Click here for Part I & Part III

A public university offering high-quality undergraduate and graduate education programs

Dr. Christopher Fiorentino is the President of West Chester University, a public university in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1871, WCU began as a private institute focused on pedagogy. Today, the school is one of Pennsylvania's 14 state universities and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate programs covering diverse liberal arts, science, and engineering topics and fields of study. In 2009, U.S. News & World Report ranked WCU 69th in the Master's Universities (North) category. Dr. Fiorentino is the 15th person to serve as the university’s President. His inauguration will take place Friday, April 21, 2017.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you tell us about West Chester University’s impact on the business community? How did you get your reputation as an entrepreneur?

CHRISTOPHER FIORENTINO: We were in a position where the funding was very limited and if we wanted to do things, undertake initiatives, we pretty much had to figure out how to do it ourselves. I alluded to our Graduate Center few moments ago—the Graduate Center was actually 47,000-square foot, class A office building that I put together a business plan, pro forma, and presented it to the University as Dean asking that that they support me in acquiring this facility for us to offer off-site courses—typically graduate courses. My premise was that if we could offer our graduate program, primarily the MBA program at an offsite location, we’d be able to significantly increase enrollments in the MBA programs, because people would not have to come to the actual campus, which is challenging in the evening. What I asked for was that the University support a bond that could be issued to purchase the building.

I was able to acquire a $7.5 million bond funding to buy this building and fit it out. The deal was that all the revenue generated in the building would be retained by my college to support the programs. It was immediately wildly successful, so from a standpoint of being a business dean it gave me great credibility in the business community, because not only was I running a business school and a college of business and public affairs, but I was a successful entrepreneur in my own right because I had this building that was kicking off a million plus dollars of net revenue every year that could support the programs in my college.

I gained this reputation as an entrepreneur. We worked extensively with teams of students and faculty redeveloping the business district in West Chester, which, if you go back to the mid-90s, you could stand in the middle of Gay Street and look down and see nothing but vacant storefronts. We had a lot to do with the renaissance—the restaurant, art gallery, and antique shop renaissance that’s taken place in West Chester. If you stand in the middle of Gay Street now, you’re going to get hit by a car because it’s a thriving place.

We’ve had great opportunities. And I think one of the key things to emphasize is that when we engage in these sorts of things, everything we look at we look at from the perspective of an educational experience for our students and an opportunity for our faculty to engage in activities that utilize their skill sets. We had marketing faculty, we had faculty from the geography program who are GIS experts and we were doing all sorts of spatial analysis for the borough around trying to recruit businesses and making a case for the concentration of income within the region. It became an educational experience for our students, a professional development experience for our faculty, and then a huge benefit to the citizens of the borough and the county in general.

We continue with that model. We’re always looking for opportunities for our faculty to engage in external activities. We have a Center for Community Solutions that we operate right now that really invites people who think they could benefit from the expertise of the University to come and talk to us. We started this center because the mayor of West Chester identified the fact that if you know somebody at the University, it’s easy to pick up the phone and call them; but if you don’t, then the University is this monolithic organization and you don’t even know where to start. So we created this Office for Community Solutions. We have a webpage for it, we have a person who is the point person who gets contacted, and if somebody has a need for a certain kind of expertise, they can give us a call and we try to make a connection. We can’t always do it—it depends upon the circumstances—but if we can connect somebody with the right kind of expertise, we can again provide an opportunity for a faculty member, maybe students can work on a project—which is again an educational experience—and we can help a nonprofit organization, a business, a government organization. And so we continue to do this sort of thing.

By the way, a key portion of our mission beyond just the education and the success of our students, is to impact the economy of the region, and so we are aggressively doing that. I have in my office a sign—whoever comes into my office sees it—and says: “Don’t forget to take some risks.” We are inclined to go out and engage in things and try to support the greater community while educating our students and providing opportunities for our faculty.

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