President Alan Merten applauds the men's basketball team during their 2006 NCAA Final Four run in Indianapolis. (Student Media file)

Few things about George Mason University have remained unchanged since 1996. Fifteen years ago, there was not an Aquatic and Fitness Center. There was not a nationally known basketball team. There wasn’t even a Starbucks.

But, 15 years ago, as now, Alan Merten was president.

“Being president of an institution for 15 years is a long time,” Merten admitted in an early April interview with Connect2Mason. “Especially when you take into account the fact that the average tenure for a university president is less than 10 years. I stayed because every three or four years I would look around and realize this [university] had become a very different place.”

Earlier this spring, Merten announced he would retire in the summer of 2012. Since Merten’s term began nearly two decades ago, the student population has nearly doubled and extensive construction has transformed the Fairfax, Prince William and Arlington campuses, and a fourth campus was opened in Loudoun County in 2005. 

Mason overtook Virginia Commonwealth University in September 2009 to become the most populous institution of higher learning in Virginia. In 2010 Mason passed another benchmark when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classified it as a “primarily residential” campus.

Merten credited the school’s extraordinary growth to long-term strategy—and a little bit of luck.