Interim Chancellor Dan Ferritor said that the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville has been his life for more than 40 years. “This university gave so much to me.”
Dan Ferritor is at the age when his name is almost always followed by that number.
Ferritor, the interim chancellor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, is not shy about his age or the effects of his years on his energy level.
But being referred to in print as “Ferritor, 75” so often has prompted his daughter in Kansas City to send emails lovingly addressed to “Dad, 75.”
“My name never appears without ‘comma 75’ after it,” Ferritor said. “That’s the power of the press. I’m waiting for my birthday, and I’m going to go to the error guy at the newspaper and go, ‘You all made this horrible mistake. I’m Dan Ferritor, 76!’”
Actually, Ferritor is at an age when most people have retired and dropped out of the news altogether. Retirement, though, hasn’t been in the cards — although he was this close to finally stepping aside when he was asked to fill in as chancellor during the search for David Gearhart’s replacement.
All joking aside, he said there was little reluctance to step back into the chancellor role he held full time from 1986-97. He had planned to retire March 31 of this year, but UA System President Don Bobbitt called him after Gearhart announced he was retiring at the end of July.
Bobbitt wanted to know if Ferritor would serve in the interim until a permanent replacement was hired.
“Why would I come back?” he said. “I had no choice. I owe them. This university has been my life.”
By working into his mid-70s, Ferritor is part of a small but growing segment of the American labor force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the national share of workers who are 65 or older doubled between 1977 and 2007, and the BLS predicts that workers age 75 or older will make up 1.6 percent of the workforce in 2022, nearly double the 2012 level.
But Ferritor promises — emphatically — that this is his last go-round. Once the search committee settles on the next chancellor, he’s done with working.
Honest.
“When I finish this job, I am retired,” Ferritor said. “I’m looking forward to it. I have failed retirement several times. This time I just got an incomplete.”
Ferritor said he doesn’t know how long he’ll be interim chancellor — that all depends on the search committee’s work. He told Bobbitt that he would sit in the chair as long as the university needed.
“I’m afraid I did write Don Bobbitt a blank check; actually, I wrote the University of Arkansas a blank check,” Ferritor said. “I know it is at least a seven-week job because I’ve been at it for seven weeks. I don’t know if it’s a three-month, six-month or 12-month job. This job is going to be over and they’re going to have a great new person in here.”
When asked, what if it takes two years, Ferritor, known for his quick wit and robust humor, immediately snapped, “Don’t say that!”
Targeting Graduation Rates
In the meantime, Ferritor busies himself with the day-to-day and month-to-month operations of the state’s flagship university. Ferritor said he feels no reluctance in making important decisions, but he does avoid anything that would result in long-term obligations that the new chancellor might not want.
One exception to that — and Ferritor is sure it isn’t really an exception — is that he’s spending most of his time — and the university’s money — on programs to improve the retention and graduation rates for students. He said the university’s most recent statistics showed that 62 percent of the most recent class graduated, and Ferritor wants that number to be 70 percent.
“That’s going to be important for anybody,” Ferritor said. “If the person coming in isn’t excited about improving graduation and retention, then we hired the wrong person.”
And who better to work on retention than someone who has hung around the university since 1973?
Ferritor admits that he missed the hustle and bustle of being chancellor after he retired from that position to go back to teaching sociology. For the past 10 years he has worked for the UA System, most recently as vice president of learning technologies.
“You really work with a bunch of neat people who are very talented, and when I went back to teaching it was much more of a solitary job,” Ferritor said. As chancellor, “I don’t know how to put it — you have a lot of people who do things for you that you don’t realize people are doing things for you. They make your schedule. When you type this piece of junk, they clean it up and take out all the typos. They give you advice that your tie is crooked. They come in earlier than you do, and they stay later for so much less pay than you do.”
Ferritor remains physically active as much as he can — he is a frequent bike rider on the Fayetteville trails. When he was full-time chancellor, Ferritor, who had heart bypass surgery in 1984, prided himself on working from 6 a.m. to well into the night. Now he parcels out his time and energies more carefully.
“Right now, I have more senior moments than certainly I had 15 years ago,” Ferritor said. “The evening work has gotten a little tougher for me, and there is a lot of it in this job. I get up at 4:30-ish, but I enjoy sitting there reading the newspaper and drinking my cup of tea, stretching, and I get in here at 8 o’clock. Sometimes 8:15.”
‘A Magical Place’
Ferritor joked that being an interim chancellor with a countdown to retirement means he doesn’t have to prove anything to his bosses. If they don’t like how he is doing the job, they can just fire him.
The truth, of course, is Ferritor loves the university too much to ever put less than his heart and soul into whatever he can do to make it better — as he has been doing for more than 40 years.
“This place is a magical place,” Ferritor said. “I have been lucky enough to have my kids grow up here and watch the university and community grow and have been a little bit a part of it. I thought, honestly, I can’t imagine anybody having a better life than I had, incredible kids and wife and a job that was always challenging and rewarding. This university gave so much to me.”
When retirement does finally come to Ferritor, he said he and his wife, Patsy — they met at age 13 — plan to travel to various spots in the United States and do as much volunteer work as he can. There are grandchildren to spoil in Kansas City and Baltimore, as well.
“This is the very best place to live in the world except maybe during August,” Ferritor said. “We will fill our time. This time retirement is going to work.”
Sign up for Daily E-news
