Roy J. Nirschel stands confidently before the packed audience of more than 100 people eager to hear how he has turned Roger Williams University around.

Nirschel, the president of the university, is wearing his uniform: a navy blue pinstripe suit from Brooks Brothers, a red silk tie, black wingtips and wire-rim glasses. In public, he has a polished way about him and can seem a cross between a politician and a salesman.

He delivers his sales pitch to the annual meeting of the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officials. Roger Williams, Nirschel declares, has quickly become a quality educational institution.

Five and a half years ago, when he was hired to preside over the university, that was a hard sell. Not anymore, he tells the audience at the Providence Marriott.

In the 51 years since it was founded, Roger Williams has grown from a junior college offering night courses in Providence to a university with accredited business and architecture schools, a respected marine-sciences program and Rhode Island’s only law school, all located on a bucolic 140-acre campus on Bristol’s waterfront.

Nirschel describes a trip he made during his Christmas vacation in 2005 to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. He did it without friends or family, climbing with only a cook and a guide.

"It’s one of the most grueling treks in the world," he says and then pauses.

"It pales in comparison to being president of a university."

He gets some appreciative laughs and then launches into his tale about Roger Williams University.

"I don’t want to brag about our place," he says. "But I think it’s a good story."

Judging by the numbers alone, Roger Williams University is not the same school that Nirschel arrived at in the fall of 2001.

It has more students, more teachers, more buildings and more money than ever before. Perhaps that’s not so unusual for most academic institutions. What is unusual is how dramatic those increases have been.

Under Nirschel’s leadership, a $3-million deficit in the university’s operating budget has become a $13.1-million surplus. Annual donations have grown from $946,000 to $6.6 million. The endowment has more than doubled, from $38 million to $98 million.

Enrollment has increased from 3,700 undergraduate and graduate students to 5,172. The faculty has seen a parallel increase, growing from 150 teachers to 283.

A larger student body has meant larger and better facilities. The university embarked on a massive construction program in 2002 and has already spent $60 million. An expanded recreation center with an Olympic-size swimming pool opened in 2005. A new dining hall opened before the start of this academic year. Another $40 million of work is being planned.

Academic programs have improved, and the university has steadily climbed the rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report. This past summer, for the first time, it was rated among the top 10 comprehensive colleges in the northern United States.

Course offerings have expanded, with students now able to earn graduate degrees in public administration, forensic psychology and architecture.

The school has a new focus on global studies, and a new slogan: “Learning to Bridge the World.” Students can learn Arabic and Mandarin Chinese and study abroad in 30 different countries, including Italy, where Roger Williams runs an academic center, and Vietnam, where the university has set up a sister school.

The school has raised its profile by becoming the first U.S. institution to offer scholarships through the “Initiative to Educate Afghan Women,” a program started by Nirschel’s wife, Paula, and by hosting visits from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, the president of the European Commission, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and, most recently, the first lady.

The changes have also raised Nirschel’s profile. Last November, University Business, a trade magazine, put him at the top of its list of “rising stars.”

ROY JOSEPH NIRSCHEL is 54 years old. He is tall and clean-shaven. On workdays, he almost always wears a suit and is so rarely seen in casual attire that one day this past July the public-affairs office at the university organized a special photo shoot simply to get pictures on file of Nirschel in shorts and a T-shirt.

He’s a natural on stage who has made a tradition out of good-naturedly singing off-key tunes to the graduating seniors at commencement. His parodies at the four ceremonies he’s led have included covers of an Eminem rap and the American Idol theme song.

Despite his comfort in the spotlight, his employees describe him as a private person, and he admits to craving solitude.

He reads The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, but he also subscribes to Rolling Stone. His favorite book is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but he also seems comfortable talking about the latest season of The O.C.

He was not the obvious choice to fill the vacant presidency at Roger Williams. After Joseph H. Hagan was arrested for drunken driving and then forced to resign the presidency in May 2001, the university’s search committee went through several candidates before they considered Nirschel.

At the time, he was in his third year as president of tiny Newbury College, in Brookline, Mass., and had just steered the school through its first-ever accreditation.

Over a 20-year career in academia, Nirschel had built a reputation as a prolific fundraiser in positions at the University of Hartford, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Miami. He raised more money in three years in charge of Newbury than in the combined previous 36 years of the school’s existence.

