Can John Fry Revive Temple?

John Fry at Temple University / Photograph by Colin Lenton

“I’m not a real estate person,” John Fry says 10 minutes into a winding tour of Drexel’s campus on an overcast afternoon in late September. You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Fry, piloting his dark Volvo wagon while impressively avoiding the swarms of jaywalking students around him, has been dropping addresses and square footage like a high schooler rattling off SAT vocabulary words.

Across from 30th Street Station he points out an imposing flat slab of concrete that used to be the home of the Bulletin newspaper; the building has undergone a complete makeover, its once-windowless facade replaced with glass, and is now home to the multibillion-dollar gene therapy pioneer Spark Therapeutics. Down the street, there’s 3025 JFK Boulevard — a two-tiered skyscraper containing life sciences lab space on the bottom half and luxury apartments on the top. There’s 3151 Market — a misshapen blue-glass cube with a Drexel University flag blowing out front that will be home to 470,000 square feet of life sciences lab and office space. Just beyond that, 3201 Cuthbert comes into view, a square mass of beams emanating from the ground, which will eventually become yet more lab space.

The point that not-a-real-estate-guy Fry is trying to make is this: “One thing I know is that these real estate people do not like to go first. They want to know that someone is taking the risk and has confidence. And once that starts happening, then other things happen.”

There is certainly no shortage of things happening. As president of Drexel University, Fry kicked off a building bonanza, partnering with private developer Brandywine Realty Trust on Schuylkill Yards, a $3.5 billion life sciences and residential development that’s transforming the area around 30th Street Station. (Drexel owns the land and issued decades-long ground leases to Brandywine, which is paying for the construction.) Fry’s real estate philosophy is bearing out in real time: The Bulletin Building, 3025 JFK Boulevard, and 3151 Market Street are all Brandywine developments; 3201 Cuthbert is a $450 million project separate from Schuylkill Yards involving Drexel and an entirely different developer.

Fry is admittedly not just a builder. In his 14 years at Drexel,­ he has raised more than $1.3 billion and helped lead the school to Carnegie R1 status, a distinction afforded to only 146 of the top research universities in the country. (The other two in Philly are Penn and Temple.) “We’re not going to out-Yale Yale,” Fry says, but he has established a few institutional priorities — ­like the school’s autism research institute, which Fry announced early in his presidency — that have enabled Drexel to, in his view, “punch way above its weight.”

Still, the building is the most obvious sign of Drexel’s growth. Fry likes to think of Schuylkill Yards as an “innovation neighborhood” that serves to connect the Drexel students and scientists working in labs with nearby Center City. “I have a long obsession with public environment, how institutions and neighborhoods should interact in a much easier, almost boundaryless type of way,” he says. The form this obsession takes is a constant analysis of geography: where to build, how to build, how to integrate a project into the existing urban fabric. One of the first Schuylkill Yards projects was Drexel Square, a compact green space across from 30th Street Station with crisscrossing footpaths that from above looks like a flattened basketball. This would have been the “perfect site for a major tower,” Fry says; instead, Drexel and Brandywine created what he likes to think of as Philadelphia’s sixth square.

As we zip around University City — past new residential towers dotting the eastern bank of the Schuylkill (more proof of Fry’s theory) — the tour begins to take on the feel of a victory lap, though Fry would hate the term. “We’re in the super-early innings here,” he says at one point; at least three more Brandywine towers are planned, and Fry eventually believes a cap will be built over the Amtrak rail yards running into the train station, allowing construction to extend even further. But Fry will not be here to witness any of that: His race at Drexel is over. In November, he crossed the river and headed north to become the 15th president of Temple University.

In this game, if you want to make an impact, you probably want to make a commitment of at least 10 years. So I thought, ‘I’ve got one more window.’” — John Fry

When the news of Fry’s move first leaked, in June, it qualified as a shock. With a little more consideration, though, it begins to feel like the most obvious next step in the world. Fry, who played a major role in transforming West Philly as executive vice president of Penn in the ’90s, who as president of Drexel­ since 2010 has turned a campus once rated the nation’s ugliest into a place where skyscrapers sprout from the ground like dandelions, who has used the might of universities to change neighborhoods, is taking on the challenge of Temple. Judith Rodin, the former Penn president who hired Fry in the ’90s, describes Temple and North Philly as “the last piece of Philadelphia that really needs the kind of integrated, intervention set of strategies” that she and Fry deployed in West Philly.

