Scott L. Scarborough did not consider himself the favorite when he applied for the position of president at the University of Akron.
He thought Jim Tressel, the legendary former football coach at The Ohio State University who had moved on to become an administrator at the University of Akron was more likely to get the job.
“It appeared he was being groomed for the position, but I went ahead and applied,” says Scarborough, who was serving as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Toledo at the time. “I thought at the worst, I can at least get the experience of going through the process, which is worth something. One of the great lessons of life is you just never know how things are going to turn out.”
Scarborough is a Texas native having grown up in Baytown, a refinery town about 20 miles east of Houston.
His family ran a corner drugstore in town that had an old fashioned soda fountain that Scarborough would work at in the summer. His grandfather was the pharmacist, his father ran the soda fountain and the retail part of the store and his mother was a teacher in the community.
All three parental figures made one thing abundantly clear to Scarborough from a very early age.
“They said, ‘You will be going to college. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of where,’” he says.
Scarborough started out at a small, private university in San Antonio, but felt it was too small. So he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest universities in the U.S., where he majored in accounting.
From there, he followed a path that brought him experience in finance, education and health care at several institutions. As provost at Toledo, he was essentially the school’s No. 2 leader.
“To me, there are always multiple forks in the road,” Scarborough says. “Usually, I went with what was the opportunity to do something good, to do something that the organization needed done. I was always the person willing to say, ‘Sure, I’ll help with that,’ regardless of which path along the fork I ultimately took. But it always worked out. If you’re always willing to meet a need, then opportunities are always presenting themselves to you.”
It turns out the University of Akron had a need. And Scarborough was deemed the man for the job.
The assessment phase
UA, known as Ohio’s Polytechnic University, has nearly 26,000 students and more than 300 associate, bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate and law degree programs. It has more than 2,400 full-time employees, nearly 2,700 part-time employees and operating revenue totaling $322.2 million in 2014.
Unfortunately, total operating expenses exceeded that figure. The board’s philosophy in hiring Scarborough was that they needed someone with academic credentials and a strong financial background who could lead a financial turnaround.
“They liked what they heard during the interview process, which was essentially a commitment to do what was necessary to take a very good institution facing difficult financial challenges and make the tough decisions to make it great,” Scarborough says. “That’s what the board really wanted to hear and ultimately what the city and region needs of this institution.”
Scarborough took the job July 1, 2014, and divided his first year into quarterly milestones. He spent the first quarter learning about the university’s financial condition, along with its place in the broader higher education market. The second quarter was used to work with each of the university’s 11 colleges to learn about them and help update their strategic plans. With his doctorate in strategic management, it was an area he felt he could make a strong contribution.
The budget process began in the third quarter and continued into the fourth quarter as Scarborough sought to tie it all together.
“Year one was the foundational year to set up the really critical year, which was year two,” he says.
In a complex setting such as a university, communication and transparency are vital components to the implementation of significant change, Scarborough says.
“The most important thing to get done was to involve internal stakeholders in the process of looking at the finances and determining the strategic plans,” he says. “In that situation, you need to be fully transparent. They have to believe every piece of information is available to them. You need to get leadership consensus on the new directions. If you have that, you have a chance to move forward. If you don’t have that, it’s very difficult.”
Scarborough asked a lot of questions and worked hard to reinforce the idea that he wasn’t going to unilaterally issue directives about what would be done.
“I spent a lot of time with the board,” he says. “I have nine bosses appointed by the governor. I said, ‘Here’s what I’m learning. Does this fit what you’re seeing? Here are some potential strategies. Do you like any of them? If not, do you have other strategies we might consider?’ I spent a lot of time developing the internal support for the plans to move forward.”
Get it done
Difficult financial decisions were going to need to be made at UA and when that’s the case, Scarborough says it’s best to do it and move forward.
“If you purposely choose to take longer than necessary to solve a problem — especially at a university, universities are smart places — they’ll figure out there is a phase two coming and that the other shoe is going to drop,” he says. “What you find is you adversely affect morale for a much longer period of time and you never turn the corner. There’s never a bad time to make the right decision. Go ahead and make it, look everyone in the eye and say, ‘We’ve done it, it’s tough, it’s over. Now better days are ahead.’”
