I don’t think there is anything more difficult than replacing someone who has been in their position for decades.
I have a little experience with this. I was hired as the University of Montana’s football and men’s basketball announcer in 1993 after Bill Schwanke retired after more than two decades of award-winning play-by-play.
Of course, the question surfaced: Just how are you going to replace a “legend?”
On a far higher level, that’s the same question facing Royce Engstrom, who replaced George Dennison, UM’s longest tenured president who guided the Missoula school through unprecedented growth.
As enrollment burgeoned during Dennison’s 20-year tenure, so too did the need for, among the plethora of other challenges, additional facilities and curriculum.
A year ago this spring, Dennison wrote in the Montanan that in the last two decades 1.3 million square feet of space, a 20 percent increase, has been added to the institution in his tenure.
That seems inconceivable, but as I weave my way through campus, I can see it. And it was accomplished so tastefully and appropriately – the new has been easily molded into the old.
But with any passing of the reins comes a change in style and priority.
Not by any means mandated or necessary, but we all tend to communicate in different manners. And fresh eyes are a good thing.
I go back to my first season with football in 1993, after eight years with the Lady Griz, and the oft-asked inquiry about how I was going to be different than the voice that had been heard on the radio for all those years.
Indeed, I agreed it would be different, and not necessarily because it was better. But rather because no two people’s way of communicating or prioritizing is the same.
Like me, Royce Engstrom is not a UM alum.
He’s a self-described flatlander who cut his teeth first in the Midwest, then in South Dakota and four years ago became UM’s provost, the school’s senior academic administrator who oversees the school’s deans.
You will find him and his wife Mary extremely approachable and comfortable in just about any setting.
I first met Royce in Livingston at a booster function shortly after he took the provost’s job and immediately took a liking to him. He was conversational and friendly and I had an inkling then that he might be the “heir apparent.” And there’s been nothing to dissuade my notion that UM will be in excellent stead since Engstrom was elevated to the president position.
And that is also what a nationwide search for a presidential replacement determined: That the best person for the job was already in place, making it a seamless transition.
Recently, I had the opportunity, along with many others at an alumni gathering at beautiful Flathead Lake Lodge, to listen to part of Engstrom’s vision (called 20-20) that has been developed for the next decade.
He speaks senatorially but with aplomb in carrying forward the UM banner. But it was what he said as the gathering was dispersing that I most appreciated.
It’s not hard to talk proudly about this institution, he said smiling.
And a belated thank you for your outstanding service to George and Jane. You have left your alma mater in excellent hands.