Fry feels drawn to Temple, which in recent years has been unmoored, struggling with a 25 percent drop in enrollment — down to 30,000 students from 40,000 just seven years ago — while confronting a public safety crisis spurred by the murders of a student and a university police officer in the past three years. The neighborhoods around the school are some of the most economically disadvantaged in the city; in the 19121 zip code just west of the university, the median household income is $35,700 and the poverty rate is 40 percent. Two of Temple’s last three presidential hires have not even made it through a five-year term. But for all of Temple’s challenges, it retains an irresistible appeal: It is the city’s sole public university, and ever since a minister named Russell Conwell began tutoring working Philadelphians in a church basement in 1884, Temple has maintained that access to an excellent education is a core part of its mission. The degree to which Temple lives up to that mission has arguably as much impact on the future economic and social health of Philadelphia as any institution in the city.

If the move seems obvious, though, Fry insists it wasn’t. When Temple approached him in early 2024 to see if he would be interested in the position, Fry did not experience the glorious revelation of new possibilities. Instead, he began to feel sick to his stomach. After 14 years, he was struggling to envision leaving Drexel, even if some part of him knew it was time. “In this game, if you want to make an impact, you probably want to make a commitment of at least 10 years,” Fry says. By that point, Fry, who’s 64, will be in his mid-70s. “That’s probably around the time you should hang up your spikes as well,” he says. “So I thought, ‘I’ve got one more window.’”

No one grows up dreaming of being a university president. It is the kind of job you usually ascend to by doing something completely different: being a professor. Fry took a less conventional path. He grew up in Brooklyn and made his way to Pennsylvania after being recruited to run cross-country at Lafayette College. He chose an interdisciplinary major called American Civilization. “That’s sort of when the city bug started to bite me,” he says. Budding urban interests aside, Fry was not thinking about a career in the academy. He wanted to go to law school.

After a disappointing showing on the LSAT, he had to make other arrangements. He ended up at the accounting firm Peat Marwick (a predecessor of KPMG), going through a boot camp that trained liberal arts grads in the illiberal art of public accounting. For the next two years he worked while taking night classes for an MBA. Eventually, he was assigned to a project at Virginia State University. Impressed by his work, his bosses asked him to transfer to the higher-ed consulting division of the firm; Fry was happy to oblige. “It was serendipitous, and definitely not that much of a plan,” he says.

Serendipitous moment number two: More than 10 years later, with Fry still working in higher-ed consulting, he was starting a new gig for the University of Pennsylvania. The school’s president, Sheldon Hackney, had left after more than a decade, and Fry had been brought in to review Penn’s administrative structure. One of his tasks was to help Rodin, the new Penn president, fill a vacancy for executive vice president, essentially the university’s chief operating officer. One weekend, Rodin called Fry to discuss the four finalists. “We ended the conversation and he said to me, ‘You know, I’ve gotten to know you very well, and you don’t sound enthusiastic about anyone,’” Rodin recalls. Rodin’s next move was straight out of a Nora Ephron­ rom-com: She told Fry, “‘I think you would be the perfect choice.’ And he just sort of gasped.”

Fry’s response was to tell Rodin she’d be crazy to hire someone with no real experience. “I really made a strong case because she was my client,” he says. “Of course I was flattered. But I just did not think I was the right choice. I think she probably said to herself, This guy will always have my back; if he’s willing to throw himself under the bus, he must really sort of care about me.” Fry lost the debate and got the job.

John Fry / Photograph by Colin Lenton

The Penn that Fry walked into in 1995 bears little resemblance to the institution of today, in large part thanks to what Fry and Rodin would soon get up to. “It was the perimeter that was really in trouble,” Fry recalls. There was little in the way of retail or foot traffic along the corridors of Walnut Street and 40th Street. “People just felt creeped out after dark,” he says.

