After 20 years serving as chief financial officer at St. Thomas, Mark Vangsgard said that planning and collaboration have been at the heart of every major change the university has made, from its switch to co-ed when he was an undergraduate in 1977 to its move to Division I athletics in 2020.
However, Vangsgard said that when he came to St. Thomas, planning was the last thing on his mind. He had been serving as treasurer at major chemical manufacturer Ecolab and said he found himself applying for the open CFO position after collaborating with the university on undergraduate hiring initiatives.
“It wasn’t a planned strategy,” Vangsgard said. “Most of the great things in life you just kind of fall into.”
Vangsgard said that he had difficulty adjusting to the more collaborative environment at St Thomas when he returned to work for the non-profit university after 25 years working in for-profit business.
“Any 30-minute meeting there takes about two years here because there’s this collaboration feel that’s important, and I didn’t really understand, in all honesty,” Vangsgard said. “I almost failed miserably in the first couple years because mentally I just couldn’t adjust to this kind of working style.”
Eventually, Vangsgard got the hang of St. Thomas’ slower decision-making style, which he said is emblematic of its careful, long-term strategy for growth. That approach is also a product of its limitations, which he described simply:
“We’ve got a lot of passionate people on campus with a lot of energy, a lot of great ideas, but never enough money,” Vangsgard said.
The land for the planned baseball and softball stadium at Highland Bridge south of campus is one such example. The university bought the land in 2023, but it hasn’t moved ahead with development, largely because it’s waiting for donor money to fund the roughly $50-75 million price tag to achieve the “mini-Target Field feel” it seeks, Vangsgard said.
On the other end of that spectrum is the Lee and Penny Anderson Arena, which broke ground only a year after it was announced and opened a year and a half later, largely thanks to up-front funding from the Andersons’ $75 million donation.
Vangsgard said that the university’s high-level leadership, like its president and board of trustees, are able to react quickly to new developments like the arena due to their experience in fast-paced for-profit industries.
“That business training kind of permeates the institution,” Vangsgard said. “So that when we run into like the real estate market decline in 2008-2009, which sunk the stock market, you’ve got a bunch of business people on campus saying, ‘OK, that’s the latest thing that’s been put in front of us; now what are our options?’”
When money isn’t as freely available, though, it means that every financial decision the university makes, from new residence halls to facilities and maintenance, is weighed based on its return on investment.
That return is often more than just monetary, an idea the university’s Division I move is a poster child for.
Vangsgard said that when he arrived at St. Thomas, its excellence in academics, D-III athletics and campus life were comparable to other major Catholic universities like Marquette and Creighton, but it lacked the reputation to garner equal attention. As the pool of potential students shrunk over the years — and after UST asked to leave the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference — Vangsgard said that embracing Division I emerged as a natural next step to help it garner attention.
It hasn’t made for a perfect transition, though. Changes to the transfer portal and NIL money in the past five years have made maintaining strong teams more costly than ever, which Vangsgard said is felt especially at St. Thomas.
“At larger schools, athletics is like its own silo… it’s isolated from a facility standpoint, and they operate on their own,” Vangsgard said. “Here, it’s much more integrated with the operations of the university.”
Vangsgard is retiring at the end of spring semester. As he takes down the wall-to-wall purple fliers and decorations in his office to make room for his successor, Wade Holmberg, he said that the latter’s experience at the University of Northwestern – St. Paul and Bethel University will help him avoid the same pitfalls that Vangsgard experienced 20 years ago.
“That’s his boot camp; he already gets it,” Vangsgard said. “It’s when you move from the for-profit to the not-for-profit world that it’s a little tougher.”
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
