Plachta leaving presidency with no regrets

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Establishing financial stability.
That’s what University President Leonard Plachta thinks his greatest accomplishment was during his term, and that is how he wants to be remembered.
“I would say I’d like to be remembered as one who worked hard and tried to improve the university,” he said.
“It was 8 1/2 years ago I became president. We were having financial difficulty because we were spending more than we were taking in.
“We had declining enrollment, we continued to be poorly funded by the state, and we weren’t raising very much money in gift money and all that adds up,” he said.
“I felt we were organized and structured in a way that wasn’t exactly appropriate for what we could do and be. So what we did was we began to address all those issues.”
Plachta was named the university’s 11th president in 1992. After almost nine years of holding that position, he announced his resignation at the Dec. 3 Board of Trustees meeting. His resignation will be finalized Aug. 1, but he will remain on campus as an accounting professor, the position that originally brought him to CMU.
“We are still working on details,” he said of his teaching position, which should be finalized by the end of the month.
“I still enjoy teaching. I haven’t taught full time in a long, long time, but I look forward to returning to that.”
For Plachta, simply retiring was not an option.
“I wasn’t forced to leave the presidency,” he said. “At the same time, I am not the retiring type. I don’t plan on retiring. I probably never will.
“All my life I’ve been working, accomplishing and learning, and I see that as a habit, I guess.”
But, “As I get a little older I want to have a little more personal time,” he said.
Overall, he said he is confident and satisfied with the condition in which he is leaving the university.
“We’re efficient. We’re not perfect but we’re improved in so many ways that I hope we continue to make progress,” he said.
If he could do it all over again, Plachta said he wouldn’t do anything differently.
“We were able to make a lot of changes, and probably some of them could have been done a little quicker or in slightly different ways, but basically I’m very satisfied.”
Plachta will teach courses offered through the College of Business, specifically accounting.
“That’s my field specifically. I am a tenured professor in the accounting department. That’s what brought me here in 1972,” he said. “I might possibly teach some other areas of business.”
He plans on spending the fall semester fine tuning his accounting skills and anticipates returning to the classroom in the spring, a change he looks forward to making.
“I would be allowed to have some time off to prepare to return to the classroom. The university has long had an arrangement if a person is an administrator at the senior officer level, tenured status (professors) are provided the opportunity to take some time off and do a little studying to prepare for whatever courses they might be teaching,” he said.
“I am very comfortable. I see no disadvantage in going from president to professor.”
Although Plachta is in the final stretch of his presidency, there is still a lot of work for him to do.
“Different items are in different stages of completion, of course. This is a complex university.
“We are continuing to work on building projects in terms of making plans, hiring architects and so on,” he said. “So I’ll keep on working with that and turn it all over to the new president.
“In general there are a lot of day-to-day things that need to be taken care of.”
Michael Rao, university president designate, will officially take his post as university president Aug. 1.
He was named CMU’s 12th president at the May 30 Board of Trustees meeting.
Presidential involvement with the legislature concerning university funding is very important, Plachta said.
“Half of the money that comes to the university comes through the state. We historically have not been extremely well funded by the state, but we’re getting better at it and we’ve made progress in the last three or four years.”
Fund-raising efforts and increasing budgets are essential for university financial stability.
“I think we have a long way to go, but we’re geared up to do that. That needs a lot of presidential concern and involvement,” he said.
Although Plachta does not know Rao personally, he said he is comfortable with the board’s selection.
“I anticipate it will work out well,” he said. “All signals to me are to leave the position and turn it over to somebody else.”