[PEN-L:332] College President or CEO?

[Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The College President as CEO

By David Greenberg
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 28, 1998; Page R01

"Being president of a university is no way for an adult to
make a living," wrote the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former
president of Yale, in his 1988 book A Free and Ordered
Space. "It is to hold a mid-19th Century ecclesiastical
position on top of a late 20th Century corporation."

As Giamatti's quotation suggests, the groves of academe
have become a battleground between the forces of liberal
education and the regiments of capitalism. On one side,
champions of the life of the mind, seeming ever more naive
and quaint in our cynical age, preach that the campus
should remain cloistered away, insulated from the
demands of the marketplace. On the other side, the
hardheaded bottom-liners reply that indifference to
economic pressures will render the liberal arts university
obsolete; like all other American institutions, they say, it
must (to use a phrase only the business world could coin)
"maximize profitability."

This tug-of-war is nothing new. It's been going on for more
than a hundred years, ever since a handful of titans --
Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins, William Rainey
Harper at the University of Chicago, Charles Eliot at
Harvard -- turned the American college from a cozy
retreat for intellectual (mostly theological) contemplation
into a comprehensive training ground for an array of
disciplines. As long ago as 1916 the sociologist Thorstein
Veblen excoriated these "captains of erudition," for whom
"learning and university instruction are a species of skilled
labor, to be hired at competitive wages and to turn out the
largest merchantable output."

But if the battle is old, this much is new: The regiments of
capitalism are winning, and the champions of the life of the
mind are in retreat.

To see the dimensions of the impending rout, you have only
to look at who's now being selected to govern the nation's
colleges and universities. Increasingly, the search
committees and boards of trustees are turning to the
ranks of businessmen and politicians -- "non-traditional"
presidents, as they're euphemistically called -- for
candidates who will run the university less like an
ecclesiastical sanctuary and more like a corporation.

Consider a 1996 report by the Association of Governing
Boards of Universities and Colleges, the nation's top
organization of presidents and trustees. A 22-member
commission conducted a year-long marathon of interviews,
working groups and studies of the literature. Its conclusion:
Universities should throw open their gates to
nontraditional presidents. "Trustees should not shy away
from potential presidents from nontraditional
backgrounds. The new challenges facing higher education
may lead institutions to look beyond the ivy walls to
consider leaders [with] different kinds of experience," the
commission's report said. Explains Judith Block
McLaughlin, who teaches education at Harvard and writes
about university presidents: "Places are nervous if [new
presidents] don't have the administrative portfolio. The
president has to have substantial budget experience, and
financial management is a must."

Reaching "beyond the ivy walls," as the board's report
urges, often means cutting through the thicket of ivied
credentials. "There was a time when one had to have a
PhD," says James Fisher, a former president of Towson
State who now advises presidential search committees.
"Now the sophisticated ad in the Chronicle of Higher
Education says 'doctorate preferred.' "According to a
survey by the American Council for Education, of more
than 2,700 presidents, only 57 percent today hold a PhD.
What's more, 11 percent have no degree higher than MA.
(The remaining 32 percent hold JDs or other non-PhD
doctoral degrees.)

One place search committees are looking is the political
world. For public universities, familiarity with the state
legislature, once an asset, has, in budget-cutting times,
become a requirement. When William Bulger, long known
as the power-hungry strongman of the Massachusetts
statehouse, took over the commonwealth's university
system, academics scoffed. But a surprising number
rushed to defend the choice on the grounds that Bulger's
Boston "insider" status would help him wring crucial
appropriations from the government. Former Oklahoma
senator David Boren, now president of the University of
Oklahoma, testifies to the virtues of political experience: "I
know many of the alumni from going to every town in
Oklahoma. About 85 percent of our major donors I knew
personally before I even got here."

Other prominent politicians who've recently jumped to
college presidencies include a trio of former state
governors: Tennessee's Lamar Alexander, who headed the
University of Tennessee from 1988 to 1991; New Jersey's
Tom Kean, president of that state's Drew University; and
Virginia's Doug Wilder, who was just named to preside over
Virginia Union University, his alma mater. Wilder has yet to
make any mark, but the other two have met with mixed
reviews. Alexander was generally acknowledged to have had
a troubled tenure, eyeing a run for what he considered a
more prestigious presidency from the get-go. The PhD-less
Kean has ruffled feathers with his too-political style. "His
lack of qualifications and experience as a scholar has been
a terrific drawback," Drew economics professor Rosalind
Seneca told the New York Times in a profile of Kean that
ran when he began his job. "He sees everything in terms of
constituencies and wants to maintain control."

Perhaps the most radical case of the non-traditional
president is Evan Dobelle, hired in 1995 to run Trinity
College in Hartford, Conn. A former adviser to Jimmy
Carter and chief financial officer of the Democratic Party,
Dobelle embodies the very antithesis of the stereotypical
college chief. His early career hardly pointed toward a life
in academia. After failing as a teenager to win admission to
a military service academy, he enrolled at the Citadel in
South Carolina, where he injured himself on an obstacle
course and dropped out. He ended up going into politics,
becoming mayor of Pittsfield, Mass., at 28, and didn't earn
his bachelor's degree until age 38.

