John Delaney arrived in Jacksonville at age 16 with no intentions of staying. His father was transferred to the city with General Motors, and all the younger Delaney wanted to do was get back to Cincinnati — or just about anywhere else.
“I hated it here,” Delaney, 61, said in April, a month from his scheduled May 31 retirement as president of the University of North Florida.
“We were from Cincinnati and I wanted to move back there or go to Washington, D.C., or New York,” he said.
Forty-five years later, he hands the reins of UNF after a 15-year tenure to David Szymanski, who in a twist of irony comes to the school from the University of Cincinnati, where he served as dean of the Carl H. Lindner College of Business and professor of marketing.
In retirement, Delaney isn’t going to Cincinnati or Washington, D.C., or New York or anywhere else. The former two-term mayor of Jacksonville is staying in his adopted hometown.
“I fell in love with this city,” he said.
Delaney also served as chief assistant state attorney in the 4th Judicial Circuit, general counsel for the city and chief of staff for his predecessor, Mayor Ed Austin.
Politics to academics
Because of term limits, he left the mayor’s office in 2003 and pursued the job as president of UNF with the goal of parlaying his relationships in the local public and private sectors and in Tallahassee to help elevate the university’s profile.
“It’s still a bit of a light under a bushel basket in Jacksonville,” Delaney said of UNF. “I think sometimes the city doesn’t appreciate how good it is. It’s third in admissions standards in the state and it’s gained probably 200 points in the SATs on the University of Florida.”
Delaney leads a campus of more than 16,000 students, 600 faculty and more than 1,000 staff. Each year, 4,000 students graduate from the university’s six colleges.
T
he gains UNF has made during Delaney’s tenure include:
• Raising the average GPA of incoming students from 3.6 and an SAT score of 1,145 in 2003 to a GPA of 4.17 and SAT average of 1,208 in 2017.
• Increasing the number of accredited programs from 37 to 54.
• Increasing the number of doctoral degrees awarded by 76 percent.
• Achieving the sixth-highest graduation rate in the U.S. among public, urban regional universities.
• Increasing the amount of on-campus building space by 168 percent, or 2 million square feet.
• Helped raise nearly $250 million for UNF since 2003.
• Led growth in the school’s endowment to $100 million, a 250 percent increase since 2003.
• Led UNF’s “Power of Transformation” capital campaign that exceeded its goal, raising more than $130 million.
• Secured more than $300 million in state funds for campus construction.
In addition, Delaney said UNF has developed a reputation within the business community for producing highly employable graduates, which serves to attract higher-caliber students who know they will be prepared for the workforce in a variety of disciplines.
“When I was mayor and we had economic development issues, inevitably you looked to partner with FSCJ when you needed 100 welders or 200 people with these skills or 250 with those skills,” Delaney said.
“That’s really changed to where now it is companies need to speak with our dean of engineering and our college of business, or there’s a health care company that needs to know how many hospital administrators we can crank out,” he said.
“The jobs have shifted, but never in the 12 years I was in City Hall, from an economic development standpoint, did we talk to UNF or bring them in to talk with prospective employers coming to town,” Delaney said. “And that’s changed a lot.”
Staying for the jobs
About 60 percent of incoming UNF freshman, Delaney said, come from out of state or out of the five-county region. Most of them stay after graduation, he said, because they know the jobs are here.
“I often tell the story of two retired CEOs of big engineering firms both telling me they stopped recruiting at MIT and Georgia Tech,” Delaney said.
“They would still hire their graduates, but they quit spending money sending recruiters there because they loved the UNF graduates. They liked their work ethic, but they also liked their training,” he said.
Delaney describes UNF as having a small private-school feel but with the support of a midsize regional state school and a solid relationship with a broad spectrum of the business community.
He cited Deutsche Bank as an employer of many UNF graduates. Engineering firms seek graduates of the school’s College of Computing, Engineering and Construction.
The major hospital systems, Delaney said, combined to establish a project to expand UNF’s nursing program to help meet their growing demands.
“The hospitals got together and paid for us to hire faculty over a five-year period so we could add another whole cohort of nurses, and then after the fifth year we absorbed that cost,” Delaney said. “It was a unique partnership when there was not a way for us to respond quickly to the nursing demand.”
A graduate of the University of Florida, Delaney admits to bias toward UNF. Of the school he is handing off to new president Szymanski, he said, “It’s a great place.”
“If we can get students on a tour … it’s the prettiest school in the system,” Delaney said. “If we get them here, they tend to get hooked. And when we get them to graduation, they get employed.
“I tend to describe UNF as more of a private liberal arts school with a business school attached, and health college attached, and a college of education attached, and the CCEC. It’s a great mix to help develop a region.”
