Interview of Jerry Farley, March 18, 2025
Interviewed by Mark Tallman
NOTE: The videotape of the interview was not available. This transcript follows as closely as possible to the original interview. In some cases, responses to the question were derived from an earlier written interview provided by Dr. Farley on https://lastinglegacyonline.com/blog/portfolio/dr-jerry-farley/
Dr. Jerry Farley served 25 years as President of Washburn University before retiring in 2024. Known for wearing a bow tie on campus, Farley changed Washburn from a municipal university with a largely off-campus student body to a major Kansas institution receiving state aid with a thriving on-campus student contingent. He recalls his most important decision as merging with the local vocational-technical school to create Washburn Tech. More information about Dr. Farley and his career at Washburn University is available at the Lasting Legacy Online website.
Jerry Bob Farley was a native of Tipton, OK and later graduated from Tipton, OK High School in 1964. He then graduated from Oklahoma University in 1968, the first in his family to attend college. He was drafted to serve in the Army immediately after graduating from OU. While in the army, he learned to be a Sharpshooter and to teach other soldiers. After the military, Farley got an MBA while working full-time in the Accounting Office at OU. He passed the CPA exam and continued to work at the University in ever-increasingly responsible jobs. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Oklahoma in 1986 while working full-time there. In April, 1986 he became Vice President for Administration at Oklahoma State University (OSU) before returning to work at OU for President and U.S. Senator David Boren. Altogether, Farley spent 28 years in higher education in Oklahoma before beginning his term at President of Washburn University in April, 1997. He retired 25 years later, leaving behind his bowtie and millions in scholarships for future Ichabods.
Mark Tallman: I’m Mark Tallman. I’ve worked with the Kansas Association of School Boards since 1990 in a variety of roles from working in the legislature as a lobbyist who researched in advocacy on educational issues. And I’m conducting this interview with Dr. Jerry Farley on behalf of the Kansas Oral History Project, a not-for-profit corporation created for the purpose of interviewing former legislators and significant leaders in our state and state government, particularly those who served during the 1960s through 2010. The interviews will be accessible to researchers, educators, and the public through the KOHP website—kansasoralhistory.org—and also the Kansas Historical Society and the State Library. Transcriptions are made possible by generous donors. David Heinemann is the videographer today.
Today, as I said, we’re talking with Dr. Jerry Farley living in Topeka, and we are having the ability to do this interview in the beautiful home that was the president’s home. You’re still living here in your current role. We want to talk about your experience leading a very unique institution in some ways, Washburn University. We’ll talk about why that’s unique, and how that has allowed you to see education issues, government issues, community issues, over really at least a quarter century period here in our state capital city. So, I’m very excited to do that. Why don’t we start, if you can give us a little bit of background on yourself, where you grew up, what that was like. We want to let people know a little bit about how you came from a very small town in Oklahoma to leading the university here in Topeka. So, tell us about yourself.
Jerry Farley: I’d be glad to. I grew up in Oklahoma, Tipton, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’ve never heard of that [place] before. I was born in mid-September 1946, about a year after WWII ended. This makes me part of the Baby Boomer generation. My hometown of Tipton, Oklahoma only had 1,000 souls and was the quintessential small farming town. I was born in Altus, the largest town nearby with a hospital and also the home of Altus Airforce Base. Our county seat, Fredrick was fourteen miles away with only 5000 people.
MT: When you were there. What was your schooling like, starting grade school and on? What were your experiences there?
JF: When it was time for first grade, I attended the old Central Elementary School. It was a dated three-story building with tube slides for the fire escape and an underground tornado shelter ten feet away from the building. They finally built us a new building to use when I was in the sixth grade.
In the fourth grade, I began playing cornet in the band. I learned to read music and do scales on my cornet and loved it. This is where my friendship circle grew.