Two of the more controversial cutbacks made among the $40 million in cost reductions were the elimination of the university’s baseball program and eliminating non-academic programming at E.J. Thomas Hall.
With regard to the elimination of baseball, Scarborough says there were several factors at play in the decision.
“We subsidize intercollegiate athletics with a very large percentage of what’s called a general fee that we charge to students,” he says. “You have to believe there is a return on that investment, whether it’s tangible or intangible. In most cases, it’s the marketing value of intercollegiate athletics that most people rely on to justify that investment.”
The minor league Akron RubberDucks are right across the street from the UA campus and have become the more appealing attraction in the region for baseball fans. Another factor was the Mid-American Conference, which requires UA to have programs in football, basketball and volleyball. Additionally, the university needed to maintain gender equity in the school’s athletic offerings per Title IX.
“That means a men’s sport was most likely the one that was going to be eliminated,” he says. “All those factors led us to the conclusion that baseball was the sport we would eliminate.”
As for E.J. Thomas, Scarborough says the university is not eliminating its academic use, its administrative use for commencement and other events or the hall’s availability for rental.
“Anybody can come in and put on whatever show they want to, if they rent the facility,” he says. “We decided to eliminate the community programming that was causing us to lose $1.65 million.”
Scarborough added that the Akron Civic Theatre, like the RubberDucks, is right across the street from campus.
“More people can rally community support around the Civic Theatre, which is a tremendous community asset,” he says.
Keep moving forward
Being a public figure has its ups and its downs. The past summer was not an easy time for Scarborough, who enjoys being approachable and available to anyone who wants to talk to him.
“When the times get tough, you just have to believe in the things you believe in,” he says. “When you get pushback, it’s usually people who are afraid of what they don’t know. It’s the fear of the unknown that is the great human challenge we have to overcome. That takes time.”
Scarborough says he’s passionate about making UA a great institution not just in Summit County and the surrounding communities, but throughout Ohio and beyond.
“We get about 95 percent of our students from the state of Ohio,” he says. “What we have to be able to convince people in Akron of is that we have to extend the enrollment reach of this university in order for it to survive and thrive in the future. If we only rely on the students coming out of Akron and the five contiguous counties, we can’t make it.”
The challenge for Scarborough is convincing locals that those needs in no way diminish the importance of the Akron community to UA’s future.
“We’re trying to double down on our contribution to this region and make it bigger and greater in the future,” he says. ●
Takeaways
- Understand the challenges you face before you act.
- Be open and transparent in your dialogue with key stakeholders.
- Don’t wait to do what needs to be done.
NAME: Scott L. Scarborough
TITLE: President
COMPANY: University of Akron
Education: Bachelor’s degree in accounting, University of Texas at Austin; MBA, University of Texas at Tyler; doctorate in strategic management, University of Texas at Arlington.
Scarborough on teamwork: I have a simple formula for success. It’s 80 percent teamwork; 10 percent strategy and strategy implementation; and 10 percent communication. The reason it’s 80-10-10, if you get the team right, they help you implement the plan and they help make communication possible and most effective.
So I put a great emphasis on: Have you established the right team and are they working together? Is team broadly defined in the organization? Not just the people reporting to me, but all the people connecting to them laterally, vertically and downward in the organization. Once you get to the implementation phase, it’s more dependent on the people around you than it is me at that point.
Comparing students and customers: Students are both our customers and our products. Customer doesn’t fully capture what they are to the institution, but neither does product. So we engage them to get a sense of how effective we are in terms of meeting their expectations. We also try to understand what they will need to operate and then direct them into an educational process to make sure they are prepared for the world they want to succeed in.
Scarborough on learning: You can’t learn to dance by reading a book. You have to dance. You’re not going to be a great engineer by reading out of a textbook, you have to get your hands dirty and work in a cooperative work assignment where you’re doing things. You’re not going to be a great business person by just reading about balance sheets. You have to get out there and interact with entrepreneurs and see how the world operates.