Freshman Yohan Sachdev engages Machtley in a spirited game of squash before class.

Bryant College freshman Jermaine Funchus was in his dorm, drinking and watching television with friends, when a fellow football player called to say he had been thrown out of a fraternity party across campus. He said he was going back, this time with backup.

Funchus hung up, thinking his friend was joking. He wasn’t. Looking out his window, Funchus saw other freshmen heading across campus. He followed. Within minutes, a fight was under way outside the fraternity Christmas party.

“It was an all-out brawl. There was fighting, arguing, a little bit of everything,” says Funchus, then a 6-foot, 210-pound linebacker.

The brawl made headlines across the region. Bryant officials blamed the episode on tensions between jocks and frat boys, between blacks new to campus and whites hostile to their presence.

Some of the fraternity brothers were armed with household items. One had a hammer.

Funchus, who bolted when the police arrived, reckons that the frat boys were only being sensible: “We were a bunch of 300-pound guys…. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight otherwise.”

Smithfield police and campus security arrested 15 football players and fraternity brothers and charged them with disorderly conduct. Six students were treated at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital.

The incident lingers in the campus collective memory as “the race riot” of December l998.

UNTIL THEN, Ronald K. Machtley, Bryant’s president, had been enjoying a sense of accomplishment. Two years into his term, he had established the college’s first football team.

Football, he thought, would raise the college’s public profile and build a sense of community among students. Because many of the recruits turned out to be African-American and Latino, he also got a side benefit: a quick infusion of minority students into the largely white campus.

But thrusting minority students into the campus mix required adjustments that Machtley never anticipated. “I was very naïve,” Machtley says. “I thought that these were good students, that we had succeeded, we had achieved a good start in diversity.”

Funchus, now an internal auditor for Citizens Bank in Richmond, Va., says that by the time he graduated in 2002, tensions between the black athletes and white students had subsided.

Current students, who were in junior high when the “race riot” took place, say something like that wouldn’t happen now.

Looking back, Machtley believes it was that last batch of seniors in 1998 who fought change. “There were racist and bigoted attitudes, and those students didn’t even know it. They didn’t have an appreciation for what was going on. It made me realize we had a lot of work to do,” he said.

With those growing pains behind it, Bryant is ready for more.

Now one decade into Machtley’s tenure, the school’s sights are set on opening itself to the rest of the world.

FOUNDED IN 1863 in Providence as Bryant and Stratton National Business College, the school trained students in technology that was revolutionizing business at the turn of the 20th century: the typewriter, Dictaphone, cash register and mimeograph machines.

By the 1960s, the college was outgrowing its East Side campus and looking to move elsewhere. One possible site was the 220-acre farm in Smithfield owned by Earl Tupper, then president of the Tupperware corporation. According to Bryant’s official history, Tupper was so impressed by the college’s pledge to find a job for every student upon graduation that he donated the farm.

After years of planning and construction, the college, in the fall of l971, opened its stunning new $17.5-million campus, featuring a “unistructure,” a glass-domed building that was to be the heart of all academic and social life. It would be 25 years before the college embarked on another major expansion.

In the mid-’90s, after President William E. Trueheart resigned, the search for a successor came down to two former naval officers, Ronald Machtley, former three-term Republican congressman, and Rear Adm. Joseph C. Strasser, former president of the Naval War College in Newport.

With a limited record in academia, Machtley, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Suffolk School of Law, was not the surefire choice, recalls John D. Callahan, then a member of the board of trustees. But, Machtley offered something else: a track record in raising money.

Machtley convinced the search committee over a series of interviews that he was the one most likely to bring a new vitality to the school and do so quickly, Callahan says.

He took over as the college’s seventh president in September 1996, at the age of 47.

From day one Machtley faced significant hurdles.

He inherited a school that was $1.7 million in the red. Five campus dorms were empty, evidence that enrollment had declined by nearly 1,000 full-time undergraduates since 1989. Bryant had 2,173 undergraduates, drawn from southern New England, and 652 graduate students. Academically, the college focused almost exclusively on business degrees.

Machtley determined that Bryant would not survive if it remained so geographically limited and “vanilla white.” It needed to reach outside New England and also pull in more African-American and Latino students.

“The birthrate, the economy were all down, and Bryant suffered. We weren’t growing the way we should. We were not ‘with it’ in terms of meeting the criteria of a new era,” recalls Callahan, a retired CEO of a Chicago security firm.

MACHTLEY WORKED with the trustees to draw up an ambitious plan to remake the school.

He hit the road to drum up money, using the persuasion skills honed during years of politicking. For two years he reached out to alumni before the school went public with the Campaign for Bryant, its first-ever fundraising campaign for capital improvements.