The problem of campus safety came to a head in 1996 with the murder of a research associate named Vladimir Sled. Sled had been walking home with his fiancée near 43rd Street and Larchwood Avenue when someone tried to rob his fiancée. Sled intervened and was stabbed. “The Penn campus exploded,” Fry says. “It was like the last straw.” Though public safety had been a long-standing concern, in the aftermath of Sled’s murder, “all the excuses that Penn had given about why Penn can’t impact its environment kind of were no longer viable excuses.”

The various responses Rodin and Fry came up with would eventually come to be known as the West Philadelphia Initiatives. Penn brought together neighborhood businesses and institutions to create the University City District, a nonprofit business improvement district — largely funded by Penn at first — that provided foot patrols and cleaning services to the streets bordering the campus. Fry played an instrumental role in boosting the retail around campus, bringing a hotel to Walnut Street and a movie theater and grocery store to 40th and Market. (Penn spent $170 million on those two projects alone.) At the same time, Penn sought to entice faculty and staff to move to the neighborhood and fix up the housing stock, offering mortgages at 120 percent of a home’s value, plus a forgivable $15,000 loan for repairs. The university also created a housing fund, with investment from the likes of Fannie Mae, to buy up rental properties — all the way from 40th Street to 49th Street and from Market Street to Woodland Avenue — that the university deemed to be in “deplorable condition” or whose poor management “threatened the stability of the neighborhood,” as Rodin describes it in a book she wrote detailing Penn’s efforts. But perhaps the most important move was that Penn partnered with the School District of Philadelphia to build Penn Alexander, a K-8 public school that could serve all those hypothetical new university-­affiliated residents moving into the neighborhood. (Penn to this day provides an annual per-student subsidy, ensuring that it remains better-resourced than the average public school.)

Taken together, the suite of policies was as transformational as intended. The University City District, which also offers job training to community residents, is a blueprint for countless other business improvement districts across the city and country. Penn students today can walk down 40th Street at night, listening to music and scrolling on their phones without a care in the world. For Fry, a development ethos was beginning to take shape. “What we tried to do is reinstill confidence in the neighborhood by making sure there were basic neighborhood assets,” he says. “Places to shop, and especially to buy fresh food at reasonable prices. A place to send your kids to school. Houses that could be a little more affordable because the university was giving you a boost.”

Working at Penn in the ’90s was a kind of crash course in how a university can impact its physical environment. Fry started to think he might like to be a university president someday. He began a PhD in higher-ed administration, calculating, not unreasonably, that a university probably wouldn’t want to hire someone without a doctorate as president. But it turned out Fry didn’t need to go back to night school to get the job he wanted. In 2002, Franklin & Marshall came calling.

No disrespect to the great people of Lancaster, but this is a story about John Fry in Philadelphia, so we are going to vault over Fry’s eight years at Franklin & Marshall, except to note two key details: It was at F&M that Fry began to establish his reputation as a builder of projects no one thought possible. When Fry arrived at F&M, there was a rail yard bisecting the campus. What did Fry do? He got the rail yard relocated. “It’s impossible to move a train track,” says Craig Carnaroli, Penn’s current executive vice president. “But he got it done.” The second relevant detail about Fry’s time at F&M is that he never really took his eye off of Philadelphia. In 2006, Fry was asked to interview for the presidency of none other than Temple University. Fry did the interview, but while driving back to Lancaster, he realized he hadn’t yet accomplished much of anything at F&M. “It would have been really premature to have left,” he says. When he got home, he called Temple to withdraw from the search.

If you assemble the educational assets and you marry up talented people with big opportunities, eventually you can make these things” — innovation­ and inclusion — “connect.” — John Fry

When Fry took over as Drexel­ president in 2010, it was a sort of homecoming: back to University City, back to a private research university, back to a campus that needed serious work. But Fry did not come to Drexel with the idea of building skyscrapers. What he knew was that he wanted Drexel to become the most civically engaged university in the country. “It felt to me like the extension of A.J. Drexel’s vision,” he says. “He didn’t find a nice suburban location to put this. He put this in the middle of what was the heart of industrial Philadelphia back in 1891. I mean, rail yards and slaughterhouses and God knows what else. So I thought, 120-plus years later, what’s the next gesture that an institution like this should take? And it just felt like the civic stuff was a missed opportunity.”

