On Record With George Ebbs


How would you describe your style, and how has your consulting background prepared you for your new responsibilities as president of Embry-Riddle?

George Ebbs The consulting environment demands results every three months from clients who are paying for that. They want you to come up with ideas and insights they haven't thought of.

I enjoy being here. This is one huge step from a traditional consulting project. It's a brand-new experience, so the learning curve is steep. That's what consultants thrive on.

I tend to work a lot on instincts. If I have 80 percent of the information, I'll make a judgment and move on, rather than spend a lot more time. But I've been concerned about not reacting the same way here. I'm trying to be a lot more patient, to understand the situation and the implications of actions before taking them. I'm trying to do what I feel this university needs: to put more analytical rigor into our decision-making.

I don't believe I can do everything for everybody. Rather, I think I can be a catalyst and stimulate them to do what they can. I manage by walking around. That's the kind of manager I've always been.

I've also been trying to involve the officers in helping me decide where I should spend my time and what the university needs. I've sought input from the faculty and staff, and looked and listened a lot before I confirmed what I wanted to do.

What have you heard so far?

They convinced me that moving to a chancellor for the Daytona Beach campus is a smart idea. That's one of the first major actions I'm taking. Instead of a senior person being in charge, the president of the university was also the president of Daytona Beach. That situation causes lots of problems. Things that should be settled at much lower levels drift all the way to the top because there's no other place to come together. If you have to come back to campus to adjudicate a faculty issue or make decisions about departmental budgets, your time is limited. It limits the president from going out and understanding the academic environment, promoting the institution, and developing necessary relationships with corporations, institutions, and regulators.

What are your initial plans for Embry-Riddle?

One has been to create a "one university" feel, in which everyone -- from a financial aid clerk at Daytona Beach to a professor at Prescott to a center director for Extended Campus -- feels Embry-Riddle is the institution they work for. The world sees us as Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, but we didn't always see ourselves that way. We saw ourselves as a group of individual units, each trying to optimize our own particular situation. We weren't making the most of our collective resources and our potential in the marketplace.

The second thing I'm working on is to understand why we seem to be in this financial trap of always looking for a five-percent tuition increase, pulling ourselves along for costs, and never making any headway. I began to understand our dependence upon student fees when I saw the numbers. This institution as a whole manages its costs well. But we haven't looked at the harder revenue questions. The first one I took on was tuition. There is room to do our students and the institution a favor by charging for the real value of an Embry-Riddle education, and so changing tuition is something we're moving toward.

The third priority is institutional advancement. With Perry Fulkerson on board and with what we're doing to drum up enthusiasm within the university and with the president's advisory board and board of trustees, people are beginning to understand that fund raising and institutional advancement are everybody's business. Perry's done a fine job of getting people excited about the idea that they can contribute and help us reposition ourselves so we can be the beneficiary of the interests, largesse, and gifts of individuals and corporations. We asked: how can you go out and ask alumni to participate if those who work here don't? That got a lot of people up on their toes, and we've seen a rush of contributions. We're all going to be pretty involved in that. The excitement is building everywhere. You can see it already.

The fourth issue I'm looking at is what Dr. Sliwa started: our infrastructure needs. It isn't just a matter of identifying projects and how much debt capacity we could have. We have to divide the strategy. Bob Jost [vice president for business and finance] and his troops have come up with an idea that makes sense: go to the capital markets every couple of years for smaller amounts of money, rather than do gargantuan projects that are hard to get done. Having something that is always being renewed or constructed will be a positive sign to faculty, staff, students, and parents. We're going to the market this year for 10-12 million dollars. We'll do three or four major projects and a lot of smaller projects at Daytona Beach and Prescott.

How does Embry-Riddle stand against the competition, and how do you see us moving forward?

We're a very flexible institution. For example, our business school is doing a good job providing different levels and types of managerial skill needed by industry. The big business schools like Michigan and Harvard are pretty hidebound in how they do business education, just as Princeton and MIT are hidebound in how they do research. Well, we do applied research, not basic research. We're not going to change that. We provide professionally trained, lab-oriented, hands-on people who are ready to work. As a consequence, we're a heck of a competitor against a business school that turns out financiers or a technical school that turns out research. Boeing's problems aren't research, they're application. Eighty percent of their people are hired because they know how to get the job done. We train those kinds of people. What a great thing! This applies to all of our offerings.

There are many exciting opportunities out there. We don't do much with research. That's because we've never been clear about research. If we can define it and give people a taste of what it's like to get involved in it, we're going to find ourselves more actively courted by organizations that are anxious to tie up with us. Nobody has the reputation we do in the industry. We just haven't taken advantage of it. Our problem isn't that we don't know how to do it, rather that we've never told people what we want to do.

We also have the continuing challenge of upgrading our academic programs. But in some cases the challenge is more carefully drawn than for others, because we've been fortunate to earn the lion's share of a couple of markets, such as aeronautical engineering. Our academic leverage still can increase, but we can't lose sight of the fact we're a niche institution. I've seen enough to know that most organizations would kill for the kind of differentiation we have, so why would we give it away? Yes, we have to find ways to broaden our student base, but we'll do it with programs like electrical engineering and software development and the new degrees in communication and science, technology and globalization.

What will you do to gain outside support for the university?

Our supporters in industry want to help. Members of our research advisory council recently told me, "We've been coming here for a long time. We do what we can, but we need to know from you how we can help you." I've heard that over and over again. Once we start inculcating our vision, we'll be able to take advantage of the many opportunities and the people who want to help us.

We've been blessed by having the right leaders at the right time. Without Dr. Sliwa's influence, what would we have to show off? He did so much in that regard. Now we can take what we have out to the industry and do some of the things I'm good at.