Hartley was a very good president for much of his tenure - probably the most student-friendly of the bunch.
He deserves credit for UConn 2000, among others, which didn't advance the university as much as bring up to at least a modern standard - anyone who was on campus in the early 90s knows that the infrastructure was simply breaking down. Unfortunately, he was not terribly successful in dealing with the state on other matters and the U lost a lot of staff to budget cuts over the last half of his tenure. I think he spent the last three years at UConn wanting to resign and eventually the BOT began to agree - I think he just got worn down.
In terms of athletics, I think the administration and the university worked as well during that period as they did in any until recent times - far, far better than the acrimony that developed in Austin's later years and carried into Hogan and Austin II. (Hartley and JC used to jog together, if you can picture that.)
Austin was very good - if there was a failing, it was in the people he kept on. There's no excuse for delegating so much to Emmert, retaining Hathaway - the capital campaign of the time could have been considered a success, but there's no question that the people we have in that area now are so, so, so much better. I think the construction on campus was so fast and furious that we were bound to have issues, but there were too many - examples like having Emmert in an oversight position, some of the change orders that were simply improperly approved, etc. That speaks to the people he had around him.
But he did have a national vision for the university - we'd always talked about being Michigan or Virginia, but he was the first to actually believe it and start to successfully push for the money to do it. He was also very good in bringing Mansfield on board with some of the campus improvements and there was a working relationship there that was previously too strained to be productive. He started the push to expand the med center that was ultimately implemented under Hogan and he planted the first seed of what ultimately became NextGen and perhaps even Bioscience. (There is rightfully a building on campus named for Austin - he earned that and he is truly a UConn man.)
Hogan was a train wreck. He started off complaining about the president's house and it got no better from there - how he managed to get Illinois to hire him after UConn is a minor miracle. He impressed no one, accomplished relatively nothing and there was no shortage of people willing to drive him to the airport when he quit to take a pay cut at Illinois. (They've already shoved him out, too.) He was a failure and we lost those years. Period. We didn't go from "good to great" under Herbst - Hogan was plain bad. (He can take credit for the med center expansion, but really, not sure he did much there.)
Herbst has been the best of the bunch. She was on-campus for about half an hour before she put out the four-year plan that, unlike most public universities these days, called for UConn to hire about 300 additional faculty. She helped sell NextGen and then Bioscience. It goes less pub than NextGen, but Bioscience ultimately helped bring in Jackson Labs which you might remember if you followed the Nobel prizes earlier this year - between STEM, Bioscience and JL, UConn is incredibly well-positioned in biomedical as a research hub.
The STEM plan including math/science dorms, public/private lab space to allow start-ups and private researchers to work with our students, the relocation of UConn's Hartford campus, the development of the new master plan and thank God, finally a president who is committed to the endowment. Hiring Josh Newman was brilliant - we were $15M over the fundraising target in '14 and Newman/Herbst have started to build a donor network outside of the state - one of our issues previously is that we kept mining the same territory over and over and over. We're not getting to a billion dollars dialing just 203 and 860.
Athletically, you can sort that out for yourselves. Hockey East, the commitment to the new barn, firing Hathaway, the new soccer facility plans, opening the hoop building, etc. Realignment is what it is, but whatever fuel this board has for its Big Ten day dreams happened on her watch.
So there.
