‘Show Me State’ Ready to Show Off Bill Stacy : Missouri More Than Confident About San Marcos Pick

The folks who live along this elbow of the Mississippi River don’t understand all the skepticism and hesitation out in California over Bill Stacy, who was selected last week as founding president for the new state university in San Marcos.

They’ve heard the stories from San Diego County that Stacy wasn’t the first choice among the students, faculty, staff and community leaders involved in the search for the new California State University president. And that’s insulting to this town, home of the wooded, 116-year-old Southeast Missouri State University.

Stacy is their Cinderella story, the local boy who made good. Stacy got his bachelor’s degree here in 1960. He returned as a speech professor in 1967. He became a dean. For the past 10 years he has been president. And now, after having spent 26 of his 50 years in this town, Stacy’s heading west, and, while residents say they’re happy for him, they also don’t want to lose him.

A Money-Back Guarantee

One faculty member offers this money-back guarantee to his cynical counterparts in San Marcos:

If you don’t like Stacy after a year, send him back home and we’ll reimburse you his first year’s salary.

To say that Stacy commands awe and respect in this town is an understatement. The only debate about him here is whether he can walk on water.

* A former mayor who worked with Stacy in the construction of a joint campus-city, $15-million sports and performing arts complex, called the Show Me Center, says Stacy’s the kind of fellow who works the hardest behind the scenes to accomplish something, then gives the credit to others.

“If Bill Stacy has a weakness, I don’t know what it is,” said Howard Tooke, mayor here from 1970 until 1986.

* Faculty members say Stacy encourages professors to follow their intellectual instincts in developing new programs, and asks what he can do to help.

“He has never told me what to do in the classroom--as long as I did what was best for the students and I did it right,” said Ed Leoni, who was president of the academic senate this past school year. “He has an insatiable appetite to develop and to progress within reason. We haven’t floundered. We haven’t taken any dead ends. It’s been growth with a purpose and a mission. I don’t know if it’s right for us to be this happy.”

No Executive Trappings

* Students say Stacy is an approachable administrator who doesn’t surround himself with any of the trappings of a university executive.

“He’s just the sweetest person. I adore him,” said 21-year-old senior Cheryl Sebaugh, who got to know Stacy personally because of her scholastic achievements on this campus of 9,000 students. “His door’s always open if you have any problems. And he’s always got hugs for everybody.”

* Administrators and staff members say Stacy is uncanny in working with committees in developing a consensus and a plan of action embraced by everyone. He’s such an effective mediator, he was asked to referee a longstanding grudge between local labor union leaders and management in the region’s construction trade. As if in tribute to Stacy, the Show Me Center was finished in time and under budget.

“He’s got great respect from politicians and the community,” said Leslie Cochran, the university’s provost. “He finds the middle ground and pulls people together into alliances.”

* Community and business leaders credit Stacy for sensitizing this region--where the economy is defined in terms of corn and soybeans, barge repair and the manufacture of Florsheim shoes, Kitty Litter and Pampers--to the impact of the Pacific Rim economy. He recruited Japanese and Chinese students to his campus and then, on a visit to Tokyo, where he was establishing an overseas program for students and faculty from his campus, he paved the way for a Japanese firm to relocate here as well. Two others later followed suit. No wonder that Stacy spent a year as president of the local Chamber of Commerce.

“He’s a golden-tongued salesman--with brains,” said Bill Edwards, a local retail businessman.

Plenty of Buildings

* State legislators joke that if Stacy continued to win funding for new

buildings on his campus, it would sink into the Mississippi under the weight of all that concrete.

“You can’t spend much time talking to him at the Capitol because all the other legislators want to talk to him, too,” said Mary Kasten, a state assemblywoman whose district includes this city of 38,000. “It seemed like nobody could resist Bill Stacy.”

* Fellow university administrators in the state tip their hat to Stacy, who is president of Missourians for Higher Education, a consortium of private and public universities and colleges.

“He is considered an educational statesman in our state,” said Dr. Bill Danforth, chancellor of the private and prestigious University of Washington in St. Louis, 120 miles north of here. “He’s bright, articulate, sensitive, wise and balanced.”

* People with money are fans of Stacy--and put their money where their mouths are. Stacy formed the University Foundation six years ago, and it has since raised $15 million for the campus.

“We admire Bill and his university,” said Harry Crisp, who owns the Pepsi Cola Bottling Co. serving a five-state region. “He’s not a fund-raiser per se. But he’s such a sincere and outstanding leader, you want to work with him.” So Crisp and his wife, Rosemary, gave the university a $3-million building in the so-called Boot Heel, the southeastern corner of the state, for a satellite campus, and gave more than $100,000 in cash for campus development here.

Added Tom Wood, a St. Louis publishing executive and chairman of the University Foundation: “Bill’s a master at nurturing people.”

Even the Press Likes Him

* Even the region’s daily newspaper, where reporters might provide some cynicism about the town’s biggest news maker, was singing Stacy’s praises in a farewell editorial Thursday. It read, in part:

“What Cape Girardeau will miss when Bill Stacy departs is a gracious man who moved easily between academicians and the less educated, who gave of his time at student recitals and Boy Scout meetings and who took as much pride in the community as he did in his university, knowing one could not succeed without the other. He is nothing short of a class act.”

What develops from these snapshots, then, is a portrait of a man who won’t be damned in San Marcos for what unwanted baggage he’ll bring with him, but who will need an entire river barge to carry his accolades and kudos. His associates say Stacy would rather start fresh in San Marcos as a relative unknown and build his own reputation from scratch.