John Fry in 2010 after accepting the role of Drexel president / Photograph by Mark Stehle/Associated Press

Over time, skyscrapers and Fry’s “innovation neighborhood” are what emerged. At the center of it all, as at Penn, is a school. “This is the magic,” Fry says on our drive as we approach the sleek, low-slung gray structure that houses Powel Elementary and Science Leadership Academy Middle School. “We built this school from the ground up.” Fry, who calls this the “single hardest project I’ve ever worked on,” raised more than $45 million to construct the school; Drexel leases the building to the school district at the cost of $1 per year. Unlike Penn Alexander, which at its core was built as a neighborhood asset for potential new Penn-affiliated residents, Fry thinks Powel/SLAMS, as the new school is known, serves a different function. “We like to say that the young girl growing up in Mantua goes to the Powel Science Leadership Academy Middle School,” Fry says, “then goes on to Central High, then goes to Penn or Drexel, and then goes to work at Spark. But she started in 19104, and she had the educational opportunities.” Fry concedes that this is a “misty-eyed view of the world,” but he believes that “if you assemble the educational assets and you marry up talented people with big opportunities, eventually you can make these things” — innovation­ and inclusion — “connect.”

It is impossible to have a conversation about geography and urban universities without also talking about history. A few minutes after passing by Powel/SLAMS, Fry gestures at One uCity Square, another node of Fry’s innovation district. The building sits on land once occupied by University City High School, which was itself a product of a different kind of innovation district, as urban historian Laura Wolf-Powers notes in her recent book, University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District. In the urban renewal era of the 1960s, the federal government, in concert with Penn and other universities, razed the Black Bottom neighborhood in West Philly, displacing hundreds of families to erect the University City Science Center, an original innovation district. University City High School was meant to educate the students who would eventually populate the innovation district — much as Fry envisions Powel/SLAMS. But University City High School — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the original sin of its creation — never lived up to its ideals and was instead marked by underfunding and student underachievement; by 2013, it was set for closure. Then Drexel entered the scene, teaming up with a developer to purchase the land for $25 million and build One uCity Square, its innovation do-over. (In further proof of the impossibility of outrunning history, Drexel’s new building is actually a partnership with the University City Science Center as well, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it because the Science Center has since rebranded itself as uCity Square.)

The question to ask of any urban university development project is simple: Who benefits? Wolf-Powers answers one way, writing that “the capacity of innovation districts to deliver benefits” to the Black communities where they’re often sited “remains constrained, because the developers of these new urban spaces are designing them — physically, economically, and institutionally — around the capital, credentials, and purchasing power of people who already possess high socioeconomic status.” Another way of considering the question is to ask who gets to stay around to reap the benefits. In University City, thanks largely to the West Philadelphia Initiatives Fry had a hand in crafting, property values more than doubled, jumping from an average of $78,500 in 1995 to $175,000 in 2003, according to a WHYY report. (These days, the average home in the neighborhood goes for just under $500,000.) That may have been a boon to the residents who owned their houses, but it wasn’t to the much larger majority: renters. When the Penn Alexander school opened in 2001, 57 percent of the student body was Black; today that figure is just 13 percent.

Fry says he never expected the degree of change in the neighborhood around Penn. “I think in retrospect maybe we should have seen some of that gentrification coming, and we didn’t see it,” he says. “I know at least in the rooms I was in — and I’m pretty sure I was in all the rooms — there was never a conversation. We didn’t think gentrification could ever be possible in this neighborhood.”

John Fry with a Powelton Village resident in West Philly / Photograph by Mark Peterson/Redux

Given that legacy, one might expect Fry’s reputation in West Philly to be checkered. In some corners it certainly is. In a 2022 article about a Drexel development project, the school’s newspaper quoted a student activist blaming Fry for “leading the destruction of West Philly communities since the ’90s.” (The student then went on to erroneously state that the University City District was responsible for demolishing homes in the neighborhood.) But at least according to many of those who have worked directly with Fry, he is far from an object of acrimony.