It should be no surprise the teacher that had the greatest impact on me was Don Leavitt, our marching band and music teacher. The band won all kinds of awards. It afforded me the opportunity to travel for contests and to play in concerts and other band events.
School would close for one to two weeks to let people harvest the cotton. My friends and I would work on each other’s farms, alongside the migrant workers.
After music, my favorite class was mathematics. I took all the math my high school offered – Algebra 1 & 2, Geometry and Trigonometry, which later helped me with the ACT.
All my friendships began in elementary school and continued on through high school. Our class ended up with thirty-two students, so we all knew each other.
Many friends in junior high and high school had to work, either on the farm or in town. We hung out together when we could, but a lot of time was spent working. The older we got, the more time we spent working. My dad had to keep the service station open all the time and needed my help. After school, I would go to work, go study, and then go back to work.
I had an old car to drive my senior year, and we would cruise the streets of Tipton like they did in “Happy Days.”
My family gave me $100 when I graduated from high school. Rather than thinking about college, I decided to use it to take flying lessons in Altus for $10 an hour. I took ten lessons and soloed.
I liked school. I liked taking their ideas. I liked doing assignments. I had a chance to see what it would be like to be involved in university. In fact, I didn’t know what a university was.
MT: That’s something that kind of struck me. As we’re talking to people in this series about education, I always kind of say, “When did you decide you wanted to become a teacher?” But that really wasn’t your experience. You were interested in going to the university, but you didn’t really have a plan at the time. Is that right?
JF: Absolutely correct. I had not done anything I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t pay attention to it until it was probably the week before I had to turn in my material at the University of Oklahoma.
Even though I took the ACT, I had not thought about or even talked to my parents about what I wanted to do after high school. No one in my family had ever gone to college or thought I would. My parents were surprised when I came back from a visit to Norman with my friend Jon and told them I had enrolled at Oklahoma University [OU]. Since they did not finish high school themselves, they told me they did not know anything about college. However, after they thought about it, they said they would support my going. They gave me enough money for the first semester.
Now that I have met and learned more about First Generation college students, I realize my parents’ acceptance and support for my going to college made all the difference for my direction in life and ability to find my path. This makes me even more supportive of today’s First Generation college students.
MT: Getting to know your biography a little bit, you got interested sort of in the business side. Is that right?
JF: I did. It was because I could do that very well. It gave us a way to make enough money that I could pay for a lot of the expenses. So, that turned out to be a really good connection. Without that connection, I didn’t have the money to go to school.
MT: So that was a way both to help put yourself through school, but it also gave you connections at the university. Your entry [into education] was not that you necessarily wanted to be in education as a teacher, but you got involved on the business side and ultimately the leadership side down there starting at the University of Oklahoma, correct?
JF: Really the thing that I enjoyed about it was that I’d see those people that had jobs. When I was getting nearer the time to graduate, one of my teachers recommended me to some people that were looking for people. I didn’t know what I was going to get into, but you had to have something.
Right after graduation, the OU Bursar, Mr. Freeman, was trying to hire an assistant bursar, and he had a recommendation from one of my professors to hire me. Just before we finished talking, the chief accounting officer, Bill Dunsworth, dropped by and invited me to come to his office to talk about his opening, which was more of an accounting function. Before the day was over, I had taken the job.
When I told my parents I had taken a job at the university, I had to assure them it would be indoors, as opposed to working outside in the elements. Since my only previous job was working for my father, the new salary was astronomical from my perspective, $6,200 in 1968.
MT: What is your thought on—so, a degree in accounting. You could have just been an accountant, right, and spent your career doing that. What got you interested in working for and with the university systems down there? You were involved with several institutions. What led you to wanting to be part of the management, the administration, the leadership of higher education?
JF: That’s exactly what happened. I did. I was looking for something to do. Unfortunately, I got drafted. I didn’t know what to do about that for sure.
MT: What part of the service were you in?
