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A Commanding Presence
06/27/2008 - By Teja Anderson
President Paul G. Gaffney, II, of Monmouth University, leads with military precision
President of Monmouth University in West Long Branch since July 2003, Paul Gaffney, a retired Navy Vice Admiral, has had an impressive and much decorated career in the military, and as a researcher and educator. Appointed by President George W. Bush to the U. S. Ocean Policy Commission for its entire 4 years term, and chief of naval research, he recently served as president of the Naval Defense University in Washington, DC, before moving to the Jersey Shore to preside over this nationally ranked and esteemed college.
Quality education, recognition of current academic and athletic successes, and providing more dorm rooms and a new multipurpose activity center (MAC) on campus are President Gaffney’s goals for the university. Most importantly, he truly cares about “the kids,” although he reprimands himself for calling them that. He prides himself on his Management by Walking Around (MBWA) technique, taking time to speak with every student.
Gaffney explained the lampshade effect – his theory is that if you remove the shade and let the light shine, more people are enlightened. He elaborated on how he intends to increase the visibility of the school to let people see all the wonderful things going on there. He wants his school and his students to have both a local and a global impact, sharing their ideas and time and assisting the local community and beyond. Education for the betterment of us all is his resounding theme.
President Gaffney took time from his busy schedule, just one day after the graduation of 1,160 students, to chat with
Living In – The Jersey Shore in his office on Monmouth University’s inspiringly beautiful campus.
LIJS: Let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and raised?
PG: Attleboro, Massachusetts. When I was in the 8th grade, my family moved to Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton.
LIJS: Give us one trait or characteristic that you got from each of your parents.
PG: From my dad…he instantly likes people. My mother…she is conservative. Mostly I like people right away and they have to prove to me otherwise, which is good. My mother is the organizer and manager of the family, keeping them on the right track. I am like both of them in that respect.
LIJS: Do you have any siblings?
PG: I had a brother; he died of a childhood illness when I was in high school. And I have a sister, [who’s] probably the more famous person in our family. She has two Emmys. Her name is Rickie Gaffney and she’s been a producer on “Good Morning America,” “Hollywood Squares,” the “Mike Douglas Show”…she’s pretty much retired now, but she still writes and does consulting.
LIJS: So, what did you want to be when you grew up?
PG: I had no idea; I wanted to go to a good college. My dad had gone to Brown, and I was accepted at Brown; it was thought that I would go there, but at the last minute the Naval Academy recruited me to come and run track for them. They both had excellent running programs, but the price was better at Naval Academy. If you go through the Naval Academy or West Point or the Air Force Academy, and you want to be a good student and you want to be a Division I athlete, you can do it because every single student there is spending three to four hours a day in a gym or on an athletic field; everyone is on a team, and that was great for me.
LIJS: Tell me about your wife Linda. How did you meet her?
PG: Linda is from Texas and New Mexico, but I met her in Spain. She was teaching at an American high school in Morocco and was also the track coach. I was a volunteer track coach as a Naval officer on a Navy base in Spain. We met at the European Championships at the University of Madrid.
LIJS: Was it love at first sight?
PG: No, I think she was desperate (laughs). We were both in our late 20s, we had both been around…we knew what we wanted. Our daughter Crista was born in Spain. She’s a 1998 graduate of the University of South Carolina, and a business professional. She’s also a big athlete, like her parents.
LIJS: What were you first impressions of Monmouth University when you moved here?
PG: The majesty of this campus. We came up on a cold, rainy Thanksgiving weekend, about 6 months before I was hired. I didn’t expect the campus to be this beautiful. It was a miserable day; we drove up from DC and drove back down. We stopped and ate pizza at this little place in Neptune, and we were just struck by the beauty of it all.
LIJS: You’ve been here for 5 years now. How do you like life at the Jersey Shore?
PG: Very much so. We have a great house on the campus, just a mile from the ocean. We also have a townhouse up on the bay shore; if we want to get the ferry and go into New York City we can do that. We like to go to the beach house about one night every two weeks and hang out, wear jeans and a T-shirt, walk around the town, go to the restaurants. We love that restaurant, Havana.
LIJS: How did your personal college experience differ from those of your students today?
PG: At the Naval Academy we took on an average, about 20 credits. Students now typically take only about 12 to 15.We went to classes on Saturday mornings; we didn’t have cars; we ate, slept, studied, ate, slept, studied, with perhaps a practice thrown in. It was very regimented, very disciplined. It was a great education, but not a lot of leisure time; it was and still is a very structured environment [there]. Here it is less restricted, more down time.
LIJS: You must feel more relaxed on this campus; the rumor is that you enjoy hanging out with the students.
PG: I do – I like to get out of this office. It’s one of the reasons I took this job. There are 4,000 great kids out here, and I like to go out there and spend time with them and get away from the paperwork.