But he was a relative unknown. It took a phone call from George J. Matthews, the chairman emeritus of the board of trustees at Northeastern University, in Boston, to get him an interview at Roger Williams. Matthews was impressed by Nirschel’s work at Newbury and recommended him to Ralph R. Papitto, the longtime chairman of the board of trustees at Roger Williams.

Nirschel made an immediate impression, says Stephen B. Kistner, a trustee who served on the search committee.

“I thought Roy was the top candidate by far,” says Kistner, a managing director with U.S. Trust in Boston. “He had a vision of where Roger Williams could go.”

Nirschel was encouraged by a tour of the campus. But he saw problems. First and foremost, the university lacked a positive identity. It was the top choice for few applicants and a safety school for many. Students had taken to saying that RWU stood for "Rich White Underachievers."

"You’d go down the list of schools in Rhode Island," Nirschel recalls. "What did people think of when you said their names? Bryant? Business. Johnson and Wales? Culinary arts. RISD? Art and design. Roger Williams? Nice location."

That mediocrity didn’t discourage Nirschel."You don’t take a job somewhere for what the place is," he says. "You take it for what it can become."

ROGER WILLIAMS has made a habit out of becoming new things over the years.

The school was founded in 1919 when Northeastern University opened a branch of its School of Commerce and Finance inside the Providence YMCA on Broad Street. It was known as the Providence Technical Institute and later, after Northeastern ended its association, the YMCA Institute.

In 1956, it became Roger Williams Junior College, the first institution in Rhode Island to award two-year associate’s degrees. It was small, with only 62 full-time students and 209 evening students.

The school had only modest ambitions. A 1958 Journal article described it this way:

"Roger Williams has no elms, no verdant lawns, no football team and no real endowment. Its facilities are a handful of classrooms and offices rented from the YMCA. The vistas to be appreciated from its windows are those of gravel rooftops and neon signs in a crowded section of the city.

"It has a one-room student union furnished with two round tables and a few lamps and stuffed chairs. It has a program built around the specialized vocational and educational requirements of students who do not fit readily into the standard pattern of the four-year colleges."

That program wouldn’t change after the state allowed it to operate as a four-year college in 1966.

"We’re looking for kids who for some reason have not lived up to their potential," Dr. Ralph E. Gauvey, the school’s second president, told the Journal in 1967. "We want those who didn’t make it at Yale or other colleges — not all flunk-outs but some."

With the step up to college status, the board of trustees decided the school needed to move out of the YMCA and find a permanent campus. So Gauvey acquired Ferrycliffe, a 63-acre dairy farm on the southern tip of Bristol.

The new $8-million campus overlooking Mount Hope Bay opened on Sept. 29, 1969. Over the next two decades, enrollment would steadily grow to upwards of 3,000 students, and the college would buy adjoining pieces of land to accommodate the growth.

Roger Williams took its most ambitious step in 1989 when it started exploring the establishment of Rhode Island’s first law school.

Providence College and the University of Rhode Island had done their own studies into creating law programs, finding a need but not the money to launch. Roger Williams, a school that had yet to create any graduate programs, did.

In 1992, on the eve of the founding of what would eventually be named the Ralph R. Papitto School of Law, Roger Williams became a university. Papitto, the president of the board of trustees, led the aggressive effort to set up the $20-million school.

“That was a real coup,” the now retired founder of Nortek recalls. “They said we couldn’t do it. We did.”

WHEN NIRSCHEL was selected to be the university’s eighth president, it seemed a good fit. He knew what it was like to rise up from a modest beginning.

He grew up in Stamford, Conn. His father was a firefighter and his mother was a homemaker. The family, which included Nirschel’s two younger brothers, lived in an apartment in a multifamily house that one of his grandfathers, a stonemason, built.

Neither of his parents was well-educated. His mother didn’t go to school beyond the ninth grade. His father didn’t go much further.

But reading was important in their household. There were always back issues of National Geographic lying around or old books Nirschel’s father was given while moonlighting on landscaping jobs for the city’s wealthy families. The family had an eclectic collection, books on Buddhism sitting alongside biographies of Davy Crockett and John Muir.

Nirschel traces his interest in international issues back to his 12th birthday, when his parents gave him a Hallecrafter S120 radio. He got a ham radio license and became an expert operator.