JF: I wanted to be on airplanes. I love airplanes. I still want to fly. Can’t do it. Too old. It doesn’t work anymore.
MT: So, you indicated you were drafted. What branch of the service were you in?
JF: The Army. I (immediately) asked to be admitted to the Drill Sergent Academy. I graduated first in the class. The Colonel in charge of the Academy offered me a job teaching at the Academy. This experience was invaluable as I developed my leadership and pedagogy/teaching skills modeling a group of professionals.
MT: So, you did not have a lot of opportunity to do the flying that I know you’re very interested in doing.
JF: I would have done it in a minute. But like I say, the best you can do is probably be somewhere in an airplane, but not a pilot.
MT: After the Army, how did you get back reconnected with higher education?
JF: After the Army, I returned to Norman where I planned to return to my full-time job in the Accounting Office at OU. Federal provisions stated that my employer had to return me to the job I had before I was drafted. Of course, they had already hired someone, so I made a deal that I would work half-time in Accounting at half the normal salary and go to school half-time working on my Master of Business Administration (MBA)
MT: You went back to school, continuing your education.
JF: Yes, I got a master’s degree, and I loved doing that, but I also got to go back to the courses and the programs that I could get into and use that to go on into the next piece of my career. So, there were things that I had to do in order to do that. It turned out to be great. I loved it. And they gave me a job.
OU changed my assignment to assist Gene Nordby, the new Vice President of Administration at OU and former Dean of Engineering. My title was Assistant to the Vice President. He (Gene) asked me if I wanted to be promoted to the Chief Accountant/Controller job.
I stayed in the Controller job until 1977 when another major life event occurred. I got sick, was diagnosed with cancer and had major surgery in August 1977. I went to MD Anderson Hospital in Houston and had another major surgery to remove all my lymph nodes in my core. I returned to work after six months of chemo at MC Anderson in 1979.
I still had chemotherapy outpatient but could not pass up the opportunity for professional development trips when presented.
I was so involved in the development and implementation of accounting standards for higher education that I was jokingly called “King of Accounting.” I would like to think I had an impact on higher education management, finance and accounting through my teaching and officer positions.
MT: Where were you and what were you doing prior to the time—what prepared you when you got interested in the presidency of Washburn?
JF: Shortly after I returned from my treatments in Houston, the OU Vice President for Administration took another job. President Sharp called me in and asked me to be the interim Vice President. I said “of course, I would be glad to.” I still had to miss work part of the week during the chemo treatments.
From this interim experience, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. so that I would be seriously considered for the Vice President’s position in the future. So, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program and took until summer 1986 to finish. It was unusual, but I did all my classwork at night while working full time, which is why it took me from 1980 to 1986. Susan [Farley] was helpful in typing up all my notes and papers.
This led to several dream jobs: Vice President at Oklahoma State, then OU Health Sciences Center, and finally the OU Norman campus.
MT: So, you worked on your PhD while you were at Oklahoma State? Is that right?
JF: No. I finished my job with the PhD. While I was there, I got a job back at OU, and while I was there, I hired a person to manage our OU campus food service and student union. His name was Tom Ellis. He was from Topeka. I had to hire somebody in the early days for things to do for freshmen. It was pretty exciting, and he came in one day and said, “I’ve got a job for you. You need to see what you think about it,” and it was a vacant position at Washburn University.
Tom was doing a good job at OU, so I had confidence in him. He returned with materials about the WU Regents’ search for a new president and said he thought I would be a good candidate. I had really never thought about being a president, except for OSU President Boger’s comment about my being a good candidate to follow him.
MT: That was your connection.
JF: That was the final connection.
MT: Bringing you here to Topeka.
JF: Yes.
MT: What did you know about Washburn University when you started looking at it as an opportunity? It was a rather unique institution.
