Thinking big: Michael Benson delivers the goods at Snow, SUU

Not everyone was happy when Michael T. Benson — the ambitious, energetic, piano-playing, globe-trotting, Oxford-educated, low-handicap-golfing, speeding ticket-collecting, marathon-running grandson of the late LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson — was appointed president of Southern Utah University.

Much to his dismay, Benson, who collects friends like a guy who just won the lottery, learned that a committee of students had rejected his candidacy 10-0 weeks earlier. Of the five finalists, he was the only one not to receive a single vote.

"Even the Boston Strangler would have received one vote," one SUU administrator quipped to Benson.

With his usual deft touch, Benson met with the 10 students and heard their concerns, then calmly addressed them one by one. Among the complaints: During the interview process he had vowed to raise $115 million in time for the school's 115th anniversary in 2012. The students thought he was campaigning with a promise he couldn't keep.

A couple of weeks later, Benson flew to New York and secured a $3 million donation. Before he had even officially begun his new job, he had collected the biggest donation in school history.

"I decided that if they were going to have a problem with me raising that money, then I'll show them," he says. "They saw me as being arrogant. It was confidence."

Benson earned a reputation for thinking big and delivering the goods during his five years as president of Snow College in Ephraim. He raised more money in those five years than the school raised in its previous 115-year history — almost $6 million in cash and $4 million in pledges.

This is no small feat at a school that, besides being based in a tiny, isolated town and having relatively few alumni (annual enrollment is about 3,000), alumni loyalties are usually divided between the junior college and the university to which many students subsequently matriculate.

Benson nevertheless made Snow the first Nike-sponsored junior college athletic program in the country.

He made Snow an all-Steinway junior college, securing 32 of the famous pianos for the music department through purchases and donations, some with a price tag of $90,000.

He made Snow the host for the famed Juilliard School of Music's annual summer camp.

He built the Eccles Performing Arts Center.

Told that the project would be scrapped if he didn't raise $2 million in one month, Benson did just that, collecting $1.5 million from the Eccles family and $500,000 from the Horne family in Arizona.