Former University of Central Florida president John Hitt, who oversaw tremendous growth at the school and the addition of a medical school, on-campus football stadium and more than 100 new buildings, has died.
Hitt, 82, died Monday, less than five years after retiring from the university where he spent 26 years at the helm.
Before his retirement, Hitt spoke frequently of UCF’s role in providing access to a college education to people who may not have otherwise earned bachelor’s degrees.
“I hope I’ll be remembered and thought of as someone who was committed to improving access to high quality education at an affordable price,” Hitt said in a December 2017 interview with the Orlando Sentinel. “And someone who cared equally about access and excellence.”
Once a small commuter school, UCF became one of the country’s largest universities under Hitt’s direction. When he announced his decision to retire in 2017, Hitt said he’d “never felt better” about the university, which had about 22,000 students when he became president in 1992.
During Hitt’s tenure, the longest for any state university system president since the 1940s, UCF tripled its enrollment and awarded more than 260,000 degrees. He also shepherded the creation of a new campus in downtown Orlando that opened in 2019.
As a former college football player, Hitt often spoke about how he believed finding success on the field was an important step toward achieving a national footprint as a major research university.
“If you’re a state university in the South, and you want to be taken seriously, there are several things you do,” Hitt said in a 2015 interview with the Washington Post. “You do a fair amount of research. You award a fair number of PhDs. And you play Division I football.”
In his final year as president, the Knights went undefeated and defeated Auburn in the Peach Bowl.
In an email to students and faculty Tuesday, UCF President Alexander Cartwright called the on-campus stadium Hitt helped create “a catalyst for UCF’s upcoming entry to the Big 12 Conference.”
“He was a strong advocate for partnerships and believed they were an ideal way to advance both UCF and our community. Partnerships continue to fuel our excellence as we build on the strong foundation established under his leadership,” Cartwright wrote. “… We will always remember Dr. Hitt as a visionary leader, a champion of education, and a beloved member of the UCF community.”
Hitt grew up in Texas and was among the first in his family to attend college. He graduated from Austin College, where he earned a degree in psychology and played football, and went on to earn a Ph.D from Tulane University.
Hitt is survived by his wife of six decades, Martha, two children, Charles and Sharon; two grandchildren, Jarrod and Alex; and great-grandson, Luca.
After retiring from UCF, John and Martha Hitt moved to Wisconsin, where they planned to spend time with their nearby children and grandchildren.
Standing next to Martha at an event in 2017 where he announced his plans to retire, John Hitt described his tenure at UCF as “one of the greatest joys of our lives.”
“When we first visited campus, we had a powerful feeling that UCF was a special place,” Hitt said. “We never could have imagined back then how very special it would become.”
Prior to his hiring as president at UCF, Hitt was the interim president and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maine. He was one of 142 people who applied for the top post at UCF.
Hitt was named the Orlando Sentinel’s Central Floridian of the Year for 2005, in recognition of “his overall efforts to make UCF one of the best public universities in the nation.”
Former Board of Trustees Chairman Marcos Marchena described Hitt as one of America’s best college presidents in 2017, touting his role in building a campus where one out of four students is the first in their family to attend college. The number of students of color on campus also grew dramatically under Hitt’s leadership, Marchena noted.
“We have more minority students enrolled today than we had total students when John started,” he said.
After news broke on Tuesday about the former university leader’s death, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer lauded Hitt’s belief “in the power of education to transform lives.”
Dyer publicly supported UCF’s plans for a long-awaited campus in downtown Orlando, writing in a blog post on the city’s website in 2016 that the addition would bring new jobs to the city’s urban core, anchor the Creative Village and offer new educational opportunities to residents of underserved ZIP codes.
“As UCF’s president, he helped ensure that educational opportunities were accessible for so many residents in our community and beyond,” Dyer said Tuesday in a statement. “Under his leadership, UCF became what I consider the nation’s premier partnership university, playing a key role in our community’s growth and culture of collaboration. I’ll always be grateful for Dr. Hitt’s immeasurable impact on Orlando.”
Hitt’s tenure at UCF wasn’t free of controversy. In 2005, the university’s plans to build a football stadium on campus riled residents who feared problems with parking, traffic and lighting.
Later, the university scrapped plans to build a dental school in Lake Nona’s Medical City after the proposal faced criticism from leaders in the industry and members of the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the state’s 11 public universities.
His successor, former university provost Dale Whittaker, served as the school’s president for about seven months before resigning in the midst of a controversy regarding roughly $85 million intended for operating expenses that school leaders spent, or planned to spend, on construction.
The misspending was first exposed after Hitt retired, when the state auditor general’s office discovered the university had budgeted $38 million in operating funds for Trevor Colbourn Hall, an academic building that opened in August 2018.
In the aftermath, Whittaker identified an official he said took “immediate and full responsibility” for the transgression. But that official, Bill Merck, told the Sentinel that Whittaker and Hitt both knew where the money came and made the decision to spend it anyway in order to replace an aging building that endangered employees and students.
Hitt wrote in a 2018 letter to a law firm investigating the spending problems that “honest, competent and reliable UCF employees” knew where the money for Trevor Colbourn Hall was coming from and did not express concerns.
“We absolutely did not think there was any legal or ethical prohibition against the project or the use of the funds designated for it and we did not fail to report anything that, even now looking back, I think should have been reported,” he wrote. “There was an imminent, real and serious threat to the faculty, students, staff, parents, and others who visited Colbourn Hall and it needed to be fixed.”
Jason Beede of the Sentinel staff contributed.
anmartin@orlandosentinel.com
