Turning ideas into reality

This story initially appeared in the Chancellor’s 2020 Annual Report to the UC Foundation.

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“He lives in this river of ideas and the water’s always fresh.”

Robert Fulton, former director of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Honors Program, eloquently uttered those words as part of a speech he delivered at the September 2019 UTC Honors Homecoming Gala. Fulton was at the microphone accepting an alumni award on behalf of Richard Zhang, a member of the Class of 1992.

Zhang was the recipient of the Sompayrac Alumni Award by virtue of being a UTC alumnus who triple-majored—having graduated summa cum laude with bachelor’s degrees in chemistry, economics and accounting. But he was also being celebrated for remembering his UTC roots. With no fanfare, he had made several generous donations to his alma mater over the last year.

Months after the gala, the quote was read back to Zhang, who took a moment to let Fulton’s comments sink in.

“That was very kind of him. I appreciate that remark,” said Zhang, an equity partner and the head of Greater China operations at Apax Partners. “It’s one thing to have a lot of ideas. It’s another to turn those ideas into reality and make them happen.”

Zhang has been turning ideas into reality for a long time.

He freely admits that his path through UTC came about totally by accident.

It was the late 1980s, and 18-year-old Xike Zhang had the idea that he wanted to study abroad. China was only beginning to open up, and the Shanghai-born teenager was determined to do something that at the time was quite unusual in his part of the globe: Go abroad and explore this vast world of ours.

“I wanted to be exposed to Western culture. I wanted to learn the broader world,” Zhang recalled. “I was incredibly poor in the sense that in those days all Chinese were very poor, but I was well-educated. My parents were college-educated, even though they were only making the equivalent of $50 a month, collectively.”

Zhang, who began learning English when he was in the third grade in school, was researching American universities. He literally stumbled upon UTC.

“To be honest,” Zhang said, “I didn’t even know there was a state of Tennessee—much less a University of Tennessee or Chattanooga—when I began looking. It was not something necessarily well planned, and it was very much by accident that I found UTC. I couldn’t afford to pay multiple application fees for different schools or a four-year college tuition. The beauty of UTC was that I was able to defer paying my application fee until after admission. So I applied.

“UTC later awarded me a Brock Scholarship, thanks to Dr. Bob Fulton. And with that Brock Scholarship, in those days, it essentially became completely free tuition. That allowed me to spend four years in Chattanooga.”

Sight unseen, Zhang made his way from Asia to North America. He was laughing as he recounted his less-than-direct, halfway-around-the-world route to UTC, starting with a train from Shanghai to Hong Kong—followed by flights to Detroit, Memphis and Chattanooga.

“I arrived in Chattanooga and fell in love with the place,” he said. “I thought it was just a terrific, friendly city, and it exposed me to a lot of the wonderful Southern culture.”

He was known by his given name of Xike back then. He chose to go by Richard upon entering the workforce after receiving a master’s degree from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and it became his legal name when he was naturalized as a United States citizen.

Zhang immediately immersed himself in the city, the culture and—of course—his studies.

Tom Rybolt, a UC Foundation professor of chemistry and one of Zhang’s first UTC instructors, quickly saw the learning capacity his young protégé possessed.

“Xike knew a lot of chemistry from his high school experience, and at some point, I asked him about doing research. He was interested in that,” Rybolt said. “There was a rich tradition within our chemistry department of faculty having undergraduates perform research with them. One benefit was publishing papers together—as Richard and I did.

“I also recall this one other time when some of the research we were doing was in programming—and it was in a language called Fortran, which you don’t hear much about anymore. Xike was going on a bus trip to Chicago and some other places. He asked about the programming, so I gave him a book that he took with him to read on the bus. He knew an awful lot by the time he came back just from reading that book. It was quite striking in terms of his ability to learn and apply things.”

That one-to-one relationship resonated with Zhang. He spent multiple years working on projects with Rybolt.

“I had an opportunity that very few undergraduate students, even at the Ivy League universities, receive—this experience of working so closely on a research project with a tenured professor,” Zhang said. “To be an undergraduate like I was and to be able to work with a tenured professor doing cutting-edge research, being able to publish papers, speaking at an international conference. That kind of unparalleled opportunity was just unique. Dr. Rybolt and I formed a strong friendship. He had a huge influence on me.”

Although he initially came to UTC to study chemistry, Zhang figured out the free market system very quickly—both inside and outside of the classroom.

He landed a job as a resident assistant and soon parlayed it into an assistant resident director position. As a result, he received free housing.

He found on-campus part-time jobs working at Lupton Library and in the cafeteria. Zhang looks back fondly at his time working in food service.

