YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
As Drury University prepares to welcome students back to campus in a couple months for the 2024-25 school year, it will do so with a new leader at the helm.
Jeff Frederick started work June 1 as the 19th president of the private, liberal arts university, which marked its 150th anniversary last year. He comes from North Carolina, where he was employed for over two decades in higher education roles, including the past four years at Wingate University. He most recently served as provost and executive vice president of the private school, located near Charlotte.
As Frederick starts his new job, he said he’s currently on his own, as his wife, Melinda, is wrapping up her work as director of counseling at Wingate. She should be joining him on Drury’s campus by mid-July, he said, adding she’ll be bringing along their mixed-breed dog, Briggs. The couple also have three adult sons living on their own: Logan, 28; Jack, 26; and Quinton, 22.
While Frederick is getting settled into his office at Burnham Hall, he’s also in connection mode – be it staff, faculty, the few students that are attending summer courses, and various community groups, such as Rotary Club of Springfield.
“Nobody comes to Drury to get lost in a crowd,” he said, adding the school currently has 360 full-time employees. “Whether you’re a student, you want to be in small classes, you want to know people from one end of campus to the other. Same thing with staff and faculty. That’s part of what drew me to want to work at Drury is that I’m predisposed to not want to spend my day behind that desk.”
Making a choice
Frederick succeeds interim President John Beuerlein, who took on the role following the March 2023 resignation of Tim Cloyd. Drury officials said family health concerns resulted in Cloyd’s departure, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting.
Beuerlein, a retired financial analyst and philanthropist, is a 1975 graduate of the university and previously served on its Board of Trustees, 1991-2011.
Rita Baron, vice chair of Drury’s Board of Trustees, said among the 87 applicants for the role, three finalists were brought to campus to interview. The other two finalists were undisclosed.
She added Walter George III, a 1979 Drury graduate and president of advisory firm G3 Consulting LLC in Fairway, Kansas, was recently selected as the board’s new chair.
The board approved Frederick in March for the role following a search process that began in October 2023. Baron served as chair of the school’s 14-member Presidential Search Advisory Committee.
Of Frederick’s 21 years of experience in higher education, 17 of them were as faculty member, chair and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Frederick holds a doctorate in history from Auburn University and a master’s degree in history and a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Central Florida.
“He went from being in businesses and then he went into academia, working up from professor to a dean to provost,” Baron said, noting Frederick also has experience in private sector business administration, such as American Medical Electronics, Kendall Healthcare Products International and Motorola as an account executive, and Medical Resources Inc. as chief financial officer. “He’s basically honed his leadership skills. You can tell he’s a true leader. He understands what it takes.”
Still, Baron said Frederick isn’t the type of leader who is going to come in and implement myriad changes.
“He’s going to listen and learn and then make decisions. That’s important to me,” she said. “I think Jeff is the person that is going to work really well with everyone and he’s going to learn a lot from listening. That’s going to help him on how to lead.”
In the lead
Although Frederick said he is a bit of a goal-setter, he added getting to know everyone at Drury – particularly the students, whom he calls the most important people on campus – will inform his decision-making process.
“I’m of a mind that says you ought not to put your goals down on paper until you really get to know people,” he said. “What you think you’ve learned from a spreadsheet, or a website or a couple of phone calls may turn out maybe not to be where to place your priorities once you get to know the people on the campus and the community.”
It’s a quieter time on campus, but he said the Facilities Services department is all over the university’s 90 acres on various projects, such as landscaping, painting and upkeep jobs as small as changing out lightbulbs.
“June and July in higher ed is when a lot of strategic planning and long-term thinking really happens,” he said, noting that includes wrapping up the enrollment cycle for the upcoming school year. “The campus is usually quiet. We have a full range of summer activities and camps and courses both for our Drury Go program and some courses in our day program. Grad programs, they are all year round, seemingly. But it slows down a little bit.
“You can do your thinking, your planning, put together your ideas for the next year,” he added. “Once the campus fills back up – first of all, you’re so thrilled to see it full of life again. But it also begins to take on a life of its own once classes are in session.”
Frederick comes to Drury as the university is amid its Fortify the Future capital campaign. Officials say the campaign, which was publicly launched in 2023 following a quiet phase in 2022, has raised roughly $42.5 million of its $50 million target. The goal to meet the campaign total is scheduled by May 31, 2027. The campaign’s focus areas include student scholarships and academic programs, building upgrades and an endowment increase, according to past reporting.
The new president is hopeful new Drury academic offerings, such as its engineering program, which starts in August, and a second class for its physician assistant program that debuted in 2023, will help boost enrollment. Local spring 2024 enrollment at the university was 1,921, down 1.9% from a year prior, according to SBJ list research. That was preceded by another slight dip in undergraduate enrollment in fall 2023 – 1,369 students, down from 1,386 students the previous year. Total enrollment was 2,268 in the fall, according to Drury officials.
Baron said she’s pleased with enrollment overall but would like to see the numbers increase. However, she said the board didn’t place expectations on Frederick to boost the totals.
“We were just taken by his style of leadership that I think he is going to guide us more than we are going to guide him,” she said. “When you bring in new management and tell them what to do, I think they’re going to fail. If you give them the time and the tools that they need, I think you need to see how they perform.”
SRC Holdings Corp. CEO Jack Stack, who recently completed a term as interim dean of the Drury University Breech School of Business Administration, said Frederick strikes him as prepared, competitive and a relationship builder.
“I do believe he’s smart from the standpoint of crafting an identity of Drury because he told me he’s thinking of Drury as problem solvers,” Stack said. “I love that kind of stuff. That’s pretty definitive.”
A past Board of Trustees member, Stack also served on the presidential search committee. He said Drury needs to generate additional revenue off its hard assets, such as its history, buildings and reputation in higher education and the community.
“The only thing that they really need to do is get out of each other’s way and appeal to a higher level of commitment,” he said, adding he believes Frederick can put together the deliverables to grow the business. “He understands that it’s going to take everybody to be able to be successful.”
Frederick said the university plans to announce several leadership hires, including a permanent dean at the business school, in the coming weeks. In the interim, he said he’s excited about his newest professional chapter and meeting as many people as time allows.
“A university president should be heavily engaged in the community and so should the university in general – whether it’s economic development, whether it’s thinking about common problems that we can bring a shared approach to, whether it’s just working together as community collaborators to make an area better,” he said. “I will be out and about and want to be heavily engaged with community organizations, with our alums, certainly with our trustees and those who give of their time and their resources to make the university better. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
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