Cliff Hughes, USF’s former purchasing director who retired Oct. 1. saw his purchasing budget grow from $4 million to $25 million.
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Buyer’s Delight, or How Cliff Hughes Flexed his Purchasing Power for 37 Years
Cliff Hughes, the recently retired director of purchasing, witnessed the incremental but steady march of change during his 37-year career at USF. He can cite, for example, that there were 12 university-owned IBM copiers in 1978, while the campus uses more than 100 today. Copy paper necessary to feed those machines each year has grown from about 25 tons 20 years ago to approximately 95 tons today. Before the days of personal computers, the university had to order 437 different printed forms to do business. Today, only eight forms cannot be printed out by a campus PC.
Campus life changed most dramatically with the advent of the desktop computer. When Hughes came to campus, in 1966, the university had recently bought its first prototype: a monstrous Spectra 70 RCA with a punch card operation that filled up the room later called the computer center.
“It didn’t even have 75 kilobytes of RAM,” Hughes recalled. Almost 20 years later, he introduced the first Apple II computers to campus, at a cost of $1,000 to $4,000 each. “We’ve been going through a lot of them since then,” he said.
Hughes, 62, retired from his post Oct. 1. The 1963 USF alumnus worked under seven presidents during his USF career, starting with Charles Dullea, S.J. in 1966 when Hughes was hired as director of University Center. When the center opened, Hughes got his introduction to filling innumerable campus demands when 3,000 requests for classroom space poured into his office the first day of the building’s operation.
“He’s one of the individuals around here who’s behind the scenes keeping things going,” said John Lo Schiavo, chancellor and former president. “It’s people like Cliff who keep pace with the university’s changes.”
Hughes went on to oversee campus housing before switching to business and finance as an assistant to the vice president in 1976. Two years later, he took over the purchasing department. At the time, Hughes controlled a $4 million budget, an allowance that has grown to $25 million today. It could well be more than that amount if Hughes hadn’t negotiated discounted contracts with suppliers during his tenure. Other job duties have included acting as university marshal for commencement and supervising the campus’s emergency operations center, which he manned during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
“He was very dedicated to the university community and he wholeheartedly tackled any project thrown his way,” said Janet Taymourtash, the new director of purchasing and Hughes’ co-worker for 22 years. “I emphasize ‘tackled’ because anything that can’t be handled by other departments comes to purchasing.”
USF’s shopping list hasn’t been limited only to Post-It Notes and Scotch tape, however. Up until the late ’70s, anatomy classes for pre-med majors still needed cadavers, at $375 each, from the San Francisco Mortuary Society. There were also Physics Professor Eugene Benton’s requests for special European-made machinery related to his work for NASA in the ’70s and ’80s. Even relieving the bursar’s office of 24 file cabinets that became obsolete after the advent of the computer fell to Hughes’ office.
“(The office) is the backbone of the university, we had to maintain efficiency,” Hughes said. “We have a joke in the office that the difficult we do right away, the impossible might take a little longer. But we get it done.”
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