And Finally...

LOFTON STUART

By Chuck Wasserstrom

Sometime this fall, perhaps before you have the opportunity to see this page, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will name its next vice chancellor for Development and Alumni Affairs and executive director of the UC Foundation.

A new person coming on board means the interim person is soon moving on. As the saying goes, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Lofton Stuart took the interim vice chancellor post in February 2020 expecting to stay for a few months. Nobody— including Stuart—expected the pandemic that began just a few weeks later and the short-term assignment that brought him to Chattanooga would extend well into fall 2021.

Stuart has a habit of staying a little longer than intended. His first job out of college was with annual giving at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he expected to stay five or six years before returning to his family’s farm in rural Haywood County in West Tennessee. Instead, he spent 43 years in Knoxville in various capacities within the UT System before retiring in January 2016.

When Stuart was approached about stepping into an interim role at UTC, he figured it was too good a possibility to pass up. He had previous temporary experience among the many higher-level responsibilities he had held, including interim president of the UT Foundation, Inc.; interim vice president for development and alumni affairs; and executive director of the UT national alumni association. He had worked under 10 UT presidents and served as executive assistant to former presidents Joe Johnson and John Petersen.

In coming out of semi-retirement— “I wasn’t really retired; I was actively working in real estate,” he says—what could possibly go wrong with another limited-term temporary role?

Thanks to the challenges of working in a higher education environment during COVID-19, Stuart’s time at UTC has been— shall we say—rather interesting. Working in a COVID-19 world has presented many obstacles, including the difficulty of doing business in a traditional face-to-face setting.

Had he served six or fewer months at UTC, as he initially expected, Stuart might not have had a real opportunity to get to know staff, alumni volunteers and students. He says he wouldn’t have gotten to experience first-hand the quality of compassion and dedication of faculty and staff to putting UTC students first. He ranks his nearly two years working in Chattanooga among the capstone events of his professional career.

While he has been associated with the University in some capacity for nearly 50 years, his involvement with the day-to-day UTC experience has given him a proper understanding of what the institution means to the community and its citizens—and vice versa. “And how much it gives me hope,” he says, “not only for the success of this campus but for the University of Tennessee system, in general, for the example that’s being set here.”

Maybe this time, Stuart actually will stay retired. His successor has a tough act to follow.