‘hi,’ and listen and learn,” said Pullin. “That’s why I wear tennis shoes every day — purple tennis shoes — because A, I take a lot of steps, and B, I meet a lot of students, and that creates relationship-building opportunities.”
It’s this kind of accessibility, he said, that will make a “great place even greater.”
Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. Contact her at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.