Jerry Farley and Washburn University have been together for a generation. What comes next? (2024)

The lawn mowers, under Washburn University president Jerry Farley, always run on time.

Every morning, Farley’s small army of landscapers buzz, cut and trim the compact campus into pristine perfection. Miles of winding sidewalks are edged along their entirety. Flowers and hedges are planted against tan sandstone, limestone blocks, tying together the motif that Washburn, too, is a place of learning and sophistication.

This is the American college campus — and Farley is over it all.

It’s a different campus, both in terms of size, students and programs, since Farley took the helm of the university more than 25 years ago. Millions of dollars’ worth of new buildings — some of which are still under construction — dot the main campus, while new programs and state-of-the-art equipment train associate’s degree students in the university’s off-site Washburn Tech buildings, which Farley led efforts to acquire and operate in 2008.

All this and more are the quintessential points of pride for Farley, who keenly remembers the vision he had when he arrived in 1997 to turn Washburn from a quaint, commuter campus to a destination for the region’s high school seniors.

To do that, he’d not only have to sell students on the value of an academic degree, but on a campus experience — which Washburn didn’t really have the time. Farley would also have to sell parents on the idea of a place they could send their children, a place that not only looked good but also could be good for their children’s future careers.

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And campus looks really good, he says.

“If people see that and think we’re taking good care of the outside of the university buildings, then they’ll ask, ‘Well, what are they doing inside?’” Farley supposed. “And they give us the benefit of the doubt — that we’re taking care of the inside as well.”

For 25 years, Farley has overseen the grounds, operations, academics, recruiting, enrollment and finances as president of Washburn University, one of only three remaining U.S. municipal universities with at least partial city control.

Although he’ll retire Sept. 30, as the longest tenured president in university history, Farley will remain on campus as president emeritus for a year, taking a salary of $327,000 to help the university recruit international students and fundraise at alumni events around the region and country.

After that, the university’s Regents, then, will have a challenge on their hands in asking — what is Washburn University without Jerry Farley?

Enthusiasm and research secured Washburn post for Jerry Farley

To hear Farley talk about his path to Washburn University’s presidency, it was practically luck that he ever stumbled into higher education administration work.

He had just graduated from the University of Oklahoma on a Sunday afternoon in spring 1969 when he was asked to report to the bursar’s office — probably to settle some sort on unpaid parking ticket or something, he reasoned. Turned out that they had wanted to hire someone to assist in the bursar’s office, and a faculty member had given Farley’s name.

“They hired me on the spot. You couldn’t do that today at all — they shouldn’t have done that back then either — but that turned out to be just the thing I wanted to do,” Farley said. “Even then, I didn’t have any aspiration at that point that I’d want to be the president of a university. I was 23 years old.”

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It was the beginning of a long career in university finance, first as a controller and vice president for administration at OU, then at Oklahoma State University as a similar vice president. Farley credits the insights he gained in these positions with helping him understand how universities tick, as well as how to relate some of the complicated finances and needs of a university to stakeholders.

When an old colleague returned to Oklahoma from Washburn in Topeka, the colleague pointed out that the presidency there was open, and Farley might be interested in applying. But Farley didn’t give it too much thought. After all, he was a finance guy.

But the friend was persistent, and after Farley began looking more into the municipal university and its history, he applied for the job.

Blanche Parks, Washburn’s longest-tenured Regent who stepped down from the board earlier in the spring, had been on the search committee that brought Farley to Washburn, and was later president of the board during Farley’s first two years.

Farley had stood out based on his extensive research into Washburn and the Topeka community, and that he had brought a vision for what the university could be, Parks said.

“We had our criteria of course of what we were looking for, but we were so impressed not only with his research, but his enthusiasm and the vision for the university he had,” Parks said. “He had an enthusiasm about himself and the things he wanted to do that just impressed us.”

Jerry Farley worked to move Washburn past 'community campus' reputation

Washburn before Farley was Washburn a generation ago.

The university in the mid-1990s had hit a lull. Officials had long before repaired and replaced some of the buildings wrecked and lost in the 1966tornado, but damage to the campus atmosphere endured, Parks said.

Its status as a municipal university and one of just two law schools in Kansas gave the institution a sense of prestige, but it was a sense that also worked against it. The broader community and region considered Washburn a commuter campus, or one that lacked the frills of college that its neighbors in Kansas State University, the University of Kansas and even Emporia State University down south provided its undergraduates.

Students could go to Washburn to get an education, but just an education, so the first thing Farley outlined in his vision was a mission to revamp that reputation.

