By RAY LESZCYNSKI / The Dallas Morning News
rleszcynski@dallasnews.com

The ambition discussed among former and current University of Texas at Dallas presidents Wednesday afternoon did not mention Harvard or Stanford.

Rather, the talk centered on Cambridge, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif., cities that those noted universities call home.

"We need to be more than a college campus. We need to be a college community," said David Daniel, who is in his fifth year as president of UTD.

Daniel and his two immediate predecessors, Franklyn Jenifer and Robert Rutford, made up the Panel of Presidents, a presentation linked to the school's 40th anniversary celebration. They talked of the challenges of establishing Richardson as a collegiate destination.

Jenifer, president from 1994-2005, recalled being recruited to the school, telling a cab driver at the airport he needed to go to UTD and being driven instead to the University of Dallas.

"It dawned on me that if the people of the city didn't know it was here, what was I getting into?"

The campus, he said, was little more than potential.

"But when you drove off campus, you could see that on every corner of this great city of Richardson was the start of technology," Jenifer said. "It was the hub of American technology."

That partnership with the city strengthened in technology's down times.

"The fact that community, that the university and that Richardson survived some of these turmoils says something," Rutford said.

A 10-minute historical presentation included taped interviews with some of the school's early leaders and a message from President Lyndon Johnson on the dedication of the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, the learning center that preceded UTD.

An interview with Francis Johnson, the university's first acting president, recalled the political concerns that led to forming UTD without an undergraduate program. Its first freshmen and sophomores did not arrive until the early 1990s. Rutford, who became president in 1982, listed that infusion and the arrival of student housing among his proudest accomplishments.

A 61 percent enrollment increase under Jenifer and hundreds of millions of dollars in campus improvements under Daniel followed. But none of the leaders were on stage to take the credit.

"The people make the difference, not the president," Jenifer said. "And the people here are outstanding."

"I've always felt that in a healthy organization, the leader is not that important," Daniel said. "Someone would have to mess things up badly to derail this institution."

Despite 19 new degree programs under his watch, Daniel said the job of president remains pretty much the same as that of his predecessors.

"It's easy theoretically to design these wonderful programs," he said. "The most difficult job for the provosts, as well as the presidents, is sorting through all these wonderful ideas."

Daniel said the challenge is not only to grow, but to do so without damaging an environment and reputation created by the best faculty and students.

"If we have success, we will make North Texas, North Dallas, Richardson one of the most interesting places for a young person to go," Daniel said. "Much like Palo Alto or Cambridge, Mass."

"Where we see ourselves really is a top-tier university that draws tens, eventually hundreds of millions of dollars of research here, that draws the best and the brilliant here and becomes a hub of where people want to be," he said.