Ferritor back in driver's seat

Former UA chancellor takes reins on interim basis

Dan Ferritor, who was University of Arkansas chancellor from 1985-97, will serve as interim chancellor until the hiring of a replacement for G. David Gearhart, who retired July 31.
Dan Ferritor, who was University of Arkansas chancellor from 1985-97, will serve as interim chancellor until the hiring of a replacement for G. David Gearhart, who retired July 31.

FAYETTEVILLE -- The chancellor of the University of Arkansas' flagship campus can be seen some mornings pedaling his bicycle up the hill to campus.

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Dan Ferritor, the new interim University of Arkansas chancellor, arrives by bicycle on the campus in Fayetteville on Aug. 7. Ferritor, an avid cyclist, plans to ride to work three days a week. For more photos, go to www.nwadg.com/photos.

Daniel Ferritor, 75, has a red-and-black cycling jersey with the words "Arkansas Razorbacks" across the front.

"I'm going to try to ride to work two or three days a week," he said in early August, during the first week of his new gig.

Ferritor's bicycle may be a Giant Escape, but he has been unable to achieve escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the university.

Ferritor has worked for the University of Arkansas for 44 years. He was chancellor from 1985 through 1997, during a building boom and the renovation of Old Main, the oldest building on campus.

On Aug. 3, Ferritor began serving as interim chancellor while a search is conducted to find a replacement for G. David Gearhart, who retired at the end of July after seven years as chancellor.

UA System President Donald Bobbitt said at the time that hiring Ferritor as interim chancellor made sense because he had done the job before.

"There just simply isn't time to be a rookie," Bobbitt said.

Ferritor said he would be interim chancellor "for a couple of months" before a new chancellor is on campus.

The opportunity pulled Ferritor out of an impending retirement on March 31, but he still went to Italy for his retirement vacation.

Ferritor has never taken retirement well. In 2005, he retired from teaching.

"It was five of the worst weeks of my life trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself," Ferritor said. "When you get ready to retire, you can't go from doing something your entire life to doing nothing. You can only read the paper and watch the garden grow for so long."

Then-UA system President B. Alan Sugg saved Ferritor from that 2005 retirement by hiring him as vice president for academic affairs for the system. Ferritor later became the system's vice president for learning technologies.

Ferritor grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and Dallas.

He got an English degree from Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Mo., and taught at UA from 1967-68.

After earning his doctorate in sociology from Washington University in St. Louis, Ferritor returned to Fayetteville where he has remained ever since.

Ferritor's father, John Donald Ferritor, was a sales rep for large shoe companies.

"He used to always say that the penny loafer that all of the girls wore in those days, that that paid my way through college because it was his biggest-selling shoe," Ferritor said during a 2008 interview for The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.

Known for his quick wit, Ferritor said in the Pryor Center interview his career ambition as a fifth-grader was to write jokes for Milton Berle. Farther down the list were other professions, including elevator operator, priest and lawyer. Sociology professor won out.

Around his parents' dinner table, humor was important, Ferritor said.

"There was always some kind of word game going on -- puns and attempts at humor and sarcasm and a very verbal family," he said during the 2008 interview.

An avid runner most of his life, Ferritor stopped jogging two and a half years ago because of pain in his knees.

A few months later, Ferritor took up cycling after his doctor encouraged him to find a type of exercise he enjoyed.

At about that time, Ferritor discovered a bicycle in the basement of a vacation house he and his wife Patsy were renting in Colorado and began riding regularly around Lake Estes.

Since then, Ferritor has been logging about 100 miles a week cycling around Fayetteville, primarily on the Razorback Greenway trail. He has cycled 350 miles from Pittsburg to Washington, D.C. and through the Umbrian valley of Italy. Since he took up cycling, Ferritor has dropped from 189 to 156 pounds.

"I'm as compulsive with this as I am with almost everything else," Ferritor said.

During the last week of July, Ferritor logged 145 miles on his bicycle, in anticipation of becoming interim chancellor the next week and having less time to ride.

Ferritor said he's not sure what he's going to do when Daylight Savings Time ends on Nov. 1.

"I won't ride in the dark," he said.

Ferritor hauls his bicycle to the Mud Creek Trail head, parks his car and rides the seven miles to campus from there. The ride takes him along the Mud Creek Trail and Razorback Greenway, which extends from south Fayetteville to Bella Vista Lake in Benton County.

"It is such an incredible resource," Ferritor said of the Razorback Greenway. "Good, safe biking. And from my point of view, not too many hills."

When he goes home in the evening, Ferritor sometimes takes a longer route by Baum Stadium, home of the Razorback baseball team.

"It's good exercise. It's fun. I get to meet people out there," Ferritor said. "I get to see Northwest Arkansas in a way you don't normally see in a car."

Like running, cycling gives Ferritor a time to think without interruptions. Sometimes it's easier to get work done outside the office.

"It's healthy for me," he said. "And for me it doesn't put the same stress on my body that running was doing. The downside of it for me is that it takes longer to get the exercise done that way."

Ferritor said he enjoyed his career at the university, most of the time.

"This place has been good to me," he said. "To be able to teach and be around young people and to be at a university that I think has gotten successively better every year -- I got lucky."

Next year, Ferritor said, will be the time for retirement.

NW News on 08/17/2015

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