NEWS
With continued budget cuts, a decrease in enrollment, and competition with local trade schools, Mary Jane Saunders will face many of the same difficulties as her predecessor, Frank T. Brogan.
But for FAU’s sixth president, the expectations for tangible results are higher — and so is the pressure.
Brogan, who left in September to oversee Florida’s 11 public universities as chancellor of the state university system, helped set the plans for FAU’s growth. Saunders was hired to make them happen.
“We made a change in selecting Saunders. She has full support and consensus from all of FAU’s constituents; now she needs to prove herself,” Board of Trustees member Lalita Janke told the UP after the 13-member board selected Saunders on March 3. “We expect her to take us into the future.”
That change includes selecting a more traditional university president. When Brogan was hired in 2003, the former Florida lieutenant governor came to FAU with a political background and many community contacts. FAU’s choice in Saunders, and her higher education and science background, also represents the new goals of the university.
Those goals: to transform the campus into a more traditional university and gain national recognition as a biomedical research institution.
Saunders has been the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Cleveland State University in Ohio since 2006, and she also has an extensive background in science, including a Ph.D. in botany from the University of Massachusetts and postdoctoral training in a science program at the University of Georgia.
“I think FAU is a wonderful university that will have tremendous success in the next few years,” Saunders told the UP in a phone interview last week. “I am very excited to be a part of that.”
Tradition
Creating a “traditional university experience” has been a bullet point in FAU’s strategic plan since Frank T. Brogan was hired in 2003.
During Brogan’s reign as president, FAU became the fastest startup football program to win a bowl game. After being crowned the New Orleans Bowl champs in 2007, the Owls took home another win the following year in Detroit. The next step for athletics became clear to everyone: an on-campus stadium.
Mary Jane Saunders said she knows the importance of an on-campus stadium. In fact, she was instrumental in helping University of South Florida build theirs when she was an administrator at the Tampa school 10 years ago.
“A stadium can drastically change the dynamic of the campus,” Saunders told the UP. “I’ve seen it happen first-hand, and it was a wonderful transformation.”
But for Saunders, making FAU more traditional isn’t just about the stadium.
Her goals include integrating each of FAU’s seven campuses with the communities that surround them, and raising funds to support the construction of Innovation Village — FAU’s planned on-campus residential and retail neighborhood for the Boca campus.
Comments from two of FAU’s Board of Trustees during the March 3 deliberations
Nancy Blosser
BOT and presidential search committee chair, member since January 2003
“I liked Saunders all along. She has solid academic credentials, and her USF experience is valuable to us.”
Rajendra P. Gupta
Fort Lauderdale physician, member since January 2006
“Saunders is a very eloquent speaker, and I like her track record in diversity.”
RESEARCH
Mary Jane Saunders is no stranger to science. Before becoming provost at Cleveland State University, Saunders was the director of CSU’s Biomedical Health Institute. She was also a professor and the founding dean of the College of Science, CSU’s second-largest college.
Prior to CSU, Saunders was a program officer and deputy division director at the government-funded National Science Foundation, director of the Institute of Biomolecular Science at the University of South Florida, and an assistant professor in the botany department at Louisiana State University.
Saunders said she plans to use her experience in science to help FAU and its research partnerships take a “giant leap .”
Master’s student Lynsey Bruce is ready for that leap and for some attention. Bruce and three others are working on a neuroscience study in a lab on the second floor of the Breezeway, a lab most students don’t even know exists.
“We get a lot of funding, and science is a big part of this university that most people are not aware of,” Bruce said. “I’m very excited about [Saunders]. I think she’s going to bring light to research and the great things that are going on at FAU.”
Bringing FAU to the forefront of science is exactly what Saunders plans to do.
“We have an obligation to create knowledge and be a university known for its scholastic research,” Saunders told the UP. “With the partnerships FAU has and the kinds of research that is currently going on, I think FAU is poised to make some major discoveries in the near future.”
"I don’t think there is any other place in the country that has what FAU has to offer right now. I’m just so excited to get started."
— President-elect Mary Jane Saunders
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