LIJS: Word is that one of your favorite haunts is the cafeteria. How’s the food?
PG: The food is actually excellent! We use the same executive chef that oversees the food in the cafeteria for all of our fundraisers, functions, and private parties on campus. They are terrific; I eat their
[Aramark’s] food all the time. I think I am a pretty good judge of quality, and I think they do a very good job.
LIJS: Okay, but the cafeteria can’t be your favorite building on campus; there are so many beautiful buildings here.
PG: Well, there is our library, which won the prize as the most beautiful building in America in 1903. This building (Wilson Hall), too, of course is just gorgeous, but I would have to say that my favorite building hasn’t been completely built yet. You can hear the construction going on right now. It’s the MAC building, the new Multipurpose Activity Center. It’s right in the center of campus, holds 4,100 seats, has a multipurpose gym, 200M 6-lane track, bookstore, locker rooms, meeting rooms, and a student fitness center. It’s going to be beautiful as well as functional; I go over there every day and watch it going up. It should be completed in 2009. That’s been one of our biggest
accomplishments here, getting that through all the zoning and
planning…working on it from the initial planning stages, fundraising, and keeping it all going on track.
LIJS: You had lots of goals for the university when you first came here: improving the quality by raising the entrance standards (currently 3.17 GPA, 1073 SAT), decreasing class sizes (currently 22 students per class), increasing the student-to-faculty ratio (currently 15:1). Have you stayed on target?
PG: I think we are making progress. Each incoming class is getting a little bit better with their GPA and SAT scores. We are keeping the sizes of the incoming classes just about the same. Between 900 and 1,000 new students is what we need; any more than that and we have a space problem; less than that and we have trouble paying our bills.
LIJS: How may of your students commute?
PG: About half of our student body. We are up to almost 20% of the student body coming from out of state, which is great. We are working toward more than that. Our retention rate is up, and our ratings in the national magazines are up. The Princeton Review lists us as one of the top 366 schools in the country.
LIJS: Is there anything that you haven’t been able to accomplish yet?
PG: Yes. Without increasing the student population, the size of the campus, or buying more property, I would like to build or have more university-sponsored beds on campus or just off campus. Of the commuters that we have, half of them live at home with their parents and half live in houses or apartments in the surrounding communities. We are talking to developers all the time. Our real goal is to get a bed for every freshman and sophomore on our campus. For the upperclassmen and graduate students – we would like to have space available to them so that they could drive here in 5 minutes. The important thing here is I don’t want to make us a bigger school. We are 6,000 students; I want to keep it at that. I just want more beds available for those students that want them.
LIJS: Are there problems with students who live off campus?
PG: Well, sure. Kids can be loud and keep different hours.
LIJS: What is the university doing to improve relationships with the surrounding towns?
PG: We send some student leaders to a national convention each year where they share and exchange ideas; one of the notions that came out of that was a national program called “The Big Event,” where college students organize themselves, contact the local towns, and go out on a weekend and try to help them fix things. It’s painting, gardening – it might be helping people in an retirement centers, doing some repairs…it’s mostly sprucing up, and we get a list of requests in from the local towns like Long Branch, West Long Branch, Deal, Ocean, the surrounding towns…also from churches, schools, municipalities. We have hundreds of students participating. Also, almost every single group on campus – fraternities, sororities, athletic teams, or community service clubs – is doing something with some group in the community. We spend a lot of time trying to reach out and connect with the community here. It’s a big deal.
LIJS: What are parents’ biggest concerns for their children?
PG: Well, there are two. Of course the biggest one that we hear now is safety, because of Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University… The second is dangerous drinking; that’s what hurts most kids. Students already have some skill in procuring alcohol. It’s not something that they learn in college, but it’s what hurts their reputation, hurts their grades, and hurts them personally. All those things that are really important to keeping yourself well – eating healthy, not having risky sex, drugs and alcohol – those are all things that parents are concerned about. So we are concerned with them as well.
LIJS: What are you doing to help protect the students from these
issues?
PG: We are working on that. We have four full-time psychological counselors on campus, a substance abuse counselor, visits by a psychiatrist. We are trying to watch out for our students in every way possible, and we are trying to get them to watch out for each other. This is more important than all those programs; peers really need to look out for one another, and I can’t stress that enough.
LIJS: What steps have you taken to prevent another Virginia Tech?
PG: Look, Virginia Tech did a great job in handling a very difficult situation, but we started that same instant alert system a year before that even happened. Because 50% of our students are commuting and if you live across the Raritan Bridge you are coming for an 8 am psychology class; if there is an ice storm here but not up in Edison we can send out a blast message by text, by e-mail, by phone, with emergency information. We use it for snow and other safety crises. It’s used very sparingly and ultimately for the safety of our students and staff. You have to sign up for it, though. We have been talking to our legislators and the Department of Homeland Security here in the state about our capabilities, and I think we have a very good communications system in place.
