New design for success

Jiffy Lube cofounder and Philadelphia University president Stephen Spinelli Jr. got the luckiest break of his life in college. And the very thought of it drives him crazy.

Spinelli was a poor kid from what he calls an Italian "ghetto" in Springfield, Mass. He was studying economics and playing running back at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel) three decades ago when his coach - a semiretired entrepreneur - noticed something.

"You're a tough, smart kid - I think," Jim Hindman told him. After college, he hired Spinelli at his nursing-home business, watched him work, and a few years later floated Spinelli and his partners $2 million to start the oil-change franchise.

Spinelli gets irritated as he thinks back: It was too random . . . should have had something to do with his college courses . . . didn't seem logical.

So he is overhauling academics at the East Falls university that used to be called the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences, when it reflected the used-to-be American apparel-manufacturing economy.

Next fall, Philadelphia University will introduce a College of Design, Engineering, and Commerce. It will combine existing design, engineering, and business majors, put students from all three into some of the same classes, and make them tackle real-world projects for the new, if uncertain, economy.

"I don't believe someone comes and sprinkles: 'OK, Steve will be the lucky guy and John won't be,' " Spinelli said with the high-volume and hand-waving passion that has made him known across campus to students as, simply "Spinelli."

Lucky breaks? "That's crazy! That's not democracy," said the rags-to-riches entrepreneur whose parents, he points out, didn't even finish junior high school but put four children through college. "Taking hold of your own destiny: That's luck."

If a furniture manufacturer wants a new product to attract customers, the university will put marketing, design, and engineering students on the case for credits. It did so last year as a pilot class.

The idea of integrating expertise is ripe in today's times, when unemployment and outmoded business models are painful proof that expertise in one area - no matter how sparkling - no longer guarantees success.

"I want people who are not going to be a cog in the machine," Spinelli said in a campus interview last week. "I want them to create new machines."

For much of its 126-year history, the college had a simple job: Train students in balance sheets, fabric engineering, and fashion - the types of disciplines that helped Philadelphia's and the nation's manufacturing economy hum.

In 1950, well before mass-apparel manufacturing moved overseas, all bachelor's degrees at the school were textile-related.

Today, Philadelphia and its environs are littered with factory carcasses and mansions that once belonged to textile magnates. The college has eliminated old majors and added new ones to avoid its own obsolescence.

The name changed to Philadelphia University in 1999. In September 2007, the college hired Spinelli, who was vice provost for entrepreneurship at Babson College in the Boston suburbs.

Spinelli said he believed graduates of the soon-to-be-integrated college will have an advantage because they will walk into interviews with problem-solving experience. That will help them especially if jobs are scarce.

Spinelli, 55, did not need that kind of experience in his day. Workplaces used to be de facto boot camps for new graduates. The economy was forgiving.

His own mentor had watched him in action before coughing up $2 million to help start Jiffy Lube International Inc.

"Do you think he was going to give us two million dollars?" Spinelli asked. " 'Here kids, go play?' He's not nuts. He said, 'If this doesn't turn into 20 million, I'm going to rip your hearts out with my bare hands.' So we had to go show him we could solve the problem.

"That's what attracts capital, that's what attracts people to hire you," Spinelli said. "Not standing in line and saying, 'I'm an engineer, here's my grades.'

"All of that is good and we need to do that," he added, "but it's not enough anymore. It's not enough. And we need to teach kids that."

Christopher Anderson, an architectural-engineering major, has started to come to the same conclusion, just by talking to classmates who already graduated.

His light-brown, curly locks flew as the 21-year-old from Carlisle, Pa., bolted from the library, only to hear Spinelli shouting at him from behind. The pair met on a path and said hello.

The night before, Anderson had sent Spinelli an e-mail asking for a chance to take his entrepreneurship class before graduation in the spring.

They giggled and joshed each other like locker-room buddies, rather than patriarch and peon. How, the senior was asked, did he know the president so well?

"It's Spinelli!" he said, laughing with insouciant affection, as Spinelli, too, broadened his smile. "He comes to everything. He comes to all of our stuff; he's all over."

Last year, Anderson danced the tango at a student event; Spinelli danced, too.

"I was very bad," Spinelli said, laughing even harder.

"That was awesome," Anderson replied.

Before the fall semester, Anderson was not thinking much beyond engineering.

"A couple of my friends from engineering school started doing just engineering work," he said, "and they felt like cogs in the machine."

How much fun would it be, Anderson thought, if he could turn his own ideas into reality - have that control from the start?

As Spinelli and Anderson stood there, laughing and talking, Spinelli's vision became clear: Empower the Andersons of the world to be creative and in control, from Day One.

Before their impromptu meeting ended, the pair agreed - like any team tackling a problem - that they would find a solution to Anderson's senior-year dilemma.

"We'll figure it out," Spinelli said. Ever the entrepreneur, he added: "He's got an interest, I've got a capability, we're friends, we'll work it out."