“I found the cafeteria job to be particularly exciting because you get free food. That, by the way, significantly reduced my budget,” he said. “I basically could live on roughly $7 per week. At the cafeteria, there’s plenty of excess food for employees to eat, and that was quite helpful to me. And by working there, I ended up meeting a diverse group of people from all ethnicities, races and backgrounds.

“Frankly, I was poor, but I didn’t feel poor; I actually felt enriched. There was a lot of learning, lots of new opportunities, and lots of great people to meet. And I never spent a single day hungry.”

As a member of the Honors program, Zhang took elective courses introducing him to the concepts of economics and accounting. Like everything else he did at UTC—his many activities included participating in Student Government Association as a senator, becoming chair of SGA’s academic and ethics committees, serving as an officer in various honor societies and organizing resident hall programs—he dove into it headfirst.

“I took a lot more credits than I needed to graduate,” Zhang said. “Once you take your required course load, you didn’t pay extra tuition for additional courses. I was like, ‘Why not?’ It’s like, ‘Buy one, get one for free.’ I admit that I took advantage of the free market mechanism and that benefited my learning.

“I went to UTC to study chemistry because it’s a scientific discipline, but everywhere, science is the same. Quickly, I became fascinated by economics, by the market economy, by the Western way. I ended up taking economics as well as accounting as majors. I was passionate about learning new things. It was overwhelming, but there was so much to learn. Every day presented new challenges; I found it both intellectually challenging and personally rewarding.”

And his eyes were opened to a different way of thinking.

“I was reasonably good at math and science when I came from China, but the whole liberal arts side—the understanding of the Western culture—was new to me,” Zhang said. “Bob Fulton introduced me to it and gave me an incredible foundation. He provided me, first and foremost, with the opportunity for a world-class education that I otherwise could not have afforded. He introduced me to a new way of thinking—to be independent—and becoming a critical thinker has benefited me throughout the rest of my life. And he gave me a liberal arts foundation, which I was lacking.

“Dr. Fulton fundamentally changed my life by giving me this education. If he hadn’t awarded me the Brock Scholarship, there would have been no way to complete four years of college in Chattanooga—or anywhere, for that matter.”

At the Honors Gala reception in fall 2019, Fulton had people laughing as he reminisced about first meeting Zhang.

“My first impression of him as a student was his manner of speech,” Fulton said. “You were face-to-face with this guy, and what was in his mouth was a machine gun; the words were coming out staccato—’bit-bit-bit-bit-bit’ like that—and I pretty soon figured out why. The guy had so many ideas in his head; he had to get them out. It was amazing.”

Zhang has never forgotten the roles that Fulton and Rybolt have played in his life. Likewise, he fondly recalled John Fulmer, the associate dean of the College of Business when he was in school, who introduced him to the world of business and finance and encouraged him to pursue a career in the field. Zhang also waxed eloquent when he spoke about Honors College Dean Linda Frost—”she is enormously passionate, energetic and taking the Honors College to a new exciting level”—and Gary W. Rollins College of Business Dean Robert Dooley.

“Dean Dooley is just an incredible, charismatic and visionary guy who gets great things done; he’s very inspiring,” Zhang said. “The Rollins College’s naming and the huge gift is setting the stage for the business school to become one of the best in the country under Dean Dooley’s enormous leadership. It just made me feel that this was the time to start to contribute back.”

During spring 2019, Zhang returned to Chattanooga for the first time in more than two decades to establish multiple gift agreements with UTC. For him, it was an opportunity to repay the University for what it had done in changing his life’s trajectory.

Zhang created the Robert Fulton and Richard X. Zhang Endowed International Exchange Scholarship Fund; the Tom Rybolt and Richard X. Zhang Endowed Undergraduate Research in Chemistry Scholarship Fund; the Richard X. Zhang Endowed Business Professorship Fund; and the Richard X. Zhang Annual Honors College Scholarship Fund.

“I just felt it would make sense for me to make some contributions to each of those things—each of which I benefited from when I was at UTC,” he said. “I’m a deep believer that education changes lives. Education creates a lifelong impact on the betterment of an individual. I have this deep passion for education and toward making high-quality education accessible to anyone and everyone.

“My motivation was simple: To contribute back to the University that gave me the quality of education that changed my life. I also wish to see the University become an even stronger force with an ever-increasing national prominence and global impact.”

As for Fulton’s assertion of his former student’s living in a river of ideas, “I recognize that it’s important to turn ideas into reality,” Zhang said. “I’m hoping with these gifts that I’m helping in some small way.”