Jeff Williams: A Citizen of the Campus

University of Cincinnati alumnus Jeff Williams, DAAP ’75, comes from a family of seven siblings. He grew up in an idyllic suburb of Cincinnati which he describes as a typical small town.

“This was in the 1950s and ’60s,” Jeff explains. “It was a bucolic way to grow up. Everyone knew everyone else. We lived within walking distance of the school. My siblings were always ahead of me or behind me in school, so there was always somebody to follow or someone following me.”

In the wake of the baby boom, the local school district built several new schools. Jeff’s father was on the school board, so Jeff got to spend time around the architects planning the new schools. He was fascinated by their work and decided to pursue it as a career.

“I applied to UC, primarily for the affordable tuition, the quality architecture program, and the co-op opportunity,” Jeff says.

During his sophomore year, he was urged to apply to be a resident advisor in the men’s dormitory. Jeff speculates this was possibly the most formative thing that happened to him at UC. “Being an RA forced me to get to know people outside of my academic program. RAs were all notoriously overachievers. I met all these motivated students who were active in student government, getting good grades, and headed to graduate school. In a sense, I became a true citizen of the campus.”

He made many good friends, some of whom he’s still close with today. Though he ultimately fell out of love with becoming an architect, he finished the program and considered what to do after graduation. Many of his friends were headed to graduate school to study business or law, which opened his eyes to the realization that graduate school could be a fresh start. Jeff earned his bachelor of architecture from UC in 1975, and after working for a few years, he entered the MBA program at Harvard University.

He graduated from Harvard with honors and became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where, he explains, “I met another crowd of overachievers who respected hard work and integrity. At the firm, they took young people under their wings to help them learn because—it was still a small firm then—one person not getting the job done could drag things down.”

From 1979 to 1996, he worked with corporations doing mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications and media sectors, and doing numerous deals with AT&T. After handling the breakup of AT&T in 1996, he left Morgan Stanley and joined McGraw-Hill and then went on to become founding partner of Greenhill & Co. In 2003, he started his own firm, Jeffrey Williams & Co., LLC, which focused on telecommunications and media. Jeff retired in 2013.

Lessons from the Foundation Board

His connection to UC grew along with his career. Jeff became active at UC because a fellow alumnus and mentor, Jim Kautz, encouraged him to get involved. Jeff later became the vice chair (2003 – 2005) of the Foundation board and eventually chair (2005 – 2009).

“When I began working with the Foundation, some of the people who were instrumental in founding it were still around. They were the early leaders, generous in spirit as well as financially and they loved UC.”

During the next few years, the new board instituted a formal audit process, term limits for members, a succession process, and, for the first time, formed a compensation committee.

When asked about the most meaningful experience he had working with the Foundation board, Jeff says, “I was chairman of the board when it was decided that it was time to proceed with a major capital campaign, the Proudly Cincinnati campaign, which ran from 2005 to 2013. Nancy Zimpher, then UC’s president, and I recruited Buck Niehoff and Otto Budig Jr. as co-chairs. Initially, the campaign goal was $800 million, but we had tremendous good fortune in the quiet phase and were able to raise $500 million. We called everyone together, and explained that we appeared to be shooting too low and that we might want to consider raising our goal to the ‘B number.’ We ultimately raised the campaign goal to $1 billion dollars and, of course, we exceeded even that goal.”

According to Jeff, UC was, at the time, one of only a couple dozen public universities to have ever raised a billion dollars in a campaign.

Jeff says that part of what made being the Foundation chairman so special was that he got to come back to the place where he’d had such a transformational undergraduate experience, but now, as a mature individual who could contribute even more.

Jeff is proud that he’s been able to contribute to his alma mater in such a meaningful way.