Drexel's Papadakis has driven growth. Some have found the ride too brisk.

By Kathy Boccella
Inquirer Staff Writer

Papadakis follows the tradition of students who want good marks: He rubs the toe of The Alsatian Vintner, a Bartholdi sculpture outside his office.

Papadakis follows the tradition of students who want good marks: He rubs the toe of "The Alsatian Vintner," a Bartholdi sculpture outside his office.

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During his first week as Drexel University 's president in August 1995, Constantine Papadakis recalled, he went to work on Friday and no one was there.

He called his secretary, who told him that employees worked only four days a week in summer.

"Do you get paid for five days?" he asked. Yes. "What do you get paid, 80 percent?" No.

That struck him as absurd, so he told his staff they could keep working four days but wouldn't get paid full time.

The next Friday, "everybody came to work," recalled Papadakis, who also canceled employees' two-week Christmas break.

"I was the Grinch who stole Christmas," he happily admitted while noting that today, 10 percent of Drexel's applicants visit the West Philadelphia school during the winter break.

There are other hard-driving university presidents, but few with a temperamental combination of showmanship and ambition quite like Papadakis'. In his 12 years as president, Papadakis has transformed Drexel from a flat-broke engineering school into a financially stable institution with medical and law schools, and created several new majors to lure non-technology students.

Now he has a plan to hatch even more Drexel Dragons: Start a new university in California .

Papadakis is more entrepreneur than academic, running Drexel like a company and earning $886,279, more than most university presidents. He has made Drexel one of the most market-driven universities in the country. His students are his paying "customers," and he heavily promotes profit-making initiatives such as online courses while cutting back on such last-century ideas as library books and four-day workweeks.

That dagger from Crete that he keeps on his desk? He uses it, Papadakis jokes, to slash budgets.

Since he arrived, enrollment has more than doubled to 21,500. Freshman applications are six times higher, as is the endowment, which totals $634 million. The once raggedy campus has an impressive array of new buildings, including the law school, three new residence halls, a student activities center, an art gallery, a business center, and the I.M Pei-designed Edmund D. Bossone Research Enterprise Center .

With 11,000 students and $40 million in revenue, Drexel Online, a subsidiary started in 2002 to market "distance learning" courses to off-campus students, is larger and more successful than many small colleges.

"If you look at Drexel when he arrived and where it is now, it's a totally changed place," said Rick Hesel, a principal with Art & Science Group, higher-education consultants in Baltimore, who has known Papadakis for about six years. "It's stronger in almost any way you can imagine."

At the same time, Drexel has yet to crack the top 100 on U.S. News & World Report's college rankings. It placed 108 this year, far below its fifth-ranked neighbor, the University of Pennsylvania . Faculty members criticize Papadakis' autocratic management style. And they say his focus on making money overshadows initiatives that could enhance academic prestige.

The faculty senate censured him in 2002 for hiring a provost without conducting a national search. Papadakis, "Taki" to friends, brushes off the flap, saying that since he had veto power there was no point in forming a committee and getting faculty and staff input.

"I would veto every candidate until they get me the one I want," said Papadakis, who makes no secret of his disdain for tenure as a deterrent to hard work and productivity, "so why go through all that?"

When a university has a top-down corporate style, "collegial governance gets sacrificed," said history professor Robert Zaller, a frequent critic of the administration, though even he acknowledges that Papadakis has put Drexel on a strong footing.

Too many part-time faculty and crowded classrooms are frequent complaints. But mainly it's the frenetic tempo that's hard for stodgy academics to adjust to, said Donna Murasko, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who came to Drexel from MCP Hahnemann University .

A year after deciding to start a law school, for instance, Papadakis welcomed the first class.

"Academics like to discuss and discuss and discuss before coming to a conclusion," Murasko said. "It's pretty much like a rushing river around here. It doesn't stop."

A Greek-born engineer and former Bechtel Corp. executive who is behind his desk at 6 a.m. and stays after everyone else leaves, Papadakis, 61, has little patience for the molasses-like pace in academia.

"We try to avoid using too many committees," he said. "If the faculty senate was taking three years to approve a program of study, then the window of opportunity would be closed. . . . We are down to the point where decisions are being made in two to three months."

That sense of urgency was behind the California project. With the pool of 18-year-olds expected to shrink by 4 percent at the end of the decade, Papadakis sees a bumper crop of new customers in the fertile fields of Sacramento 's agricultural region.

