A Vice President's Perspective
As vice president for university advancement, Marc Raney was a key figure in helping turn Calgaard’s vision into reality. For 19 years, Marc and his wife Gail lived next door to Ron and Genie in historic Monte Vista homes on Oakmont Drive owned by the University. When describing president Calgaard, Raney said, “Ron was this spellbinding visionary who was going to elevate the University into the realm of the top liberal arts schools in the country. He offered us the opportunity to be part of something that was going to make a real difference in the space of a lifetime (Raney, 2020).” Raney also said Calgaard “was a very challenging, demanding leader.” Raney went on to say “We were raising standards. Change is never easy, and there were people there that resisted it, so it was hard work (Raney, 2020).” Raney also talked about how annual division budget sessions with Calgaard, an economist, were brutal, and once budgets were set, there was no going back for more money later in the year. Calgaard’s focus instead was using all available funds to improve faculty, the library, student recruitment, and to expand the campus. Those efforts began with a $48.5 million capital campaign in 1980 when the university endowment was about $75 million. At the time, it was an unheard-of sum of money for an academic institution to raise in San Antonio (passive). By the time Calgaard retired, the university endowment stood at $540 million. For a comparison, today it is more than $1.3 billion. “He had a receptive board of trustees,” Raney said. “They essentially said, ‘Ron, we want to be a great school, but we don’t know what that means.’ Ron had written down exactly what it meant on the back of a napkin: a first-rate faculty, a first-rate library, more endowment funds, defining what you were going to be and what you were not going to be.” For Ron, “it was all about Trinity, the institution, never about him individually, unlike what we see in some public figures today,” Raney said (Raney, 2020). As opposed to what the norm was for people in his position during the late 80s and early 90s, this mindset, enabled the improvements to occur. Ultimately through hearing what Marc Raney had to say, the impression that Ron Calgaard made on Trinity was visible through a different lens.