JF: It was a really incredible university. I’d been at big schools, OU, OSU. When I got here at the university in Washburn, there was really something happening, something happening on campus. People were doing things. And it was unique. And Tom Ellis had worked there. So, he gave me more information about it. I didn’t think there would be anything that would come of it. And it did. We interviewed one another. It was a great job.
MT: Something that probably many of our viewers and readers know but maybe not everyone, Washburn, of course, here in Topeka, Kansas, the capital, had the distinction, at least as I understand it, and I’ve been observing Washburn for a long time, was the only remaining municipal university in the country. Am I saying that right? In that it was not independent, it was not operated by the state. It was not a community college. It was a full institution, but with a heavy reliance on local funding and local governance, and that made it certainly unique in Kansas, if not the country. Am I remembering that correctly?
JF: Good memory.
MT: Again, it was kind of unique. So that’s what I thought. You were kind of walking into something that—
JF: I looked at it. “What is this? And what do the people say about it?” To me, it seemed to me [Washburn] was looking for somebody to do something unique. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know anybody on the board. I didn’t know any of the faculty members that were there. There weren’t any potential connections to anybody. I looked at all of them, talked to them, talked with them about what they saw there, and it seemed to me that they were ready to go and do something.
So, I started working on things. They wanted to know what I was thinking about doing. What did I have in mind? When I first spent time on the Washburn campus, it became obvious to me that there were great opportunities for the university. Faculty and staff were eager to move forward. The more I talked about opportunities, the more I felt the excitement grow. I decided to visit every department on campus to listen to what people thought. Everyone would tell me what they were doing and what their job was. When they wanted to know my vision, I told them I wanted to take some time, listen and learn on all my visits to people who have been here and then thoughtfully decide on articulating a vision.
MT: Again, I lived in Topeka during a large part of that time. I had some insight into some of what you were looking at. In my mind, there were a couple of big things. I don’t know what order to take them in. Maybe we could start by the fact that when I came to Topeka, very much the sense of Washburn was that this was kind of a commuter campus. It had an older population. As I understand, reading some of your background, when you started looking from a strategic sense of what you needed to do, you kind of had the idea and I gather support to say, “We need to refocus that a little bit.” What were the changes that you made, I guess starting with looking at the kind of students you served and how you did that?
When I arrived, Washburn was mostly a commuter campus with a declining enrollment. We had an outstanding academic program to offer students, but the existing housing was not attractive from anyone’s point of view. Important steps needed to be taken if we expected to attract more students who would want to live on campus.
In August, we had a vacancy surface in public relations because of a career change. I decided to combine that position with a president’s executive assistant position and persuaded Tom Ellis to come back to Washburn from OU to fill it. I had great respect for his ability and was pleased we were able to serve together for fifteen years.
I wanted to get broad-based support for a new vision and strategic plan, based on a shared understanding of our mission. This would require everyone’s involvement in developing a new strategic plan.
MT: I think some of those [ideas] were really around, and facilities were a big part of it because, as I recall, you really needed to improve the amenities of life on the campus. You wanted to make opportunities so students could have a more traditional college experience. That was, as I understand, part of the goal. How do you then bring a wider group of students, younger students and foster more a sense of community? So, part of that was just creating the facilities that would allow that to happen. Is that right?
JF: I began talks with the Washburn Board of Regents and others about reinvigorating Washburn by making it a more traditional college campus with appealing residential options. With the help of Tom Ellis we put together a diverse committee to work on what the vision and strategic plan should be, knowing it needed broad-based support. My Inaugural address in April 1998 targeted my vision to revitalize the campus.
And the other thing was that we had regents that were willing to take a risk. One of them was [Mayor] Joan Wagnon. We built a Living Learning Center, and everybody took a risk on that. I kept the regents informed on the vision that was developing and we had their full participation and support for these bold moves. Our new Living Learning Center residence hall was designed to be more than a dormitory. We wanted to meet the needs of 21st century students for community living with computer, recreation, laundry and reading rooms along with a wonderful reception area. The plans looked fantastic and the finished project, even better!