"We want to go to an area that is growing," he said in an interview in his office on the first floor of the richly ornamented Main Building , which houses a valuable collection of art and antiques that Papadakis stopped the trustees from selling off. " Sacramento has no major private university."

What it does have is a booming populace. Lincoln , just outside Sacramento and the fastest-growing suburb in the country, more than doubled in population between 2000 and 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Colleges in the area "are busting through the seams," Papadakis said.

He and his staff had discussed ways to export the Drexel brand. Then in the spring, developer Angelo Tsakopoulos offered to give the school 1,100 acres of land, about half of which could be developed with houses and sold for $100 million to $150 million to finance construction. The rest would house a 6,000-student campus and possibly corporate offices.

If the idea ever bears fruit, and that's a big if, it will take five to seven years for the Western campus to open. Not surprisingly, the president, who would preside over both institutions, wants to get started right away, leasing space and offering a few high-demand courses as early as September 2008.

"Right now, everybody is enthusiastic. Five years later, everyone - donors, alumni, trustees - will forget about it," Papadakis said.

The president's outsized ideas are matched by his physical presence and intellect. Associates describe him as charming but also a no-nonsense taskmaster when it comes to getting things done.

"Taki is a visionary. That's his strength," said Manuel Stamatakis, a university trustee and chairman of the board of the Drexel University College of Medicine. "He has the ability to see things in advance, and that's a very important quality for an organization to keep it from becoming stagnant."

But even trustees were surprised, he said, that the Sacramento project was moving so fast.

"It sounds like a great idea, but you've got to look at it," Stamatakis said.

Hesel, the marketing consultant, said it made sense for Drexel to get a foothold in California rather than try to recruit more students to come east.

"There's extraordinary growth in California , especially among students of color and the minority population, and I'm sure Drexel is interested in that market," he said.

The son of a doctor, Papadakis went to engineering school in Greece before graduate studies in engineering at the University of Cincinnati and a doctorate degree at the University of Michigan . He was chief engineer at Bechtel, the giant construction company. He switched career paths when he took a job as dean of engineering at Cincinnati and decided to become a university president.

The job that awaited him at Drexel was mostly one of survival. With broken air conditioners, a boarded-up dormitory, and the lowest enrollment in its history, the school was a shambles.

Papadakis lives in a 10,000-square-foot Georgian mansion with his wife, Eliana, and daughter, Maria, a senior at Drexel's LeBow College of Business. He and his wife entertain about 1,500 people a year in the Wayne home, which was donated to the school. Last year, the men's and women's basketball teams got invited to a lavish Thanksgiving dinner, though Papadakis sheepishly admitted that the couple hadn't expected such big appetites and had run out of food. Nearly every night he is fund-raising and schmoozing with business leaders, trustees and alumni.

Papadakis' idea from the beginning was to expand Drexel's narrow focus on technical and engineering, its hallmark since it was founded in 1891.

The first opportunity was the bankrupt Allegheny health system, which vastly increased the school's size when Drexel took over the hospital and medical school in 2002.

Drexel Online, which shares about 50 percent of the revenue with Drexel deans and faculty members, has grown 35 percent a year, and the law school opened in September with a third more students than expected.

For all its success, Drexel would like to leap ahead in the U.S. News rankings. Papadaksi said his goal was to hit 80 in five years. Holding the school back may be a faculty that is only 77 percent full time, lower than its peers. At 48th-ranked Pennsylvania State University , the figure is 96 percent.

The retention rate is also an issue for Drexel, which compares unfavorably with four-year schools because it is a five-year institution that alternates work with study. Sixty percent of its students graduated, while Penn State boasted 85 percent. Drexel's tuition and housing total $40,705.

Senior class president Jeff Gardosh said that a lot of administrative problems that had plagued the university had been fixed, but that there were still too many part-time professors and teaching assistants in the classroom. In May, the student newspaper, the Triangle, wrote that with only half the faculty employed full time, they were "overworked, underpaid, and unable to invest in the lives of students. . . ."

Papadakis cited the "incredible pool of talent in the city." As an urban technical university, "we utilize adjunct professors as much as possible. In order to have a well-balanced university, you have to have both."

Right now there are more pressing matters on his plate, mainly to keep the momentum going on Sacramento . There are developers to woo, a board to convince, and a plan to create a brand-new Drexel University between the bumpy hills of California and the Pacific Ocean .

He expects to wrap it up in three to six months.

"I don't like to wait," he said.

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