Sheila Ireland, who lived in West Philly in the ’90s and was the founding director of the University City District’s workforce development program, doesn’t blame Fry for the market pressures wrought by the West Philadelphia Initiatives. “It’s always a double-edged sword,” she says. “Do I have sympathy for folks that are experiencing displacement or rising taxes and assessments that they can’t keep up with? Absolutely. But by the same token, would I have changed any of the approaches? Probably not.” Della Clark, who runs the Enterprise Center, a nonprofit that provides capital to minority-owned businesses in West Philly, rejects the gentrification line of inquiry altogether. “Gentrification in most people’s lenses is a white person walking with their dog in a community that was previously dominated by diverse families and now has got white families,” she says. “I don’t believe in that. I think there should be blended families, blended people in one community.” In Clark’s view, Fry’s work has been in service of making that more of a reality.

Fry, to his credit, has modified the playbook during his most recent chapter at Drexel. By way of proving the point on our tour, he drives us north of Spring Garden Street into the neighborhood — in this case Mantua. Here we look at the physical manifestation of Drexel’s, and Fry’s, evolution: the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships. The center was in no small part formed as a response to Drexel’s prior relationship with its neighbors, which Fry flatly describes as “terrible” and “one of real neglect.”

Fry’s answer was to build a community resource that is steered by members of the community; based on feedback from Mantua residents, the Dornsife Center offers everything from a free legal clinic to a primary care facility for uninsured patients to a community writing class. While there may always be an inherent tension between the expanding university and its neighbors, De’Wayne Drummond, the current president of the Mantua Civic Association, says he found in Fry a willing partner. “He did more than other people have done,” Drummond says. “At least he tried. John also realized our community motto — Plan or be planned for. You’re not just coming in here making decisions for us. We can make decisions for ourselves. And I think John understood.”

Schuylkill Yards will undoubtedly exert pressure on a neighborhood like Mantua, but it does seem to differ from Penn’s West Philadelphia Initiatives in one meaningful way: It is not so much a neighborhood improvement project as it is a neighborhood creation project. Fry has very consciously avoided building outside the campus core. “We have literally never crossed Powelton Avenue, other than the Dornsife stuff, which was an abandoned piece of property that everyone considered an eyesore,” he says. In fact, Drexel has built more than 3,300 new student housing units during Fry’s time as president — part of a long-term bid to suck transient, partying students back onto campus and away from neighborhoods like Mantua and Powelton Village. A coalition of neighborhood groups has also managed to extract some concessions from Brandywine. As part of a community benefits agreement, the developer agreed to give $9.3 million over 15 years to the coalition for affordable housing support and other initiatives; the neighbors also succeeded in changing zoning regulations, making it harder for developers to build multi-unit student housing by right.

Across the street from Dornsife is the West Philadelphia Community Center, a rec center that was set to be demolished and sold to a residential developer building more student housing — “the last thing this neighborhood needs,” Fry says. Drexel outbid the developer, and after a $2 million renovation, the rec center is still a rec center. This type of community engagement represents Fry’s solution to the gentrification problem. “The reason why so many of these things are community-facing is precisely to combat that,” he says. “Because we’re doing this with our community, and our community is not going to give us advice that’s going to end up creating a situation where everyone is going to lose their house.”

Fry maintains a devotion to his work that fits the profile of tech CEO more than that of university president. He wakes up around five in the morning, then goes to the gym. At the office, he schedules upwards of a dozen meetings a day, stacked in rapid succession. At night, there’s usually some kind of a dinner. Fry lives in Chester County with his wife, Cara, an art historian who has worked as a volunteer at Drexel, curating shows on fashion history. Despite the peculiarities of his job, Fry has taken pains to establish a semblance of a normal life. “Weekends we really try to keep for ourselves and kids,” Fry says. Their three kids are now grown — Fry is a newly minted grandfather — and all three still live within driving distance. Still, work manages to creep in on the margins. Fry has been at work, haltingly, on a book for Princeton University Press about university development. Even a look at his bookshelf offers a reminder: He owns a 5,000-book collection of university histories and biographies of university presidents.

