
In February, Executive Vice President John Fry announced that he would be leaving Penn at the end of June to become president of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Ever since he arrived from the management-consulting firm of Coopers & Lybrand in 1995, Fry has been the high-revving engine behind a plethora of projects at Penn, ranging from improving the cleanliness and safety of University City to upgrading the retail and housing options (such as the Sansom Common retail complex and the Left Bank apartment complex) to incubating high-tech businesses to building new classrooms and dorms—to name just some of the more obvious ones.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Four years ago, he led the move to outsource all of Penn’s on- and off-campus building management to the Texas-based real-estate management firm of Trammel Crow. Though it was considered a landmark agreement at the time, last year the University quietly scaled back its contract with the firm following many complaints about the company’s management of campus buildings.
In March, Senior Editor Samuel Hughes sat down to talk with Fry about his tenure and what he sees for Penn down the road.
Gazette: What are you proudest of accomplishing in the past seven years?
Fry: Let me replace the word I with the word we … We did a great job in, number one, fixing public safety at Penn. I feel very good about the turnaround in that department. It was in a very sorry state in ’95, and I think that if you look around right now you have to say that we have the best university police force in the country. Its sister, the University City District, I’d put along with it, and that’s something I feel very, very good about.
Number two, I think we’ve had a very smart and disciplined approach to thinking about the way we expand the campus, [in] on-campus acquisitions like the Christian Association [building at 36th and Locust Walk], the opportunity for the Health System to build itself out at the Civic Center site, the acquisitions we’ve made around 39th and 40th streets to give ourselves more residential and retail space, [and] what will hopefully happen soon at the [30th Street] Post Office. The envelope of the University has been expanding in a way that allows future generations of Penn leaders to continue to move the place forward.
Gazette: What are the biggest challenges remaining?
Fry: To keep up the momentum across all of these areas. If you’re dealing with the future of our neighborhood here in West Philadelphia, that’s nothing that you can sort of pause and take a break on. One reason I am optimistic about this, particularly with regard to the neighborhood initiatives, is because the Penn board of trustees is fully committed to this and will carry that charge across the various administrations.
Gazette: How would you describe the changing relationship between Penn and West Philadelphia?
Fry: When this administration took over in ’94, there was a high degree of suspicion by the neighborhood toward the University. I think we’ve worn a lot of that down. Have those attitudes completely disappeared? No, [but] if you talk to people who are living out there, sending their kids to school out there, experiencing what the streets are like, what the supermarkets are like, they feel pretty good.
Gazette: While you might find people who would complain about it, the rise in West Philadelphia housing costs would have to seem like a fairly good statement.
Fry: It is an interesting indicator, as is a 40 percent drop in crime. One of the things I think people have been very, very cynical about is that they believe this is just a big gentrification. And it really isn’t. I think that University City’s great strength as a neighborhood is the diversity of its people. So we’ve purposely tried [to maintain that diversity] by, for example, using the mortgage program. Look at the program’s statistics and how many people at various income levels are using it—you’ll see a really nice distribution.
Gazette: How do you think the office itself has evolved in the time you’ve been here? It seems to have been a very dynamic force, particularly in the real-estate area.
Fry: The executive VP of the University of Pennsylvania should be someone who has the resources and the ability to move agendas forward. This is one of the world’s great universities, and it should have a very powerful management apparatus.
One of the things I’ve worked hard at is getting rid of this completely false distinction between academic and non-academic. People view all of these things that are happening over in Fry’s area as sort of non-academic, and everything else as academic. Well, I think if you talk to the faculty and the students, they’ll talk to you about the importance of the environment in doing their work—their research and their teaching and their learning and so on.
A real-estate strategy is a means to an end. The end is creating the best possible university environment for our scholars, and you do that by having safe and clean streets and great places to work and all the other things that we’ve tried to do here.
Gazette: Within the business/ real-estate realm of things, what are you most excited by and what do you think needs to be done?
Fry: I think the most important thing is the eastward expansion of campus—particularly the acquisition and the long-term development of the postal service [land]. If done correctly, we will come back 25 years from now and see Penn basically having a waterfront campus, which I think it deserves. It will have wonderful gateways; it will really knit together University City and Center City in ways that they haven’t been. This is really going to define Penn’s campus for the next century