"You could tune in the world on it," he says. "One day, I’d listen to Radio China. The next, it would be Radio Cuba. Then Radio Mozambique. I realized what was out there."

He was only a mediocre student. He still remembers the rejection letter from the Connecticut state university system, saying that college wasn’t for everybody and suggesting he look into the military or a trade.

But Nirschel persisted, and in 1970 he became the first person in his family to go to college when he enrolled in Sacred Heart College, a small school in Connecticut. He worked hard and excelled. After finishing out the school year, he transferred to Southern Connecticut State University, a more competitive school.

He graduated with a degree in history, and dabbled in freelance journalism and then politics. In 1978, he ran for a seat in the Connecticut state legislature, but as a Republican candidate in a heavily Democratic district, he predictably lost.

He met his wife, Paula, while campaigning. He also made connections and started working as the spokesman for the GOP delegation in the Connecticut Senate. One of the politicians he worked for told him he should think of a career in higher education.

Nirschel was 30 when he was hired by the University of Hartford as a director of development in 1982. He was there to raise funds, something he did well. Four years later, he became an assistant vice president at the University of Pittsburgh, where he did the same thing.

And five years after that, he moved to the University of Miami, taking on a different title, vice president for university advancement, but still focusing on fundraising.

He wanted more, but he realized that he wouldn’t go further without higher degrees. So he got a master’s degree in public administration. And then in 1994, when he was 42, he set his sights on a Ph.D.

"I said, ‘OK, it’s a seven-year program. I can do it in three. I just need to give up lots of nights and lots of weekends," he recalls.

As planned three years later, he walked across a stage at the University of Miami, collected his diploma, and, in his own words, went from Mr. Nirschel to Dr. Nirschel.

IN THE DAYS after his inauguration as president of Roger Williams, Nirschel realized there were more problems at the school than he saw on his first visit.“There wasn’t as much going on inside as there seemed to be from the outside,” he says.

He focused on what he knew best — fundraising — and launched a $30-million capital campaign. But chief among Nirschel’s goals was improving the quality of students. It would, he says, help cultivate donations.

“People want to invest in winners, not places that are on plateaus or in decline,” he says.

Before 2001, it was hard to get rejected from Roger Williams. Nine out of 10 applicants got in. The reasons for the high acceptance rate were many, but Nirschel says it was primarily because of the university’s nearly total reliance on tuition to fund its budget. The school, by necessity, had to take in students who weren’t qualified or a good fit.

The practice led to an abysmal graduation rate of only 34 percent. It was bad for the school’s reputation but also bad for the bottom line. As students would leave, the admissions department would then have to recruit aggressively to fill their places.

But as the endowment grew and finances improved, the pressure to take in unqualified applicants decreased. As a result, the admissions department got pickier. The mean SAT score of incoming students has risen 20 points to 1086.

Better able to handle the rigors of a college education, fewer drop out now. The graduation rate currently stands at 66 percent, a significant improvement, though well below the rates of elite institutions, which are typically in the 90s.

But perhaps the best measure of how Roger Williams has changed can be seen in an increased demand to get in. Applications have doubled since 2002, and in 2005, of 7,100 applicants only 1,150 were accepted to the school.

HISTORICALLY, it wasn’t just the students who had underachieved at Roger Williams; faculty members had also failed to perform. Nirschel partly attributes the problem to previous administrations’ low expectations. Until he arrived, he says, no professor eligible for tenure had ever been rejected.

Soon after he was hired, Nirschel met with June Speakman, the chair of the political science department and at the time the president of the faculty union. Speakman got the sense that he was uncomfortable with the presence of a union. Whereas most public universities have faculty unions, Roger Williams is one of only 66 private educational institutions in the country where the teachers are unionized.

“He said he wanted to make the faculty so happy there’d be no need for a union,” Speakman says of their 2001 meeting. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

But not for want of trying on Nirschel’s part, she observes. He signed a new contract with the union soon after taking over. He also reinstated the faculty senate, and started holding monthly meetings with faculty members.

In recent years, there has been a general tension among faculty members as Roger Williams, historically a teaching institution, has changed into a school that places an equal focus on research.

Some older faculty members, who were hired years ago for their teaching ability rather than their research skills, have had trouble adapting to modern academia with its focus on publishing articles and books. Speakman, the current president of the faculty senate, believes the tension reflects a positive change.

