THE VISIONARY

People told Dan Mote he couldn't do a lot of things.

And the university president wants to tell the 500 people gathered in Stamp Student Union for a farewell luau Tuesday about all the things they said he couldn't do. They told him, he explains to the lei-wearing crowd, that he couldn't build the M-Square Research Park. How was he going to build a research park? With no money? Inside the Beltway? On land the university didn't own? Next to a Metro station?

He did it. Of course he did. There was never any doubt, not for Mote.

Mote wants to take the crowd back to the beginning — October 15, 1998, the date of his first State of the Campus address. New to the university, he wrote the speech and showed it to a longtime staff member. She was horrified, told him he couldn't deliver the speech. She said the faculty, the university system and the state had already rejected the ideas he was proposing.

He gave the speech anyway.

"If we're in the wrong place with the wrong vision, it's better to find out sooner rather than later," Mote said Tuesday. "I might as well get fired now."

Almost 12 years later, Mote looks back on the speech with pride.

"Essentially, we've done what I said we were going to do," he said.

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Vision is a personal obsession of Mote's. Before you can accomplish something, he believes, you must see yourself doing it. And anything you can imagine, you can do.

"You can never become what you don't see yourself becoming," he said.

Mote's relentless drive to fulfill that vision — to raise standards, to change the way the university saw itself and to do it all without substantial increases in state support — is what defines his 12 years as university president.

But his relentless focus on that vision can cause him to disregard issues and develop a fierce belief in his own stances that alienates important stakeholders, critics said.

Denying the quality and perception of the university improved under Mote, though, is impossible. He imagined a university that had a modern fundraising infrastructure, had top-notch students, had Nobel Prize-winning faculty members and strove to be great not just in a few select areas, but everywhere. To Mote, this vision came naturally.

"I like," he said, "to build great things."

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From the day Mote first stepped foot in College Park in 1998, he knew he could build an elite university, one on par with the University of California, Berkeley, where he had worked for more than three decades.

At Berkeley, Mote had grown used to high standards. At the nation's top public university, designing a ski boot modification that saved thousands of legs was par for the course. As chair of the mechanical engineering department, he led it to a No. 1 national ranking. Before taking the vice chancellor for university relations job in 1991, he demanded that he be allowed to raise $1 billion.

At Berkeley, people were expected to do things like that.

But then something happened Mote didn't expect: He received a one-line e-mail from a former colleague that read: "Susan Schwab from UMCP came and talked to me today." Mote thought it had something to do with the Marine Corps. Actually, Schwab was chairing the university committee searching for a new president.

Before the interview, committee members knew the glittering parts of Mote's resumé: the excellent academic skills he had as a professor and the hundreds of millions he had raised for Berkeley. What they didn't anticipate was his drive.

"The man came across as a person who had an uncompromising attitude towards excellence," said Provost Nariman Farvardin, who at the time was the chair of the electrical engineering department and served on the committee.

Less than a month after receiving that e-mail, Mote was leaving Berkeley for College Park. When he did, he didn't just travel east to west, he also traveled downward — from No. 1 to No. 30 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. He went from a university that panicked when a department fell out of the top five nationally to one that was ecstatic to have any programs in the top 10. Mote saw that feeling as part of the problem.

"We must build a culture of excellence across our university," he declared in his inaugural address. That very call for excellence struck a cord with many faculty members, who bring it up without prompting.

"The most remarkable thing about President Mote is his use of the word excellence," anthropology professor Mark Leone said. "He intended to apply it to all aspects of the university. No one had ever done that before. ... It was contrary to all previous university strategy."

The university had previously used the phrase "Pillars of Excellence" to explain how it would rise. The idea was that a dozen or so stand-out programs would enhance the university's reputation. But the strategy sapped the enthusiasm of those excluded from the plan. And to Mote, the very idea was bankrupt. He was used to excellence everywhere.

"No great university is built on pillars," he said in his 2001 State of the Campus address. "Its entire foundation must be solid."

Raising those standards required shifts in university policies. Instead of measuring retention rates, he decided the university would measure graduation rates. He had the University Senate raise the standards for granting tenure. He focused on keeping Maryland's best high schoolers in the state, and the university's admissions became more selective.

"Each incoming freshman class becomes more and more talented," said Vice President for Student Affairs Linda Clement. "And they're ambitious for themselves."

The results are self-evident.

The university now has three times as many members of the National Academies as it did when Mote arrived. There are 29 departments ranked in the top 10 nationally, and 78 programs in the top 25. The number of students who go on to graduate school has grown, and the number of students receiving national scholarships is in the triple digits. And the U.S News ranking has climbed one spot for every year Mote has been in office, and is sitting at No. 18.