“We didn’t know how much we could raise because it had never been done,” said Machtley.

By 2005, when the campaign ended, the school had raised $40 million.

Machtley also recruited a new team of administrators and set about changing what Callahan calls the “mentality of a suitcase campus.”

“We knew students liked the school, just not on weekends. We wanted students to stay around campus and create that campus life,” Callahan says.

Between 1998 and 2002, the school, ranked in Division II of the NCAA, added five varsity sports –— football, field hockey, women’s golf, men’s and women’s lacrosse and swimming — built a 3,300-seat football stadium and added new baseball and softball fields.

After developing a full-blown athletic program, Machtley turned his attention to a $50-million expansion of the campus.

The Elizabeth and Malcolm Chace Wellness and Athletic Center opened in 2001. The center, with separate facilities for students and athletes, features a basketball arena that can seat 2,700 spectators.

The George E. Bello Center for Information and Technology opened a year later as the anchor of the newly reconfigured campus. The center includes the Douglas and Judith Krupp Library, which holds 150,000 research materials, and the C.A. Starr Financial Markets Center, where students simulate real-life trading-floor scenarios.

In a bold move, parts of the school’s vast parking lot became a grassy college quadrangle with a large reflecting pool. “The school was crying out for a quad, a place where students could gather,” explains Callahan. The quad was bounded by the school’s two oldest buildings, the Unistructure and the student union, on one side, and the new information-technology center and wellness center on the other.

Meanwhile, Machtley’s new administrative team was rethinking the school’s academic offerings, starting with the introduction of programs in sociology and applied economics. A new master’s degree program in business administration was started for those who wanted to go to school part-time at night. This academic year, Bryant added four humanities programs: global studies, history, literary and cultural studies, and politics and law.

Bryant invested in major technology upgrades in all its classrooms and, since 2001, has issued a new laptop to every freshman.

The school also set a higher standard for its faculty, 98 percent of whom now hold doctorate degrees. (There are currently 148 full-time faculty members and 93 part-time professors.)

The academic overhaul culminated in the creation of a College of Arts and Sciences to complement the Business College. And, as the school sought to go global, Bryant officials feared the title of “college” was being lost in translation.

“The word college is very limited,” explains Machtley. “In trying to establish an international presence, we were finding that ‘college’ in other languages meant preparatory or secondary school.”

So in 2004, with more diverse academic courses, Bryant College made what Machtley characterizes as the “easy transition” to Bryant University.

CHANGES IN physical layout, campus life and academic offerings have brought Bryant back to the enrollment it enjoyed in the 1980s.

Today Bryant has 3,090 full-time undergraduate students and 550 graduate students.While that is a gain of about 900 students in 10 years, Machtley makes the case that the biggest achievement has been attracting a better student. “We didn’t want to just open up the gates and let everyone in,” Machtley says. “It was a question of how to improve enrollment while improving the quality of students we accepted every year.”

Applications to graduate and undergraduate programs have increased 300 percent since 1996, from around 1,850 that year to 5,800 in 2006 and, even more, 5,954, in 2007.

The increase allows the university to be more selective. In 1995, the school offered admission to 82 percent of its applicants; by 2006, that rate was down to 44 percent. For next year’s freshman class, only 42 percent of applicants got admission offers, according to university spokesperson Rene Buissson.

The average SAT score for incoming students has gone up 150 points, from 1001 in 1996 to 1151 in next year’s class. (A perfect score for the critical reading and mathematics portions of the SAT is 1600.)

Taylor, the board of trustees chairman, says the campus has a way to go before it is a “balanced” campus. The university still relies heavily on its sterling business reputation, with 87 percent of its students enrolled in the College of Business and the remaining 13 percent in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Machtley says the goal is to grow the arts and science college while keeping the business college enrollment steady. He would like to see three business students for every arts and sciences student by 2011.

Bryant still lacks geographic balance. Although greater numbers of students are applying from outside New England, 83 percent of students who enroll still hail from Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Another 7 percent come from New York.

Machtley emphasizes that the school is attracting more women. Ten years ago, the campus was 40 percent female; now it’s 47 percent.

Demographically, the statistics are modest but encouraging: enrollment of undergraduate students of color has increased from 263 in 2001 to 322 this year, according to Lorna Hunter, vice president for enrollment management and admission. Yet, the graduate school has seen a drop in minority student enrollment, from 93 in 2001 to 30 this year.

International undergraduate and graduate students total 88, with 19 percent from Asian countries, 29 percent from Central and South America, and 6 percent from Europe, said Hunter.

Wilberte Paul, president of the multicultural student union, remembers when she was first considering the school that she could count the number of minority students on one hand. “We’re still not diverse, but it is getting better,” the senior says. “Slowly [the administration] is trying. Students of color are certainly more visible than before.”

