Looking back, nobody would have picked Franklin Jenifer as the man who would revolutionize the Dallas economy. For one thing, he grew up, as one friend phrased it, in the “worst part of the worst slum in the worst section of Washington.” For another, his career until he came to Dallas was a textbook example of the educational bureaucrat, climbing the greasy pole of advancement until he reached his pinnacle as chancellor of the mammoth Massachusetts system. Third, when he stepped down to run Howard University, the faculty senate rewarded him with a vote of no confidence, essentially demanding that he leave. Lastly, he’s an African-American Catholic Yankee—which in Dallas makes him three minorities in one.
But in 1994 he ended up as president of tiny University of Texas at Dallas, a quiet, often-overlooked science-oriented outpost of the UT system in Richardson.
Jenifer didn’t start a revolution, but neither did George Washington. It is not the people who start revolutions who matter; it is the people who end up leading them.
For much of Dallas’ history, the three traditional pillars of our economy have been oil and gas, real estate, and banking. All three collapsed at one time in the mid-’80s. For a decade after, nobody in Dallas knew what to do. The city floundered.
But in Richardson something was stirring that nobody could have predicted. Franklin Jenifer arrived at the precise moment that those early stirrings were coalescing into a historic moment. The high-tech revolution had begun, and UTD, under Jenifer, placed itself at the center of the maelstrom.
Today we’re on the other side of history’s pendulum, high-tech companies are still on the brink of recovery, and unemployment in that industry remains a problem. Just as it is hard to see an economic revolution coming, it is hard to see its impact through the dust of its collapse.
The high-tech revolution transformed Dallas. We once were a city of deals—the financing deal, the oil deal, the leasing deal. We are now a city of ideas. The people who conceive, innovate, imagine, and invent are now more important than middlemen deal-brokers. A lot of those people come to Dallas because of UTD.
UTD is the kind of place where members of the chess team are the big men on campus. The school likes to brag that it has never lost a football game—nobody there plays football. When it opened up to lowerclassmen a few years ago, UTD surprised everyone by attracting kids with higher SATs than UT Austin or A&M. That kind of culture—respectful of intelligence, open to innovation, brimming with intellectual excitement—happens because the man at the top is respectful, open, and infused with excitement. Franklin Jenifer was the man who put UTD on the map.
Jenifer has announced he will retire once his replacement is chosen. People within the UT system tell me that will take nine months to a year. They speak with undisguised respect for UTD. It is no longer the system’s stepchild. The school is a star.
How bright that star will shine for Dallas depends on whom the Regents choose to lead UTD into its next phase. The key to the school’s future lies in its past. Under Jenifer, UTD placed itself in a position to become our region’s MIT. Dallas ought to give him the applause he deserves—and the university the means to achieve his dream.