We needed athletics. Athletics were not good. The students wanted to do things, all kinds of things, you keep what you can do, and you keep doing it. So, we turned it around. We had to get a new football coach, and he turned out to be great. He didn’t stay long with us, but he turned out to be great. Everything went perfectly. We just didn’t have anything that went wrong in that first year or so, two or three years. It made a big effort.
MT: Your sense was that the Topeka community got behind it and embraced those changes.
JF: They did. They let us put names on their windows before the game would be here. There was all kinds of other things that was going on. It wasn’t just parties, although we did have some people that were pretty good at partying.
MT: An important part of the college experience.
JF: We tried not to do too much of it, but we did that. You do other kinds of other things. We got people that were working on being the best person that would come from the school and show them what we could do.
MT: So, a lot of those things, it sounds like, were things that you could do within the institution, but another big transition had to go beyond that. Again, I’ll give you my memory of what it was like, and you can expand a little bit. Part of the honor and privilege of being a municipal university was that the people of Topeka, were supporting the institution with a pretty high property tax.
One thing we know in Kansas, probably true everywhere, property taxes are very sensitive. There had been a debate that I remember as a much younger man, “Should Washburn become a state university?” And the state universities weren’t sure that was a great idea because there were always concerns over how big the pie is.
JF: How many slices are you going to put in?
MT: How do you slice the same-sized pie? So, you worked with and the institution came forward with a way to kind of change your funding around. You couldn’t do that on your own. There had to be involvement of the state. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like or what that entailed, and how do you think you were able to sell that? You’re still a municipal university here at Washburn, but it’s kind of got into a little more hybrid role now. What happened in that sense?
JF: It was complicated. You’re absolutely correct. We would simply talk with the legislature, people at the legislature, the mayor, talk and see what they say. In fact, I keep using the word, Joan Wagnon. She was on the Jim Cates show on a radio stations, and somebody was calling in to see whether or not Washburn would be interested in having a sales tax instead of property tax as a funding base. She called me at the office while on the radio talk show and proposed replacing the property tax with a sales tax.
MT: On the revenue side?
JF: When I presented this idea to Washburn lobbyists, they were optimistic about getting this through the legislature with carefully staged steps. We carefully computed the amount of sales tax that would be required to eliminate the Washburn property tax. This would relieve Topeka citizens from the city-wide property tax for Washburn. What we proposed was to implement a county-wide sales tax that would be shared by the entire Shawnee county residents and its visitors. At any rate, what we had to do was to get more Topeka voters to agree that it would be better to have a sales tax than a property tax.
MT: Right.
JF: That was a big deal. No one really knew what would happen. So, we wrote a bill. We ran it through the House in less than a month. A couple of weeks passed by, it passed the Senate. Governor Graves, I went to see him. He said, “Great idea.” Of course, the people of Topeka, they couldn’t wait to do it, and we decided to do it.
We put the campaign together in a little over a month, and we fixed it so that it would come before everybody for a vote within about a month. It passed. I promised them [voters] that we wouldn’t make any more money out of the sales tax than we did out of property taxes.
MT: That was helpful to the community in the sense that you moved from a type of tax, the property tax, which most people don’t like very much, to a sales tax. I guess maybe because you pay it regularly, maybe because a lot of people who don’t live in Topeka come into Topeka and shop. So you have that as a little bit of an advantage, too. But it was seen as a win to the community. So, you were both able to kind of transform sort of how the institution was operating, its image, the kids it was serving, and found out a way to sell a more popular way to fund and got that through the legislature.
JF: We did one thing that I’d never seen it done before, and that is that if you over-collected, you put it into a reserve fund to spend later.