Dobelle refused the school's ritual offer of tenure,
preferring to work without even a contract; the move
seemed gimmicky and ostentatious -- indeed, the symbolic
gesture of a politician. His main preoccupation as
president has been gentrifying the Hartford neighborhood
in which Trinity is situated. His first few years as president
saw a mass exodus of veteran Trinity officials, unhappy with
his priorities and his brusque personal style. And while he
makes all the right noises about respecting tenure and the
values of academia, his answers to questions can seem
canned and empty. "I simply believe in the time urgency of
regaining moral authority in our democracy which has been
marginalized by politicians and other institutions," he
wrote to me in following up an interview. It read like the
gibber-jabber one expects from politicians but cringes to
hear from an ostensible intellectual leader.

If politicians sometimes seem tone-deaf to the delicate
timbre of academia, businessmen often march to an
entirely different drum. Among the recent executives
who've crossed over into higher education are Dick
Spangler, a sometime construction company executive
who headed the University of North Carolina system; Peter
McPherson, a former vice-president at Bank of America
who now runs Michigan State University; and Barry Munitz,
who came to his position as chancellor of the California
State University system after working for Maxxam Inc., a
Houston-based holding company. Some have little patience
for what they see as the inefficiencies and indulgences of
the university.

"I decided when I came in here I was going to be the CEO,"
says McPherson. "Universities are under increasing
financial pressure and are looking to conduct their
operations in a more businesslike way." He says one of his
big decisions was to sell off the university's bookstore,
which was losing money. The payoff showed up instantly in
the budget. Matters like this, he says, are the ones a
president has to be concerned with.

Munitz, who left his position in March, also believes
academia sorely needs corporate values. "Until recently,
the college presidency was one of the last bastions of
amateurism," he says. He unabashedly employs
corporate-speak, referring to students as "consumers,"
their education as a "product." Early in his tenure, he
began evaluating the presidents of the various Cal State
schools on the amount of money they raised; soon after, he
started compensating professors based on their
"performance" as well.

Some businessmen and politicians have served successfully
at the helm of schools. Former Indiana congressman John
Brademas, president of New York University from 1981 to
1991, turned his institution from a middling commuter
school into a competitive pacesetter. At Oklahoma, Boren
not only raised a lot of money (his five-year capital
campaign, he says, is ahead of schedule and will likely net
$300 million by 2000) but has also created an Honors
College and remodeled dorms so professors and their
families can live among the undergraduates. Douglas
Bennett, a former state department official and head of
National Public Radio, has also gotten high marks as the
new president of Wesleyan University.

What's more, the financial pressures bearing down on
colleges today are real, and a bit of business sense surely
helps a president in his or her job. Overall, though, running
a university like a business will probably prove to be
shortsighted. Presidents who intend to reward the
"performance" of professors will find themselves losing out
on those scholars whose work doesn't rope in fat
government grants or wow their students but enriches
campus life in intangible and enduring ways. Presidents
who concern themselves with real-estate development or
buying and selling bookstores will find themselves ill
equipped to engage the larger questions about what kind
of teaching and learning should go on. Presidents fixated
on the bottom line will find it expedient to cut out the
costly, inefficient programs (say, financial aid, or
sabbaticals) that are a college's lifeblood.

The problem is that, for all its virtues, the free market was
never meant to be applied to education. Not even Adam
Smith thought so. Capitalism prizes profits; it isn't
supposed to make room for activities -- such as
scholarship and study -- whose rewards lie outside the
market.

The profit-minded presidents, though, are not wholly to
blame. In one sense, they are simply a symptom of a
culture that increasingly sees higher education as a
business. Last year, for example, an NYU student wrote an
op-ed piece in the New York Times boasting about
shoehorning her coursework into three years so she could
save money. Parents complain about the high cost of
college tuition. Cynics eye a tenured professorship as a
cushy sinecure that discourages producti- vity.
Undergraduates flock to vocational majors and
shortchange their classroom experience (while teaching
students at Columbia University, I have been shocked at
how often they cut class, pleading the excuse of a
simultaneous job interview). Graduate programs,
meanwhile, don't teach students to think and write so
much as to jump through the right career-path hoops.

On the other hand, it is the responsibility of college
presidents, as the guardians of the ideals of liberal
education, to speak up about these baleful trends --
something too few of them are doing. It is presidents who
need to discourage students from racing through their
coursework simply to nab a degree. Presidents need to
reaffirm the value of scholarship that may seem abstruse
or not practically useful. Presidents need to offer a
compelling vision of liberal learning that will inspire
students, parents and alumni. Politicians and businessmen
are unlikely to provide such visions. Maybe we should
consider hiring as presidents more professors who have
absolutely no business, political or even administrative
experience. Maybe, if we want college presidents to
provide us with real ideas, it makes sense to look among
those people whose job it is to have them.

David Greenberg is a Richard Hofstadter Fellow in
American History at Columbia University who has written
about higher education for The New Republic and Lingua
Franca.

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