ORANGE : Skilled Fund-Raiser Joins Chapman Staff

The former president of the University of Tampa in Florida has been named Chapman College’s vice president for institutional advancement.

Richard D. Cheshire, of Annapolis, Md., who arrived on campus this week, was the immediate past director of the American effort to help rebuild Shakespeare’s original Globe Theatre in London, and is a skilled fund-raiser, said Chapman President Allan E. Koenig.

“Dick Cheshire is a rarity. . . . Over a 30-year career at institutions similar to Chapman, he has directed campaigns which have raised more than $100 million,” Koenig said.

Cheshire is expected to propel Chapman toward its goal of becoming one of the best comprehensive liberal arts institutions in the country, Koenig added.

Chapman is an independent Christian college with 2,200 undergraduate and graduate students at its main campus in Orange. It also has an additional 5,000 students attending 56 of the college’s academic centers in nine U.S. states as well as in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa and Guam.

Cheshire, 54, resigned from the University of Tampa in July, 1986, when the 2,500-student liberal arts college was facing a $1.75-million deficit and had cut nearly a third of its non-teaching jobs. While some blamed the shortfall on Cheshire’s quest to raise academic standards and build expensive new athletic and computer facilities, others said a national decline in the number of college-age students and the lengthy illness of the campus’ financial officer were bigger factors.

“I resigned amicably, by mutual agreement with my friend, the new board chairman,” Cheshire said of his departure from Tampa. “I simply felt I’d gone as far as I was going to go there after nine years.”

His first goal at Chapman is to help “build understanding and support for Chapman College,” he said. “My second goal is to help the leadership team here to prepare for a major campaign in the late 1990s. . . . The college is trying to move from being the good institution it is now to being a great institution and a leading institution of its type in America.”

Cheshire earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Colgate University in New York in 1958 and a master’s degree in education from the University of New Hampshire in 1961. He earned a doctorate in higher education in 1973 from New York University, where he returned as a visiting scholar after leaving Tampa. He and his wife, Bobbie, have three children.