MT: Kind of a reserve. I think that was one of the things I read in your background a little bit. One of the reasons why governmental entities tend to like the property tax is it’s pretty stable. You can collect it. Sales tax, not so much. It goes up and down a little bit. As I understand, you came up with a system that said, “Okay, if we bring in—if some years, we’re high, let’s put that in reserve so if there’s years where we’re lower, we can dip into that.” I gather that’s worked out well over the time. I don’t recall you having a financial crisis worse than anyone else over the last twenty years or so.
JF: We had what I called the smoothing fund. If we collected more than we had budgeted, we put it away. If we had less than was budgeted, it was there to spend. That worked out to be a phenomenal program. That assured us that this was all going to work, and it has.
MT: Another somewhat unique thing about Washburn is you had your own Board of Regents. So, you had a local board, but you also had to work with the State Board of Regents, as I understand it. You were kind of in the position of serving both a local group but having to be coordinated with the rest of the system. So, you’re kind of almost working with two Board of Regents. I don’t know whether that—do you need more pay to do that as president?
JF: I didn’t think about that.
MT: Or is that just considered a benefit? Talk a little bit about how you and Washburn fit into the larger, the overall state system of both the universities and community colleges and other institutions.
JF: Starting when I first came, not many people thought that admitting Washburn into the state university system was going to work. They believed anytime that the state gave a new state institution money, the pie’s been cut again.
But the benefit Washburn saw with the change in governance of the community colleges and the technical schools was the addition of the Kaw Area Technical School, formerly overseen by the Topeka Public Schools USD 501. As the demand for greater technical training for students grew, it appeared that a different structure would be advantageous.
MT: Right, an excellent point. Again, let me kind of give you my broad sense of the story, and you can tell me. So, a lot of things happened in higher education over the time you served. One of them was the move to bring the community colleges and technical colleges under the Board of Regents, and then even beyond that, at least in some cases, merging the technical colleges with a university or higher education institution. I gather the theory was some efficiency, some better coordination. What was the situation like when you came to Topeka in terms of your relationship with technical education? What were the changes you made that really brought your institutions together?
JF: We recommended and worked hard to build a Washburn model for the affiliation between technical education and traditional university programs without impacting state funds. In 2010 the local technical programs and operations were transferred to Washburn. This change has been gratifying, permitting us to serve students who wanted to pursue a technical education either instead of, or before a two-or four-year education on our main campus. Washburn Tech became the primary provide for a quality, technical workforce to meet business needs. A collateral benefit was the good-will this created in the community.
In collaboration with GoTopeka, we created a satellite campus for Tech on the east side of town. GoTopeka provided the majority of the funding to renovate a dilapidated armory building for the satellite campus.
MT: Most of my work has been in the K-12 area, working with the school board, but I’ve done in the last few years, writing stories and things. Here in Topeka, I think it’s been very striking, the emphasis that that USD 501 has placed on developing tech ed programs, CTE programs.
JF: Right.
MT: More students being able to access those in high school and then having that relationship with Washburn as well as with private sector and everything else. From my observation over the last twenty-five years or so, it’s really a difference on how we view trying to give students who are not immediately interested in going directly to a four-year institution a chance to start in some of these other areas. It seems to me that that coordination is really different than it was before.
JF: It’s totally different. They would be able to look at what they’ve been thinking about doing and go to tech first. Then they would go to a regular school. It was important that they’d be able to do that. There’s a story, if I can remember it all, one chap got out of the Army, wanted to be a welder, a good job, and decided that there were some things that we made people pay and built together a program. They could finish that program, come back to the other folks, take up some more of the things they need to. And then when they were ready to go to work, you’d think that they’d go to an automatic normal kind of program. They’d go back to tech and finish that thing up. It was incredible. I’m real happy for them.
MT: It’s interesting going around the state how often I hear people talk about the demand for welding, something I didn’t think of as one growing up, but how popular that is with a lot of students because they do see it was a way to a skilled, well-paying job, an important job, a job you really can’t outsource because you’ve got to do the welding here for the most part. I guess that’s interesting how again that transformation from whatever an institution like Washburn thought of itself at the time now really embracing that teaching welding and other CTE programs really as part of that mission if you’re going to support your community.
