A Day in the Life

by Ford Burkhart
Jacob Chinn photos

Along a dusty street in a working-class suburb of not-yet-so-big Phoenix, a lanky boy ran to be first in line for the bookmobile, his head filled with thoughts of protons and nuclei.

He knew just what he wanted. His favorite. Building Blocks of the Universe, a child’s version of the chemical elements, only 102 of them in that 1957 edition. (There are now at least 117.) The text by Isaac Asimov was intended to excite the imagination of such 12-year-olds. And it worked. This ever-so-serious child would eventually become a physicist and rise to the top ranks of American academics at four major universities, emerging in 2006 as The University of Arizona’s 19th president.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Robert Shelton says of the book, over supper at the Student Union’s Cactus Room, before hurrying off to the next event on his calendar. “I always worried that some other kid would have taken that book.

“Nobody ever did, of course,” he says with a hearty laugh.

As his third year at the UA unfolds, Shelton is leading a profound renewal of the entire campus. In the spring of 2009, he and the faculty will begin to implement his Transformation Plan, the biggest shakeup of the UA since it was founded in 1885. (For details of the plan, see Provost Meredith Hay’s letter on page 18.) As if that weren’t enough, Shelton oversees 14,000 employees, a $1.7 billion budget, and a campus of 38,000 students that is ranked in the top 20 of public research universities. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Just who is this tall, gregarious executive anyway?

Those days in Phoenix were part of fairly typical 1950s and early ’60s life for a boy who was as passionate, even then, about chemistry, halogens, and rare-earth metals as he was about baseball, basketball, and later, tennis — a boy who would one day grow up to become a soccer referee so he could stay close to his three children, and who taught his wife to referee and match his hard-fought tennis game. That sober boy so good in math and science would eventually learn from his parents, he says, to laugh more and observe human nature. “They taught me to take a sharp interest in the lives of others,” he says, “to get to know their strengths and weaknesses.”

He would master his mother’s recipe for pumpkin pie and surprise his own provost office staff at the University of North Carolina with one that they still say approaches perfection. He would surprise a dean at the UA who asked what this newcomer knew of agriculture. “Strawberries,” he replied. “The varieties invented at UC Davis are the number-one earner of intellectual property royalties in the UC system.” The dean, Eugene Sander, of the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, was delighted.

Shelton says his mother urged him to be outgoing. He ran for a freshman office at Cortez High School in Phoenix, and lost. “You don’t always win when you put your hat in the ring” was his lesson. When he was a sophomore his family moved to Spokane, Wash., where, standing 6 feet tall, he tried basketball and track. “I did better at tennis,” he recalls, “maybe because there was less competition.” He was senior class president, Class of 1966. Later, he was a dormitory treasurer at Stanford, and following his mother’s advice, he went to a Sunday pizza party at the nearest girl’s dorm, where, at 18, he met a 16-year-old freshman from Hawaii, who like him was a partial scholarship student. She had graduated from high school in three years and was studying East Asian history at Stanford. Adrian Ann Millar became Shelton’s wife 39 years ago. They have three children — two professors and a medical student — and one grandchild.

Her husband-to-be always worked, Adrian recalls. After high school, he found a job at the Bonneville Power Administration in Washington State. In college, he worked anywhere — the Post Office, at Macy’s, and for two summers at Moffett Federal Airfield, run by NASA’s Ames Research Center.

In college, his first role model of a president was J.E. Wallace Sterling. In nearly 20 years as Stanford’s leader, through 1968, Sterling did much to make Stanford the modern campus it is today. “One day, he had the dorm officers to his home,” Shelton recalls. “He played the piano, and told us all the anecdotes and legends of Stanford. I wasn’t thinking of that kind of job then. I was just worried about how to pass calculus.” In something of a parallel to Shelton’s renewal plan at the UA, Sterling put Stanford on sound financial footing, increased salaries to get and keep top faculty, and improved its standing from regional to global leader in research.

Shelton earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California at San Diego, studying with Bernd

Matthias, an eminent physicist who discovered the curious property of superconductivity, the flow of electrons with no resistance, in many materials. Shelton moved on to Iowa State University, where he held a joint appointment in physics at the Ames National Lab, which conducts research for the U.S. Department of Energy. For decades, Shelton studied the transition of materials to superconducting states and states with exotic magnetic properties, a key field with the potential of making a major impact on 21st-century technology.

Shelton also held visiting research posts at the University of Geneva and in Germany and Japan.

In 1987, he joined the University of California at Davis as chair of the physics department and in 1990 became vice chancellor for research. He wound down his own research at UC Davis after he became the system-wide vice provost for research in 1996 and — a bit wistfully — published his last research paper in 2001, the year he joined the University of North Carolina as provost and executive vice president. He suspected that his days ahead would be too busy to run a lab and seek grants. It proved true, during five years at Chapel Hill and now at the UA.

Recently, while taking photos of Shelton as he was being interviewed, the photographer shouts, “Pretend you are working!” “That’s what I do for a living: pretend I’m working,” Shelton responds drily.

In his off hours, Shelton’s musical tastes are broad, from classical to, surprisingly, the soundtrack of the musical Jersey Boys. On a Saturday, he says, he and his wife can leave their work desks — Adrian has a career in academic research compliance — and be at a Catalina foothills trailhead in five minutes, their camels strapped on for a solid hike. They are tough.They’ve hiked France, Switzerland, and Italy, and in and out of the Grand Canyon twice, once when Adrian was pregnant with their first child.

Shelton brings the same grit and energy to the table for the great adventure that unfolds in January as he implements the Transformation Plan. The process will continue through the spring term and beyond.

Announced on September 3, the Transformation Plan was one of the UA’s top stories in 2008, and its implementation will likely be an even bigger story for 2009. Faculty and staff members were asked to write proposals last fall. The new design, to take full effect in 2010, will be the biggest renewal at the UA in its 120-plus years.

For Shelton, leaving behind the status quo is nothing new.

In college, Shelton’s obstreperous ’57 Pontiac died one morning, stranding its driver miles from his chemistry final exam.

Shelton hopped out and ran to the classroom, aced the exam, then walked back to the highway and found a used car lot. He bought a cranky used Corvair, which lasted a few months. Later, with his first real job, he bought a vermillion Ford Maverick, and the manuals and tools to fix it.

He kept it running for 19 years, with Adrian joining the fun of tuning carburetors and changing filters.

But the task for 2009 is a much taller order.

In short, Shelton is leading the UA through a bottom-up transformation. This time, the UA isn’t fixing the old car, and it isn’t just picking out a new model. It is designing something entirely new. “I’ll have lots of help,” Shelton said, “but I’ll be the head of the design team.”

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