[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 47 (Tuesday, April 3, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E516]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       THE HERO OF CHESTNUT HILL

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                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, April 3, 2001

  Mr. FRANK. Mr. Speaker, on April 17, one of the leading educational 
institutions in America, Boston College, will honor Dr. Francis B. 
Campanella as he prepares to retire this year from his job as Executive 
Vice President. Dr. Campanella has been an extraordinary asset not just 
to Boston College, but to the Greater Boston community, and to higher 
education in America through his extraordinarily creative and diligent 
work at Boston College. Last September, David Warsh appropriately 
described Dr. Campanella's work in an excellent article in the Boston 
Globe. I am delighted to have this chance to join in honoring this very 
distinguished educational leader on the occasion of his well earned 
second retirement, and I ask that Mr. Warsh's column about him be 
printed here as an example of what commitment at its best means to our 
broader community.

                [From the Boston Globe, Sept. 12, 2000]

                       The Hero of Chestnut Hill

                            (By David Warsh)

       Anyone strolling across the densely built and sparkling 
     campus of Boston College would find it hard to believe that 
     there was a time when the school was nearly bankrupt.
       Yet in the early 1970s, Boston College came very close to 
     failing. The school had run major deficits for five years in 
     a row. Its net worth was negative. Its endowment was a paltry 
     $5 million.
       BC had a sympathetic banker in Waltham, Giles Mosher. But 
     only by temporarily dipping into the pension fund for Jesuit 
     professors was the administration able to keep doors open 
     from year to year. In a memorable report, economist Edward 
     Kane warned the faculty that BC soon might find that its 
     (then) spacious campus had become the University of 
     Massachusetts at Chestnut Hill.
       It was about that time that the trustees hired Donald 
     Monan, S.J. Within a year Monan persuaded professor Frank B. 
     Campanella to leave the faculty where he had been teaching 
     finance and take over the school's internal management 
     instead. The rest is history.
       Boston College took off like a rocket and the University of 
     Massachusetts built its new campus at Columbia Point.
       Last week Campanella, 64, said he would return to teaching 
     at the end of the current academic year. That $5 million 
     endowment has grown to $1.1 billion, the 35th largest in the 
     country. (In contrast, Boston University says the market 
     value of its endowment currently is about $980 million.)
       Faculty salaries, which in 1973 had been at the 50th 
     percentile of category I institutions, are in the 90th 
     percentile. Undergraduate applications, which had totaled 
     8,400, last year were 21,000 for 2,100 places--making BC the 
     fifth most heavily applied-to university in the country.
       And on the 1991 list of BC's top 12 application overlaps--
     meaning those schools to which a prospective BC student also 
     had applied--the names of Fairfield University, Providence 
     University, and UMass had been elbowed off by 1997 by 
     Harvard, Penn, and Brown.
       Campanella was a logical, if not an obvious choice for 
     executive vice president. He had been raised in Jamaica 
     Plain, then graduated from Boston College High School in 
     1954. After earning an engineering degree at Rensselaer 
     Polytechnic Institute and serving three years as a Marine 
     Corps lieutenant he worked for five years in the construction 
     industry.
       Low margins and chronic uncertainty led him to retool as a 
     finance professor, beginning as a night school MBA at Babson 
     College, then as a doctor of business administration at 
     Harvard Business School. (He tested Harry Markowitz's 
     portfolio theory for his dissertation; Rober Glauber was his 
     supervisor). He had been teaching for three years when Monan 
     took him by the arm in 1973. He had the confidence of the 
     faculty.
       Campanella's strategy from the first was to run a surplus. 
     He established a depreciation account--a standard business 
     practice but among the first in the nation at a university--
     which freed up cash for investment. Then he set out to build 
     the college's balance sheet.
       He borrowed as much money as possible, taking advantage of 
     the bargain rates available to tax-exempt institutions. He 
     used it for bricks and mortar, budgeting debt service as an 
     expense. With the physical plant growing, he lobbied the 
     faculty to increase enrollment, and plowed the growing 
     surpluses into endowment. He invested aggressively as well.
       Then came ``enrollment management,'' a set of yield 
     management practices more or less invented in education at 
     BC. The offices of admissions and financial aid were 
     combined, making it possible to purposefully compete with 
     other institutions on price. BC's applications pool broadened 
     to include Texas, California, the Midwest. Retention became 
     part of the picture as well.
       Campanella gradually attracted national attention.
       Campanella retired for the first time in 1991. It didn't 
     take. In 1994, the trustees asked him to come back. He stayed 
     long enough to get new BC president William Leahy, S.J. 
     settled in his job. ``He's a man who understood the world of 
     higher education, the world of business too,'' Leahy said. 
     ``He'll be a very difficult man to replace.''

     

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