JF: The words that you used, that they have the opportunity to do one or both ways, and because they could do that, they could pay for one or the other. And it turned out to be a phenomenal program.
MT: Another thing I’d like to ask you a little bit about, if you had any thoughts—we’re having this visit in early 2025. I don’t know when people will view this, but a lot of interest or a lot of discussion, debate around the federal role of education. In your work at Washburn or through higher education, did you have much interaction at the federal level in terms of funding or other policies?
JF: Not much. But they have to do all that work for the government and get paid for that, for research particularly.
MT: Okay, research.
JF: I saw that several universities had to back away from some of the research that they were doing just because they lost the government grants and didn’t have the money to do it.
MT: That I think will be a bit of a challenge, of course. One of the things that I’m sure Washburn dealt with like many institutions is most states, and Kansas is one of them, tended to not fund higher ed in the way they had in the past which really means the responsibility either has to roll down to the student or roll down to the local government which may mean property tax and the same thing with the federal government has sort of struggled with the best way to support or not support and what sort of strings to attach.
So, one of the things I’m sure you dealt with was how do you widen opportunities for students at a time when you may not be able to rely on the public funding that was there in the past? I think in your case, you were involved in a lot of fundraising around, everything from scholarships to raising money for facilities.
JF: We do two things. We try to provide jobs coming out of school, out of university or technical school, and then have the money there to help go through them. Then the other thing is to have a more robust program of fundraising. We’ve got a lot of great stars here on our campus in Washburn that have done a great job. We just had a great announcement a few weeks ago about a large gift.
MT: So, a growing responsibility for a presidency or leading an institution is how you’re able to access private fundraising to supplement maybe to a larger extent than was there in the past. I suppose again, kind of looking at your background, a key piece of what you had to do was really figure out how you connect to the community and maybe specifically local as a somewhat local institution, but you’re also trying to draw students from across the state. So, a big part of I guess your role has to be, how do you as an individual and as an institution effectively communicate with the public, with parents, with students, people who have money as possible fundraisers? I imagine that was a big challenge as part of your responsibility when you were president.
JF: Well, it is, and it isn’t. It is—you have to do it. You have to be out there talking with people. You have to be with people. But also you have to make sure that what you’re doing is useful. They have to see something from it.
We had a gift about a month ago, and it was fifty million dollars. That’s a pretty good sum. The problem that you have is you’ve got to have somebody that does want to have whatever it is that you have. You’ve got to be flexible enough that there’s somebody out there that wants to do something. That person that I was talking about earlier, they wanted to be a welder. He might have a huge company by now because he had that behind now and knew what it was, what it took, and that’s when I think it’s going to be really ready for that kind of activity.
MT: So, all of this is just connecting what you’re trying to do looking forward to “How does it have an impact on individual lives?” and if you can help them be successful, that’s part of what you are supposed to do.
JF: Yes, exactly.
MT: Let me give you a chance maybe, is there something I missed that maybe you’re particularly proud of? Of course, you can also share disappointments. That’s okay, too. Sometimes we learn from that. But I guess looking back on the time you spent in that role, the time you spent on Kansas, anything I’ve missed that you want to stress as we wrap up?
JF: I actually don’t think so because I’ve been in this business for a long time. Start thinking about things that are really important. Make sure that you’re delivering the ideas that you want them to understand and then want you to make sure that you are doing this in a way that makes a big difference, and it is. It’s a big difference.
MT: Dr. Farley, thank you so much for sharing your information. We certainly want to thank people viewing this or reading about this and the ability to be—everyone involved in the Oral History Project so that we can share this. Thank you and thank you for inviting us into your home.
JF: Glad to have you here and to be with you.
MT: Sure.
[End of File]
Farley home in Topeka, KS
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