Eugene Sunshine
To Leave Hopkins

Dennis O'Shea
Homewood
News and Information

Sunshine has been named Northwestern's senior vice president for business and finance, effective at the end of August.

"There's no other job in higher education I would leave Johns Hopkins for," Sunshine said. "I've been very happy here, and I'll be sorry to leave Hopkins and the fine Hopkins people with whom I've worked, especially Bill Brody. But this is a wonderful new opportunity for me and for my family, and we're very excited about it."

Sunshine graduated from Northwestern in 1971 with his wife, Holly, whom he met as an undergraduate. They are devoted alumni, regularly attending university events and transplanting a family vacation from Florida to California last winter when the long-suffering Wildcat football team played in the Rose Bowl. Their son, Brad, will be a freshman at Northwestern this fall.

Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody said Northwestern has made an excellent choice.

"If there is a Rose Bowl for university financial administrators, Northwestern just increased their chances of getting a bid," Brody said. "Gene is a unique individual, and it will be difficult to find anyone with his collection of talents, his unusual ability to place the financial data in the academic context and vice versa."

Brody said the five-year financial plans Hopkins has produced under Sunshine's leadership annually since 1989 have become a model for other universities.

"Gene understands our academic mission as well as the faculty does and is intensely committed to making sure our mission is advanced through prudent fiscal management," Brody said.

Northwestern's president, Henry S. Bienen, echoed Brody's sentiments.

"During his tenure at Johns Hopkins," Bienen said of Sunshine, "that university has earned a reputation as one of the best-managed institutions of higher learning in the country. He has the ideal experience and skills for this key administration position at Northwestern."

Sunshine came to Johns Hopkins in March 1987 as treasurer. Exactly a year later, at 38, he was promoted to senior vice president, just as the university was beginning to appreciate the seriousness of a deficit crunch in several divisions, particularly Arts and Sciences and the Peabody. He and then-provost John Lombardi worked closely together to craft a five-year plan to turn the red ink black.

The plan included the cancellation of some unfunded initiatives, some cuts in positions through attrition, strict controls on administrative overhead, a controlled growth in student body size and new ventures in continuing education. By fiscal 1994, the university was back in the black after running deficits in four of the five previous years.

New five-year plans constructed each year since the first one have helped the university spot new financial challenges out on the horizon and respond to them quickly, university administrators say. The plan approved by the trustees last May, covering fiscal years 1997 to 2001, is the first to project a surplus in all five years.

Sunshine, as chief adviser on non-academic matters to four Hopkins presidents, also has played a critical role in the university's response to threats to the federal system for reimbursing capital costs for research facilities. He helped create a partnership among the university, the state of Maryland and private supporters to rescue the Peabody, and helped develop a self-supporting plan, now nearly completed, for renovation of most of the university's student housing.