TEAM PLAYER

Football opened doors, but engineering Opened the world' for the University of Delaware's new president.

PATRICK HARKER'S FIRST visit to the University of Delaware's campus occurred some 30 years ago when, as a high-school student, he took a tour to see whether it seemed like the right choice for an aspiring engineer who was also an outstanding football player. He liked Delaware well enough but opted for an Ivy League education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Harker came full circle when he returned to Delaware for a second visit last year. This was a recruiting trip of a different sort. Harker was on campus as a finalist for the university presidency, and this time Delaware got its man. At the age of 48, Harker assumed the top post on July 1.

In the three decades between the two visits, Harker built a distinguished-and-unusual-career that bridged the worlds of engineering and business. After an injury during his junior year ended his days playing defensive tackle, Harker focused more intensely on engineering. A professor of civil engineering hired Harker to work in his lab and encouraged him to write a paper that won a national competition conducted by the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Football opened the door to an Ivy League school for me," says Harker, who grew up in a working-class family in southern New Jersey. "Now, here I was presenting a paper that opened the world to me."

Harker also came under the wing of an adjunct faculty member who ran an engineering consulting firm that had been hired to help redesign the New York City subway system. The faculty member employed Harker to work on the project.

"These experiences and the two faculty members changed the way I thought about the world," says Harker. "Getting hurt playing football was probably the best thing that happened to me. I learned that if you are open to opportunities, wonderful things can happen."

By the time he was a senior at Penn, Harker had begun graduate work in civil engineering. He earned both master's and doctoral degrees in the field as well as a master's in economics. After he spent a year teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara, family considerations brought him back to the East Coast.

Harker had no intention of returning to Penn. In fact, he was ready to take a position at another school when he received an offer from his alma mater that was just too good to turn down. He joined the faculty at Penn's internationally known Wharton business school in 1984 and eventually became the youngest faculty member at the school to hold an endowed chair. At the same time, he held an appointment at Penn's engineering school, where in 1994 he was named chair of the department of systems engineering.

Keeping one foot in business and the other in engineering suited Harker. He eventually left the chairmanship of the systems engineering department to head the operations and information management department at Wharton.

Early on, Harker's research focused on transportation systems. He received support from a major railroad to develop an algorithm-based system to control the movement of trains. From controlling trains, he switched to controlling the movement of customers. He developed call centers for financial services enterprises. "Traffic is traffic whether you are dealing with telephone calls or box cars," he explains. In both instances, Harker was designing large, complex systems. "Engineering helped me to see how everything interrelates," he says. "I was looking at the relationship between technical systems and economics, which also involved a lot of socioeconomic aspects. I was attracted by the complexity of it."

At one point, Harker took a year off from research and teaching to serve as a White House Fellow. The prestigious program attracts up to 1,000 applicants annually from whom a maximum of 19 are chosen to work in government. Harker held the post of special assistant to the director of the FBI, helping to oversee development of a nationwide fingerprint system. "The Fellows program led me to develop my own personal leadership skills," he recalls. "After that experience, I realized I could be good at leading."

Nonetheless, he returned to Penn fully intending to resume his research. But he found himself being asked to serve in various administrative capacities, including deputy and then interim dean at Wharton. In 2000, he was named dean of the school. He presided over a 10 percent expansion of the full-time faculty. Harker also took over a fund-raising campaign in midstream and led it to a successful conclusion by raising more than $450 million.

He expanded Wharton's reach by opening a branch on the West Coast and forming an alliance in global management education with INSEAD, an international institution with campuses in Europe and Asia. "The global market has been one of his themes," says Eduardo Glandt, dean of Penn's engineering school.

Harker also took Wharton into both print and online publishing. The biweekly online electronic newsletter knowledge@wharton provides a wide range of information and research about business and has more than half a million subscribers. "He is willing to take risks and innovate," says David Schmittlein, Wharton's deputy dean.