After almost 18 years of service on behalf of students, Tarpon Springs Provost Conferlete Carney will bid farewell to St. Petersburg College when he retires June 30.
Under Carney’s leadership, the college has undergone many large-scale system implementations and projects, including:
- selection and implementation of the PeopleSoft system
- creation of a college disaster recovery strategy and backup data center at Seminole State College in case of a hurricane or another major emergency
- two Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accreditation processes
- achieving accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums for the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art
- creation of the Tarpon Springs Campus master plan
Ann Larsen, Director, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, described Carney as a tremendous support during the LRMA accreditation process.
“Dr. Carney has been a real champion for the value of the arts to a complete education, and has supported our efforts to grow LRMA as a learning laboratory for all fields of study at SPC,” Larsen said.
Carney, who has served as Provost at the Tarpon Springs Campus since 2008, describes his time at SPC as a meaningful experience both personally and professionally.
“I get intrinsic joy out of having worked on major projects and seeing them come into fruition,” Carney said. “My experience here has been very rewarding.”
It was at SPC that he found a rewarding second career in higher education as Director of Administrative Information Systems (AIS) in 1996. He moved up to become Vice President of Information Systems and Institutional Research two years later.
In 2001, Conferlete assumed the additional responsibility of Vice President of Business Services, Budgeting and Planning, a role in which he was responsible for the college’s financial reporting, budget planning and institutional effectiveness.
Conferlete said he had a vision many years ago that he would one day work on a college campus.
“It was like a premonition,” he said. “I saw myself walking on the sidewalk towards this building with a briefcase in my hand, and I knew it was in higher education but I didn’t know where it was.”
As it turns out, the building he saw was the Allstate Center, which is where the SPC data center was located at that time.
“When I got the job at the Allstate Center, I knew that was the job that I had seen a few years before in the vision,” he said.
It also was through an SPC-sponsored leadership initiative that he earned his doctoral degree in higher education administration and met Angela Picard, the woman who would later become his wife.
“We met as part of the doctorial cohort,” Carney said about a program initiative at the University of Florida that aimed to help develop future leaders in higher education. Nationally, higher education is experiencing a leadership gap due to the retirements of many higher education leaders and SPC, at the time, initiated the program to help selected administrators earn their doctoral degrees. “My wife was a part of that initial cohort and I met her through the program and we got married.”
Before starting his career at SPC, Carney retired from a 27-year career at GTE Corporation, where he held a wide range of management and executive positions in advanced switching, networking and information processing technologies.
Although he retires June 30, he will begin leave on June 6 and will begin traveling with his wife. He plans to spend much of his time traveling, indulging in hobbies such as stargazing and visiting Civil War historical sites, and renovating his condo in New York.
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