“That’s a sign of a maturing university,” she says. “I call it a growing pain.”

Michael Swanson could be considered a member of the old guard. A history teacher, he has been at Roger Williams since 1972. He helped found the historic-preservation program and in the mid-1970s was dean of students.

Swanson is devoted to teaching and is unapologetic about his less-than-prolific publishing record.

“I’ve been published exactly twice in the last 30 years,” he says. “I don’t think I’d get tenure here under the current rules.”

But he also says the changes at Roger Williams are good for the school and says Nirschel is responsible for many. The university may be growing, and it may have greater ambitions, but, he says, “I can still go knock on the president’s door and run an idea by him.”

That sort of accessibility has endeared Nirschel to people on campus. The president maintains a near-ubiquitous presence around the school, showing up at classes, lectures, sports events and ceremonies honoring students and faculty alike.

When Adam Braver, an assistant professor of creative writing, released his third novel last June, he held a low-key reading one Thursday night at the Providence Athenaeum. Nirschel attended.

STUDENTS are impressed by Nirschel.

Ethan Marron, who graduated in May and is now a law student at American University in Washington D.C., believes Nirschel has built a strong relationship with students by creating innovative programs and hosting interesting speakers.

He mentions the visit of the Syrian ambassador to the United States during his senior year. The school has a high-enough profile that it could bring the ambassador in to give a speech, but it’s also small enough that Marron could approach him afterward to have an informal conversation about politics in the Middle East.

“I don’t think that would happen at other places,” he says.

Marron, who graduated with a degree in political science, says the president also started programs that link the classroom to the real world. He points to the Center for Macro Projects and Diplomacy, an interdisciplinary program started two years ago that aims to find solutions to major international issues such as rebuilding after war and creating a sustainable drinking-water supply.

At a conference in 2004, the first in an annual series, the center took up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Here we are, a bunch of students at Roger Williams, trying to change the world," Marron says of the event.

Senior Mike Witek, the student body president, has a succinct answer when asked what Nirschel has done for Roger Williams. "Put it on the map," he says.

He has seen a makeover in the culture at Roger Williams. The old “Rich White Underachievers” or “Rich White Undergrads” labels don’t apply anymore.

"In my past two years that stereotype has fallen by the wayside,” he says. “I haven’t even heard people say that recently. It’s a whole different group of kids now."

WHEN NIRSCHEL describes running a university, it sounds a lot like running a business. He talks about “the education market,” and “positioning the school in an increasingly global market.” Teachers say they’ve even heard him describe students as “customers.”

In Rhode Island alone, Roger Williams must share the stage with Salve Regina University and Bryant University, two private schools that have also taken huge strides in recent years.After Nirschel took charge, Roger Williams quickly carved out its own niche.

“He identified holes in the market,” says Sally E. Lapides, a trustee for the past two years. “I think he looked around and said, ‘Let’s look at the things that other universities in the state and nearby Massachusetts do not offer and see if these are things that we’re interested in.’ ”

Lapides, president of the real estate agency Residential Properties, cited the aquaculture program, the School of Justice Studies and the historic-preservation program. She also alluded to what some believe is Nirschel’s greatest success at Roger Williams: marketing the university.

The focus has been on getting Roger Williams known overseas. It’s a move that many American institutions are making to survive as education becomes more competitive. Nirschel talks about building connections in untapped places, like Turkey.

“We initially had one kid here from Turkey,” he says. “His cousin enrolls. His sister transfers in. And all of a sudden we have eight Turkish students coming. That builds on itself.”

The number of international students in each class has grown from about 25 in 2001 to about 60 this year. The number of professors from overseas has also increased from 7 to 35.

Roger Williams helped establish American Pacific University, the only school in Vietnam with an American curriculum. It hosted a group of students from Iraq a year ago and is sending books and other supplies to their university.

Forty percent of the juniors at Roger Williams study abroad. And earlier this year, the school embarked on a one-of-a-kind program to purchase passports for all sophomores with at least a B average.

ALTHOUGH NIRSCHEL has had no trouble connecting Roger Williams to the global community, he has struggled to build a strong relationship with the university’s hometown.

