Leonard W. Sandridge
Leonard W. Sandridge is the University of Virginia’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. He has worked for the university since 1967, rising from the bottom of the school’s employment ranks to the second-highest post.
He’s the man who runs much of the administrative machinery that drives the school and he is retiring after more than two decades in his current role.
On July 1 of this year he’ll start working part-time at the university, staying for a year in an advisory role.
The following are excerpts from an interview with The Daily Progress.
Q: Talk about changes you’ve seen in your more than four decades at UVa.
ANSWER: … I realized recently when we had a transition of presidents that we’ve had eight, that I’ve worked with five of them. Now, of course, you have to go back and realize that the first president didn’t come until [1904], but still, that’s not a lot of presidents for any organization for that period of time. I was not there when President [Colgate W.] Darden [Jr.] was president, but you know by all accounts of history, he really brought the university into the realization that we are a public university that serves the citizens of the commonwealth and began to see what at that time we thought was a lot of growth, but it was not a lot compared to today.
Edgar Shannon was the first president that I worked with and I think that history has shown that he really built the academic foundation on which the institution grew and was built. Frank Hereford recognized that there’s a huge role for alumni and that you deal not only with the students that are there at the time, but the alumni that will reflect the output of the institution also are critically important. Fundraising became a factor … and we began not to rely totally on state funds.
Bob O’Neil, who was there for five years, was a huge factor in pointing out to all of us that we were a changing institution, that diversity was important, that international programs were important. …
And then, of course, you’ve reported a lot on John Casteen’s tenure. Private support was huge, the place grew. We reached out. … I can remember when our reach was to Atlanta, New York, as far as where graduates would take jobs. … Today the graduates of the university are going global. …
I don’t think there is anything that I have seen that was more important to our future and to the quality of the place than the admission of women in 1970. It was a changing moment for the university. Specifically, it was at a point in time where we saw the size of the university increase rather dramatically, but we also saw the focus on quality take a quantum leap. … We’re a better place because of that.
… I think it’s also important to recognize that we own our hospital. … We did not, 20 years ago, when it was fashionable to do so … choose to sell our hospital. I think that that was a smart move at the time. ... We don’t have to deal with a separate corporation as some academic medical centers now have to do. …
I certainly believe that we will look back at this time and see that we’re in a period of huge change in the way … care is delivered. We have not started to fully understand how … changing technologies are going to affect … health care, [which] makes us very cautious about how we build facilities and how flexible we make them. … We are overall a much more complicated, complex organization today than we were. …
I think the changes that have had the most impact on us is the sort of the competitive nature of everything that we do, which has made us better. If you look at the kinds of students that we’re attracting today, they are students that could attend any college or university in this country and do well. They are academically well prepared. They have life experiences that were not possible 30 or 40 years ago. … And these same students have high expectations. Their parents have high expectations. …
Certainly, we would not have been ranked among the top 25 institutions 40 years ago, and today we are. … We are consistently seen as the most efficient among those … in the amount that we are able to spend in order to produce a graduate. Certainly the state and the parents and people that we serve would expect nothing else and should not expect anything else. …
We are one of two public universities in the country that has a AAA bond rating from all three rating agencies. … That’s important because it’s sort of an external examination of not necessarily the wealth of the institution but the fiscal stability of it and the ability of it to manage the changing times. We’re less dependant on the state.
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