2024 Economic Impact Awards Lifetime Achievement in Business: Clif Smart, Missouri State University

Clif Smart may not have been the obvious choice to lead a university, but he turned out to be the right one. Smart became interim president of Missouri State University at a critical time, when his predecessor resigned after just 11 months on the job. A leadership void had been created at the largest higher education institution in southwest Missouri, and in 2011, Smart, then university general counsel, was asked to step into it.

He says he anticipated his interim presidency to last 10 months. “We had a really good year, and we were successful on a lot of fronts, and so I was encouraged to apply for the job that became my last job,” he recalls.

After 13 years leading MSU, Smart, 63, retired June 30 from a role he loved and quickly grew into. As his good friend and former leader of Community Foundation of the Ozarks Brian Fogle says, Smart’s path from a career in the legal field to leading the university ushered him from success to significance.

Smart’s accomplishments stack high. Under his leadership, the university set multiple enrollment records, with a Springfield campus high of 24,390 students in 2018 following a system high – including West Plains students – of 26,216 the year before. With the current academic year’s fall class, the university had its largest-ever class of first-time students with 2,685 and its largest graduate student enrollment of 4,288.

Under Smart’s guidance, MSU completed two comprehensive campaigns to raise a combined $441 million. Onward Upward crossed the finish line in October 2022 with much fanfare and $274 million raised.

MSU became a doctoral granting institution under his watch, recognized by the Missouri Coordinating Board of Higher Education and the Higher Learning Commission, and offering doctoral degrees in occupational therapy, psychology, and defense and strategic studies.

Numerous building projects have come to completion, including a state-of-the-art renovation to the home of the business college, Glass Hall, and new campus facilities like the Davis-Harrington Welcome Center, the John Goodman Amphitheater, the Magers Health and Wellness Center and residence hall Heitz House.

He developed, with his team, the Efactory business incubator in downtown Springfield, supporting the creation of 3,000 jobs and new innovations and product developments. Smart calls it “the hub of small, local entrepreneurship.”

Growing on the Jordan Valley Innovation Center and Idea Commons projects that were led by former MSU president Mike Nietzel, Smart continued efforts to revitalize downtown with a research park and business development center.

In his final months in office, he paved the way for major expansions in university athletics with the move to Conference USA from the Missouri Valley Conference in summer 2025. And a roughly $20 million advancement center fronting the campus was announced, with an anonymous seven-figure gift made to help create the building that will bear his name, the Clifton M. Smart III Advancement Center.

As university president, he led an enterprise with revenue of roughly $400 million last year and nearly 4,000 faculty and staff.

Tom Strong, who hired Smart as an attorney at his firm and has been a longtime MSU supporter and donor, speaks with certainty about Smart’s legacy. “I graduated from this university in 1952. … I know a good university president when I see one,” Strong says. “Clif is the best university president I have ever seen.”

Legal basis
Smart graduated from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1986, entering the U.S. Army the same year. He spent four years in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps before moving to Little Rock – his wife Gail’s hometown – to start his career in private law practice.

In 1992, he joined what is now Strong Law PC and became a shareholder in 1995.

Smart says law fit him well. He liked to read and write and had done well in school. “I always thought I’d be a lawyer; never thought I’d be university president,” he says.

At Strong Law, he represented CoxHealth in medical malpractice cases and defended catastrophically injured clients.

“Whether it’s representing a doctor accused of malpractice or representing someone who’s been paralyzed in a truck accident or maimed in a propane explosion, the thing that I loved about practicing law was figuring out a puzzle,” he says. “Every case was different.”

In his law practice, he learned the art of communication, developing coherent theories and arguments, how to organize ideas and getting work accomplished. Those qualities would prove to be essential in the years to come.

Stepping up
In 2007, Smart says he was looking for a professional change and to slow down. His mentor, Strong, helped secure an interview at the university for the role of general counsel. “It was going to be more of a 9 to 5 kind of job,” Smart says.

That “slow down” lasted for about three and a half years before he was tapped by the board as university president.

With no experience in academia, Smart says he knew he needed to develop trust with faculty. He says his first move was to promote then-graduate dean Frank Einhellig to provost.

“It gave me instant credibility,” Smart says. “He was widely respected within our academic community, and that sort of calmed everybody down.”

Einhellig, who retired as provost in 2022, says with Smart at the helm, the university gave low-income students access to dual-credit courses at no cost, added professional doctorate programs and certificates to boost workforce development and made college more affordable.

“We made educational opportunities more available,” Einhellig says.

Smart concurs, adding his biggest accomplishment in his tenure was the designation as a professional doctoral university.

“That sets the stage for so many things,” he says, “expanded research and attracting a different level student and hiring a different level faculty member.”

In his last year in office, Smart signed an agreement with CoxHealth, Ozarks Technical Community College and Springfield Public Schools to start the Alliance of Healthcare Education, which has since added Evangel University as a partner. The alliance is designed to expand training opportunities for health care professionals, deepening the workforce pipeline in part for the two largest employers in the region.

Leadership lessons
Smart says a leader must drive change, cast a vision and stay on the cutting edge.

He counts three mentors as having influenced his life and approach to work: his dad, Murray, who he says had more integrity than anyone; former president Nietzel who hired him as general counsel and is the smartest guy he knows, “I called Mike every day during the pandemic;” and his former boss and law partner, Strong, who he says is unmatched when it comes to preparation and work ethic.

A winning attitude gleaned from Strong is something that served him well in presidential leadership.

“I remember a time pretty early on in the presidency where our freshman class had kind of bumped down a couple of years in a row, and our team’s like, ‘You know, Clif, there’s just fewer people going to college and we’re just going to get smaller.’ And I’m like, ‘No, that doesn’t have to be the answer. … There are going to be winners and there are losers and we got to figure out how we’re going to be on the winning side,’” he recalls.

Smart says he’s matured over the years in his leadership, becoming slow to anger and quick to listen. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t push his team toward excellence: “People can often do more than they think they can.

“Part of my leadership strategy is to bring in really good people, people who are better than I am at certain things, and turn them loose and have their back,” he says, adding that he counts his former colleagues as close friends. “It was never a lonely job for me.”

Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, who worked alongside Smart for years advocating for university and southwest Missouri funding in the state legislature, says his impact was in the way he empowered those around him.

“The staff and the faculty and the students, I think, would all agree that he’s one of the best leaders that that university has ever had. I think it goes back to that style of trust,” Hough says. “When I think about Clif and Gail, they are more than Missouri State. They are the fabric of this community, and we are all far better off because of the role he and Gail have played running Missouri State for the last 13 years.”

Smart says his connection with students and the community was key to his tenure.

“In the last couple years of the presidency, most students would know who I am or at least would know who the president is. That’s not true everywhere,” he says. “That was an intentional strategy to promote the university and engage our students and kind of help create that culture where you could call the president by his first name.”

In reflecting on lessons learned over the past 13 years, Smart says kindness in leadership matters. Diversity is also key. He says back in 2011, the MSU leadership team was almost all white, male and in their 60s. “As we changed that and brought in younger people and people of color and a lot more women and people of different political persuasions and different backgrounds, we just had better conversations and that helped us lead the organization better,” he says.

And it all comes down to trust, Smart says: “Trust the team and hire people smarter than you, empower those people to take risks – that’s where success lies.”

Smart said he is looking forward to retirement, spending more time with Gail and their two sons, Murray and Jim, and their grandchildren, as well as traveling with friends. Perhaps that slowdown he envisioned when he joined the university as general counsel is finally here.