Bepko to retire in June 2003

By Rich Schneider

The retirement of the chancellor should coincide with the achievement of the $700 million fund-raising goal of the Campaign for IUPUI, which continues through 2004.

During his years as chancellor, Bepko presided over the transformation of IUPUI from a campus that only 33 years ago was a university extension mixed with some professional schools to a nationally significant urban campus.

”I have always assumed that I would return to faculty work to attend to some unfinished business and to try to recapture the joy of watching students grow intellectually while, I should hope, making a contribution to that growth,” Bepko said. He made that assumption, he noted, when he was appointed dean of the IU School of Law- Indianapolis at IUPUI, a post he held for five years before being named chancellor in 1986.

Since his appointment in 1986, Bepko led a movement to unify the various programs of IUPUI, both by bringing schools to the West Michigan Street campus (Purdue Science, Purdue Engineering and Technology, and the IU Herron School of Art) and by developing a stronger sense of institutional community. One element of that unifying effort was the movement of the Intercollegiate Athletic Program at IUPUI to NCAA Division I in 1998. He also led a renewed emphasis on undergraduate education, culminating in the establishment of the University College.

During his tenure, enrollment has grown by 15 percent and annual external support has grown from $38 million in 1986 to more than $190 million currently. Additionally,

the successful consolidation of the IU Hospitals with Methodist Hospitals of Indiana to form Clarian Health Partners, Inc. has proved to be an important element in addressing the challenges of the health-care industry and of academic medicine.

http://www.newscenter.iupui.edu/newsreleases/bepko_retirement.htm

Editor’s note: The IU community will bid farewell to two chancellors at the end of this academic year. Ken Perrin, IU South Bend’s third chancellor, announced last April that he would retire in June 2002. IU Southeast Chancellor F.C. Richardson assumed the leadership of IU’s southernmost campus in July 1996. Read his “Viewpoint “ column at

http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/032902/text/viewpoint.html