When President Paul Hennigan first started working at Point Park University in 2000, he was amazed at the lack of self-confidence and vision.
“It was a sleepy little, shy commuter school for the most part,” he says. “We owned four properties in downtown Pittsburgh. I don’t really think it had an identity.”
There were discussions about the school leaving downtown Pittsburgh, as little reinvestment was being made in the area.
But the school did have an entrepreneurial spirit and a history of survival, Hennigan says.
In 1973, the school defaulted in its debt and didn’t make payroll. Faculty stood on the street holding tin cans that said “SOS — save our school.” In the 1990s, the university had a crisis of confidence.
“Those two survival episodes had really worked their way into the culture and the ethos of the school,” he says.
Today, Point Park has one of the largest footprints in the Golden Triangle and is a driving force behind the Academic Village initiative, a $244 million investment that is reshaping the campus neighborhood.
Hennigan shares how the university — with its $76 million annual operating budget and more than 3,700 students — made its transformational leap.
Building an identity
As the university’s leadership decided to remain downtown, Point Park benefitted from the general expansion of higher education.
Growth was happening so quickly that Point Park leased classrooms from semester to semester, while having an oversupply of housing. What was missing was a comprehensive plan to effectively harness the growth.
“One of the first things we did was to put together an enrollment growth plan,” Hennigan says. “We tried to project out our enrollment, and then we tried to project out what were the academic space needs that we would need.”
The university solved the academic space issue by buying property, but then it ran out of housing. Hennigan says students were housed on Chatham University’s campus, but that created a new problem: They didn’t want to make the trip downtown.
So Point Park bought and leased more property.
“It was at that point, which was roughly when I was becoming president in 2006, that we realized that we had acquired — or had begun to acquire — a critical mass of property in a dense area,” he says.
“And we did not want just a collection of buildings; we wanted to have an identity, and we wanted to have a sense of community,” Hennigan says.