This style of work does not come without costs. On the eve of the pandemic, as Fry approached a decade at Drexel, he was close to accepting a job outside of academia entirely. Fry won’t go into more detail, except to say that the disruption of the pandemic made him recalculate and recommit to Drexel. Still, there seemed to be a faint recognition that Fry’s work habits might not be totally sustainable. When he told his wife about the Temple opportunity, she encouraged him, but also offered a caveat: “She said, ‘Look, do this if you want to do this, but try to do it in a different way relative to the kind of impact on us and our time. Go out and work hard, but don’t take it as personally as you’ve done in the past,’” Fry says. This is a little like telling Wile E. Coyote not to run off the cliff, but Fry has pledged to make a good-faith effort. “I don’t think she would have said that if she didn’t really mean it,” he says.

By 2021, Fry felt he had reestablished Drexel on firm footing and started thinking once more about his next move. That July he gave an interview with the Inquirer essentially pre-announcing his departure, telling the paper, “The art of this game is you don’t overstay your welcome. I’m starting my 12th year. I’ll finish that out and who knows beyond that, but not a whole lot more. It’s time for the natural cycle of change.”

That same year, Temple hired a president it hoped would be leading the institution for its next decade. Instead, Jason Wingard lasted less than two years. Wingard’s tenure was undone by a confluence of factors: a disengaged management style that alienated many of his subordinates, a grad student strike to which Wingard responded by cracking down and revoking students’ tuition benefits and health care, and a public safety crisis. In 2021, a student named Sam Collington was shot and killed in a broad-daylight carjacking one block from Temple’s campus; two years later, Temple police officer Christopher Fitzgerald was fatally shot while stopping a group of carjacking suspects on the street. After Wingard’s resignation in 2023, Temple tapped longtime professor and law school dean JoAnne Epps to serve as interim president. In September of that year, Epps, who had gamely agreed to postpone her retirement to help right the ship, collapsed on stage during a Temple event and died.

This was the environment Mitch Morgan, the chair of Temple’s board of trustees, had to contend with while beginning yet another presidential search. Morgan, a billionaire real estate investor and recently minted part owner of the Phillies, had previously drawn criticism during the Wingard search for not giving faculty enough input into the process. “I definitely went in this time saying that we want to get this right, and we don’t want to make this decision from the boardroom,” Morgan says. At a meeting with faculty, Morgan asked whether anybody had examples of a president they thought would be a good fit for Temple. Someone volunteered Fry’s name. Morgan wasn’t overly optimistic; despite Fry’s public comments about leaving Drexel, he appeared to have changed his mind and in 2022 signed a contract extension through 2028.

As word got around that Temple was interested in John Fry again, people close to Fry started pitching him, unprompted, on the position. Among the cavalry was Governor Josh Shapiro, who had gotten to know Fry while serving with him on the transition team for then-Governor Tom Wolf. “He reached out more as a friend and encouraged me to take a look at it,” Fry says. “It wasn’t a sell.” (It definitely was a sell.)

By the time Fry agreed to interview, the search committee had already narrowed the candidate pool to four finalists. He was the last to interview, and he prepared an hour and a half’s worth of comments on the university — where it could be doing better, where it was doing well already. “He knew everything,” Morgan says. “He read the bylaws.” When Fry left the room, Morgan stayed silent, waiting for the committee to render a verdict. “They unanimously said he is amazing, he has everything we’re looking for, we have to figure out how we can get him,” Morgan says. A few days later, Fry had a job offer.

That still left the matter of Drexel. Fry had spoken into existence the prospect of his leaving, yet he still found himself hesitant as he approached the precipice. “It’s not an easy thing,” he says. “And I have a lot of Catholic guilt to begin with, so you can just imagine.” But the voices in his ear encouraging him to take a chance won out.

What happened next did not go as planned: Fry had intended to announce his move at Drexel’s board meeting in September 2024, with the idea of staying the entire academic year, until a successor was named. Instead, in June, someone leaked the news that Fry had accepted the Temple job, and Fry found himself calling members of the stunned Drexel board. “It’s really unfortunate,” he says. The leak ended up hastening Fry’s exit. Drexel tapped a longtime trustee to serve as interim president; Fry’s last day would be September 30th.

In classic Fry fashion, he spent the last day of his employment at Drexel calling donors, squeezing out every last hour.