When Roger Williams moved to Bristol, it was welcomed by the town, in part for the new jobs it created and the potential contracts it could make with local businesses.

But the honeymoon didn’t last. Former university president William Rizzini told the Journal in 1980 that tension between Bristol and the school goes back at least to the early 1970s, when student protests against the Vietnam War caused resentment among the residents of the famously patriotic town.

It continued in the years afterward as town officials periodically complained about the university’s tax-exempt status and demanded compensation for costly police, fire and rescue runs to campus. In response, Roger Williams administrators said the town was unappreciative.

The two sides didn’t sit down for substantive talks until the end of 2003. The negotiations were spurred by an announcement six months earlier that Brown, Providence College, Johnson & Wales and RISD had agreed to pay a total of $50 million over two decades to help cover the cost of municipal services in Providence.

It seemed a deal in Bristol was imminent last April when Nirschel announced a gradual increase in scholarships for Bristol residents to $2.5 million a year. The rest of the pact, however, fell through, because the school wouldn’t agree to a $150,000 annual payment to the town that would go towards replacing fire and rescue vehicles. After that, the Town Council tried without success to get legislation passed that would repeal the university’s tax-exempt status.

Although there have been statements from both sides since the November elections that an agreement governing payments in lieu of taxes is pending, nothing has been signed yet.

Nirschel’s most public challenge came nearly three years ago from the College Republicans, a conservative student group that had made a habit of courting controversy.

The nadir for Nirschel was the zenith for the small group. It came in February 2004 while Nirschel was in Vietnam working to set up American Pacific University.

The College Republicans, led by honors student Jason Mattera, announced it was taking applications for a scholarship being offered to white students only. The $250 award was created to protest affirmative action.

It was also an effective stunt to garner media attention. Mattera was quoted in stories that appeared in the Journal and in national outlets like CNN, the New York Times and USA Today.

The scholarship divided the university, but administrators were slow to respond in Nirschel’s absence.

Nirschel caught the first flight back to deal with the fallout. He sent a letter to everyone on campus reaffirming his belief in free speech and condemning the tone of the College Republicans’ actions. A month later, he announced the university’s official response.

It took the form of a new online journal titled “Reason and Respect” and a lecture series called “Civil Discourse.” Speakers have included Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Gary Bauer, the conservative former presidential candidate.

Speakman, the faculty adviser to the College Republicans during the scholarship flap, looks back now and thinks Nirschel handled the situation skillfully.

“I think opening the discussion was very healthy,” she says. “And the president deserves a lot of credit for that.”

Lapides, the trustee, says the response was typical of Nirschel.

“Anything that could be perceived as a negative, he’s turned it around as a positive,” she says.

NIRSCHEL IS PROUD to be president. He makes it clear that he enjoys being in a position of influence. He says he has no regrets about leaving politics 24 years ago.

“In a way I’m sort of in politics right now,” he says. “I’m the mayor of a little town.”

Although he’s paid well below the presidents of leading educational institutions, Nirschel is still well compensated for the position. The university paid him $289,000 during the 2004-2005 school year, according to the most recent available tax filing. He lives in a mansion owned by the university that sits across from campus and is valued at $1.5 million.

Perhaps because he comes from a working-class background, Nirschel is a little self-conscious about his comfortable position in life. When asked about his suits, he points out that although most are made by Brooks Brothers, he buys them at discount stores, such as SYMS.“I wear a Timex watch, too,” he volunteers. “$49.95.”

He is happy with the university’s progress. Two of his three children graduated from Roger Williams.

He describes what he has done as a “dramatic re-engineering of the university.”

However, there’s more he wants to do. The graduation rate must improve, he says. He’s interested in setting up doctorate programs and redesigning the continuing-education program.

“We’ve made improvements, but we’re nowhere near where we want to be,” he says.

He has no plans to leave and recently signed a new three-year contract with the university.

IN FRONT OF members of the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officials, Nirschel wraps up his tale about Roger Williams.

“A university may resemble a business, but still, it is not a business,” he tells the audience. “We don’t make widgets or cars. We shape our society’s future.”

Nirschel receives a standing ovation. During a question-and-answer session, one woman says she’d like to work for Roger Williams. A man asks Nirschel to apply for the presidency of the school where he works.

Nirschel breaks into a smile and gracefully ducks the question.

akuffner@projo.com