Despite his string of successes here, those who know Stacy best say they are not surprised he is leaving. There is, indisputably, the challenge of building a university from scratch. Furthermore, Stacy’s longtime marriage to his first wife, Jane--they have three grown children--ended in divorce about two years ago. His former wife still works on campus as the alumni director, and about a year ago Stacy began courting a business professor on campus. The two married a week ago, just prior to his appointment to the San Marcos job, and friends say the move to San Marcos offers Stacy the chance to start both his professional and personal lives anew.

Stacy’s biggest initial challenge will be in demonstrating the mettle and strength that is belied by his casual, easy-going nature, his associates say. Indeed, Stacy’s initial detractors in San Marcos during the presidential search process said they feared Stacy might be little more than a slick speaker without substance.

“There’s plenty of steel and presidential timber behind that facade,” said Art Walhausen, Stacy’s assistant on campus here.

Said Wood: “You don’t get by without substance for 10 years as a university president and still get to leave like he does, on top.”

Just Like a Midwesterner

Jamie Estes, who runs a string of service stations in these parts, is Stacy’s golf partner and arguably his best friend. “The job of an administrator is to communicate, and Bill’s the best communicator you ever knew,” he said. Told of the criticism that Stacy struck some people as a bit too casual to be presidential, Estes answered: “People from the Midwest affect everybody that way. What you see is what you get with Bill. There’s nothing phony about him.”

Under Stacy’s leadership, old buildings on campus have been renovated and new ones built. Faculty salaries have increased. A prized collection of William Faulkner works--including some unpublished pieces--was donated to the university library. The number of campus administrators was decreased. The university, founded as a teaching school, is now the single largest supplier of computer technicians to McDonnell-Douglas Corp. in St. Louis.

Stacy is most lauded for his work in five areas--politics, community support, affirmative action, support for the faculty, and curriculum innovations--and they suggest he is a man for all seasons.

Ever present, say those who know and work with him, is his skill as a communicator, facilitator and consensus maker.

He has successfully lobbied in the state Capitol on behalf of higher education in general and his own campus specifically. Missouri’s public higher education system is anchored by the University of Missouri in Columbia. In its shadow are Southeast University and its four other sister campuses representing other parts of the state. They are governed autonomously by their respective boards of regents, and while there is a committee to coordinate the financing of all six campuses, each must lobby specifically for its own peculiar needs. Stacy has championed the needs of all universities and has excelled in winning specific support for his own campus, legislators say.

(Stacy’s political savvy stems in part from his familiarity with state politicians. The brother-in-law of his first wife was Warren Hearns, a two-term governor of Missouri during the 1960s.)

Show Me Center Saga

Stacy won both state and city support for the construction of the Show Me Center on campus--a multipurpose building that has featured the likes of President Reagan, Bob Hope and Tina Turner, as well as tractor pulls, professional wrestling, circuses and basketball tournaments.

First, Stacy lobbied state legislators to give the campus $7 million toward the construction of the center, out of state bonds approved for capital improvements statewide. Once that was done, he enlisted civic support and campaigned successfully for a citywide bond issue that contributed an additional $5 million to the project, financed by a property tax increase and a hotel and restaurant tax. Finally, the university contributed $3 million of its own toward the construction of an adjoining student recreation center complex featuring such things as indoor track, basketball courts, weight rooms, exercise equipment and racquetball courts.

The construction of the Show Me Center two years ago created perhaps the biggest controversy Stacy has had to deal with: a debate on whether it should be constructed on the campus or several miles away, alongside an interestate highway on property that would have been donated by a regional motel developer and would have brought the city greater public exposure.

Stacy wanted it built on campus and prevailed, having argued that the facility was primarily for the students’ use and should be close to them.

“Sure, I think it would have been great along the interstate because of the exposure it would have gotten there,” said former Mayor Tooke. “But Bill was right. It belonged on campus.”

Said Ken Newton, editor of the Southeast Missourian newspaper, “The way he got the state and city to work together for that center on campus was a real piece of work.”

Affirmative Action

In areas of affirmative action, Stacy has surpassed federal mandates for his campus. When blacks made up 3.3% of the campus enrollment, he was told to bring the figure closer to 5% to reflect the region’s ethnic balance. Today, 8% of the student body is black; last fall, 10% of the incoming freshmen were black.

Further, the number of black professors on campus increased from four to 18 after Stacy offered his deans this interesting offer: If you can recruit qualified black instructors, I’ll hire them as new professors over and above your already-budgeted positions. Today, officials say, Southeast Missouri has more black professors than the University of Missouri itself.

Instructors on campus credit Stacy for having injected a sense of excitement into the curriculum by challenging the faculty to look beyond the tried and proven.

Consider, for instance, this anecdote from Grace Hoover, who has served as a nutrition instructor on campus since 1962:

“I proposed to Bill in 1979 that we sponsor a day-care center for the elderly. There was nothing else like it on campus. He supported me on it. It was risky and it could have fallen flat, but he was open to the idea. A lot of presidents might have said, ‘Well, we’ll do a needs assessment and see if we can get the funding and then we’ll consider it.’ But Bill is receptive to creative, innovative ideas. After he told me I could pursue it, he went out and helped me get the money to fund it.”

Stacy’s most far-reaching contribution to the campus curriculum was the restructuring of the university’s general education program. Five years in the planning, the so-called University Studies Program now calls for each student to take two years of general, liberal education before more specifically pursuing his major area of interest.

Courses during the first two years share nine objectives, ranging from the development of communication and critical-thinking skills to an appreciation for aesthetics and responsible interaction with one’s natural, social and political environment.

Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, told the university in an address here last fall:

“This program . . . is, in my opinion, the most creative, most coherent, most thought-provoking undergraduate sequence in the United States.”