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“When I first came to campus and I addressed faculty, we had one classroom on campus that could hold 100 people, in Henderson Hall,” Farley said. “The faculty came to hear me in mid-July and again in August. They, of course, wanted to see if I had horns and a tail or something. We filled the room, and I talked about the vision we had and what we wanted it to be.

“We recognized that wasn’t going to happen if we didn’t want to provide the kind of environment that students wanted to have. And that wasn’t driving back and forth between campus and their apartment in a car.”

The vision began with a new 400-bed residence hall — the Living Learning Center, or “the first residence hall that had been built in goodness knows how long" — adjacent to the campus union. Classrooms and other student support offices would be placed in this hall, to make it a one-stop-shop for anything a student might need.

But you can’t just park students in a residence hall, Farley said, so the university got to building a new recreation center, as well as athletic facilities. Faculty and student groups put about 100 curriculum-related programs and clubs in place to ensure students had outside-the-classroom learning and enrichment opportunities.

Farley credited the work of faculty and administratorsto build on Washburn’s mission as a teaching institution.

“We built new academic buildings, and we renovated every other building,” he said. “We also have some of the best faculty members that I’ve ever seen. We are a teaching institution, primarily — we do write some articles and do that kind of research — but we’re basically a teaching institution, and we’ve grown that great reputation over the years.”

Slowly, Washburn began to change its reputation, if only around the immediate region. Enrollment grew, with most students still coming from within a couple hours’ drive of the campus. With the success of the first residence hall, the university in 2016 built another similar residential building, the 350-bed Lincoln Hall, near the northeast corner of campus.

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“He was instrumental in putting Washburn on the map, especially regarding our athletic and academic programs,” Parks said. “He modernized the campus, and he created new opportunities for student life. He rebuilt the campus, really, and we not only had a modern, progressive university to attract students, but we had excellent programs to match.”

When COVID-19 hit in spring 2020, Farley said the university immediately called on professors to retool classes and figure out how to continue delivering education. He takes pride in the university’s statistic that no on-campus student was hospitalized with COVID in the past few years of pandemic education, although he admits that on-campus students are but a portion of the bigger student body.

“Everybody had the opportunity to finish spring 2020,” Farley said. “It’s not the best thing that could have happened, but no one got behind, and everyone got to graduate on time, if that was their goal.”

Farleys made connections across the capital city over quarter century

Throughout his 25 years in Topeka, Farley and his wife, Susan, made plenty of community connections even beyond the campus or the Washburn President’s Residence. The two had plenty of time to put their roots in the community since Susan, a longtime educator before the couple’s move to Topeka, retired as soon as Farley took his post, and the couple didn't have children.

The couple have each served on various community and nonprofit boards, and it was through these connections that Farley said he began to learn more about the needs and opportunities Topeka had at the time.

“I was working with an organization called Go Topeka, and it seemed to me that one of the biggest things holding us back as a community to grow and contract new industry is that we didn’t have the people,” he said. “We didn’t have the skills that people wanted to have.”

For decades, vocational, trade and technical schools around Kansas generally fell under the operation of their local school districts, and the Kaw Area Technical School was no different. Students, enrolled through Topeka USD 501, learned various tradecrafts and earned certifications in those skills.

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At the turn of the millennium, though, those types of schools began to split off from their local districts. But while other technical colleges became their own independent institutions,Farley and other Washburn administrators in 2008 put in place a plan that had the university take over operations and administrative duties for the school, with the school changing name to Washburn Institute of Technology.

The school, which now functions like a college under the Washburn University umbrella, has been a point of pride for Washburn in the past decade. The school also partners with several area school districts to offer career and technical education classes.

“No one else in Kansas does anything like this, in marrying two- and four-year programs. Some other states have it, but it’s very rare,” Farley said.

“I would say that he made the turning point toward the university becoming more modern, and more progressive,” said Parks, the former Regent. “And that had an effect on the City of Topeka, because it helped us attract a lot of new corporations, who would work with the university on programs and different ways to enhance the student experience.”

Larry Wolgast, a former Topeka City Council member and mayor from 2013 to 2018, credited Farley with helping champion not just Washburn, but the city at large.

Anytime there would be a ribbon cutting or celebration for a new business, particularly in NOTO, Farley would be there, Wolgast said.

“I don’t know how a Washburn University president could be more supporting of Topeka while he was also leading the university,” Wolgast said. “His leadership for the entire city will be missed.”

'I do have to retire eventually. It’s inevitable.'

What’s in store next for Washburn, Farley isn’t sure, but he knows he wants to be part of it.

Farley said his decision to retire began when his wife began asking him when he would join her in the retiree lifestyle — playing golf, meeting with friends and just having fun.