LIJS: How big is your campus security force?
PG: We have our own armed, sworn, and commissioned police force here. We don’t use the police force of Long Branch or West Long Branch; we have our own. There are 20 officers and many safety officers who help with traffic and such. Our chief of police was a chief of detectives in Paterson, NJ, so he has seen real issues there and is more than qualified. If we need help from outside, we have all kinds of agreements from the surrounding towns, the County Prosecutor’s Office, and the State Police – they will come running in! But mostly we can handle it and they can worry about the big crime. It’s a very good system.
LIJS: You have said in the past that you feel athletics are key to increasing the visibility of the university. How are you going about recruiting athletes?
PG: First of all, recruiting is a very fine art in Division I NCAA
athletics. The rule book is huge and detailed, and we train our people all the time so as not to incur any violations, but we try to get recruits here to see the campus, and we have great coaches.
LIJS: What sports are you known for?
PG: Wow, really all of them – track & field, men and women, football, women’s lacrosse, golf, basketball, sailing; of course, being this close to the ocean gives us an advantage in golf, and right now our baseball team is the best baseball team in the state! As of this interview, we have won 37 games!
LIJS: Do you go to the games?
PG: My wife and I go to as many games as we possibly can in every sport. Let me tell you something about athletes, and I am a victim of my own experiences. I was a good athlete, all my friends were very good athletes, we were all good students. We have all been reasonably successful, so I think it shows that athleticism is an asset. The athletes here have a higher GPA than the average student body does. That’s good news…very good news. We had 130 athletes on the Dean’s List this year.
LIJS: Do any of the athletes go on to play professionally?
PG: Yes, Miles Austin, who left here 2 years ago, is starting for the Dallas Cowboys; he’s a wide receiver and a great kid. Also, Christine Pearce Rampone, who played soccer for us from 1993–1996, was just named captain of the U.S. National Women’s Olympic Team. But most of our students go on to become teachers, business professionals; they become very successful. They come back and visit all the time, and I’m very proud of them.
LIJS: You have some rather well-known professors here, too…
PG: Yes, the mayor of Middletown, Gerry Scharfenberger, is an adjunct professor of archaeology here; he is one of the most popular professors on campus, and he’s a Monmouth County archaeologist.
LIJS: What would most people be surprised to know about you?
PG: That I was hit on the fly by a javelin and it went all the way through my leg, and the next year I had my best year ever running. My event was the mile.
LIJS: So, what was your best time for the mile?
PG: 4:10.
LIJS: So you were a pretty good athlete!
PG: Not as good as Tim McLoone!
LIJS: You competed against Tim McLoone, the musician and restaurateur?
PG: He was at Harvard and I was at Navy. He was an All American; he was a very, very good runner! On my last collegiate race, I was right behind him.
LIJS: Who are your heroes?
PG: Well, a guy who was my mentor, J. Edward Snyder…he just died, and was in his 80s. He was a Rear Admiral, which means he was a Two Star Admiral. This is interesting, we met by happenstance. I was assigned to work for him in the Navy as his aide and we became fast friends; he was an incredibly smart guy. He worked with Teller and Oppenheimer during the early nuclear days and at the end of World War II. He was torpedoed in WW II, and the Navy sent him to MIT to become a nuclear physicist; he started the oceanography program in the U.S. Navy, was an incredible thinker, and a real iconoclast…not your typical polite Admiral. And he had so many ideas. Some of his principles helped me so many times… The thing he loved to talk about most was the Battleship USS New Jersey. He had been the commanding officer when it was deployed during the Vietnam War, and he brought it out of mothballs and saw it rebuilt in a Philadelphia shipyard. He had permanent plates on his car from New Jersey. I had never lived in NJ before, and when I came up here and mentioned his name everybody knew him. It’s funny how life keeps bringing you around in circles, coming back together.
LIJS: So, where do you see yourself in 10 years?
PG: Well, I’ll be 72, so I doubt I’ll be working, but you never know. What my wife and I would love to do is live right on the edge of a college campus somewhere. That way we can go to the student plays, we can go to a baseball game, basketball practice, and use the library. We like student towns, student restaurants, student bars. We just like that life…somewhere warm.
LIJS: So I guess with global warming, that could be Monmouth University.
PG: Yes, but I have my own theories about global warming with my background in oceanography, but that’s for a whole other interview!
LIJS: I’ll look forward to that one! Do you have a motto?
PG: No, but the school does: “Monmouth University – Where
Leaders Look Forward.”
Favorite restaurants: Mister C’s, Salt Creek Grille, Doris & Ed’s and Fromagerie Favorite music: country or classical
Favorite movie: Lawrence of Arabia
Pet peeve: peers not supporting each other, whether it be students or professionals
Three people you’d like to have dinner with: Secretary of Defense Dr. Robert Gates, any Israeli prime minister, and my lovely wife
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