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corporation's newest director is a man for all seasons
This article originally appeared in the Lamp, 2008 — Number 2
“Life has its seasons,” says Larry R. Faulkner.
Larry Faulkner’s seasons have found him in many roles: student, teacher, research scientist, university department head, dean, provost and vice chancellor, president of one of the nation’s largest universities and now head of a major philanthropic organization.
One of three children, Faulkner grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, in a family with deep roots in engineering. His grandfather and father were civil engineers.
Faulkner’s brother became an electrical engineer, his sister a nurse. His two children earned chemistry degrees. His daughter teaches high school chemistry and physics. His son worked for a major chemical company before attending law school and now practices environmental law.
“My family — my wife, my parents, my siblings and my children — has been the most important influence in my life,” Faulkner says.
Passion for science
Faulkner developed a lifetime passion for science during his elementary and middle school years. “I decided when I was 13 or 14 that I wanted to be a scientist,” he says.
He credits a high school chemistry teacher — “a terrifically influential person” — with providing inspiration and encouragement.
Faulkner earned a B.S. degree from Southern Methodist University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969.
With doctorate in hand, he accepted a position that same year on the chemistry faculty at Harvard. “Until then, I had never lived north of Dallas,” he says. “The transition from Austin, Texas, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, was something of a shock.”
Four years later, Faulkner joined the faculty at the University of Illinois. After a decade, the university convinced him to take the post of chemistry department head. He went on to become dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, university provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.
In 1998, he returned to Austin as the 27th president of the University of Texas. During his tenure, he directed a seven-year capital campaign that raised more than $1.6 billion. He established the Commission of 125, a group of influential citizens who worked to create a vision of the university’s next 25 years.
Under Faulkner’s leadership, the university built the Blanton Museum of Art, acquired the extensive Suida-Manning Collection of European paintings and drawings, and became the permanent home of the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate Archive.
Scholarships promote diversity
Faulkner oversaw historic changes in the university’s ability to attract minority students.
“When I arrived,” he says, “court rulings had forced the university to drop its affirmative action program. African American and Hispanic families across the state thought we had no interest in them, and we experienced a serious drop in minority participation.”
Faulkner challenged his staff to develop creative solutions to the problem. The result: innovative scholarship programs that encouraged and helped low-income students, many of them African Americans and Hispanics, to attend the University of Texas. In 2004, the entering freshman class was the most diverse in the university’s history.
In Faulkner’s current season of life, he is president of the Houston Endowment, a 70-year-old, $1.6 billion private foundation that awards grants in seven areas in the Houston community: the arts, education, the environment, health, human services, neighborhood development and community enhancement. Grants totaled nearly $70 million in 2007.
“It’s a pretty common transition for a university president to do foundation work,” Faulkner says. “The work of the Endowment connects to the outreach agenda we had at UT.”
Faulkner enjoys golf — “if I only had time to play” – and reading. “I read a significant amount of nonfiction, mainly history and biographies,” he says. “I still like to learn things.”
He faithfully follows Texas football. “Once you’ve been part of the University of Texas family,” he says, “you can never disconnect from Longhorn sports.”
Academic and author
Faulkner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently chaired the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
He has published more than 120 scientific papers, directed 40 doctoral theses and won numerous scientific awards.
With the eminent scientist and teacher Allen J. Bard, a longtime friend, colleague and mentor, Faulkner co-authored Electrochemical Methods: Fundamentals and Applications, an authoritative text in the field of electrochemistry.
Faulkner serves on the boards of Temple-Inland and Guaranty Financial Group. As a new ExxonMobil director, he’s been impressed by how the corporation achieves its consistently strong results.
“The company maintains an exceptionally high quality of analysis and decision-making,” he says, “and that’s not easy. It starts with the human element. You need extremely strong people and processes, and ExxonMobil has both.”