“(For years), I couldn’t come up with a reason that I couldn’t have fun in this job,” he said. “I love it, but I do have to retire eventually. It’s inevitable. I don’t want to come out of this office toes up.”

Then came the Washburn Board of Regents, who in early spring 2022 began to ask more seriously as to his plans for retirement.

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“They wanted to know, what’s your succession plan?” Farley said. “That’s their job. I had given them a date two or three years ago. They wanted to be ahead of something that was going to occur, and we just worked it out.”

Farley and the Regents came to an agreement in which Farley would step down into a president emeritus role for a year, followed by a 12-month sabbatical. Between the date of that agreement in June and the end of the sabbatical, Farley will receive more than $750,000, and he and his wife will retain usage of the Washburn President’s Residence for the next five years.

In his role as president emeritus, Farley will focus on international student recruitment and fundraising, particularly through alumni networking events. Both duties will ostensibly include plenty of paid travel, although Farley said it’ll be far from something he enjoys after racking up more than 100,000 air miles over the past decade.

Farley does hope to get back into flying himself. He has his general aviation license, and previously owned a plane but sold it after not using it very much. He hopes to join some kind of plane ownership group.

Farley will turn 76 years old on Sept. 20, or less than two weeks before his retirement date. With graying hair, he jokes that he looks like he should retire.

But Farley does show other signs of his age. It takes him just a little longer to make the walk across the campus he's come to love, and conversations with him meander long into tangents or any one of thousands of memories Farley has collected over 25 years in his job.

He occasionally has trouble recalling some of his staff's names, although quite a few of them are newer or serving in interim positions. Much of the university’s administrative team has seen turnover in the last year, including several dean positions and the position of vice president of academic affairs, which would be considered the university provost at most other institutions.

Farley downplayed the significance of the number of changes, pointing to many people staying on just to see the university through COVID-19, and a retirement program he was glad to see longtime employees take advantage of.

Such turnover, he emphasized, is also a way to give existing employees opportunities “to move up the ladder.” And with Farley gone in just over a month, it’ll also be a chance for a new president to come in with a clean slate.

“I think what this new president will do is look at this as an opportunity,” Farley said. “They won’t have to come in and live with someone else’s team. You can come in and get your own team together pretty quickly.”

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Recent years have led to enrollment challenges at Washburn

A new university president will also have to contend with an enrollment decline over the past few years that is quickly erasing any of the gains Farley made over his 25-year tenure.

Since reaching a university record high headcount of 7,334 students in fall 2004, enrollment stagnated during at the beginning of the 2008 recession, picked back up slightly in 2011, then has steadily dropped in the decade since, falling last year to 5,657.

Full-time equivalent enrollment, a measure that better measures the tuition revenue a university receives, has similarly fallen by nearly a quarter over that decade to 4,212 in fall 2021.

COVID-19, to be sure, played a part in the recent years’ downturn, but it’s only the latest in a series of headwinds universities across the state and Midwest are facing as fewer high school students plan to attend four-year colleges.

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Washburn University, under its latest strategic enrollment plan, is then focusing more of its efforts to attract nontraditional students, or students who don't attend college immediately after graduating high school.

And although Farley much prefers in-person learning, Washburn is investing in offering more of its classes in online formats, with a little more than one in five now delivered remotely. He imagines universitieswill have to adapt and offer more than the traditional undergraduate experience, although that will still be available for anyone who seeks it.

"I think universities like Washburn will be giving more certificates," Farley said."We’ll have companies like IBM come to us and say that they want a student to know more about coding than they might know about some 18th or 19th century in Europe, and we’ll give that certificate, to show they’ve mastered it."

As he prepares to retire, Farley isn't counting his "lasts." The spring convocation came and went, and so did the first day of school. He volunteered again, as he has for several years, to help move students into the residence halls he so proudly helped build.

He slows down slightly when he talks about the new Washburn School of Law building on the southeast corner of campus, which won’t finish until later this year and a few months after his retirement. It’ll have a tower, Farley emphasizes, and the campus’ newer buildings all have towers that lend a certain air of academics.

Farley prefers not to talk about legacy, leaving that instead to future historians. Who could tell you much about Peter McVicar, who up until this year had been the school’s longest tenured president, Farley points out.

Instead, he prefers to enjoy the campus as he sees it — as he imagined it —for a few last weeks as president of Washburn University.

“One look for the campus makes a big difference in the way people respond to things on that campus, and mowing the lawns and edging the sidewalks is important to the image a university presents to the world,” Farley said.

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325‬. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.