Great Q&A article about Fry and Drexel's plans. He really is a visionary leader focused on growing the profile and opportunities at the University and city at large. A few summary snippets below.
Drexel’s John Fry talks about nurturing biotech, building University City, and why the school wants to mint more engineers
https://www.inquirer.com/business/jo...-20220530.html
"Built as a factory and financial center, Philadelphia’s economy now relies more on its universities. So it’s no surprise that the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia recently picked John Fry, president of Drexel University and an architect of the development around its main campus in University City, for its highest yearly honor, the William Penn Award."
"When I got here, all people wanted to talk about was the future of Drexel in Sacramento. They wanted to build Drexel West! We had a little branch campus there. I looked at the cost. It would have been absolutely prohibitive. We wound it down, and I wanted to focus on University City and Philadelphia."
"I saw that our retention rate was not where it should be. I decided to focus on retaining more students, instead of recruiting more and losing a lot of them, and to double down on experiential learning, our co-ops [six-month paid business internships]. We are a very specific type of university, and I wanted to tell our story to the students we felt would fit best, who would be able to graduate."
"It was clear to me that if we partnered and began to put this all together in one package, we would have something pretty powerful to offer [corporate tenants] devoted to innovation, development, economic opportunity, and economic growth."
"We were lucky to recruit Spark Therapeutics [the gene therapy company started by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia scientists] as our anchor tenant [at the Evening Bulletin building]. Roche purchased Spark and has expanded beyond its Bulletin building headquarters to also add the Abbott’s Dairy site as a gene manufacturing center. This makes Spark the most important example of a company whose technology was created here in West Philadelphia. Between Gerry Sweeney and Wexford and Drexel, we gave them a place to grow."
"Then the School District closed University City High School at 31st and Filbert. John Grady and Joe Reagan at Wexford Science and Technology set up an innovation district, uCity Square, from Powelton to Filbert. There were already [biotech tenants in University City], but Wexford recruited Cambridge Innovation Center to operate on-site , and we moved our fastest-growing school, the College of Computing and Informatics, to two floors there."
"We want to be in the A league in terms of gene therapy. What I learned from the [2017-2018] effort to bring Amazon here — I was chair of the chamber that year — we made a joint venture bid with PIDC and significant corporate engagement, in a great competition with the best cities in the country. It came out that their team recommended three cities: Philadelphia, Chicago, and Raleigh, N.C. On the merits, we did really well — walkability, transit, great recreation, great restaurants and hospitals, a city with intellectual assets but also a real place full of neighborhoods."
"Of course, they overruled their own committee and went to New York and Virginia. They hammered us mostly on tech talent. Our schools don’t graduate enough engineers. Our students weren’t doing enough computing."
"So we have done something about it at Drexel. We tripled the size of our College of Computing and Informatics since then. We’ve grown health sciences significantly. And we’re doubling down on engineering, [all] to attract future tech talent.
"A biomanufacturing facility that will employ 500 or 600 people, they don’t all need to be baccalaureates. We are missing the infrastructure for preparing a lot of people for these well-paid jobs."
"We are having an intense conversation with Spark about this. Community College of Philadelphia does its best, but it’s overwhelmed. I talked to the president of Thaddeus Stevens [vocational-technical college, in Lancaster] about starting a branch here. We could support that venture in terms of filling the pipeline with talent, so they eventually work at places like Spark."
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