Even with the number of minority students increasing, Paul says some students still find campus life lacking. Students of color become quickly disillusioned with the atmosphere, which is sometimes hostile to their presence, she says. The result is that many minority and international students transfer out after the first year, while others opt to live off campus, Paul says.

However, Hunter, vice president of enrollment, says transfer rates are the same as in previous years.

Tuition will be $27,639 next year. Living on campus will cost between $6,414 for a dormitory suite to $8,378 for a single room in a townhouse. A meal plan will run as high as $4,514.

Under Machtley, the university endowment has swelled from $96.4 million to more than $150 million in 10 years.

The college budget no longer relies solely on tuition and fees, a situation that led to the operating deficit Machtley faced in 1996. Since 1997, the university has run surpluses in excess of $1 million annually.

That financial security has freed the university to plan $100 million in renovations and new construction, much of it ready for use in the fall. It includes a $22-million residence hall for 200 students, a $4-million expansion of the cafeteria, and transformation of the old library in the unistructure into faculty offices and classrooms.

An $8-million interfaith chapel is in the design stage, and by 2010, Machtley says the university is considering a new academic hall.

BRYANT AIMS to garner an international reputation almost exclusively on building a relationship with China’s leading businessmen, politicians and artists. Once again, the university is pinning its hopes on Machtley’s ability to sell the idea to the country’s leaders.

“…it is important to move in the area of strengthening and getting better, not necessarily bigger,” says Taylor, a trustee. “We’d rather be an inch wide and a mile deep rather than a mile wide and an inch deep.”

Prof. Hong Yang, director of the university’s new U.S.-China Institute, is Machtley’s point man for making the university an international player.

Yang believes Bryant’s forays into China can offer more breadth and depth than what other U.S. institutions offer.

“To do business today, you cannot ignore China,” Yang says. “Our goal is to be a leader and educational liaison with China. When people think about studying international business, we want them to immediately think of Bryant.”

Yang, who joined the Bryant faculty in 1999, focused Machtley’s attention on Shanghai, the country’s financial center. “As a university president, he needs to understand the dynamics of Shanghai. That’s where all the business is happening.”

Since 2004, Machtley has flown to Shanghai for the mayor’s annual business summit and has established a friendly and personal relationship with the mayor.

Last November, Machtley inked a deal with the Chinese Ministry of Education that gives the university $100,000 to enhance its Chinese language programs and cultural offerings. The Chinese government has committed two professors of Chinese language to teach exclusively at Bryant over the next five years and to donate thousands of books, CDs and other educational material to support the university’s Chinese language program.

In October, Machtley will return to Shanghai to co-sponsor a forum for university leaders during the city’s annual mayor’s summit. That event is expected to bring together university leaders to discuss environmental management in China.

On campus, the institute sponsors a monthly campus seminar featuring prominent China scholars and Chinese government officials. Bryant will also host a national exhibit of artifacts of revered Chinese philosopher Confucius when it tours the United States next year.

“The programs show Bryant’s goal has broadened,” Yang concludes. “They guarantee that locally, at the very least, we are the leader in China-centered programs.”

Junior Ryan Daley, an opinion writer for the student newspaper, The Archway, says the student body has, on occasion, collectively rolled its eyes at the new global perspective. “Diversity, when it is more than of the color of one’s skin, and is of opinion and beliefs, is a great thing,” Daley says. “But sometimes I think the diversity here is more on the surface, to sell the school; that it is a lot of in-your-face-marketing and nothing more.”

A POTENTIALLY explosive situation last November echoed the racial tensions that led to the December 1998 brawl between black football players and white fraternity brothers.

A white freshman posted a public diatribe on Facebook, a social networking Web site, which criticized what he saw as the university’s favoritism toward minority students. The student, who was living in a suite with some minority athletes, wrote, in part: “hey I’ve got an idea! let’s go recruit a bunch of minorities, who are much less intelligent than the rest of the student body, and destroy any reputation the school still had!”

His comment was e-mailed to every minority and international student on campus. “The idea that we are all scholarship athletes is still very prevalent,” says Paul, who leads the multicultural student organization. “A lot of students of color say they hear that kind of talk from time to time. But to actually see it on paper — on a Web site — made it real for the administration, and they had to act.”

The students, instead of brawling, organized a silent march across campus in December to draw attention to the need to improve race relations.

For university officials, the student’s remarks were an anomaly in a campus climate that has become more open to change and diversity. And considering how far Bryant has come since December 1998, it was a minor bump in the road, Machtley says.

“The more you confront diversity issues, the more problems you might expect,” Machtley says. “But if you keep going with the positive attitude and admit where you need work, you can resolve these things.”

pmarcelo@projo.com