At 8:30 the next morning, the first day of his unemployment, Fry, in his usual black suit, stands in front of Sullivan Hall, the gothic building housing Temple’s administrative offices. Until now, Fry hasn’t spent much time on Temple’s campus, for fear of giving the impression that Drexel­ didn’t have his full attention. Newly unburdened — ­and happy to share that he did his morning workout wearing a Temple t-shirt instead of his usual Drexel one — Fry is here to take a tour of the campus with chief operating officer Ken Kaiser.

Kaiser, a Temple grad in a gray suit who has the wheeling and dealing energy of a Miami real estate agent, spends the next hour detailing Temple’s considerable real estate plans, starting with the $167 million renovation of Paley Hall, the school’s brutalist-style former library, into the new home for the College of Public Health.

Although Temple is situated in the middle of dense North Philly, additional future development opportunities abound, as Kaiser cheerfully points out throughout the walk. He highlights no fewer than five different parking lots owned by the university that will eventually be developed. Kaiser mentions plans to demolish a group of buildings across from the new Paley building to make way for a central quad befitting a great university. The site that for years was slated for a controversial football stadium is instead going to become a performing arts center and the home of the Klein College of Media and Communication. Temple has been gobbling up additional parcels along North Broad as well.

Part of John Fry’s charge at Temple will be to grow enrollment and allay long-standing concerns over public safety on campus. / Photograph by Ryan S. Brandenberg for Temple University

One thing that quickly becomes apparent is how much further along Temple is in its campus and neighborhood development than Penn and Drexel were when Fry got there. At Penn, Fry had to bring a movie theater and grocery store to the neighborhood; Temple’s already got both, right on Broad. As for the campus, it may not have quite the architectural grandeur of Penn, but it’s in no danger of being named to any ugliest-in-the-country list either. The place feels truly vibrant, thanks in large part to who’s walking around. There is every kind of student imaginable: kids in do-rags, kids in hijabs, frat-bro types in sports jerseys, nerdy kids, stylish kids with shockingly baggy pants. Next to the Cecil B. Moore Broad Street Line station, there’s a small sunken plaza where every day you can find a crew of skateboarders kickflipping back and forth — a scene that would be unfathomable somewhere like Penn.

For Fry, the strength of the campus core means he can spend more time thinking about “the edges, which is where campus meets community. And if you’re going to develop more commercial, biosciences, tech uses, they’re going to want to be on the commercial corridors.” Fry says he’s “not so presumptuous to say I have any sort of a vision for Temple at this point,” although he has a few rudimentary thoughts, one of which is to better connect Temple’s main campus to its hospital campus, which is located a mile and a half up Broad Street. At the same time, Fry and Temple are keeping their eyes trained southward as well — to what was the UArts campus. Though merger discussions failed — reportedly after the main UArts benefactor, the Hamilton family, refused to allow the school’s $62 million endowment to be transferred in a deal — Fry is not giving up. “Should have happened,” he says of the merger. “It could have been a different story, and it didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean that Temple still can’t find its place down there. To be determined.”

Despite these reasons for optimism, Temple is not without major challenges, chief among them public safety. The murders of Sam Collington and Christopher Fitzgerald have produced a major image problem for Temple. Fry recently met with the school’s athletic director, who informed him that families of recruits are frequently shocked, upon visiting the school, to find that the campus is actually nice. The challenge for Temple is that you don’t have to go far for the feeling to change. According to a report commissioned by the university after the two murders, from January to mid-August of 2022, there were 19 people shot within four-tenths of a mile of the main campus. In surveys, professors reported that students have considered dropping out because they don’t feel safe coming to campus for night classes. Some parents, the report found, have even gone so far as to hire private security for their children living off campus. The lack of on-campus housing also fuels the safety issue: Just 19 percent of Temple students live on campus, and the last dorm was built a decade ago.

A lot of people have a lot to say, and they want to say it to me directly. And I’m totally good with that.” — John Fry

The obvious solution to the public safety problem, for Fry, is a repeat of what worked at Penn: using a University City District-esque institution to bolster lighting, foot patrols, and cleanliness. Unfortunately for him, some of these institutions already exist, and they’re not exactly thrilled with Temple. Sheila Ireland, the former University City District workforce development leader, now works as the CEO of OIC Philadelphia, a North Philly workforce development program that’s been around since 1964. In the two years she’s been working at OIC, Temple hasn’t once invited Ireland to the university to talk. “They don’t appear to have an overarching strategy for how they’re engaging the community,” she says.

Shalimar Thomas, the executive director of the North Broad Renaissance business improvement district, is similarly disillusioned. In 2019, Temple announced that it was funding a brand-new special services district to the tune of $500,000. When Temple’s initiative was announced, Thomas says, North Broad Renaissance was listed on the website as a partner. “I’ve never met these people a day in my life. Never. And I’m listed as a partner?” The episode did little to quash the feeling that Temple had marginal interest in earnestly working with community members, although both Ireland and Thomas are optimistic that Fry’s arrival could herald a shift.

Fry, too, seems to understand that many people both inside and outside the institution have their complaints. “A lot of people have a lot to say, and they want to say it to me directly,” he says. “And I’m totally good with that.”

The past 25 years, according to Carnaroli, the Penn executive vice president, have been the “golden age” of higher ed: increasing enrollment, a booming stock market, endless philanthropy. That period happens to cover almost all of Fry’s time as a university president. The post-pandemic higher-­ed environment Fry is working in today is one of flagging enrollment and budget cuts. Not long after Fry’s move to Temple was announced, Drexel shared unsettling news of its own: The school had a $63 million­ operating deficit in 2024 and a 15 percent decline in first-year student enrollment. At the same time, Fry will be coming to a Temple campus that has seen its fair share of student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza — protests that, at other institutions, felled a number of presidents. (In October, just before Fry’s start at Temple, the university suspended a group called Students for Justice in Palestine after a protest at a campus job fair.)

Nevertheless, it’s fair to say Fry will be starting with the wind at his back at Temple. Bucking the national trend, Temple’s first-year enrollment is up nearly 30 percent, and almost 500 kids have taken advantage of a new program that provides free tuition to low-income students from Philadelphia. For the third straight year, students of color make up more than half of the freshman class. Meanwhile, the faculty union just agreed to a new four-year contract, which should take some pressure off of Fry, who’s never presided over a unionized faculty before. For the most part, the mood at Temple seems to be one of jubilance. “Electricity is now in the air at Temple,” says Valerie Harrison, an administrator who served on the search committee.

What will success look like for Fry at Temple? Fry says he’s “not the kind of person who’s interested in coming in with a blueprint on the first day” and that much is dependent on what he hears from faculty and staff at the university. But with that disclaimer out of the way, he launches into a detailed disquisition: He believes the school needs to become more affordable. Enrollment needs to grow to around 35,000, which may require recruiting students from parts of the country (or world, even) that are far afield from Philadelphia. He anticipates a major fundraising campaign tied to the school’s 150th anniversary in 2034. Academically, he wants Temple to be thought of as one of the “great urban public research universities in the country,” which will require targeted investments in areas where the school can excel. “Only the very wealthiest institutions can afford excellence across the board,” Fry says.

And then there is the development side, where the goal is so obvious it scarcely needs to be said: “a real emphasis on strengthening the North Broad corridor from an innovation, a commercial, a residential, and retail standpoint.” And while Temple is just one institution, Fry is willing to say that he and the university should be judged on whether they can successfully impact some of the city’s most intractable problems of violence and poverty. “I think Temple very much owns those outcomes, along with city government, along with the other anchors,” Fry says. “That’s what people should expect of a great public institution.”

One thing Fry does not believe is that there ever was a golden age of higher ed. Which is maybe why the present moment doesn’t feel particularly daunting. “I know Temple can be full of its complexities, but I feel like I’ve been training for this all my life,” he says. “I’ve been doing this job since I’ve been 41. Every year is hard.” He goes on, “I am not overconfident about anything. I’m too experienced to be overconfident about anything, because things can come from all sorts of different places to surprise you. And I guess I feel right now nervous about this, not taking anything for granted, and feeling extremely humble and excited to get going. But you know, it’s nice to be my age and still be living on the edge of your seat.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect figure for the amount of money Fry raised during his tenure at Drexel.

Published as “John Fry’s Last Dance” in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.