The impossible life of a college president - includes related information

Washington Monthly, March, 1989 by Julie Rose

You think it's a life of oak panels and big ideas. It's more like being a PAC fundraiser.

Julie Rose is a Northampton writer

It's the kind of fantasy that might creep through the cabin of the Eastern Shuttle just after take-off. As harried professionals unlock leather briefcases, pour Canadian Club, and g >;aze sternly at ledger sheets and legal briefs, minds begin to wander. It's 8:30 p. m.-puts me in at National at 10:00, the Hilton at 10:45, it'll take two more hours to pull the presentation together and, Jesus, I've got to be sharp at that 7:30 breakfast when I make my pitch. ("Another Canadian Club, please.") Why do I live like this?

As bankers, lawyers, and bureaucratic brass ponder their overworked bodies and underfed souls, The Fantasy takes shape: if only I were president. . .

Of a college, >; that is.

It's not that spending ten hours a day with the tax code has lost its appeal, exactly. It's just that after a few decades of power and money, it's time for something more, well, cerebral. Soulful. A college presidency seems like a dream job. It's a life of books. A world of libraries, quadrangles, and faculty clubs; of robes, ceremonies, and honorary degrees. A chance to ask the big questions, like what was Proust trying to say with the n?adeleine anyway? But the city lights rising up be >;low push the fantasy aside, for now at least, and the life of briefcases and

15-minute billable bytes returns.

Now meet Mary Maples Dunn, president of Smith College and no stranger to the billable time-byte herself. She's got the robes and the degrees, but in substance her life seems little different than those the harried professionals dream about fleeing. She's on her own time now, away from the campus on holiday, visiting a friend of a friend when the Jasper Johns catches her eye. It's just one of >;a number of the home's striking works of contemporary art, and Dunn listens attentively as her hostess describes her collection. Then, for Dunn, her hostess gets to the most important part: her one great ambition left in life is to finish her baccalaureate. Dunn leaves the conversation with the impression that this woman had even attended Smith for a year. It is all she needs to hear.

Back at her desk a few weeks later, Dunn is meeting with Smith's new museum director, Ed Nygren. It is a day in early >;December in which Dunn has let me sit in on her many meetings on campus.

At the moment, Dunn is a little flustered. She is trying to describe to Nygren her hostess's collection. The whole house had a feeling of, mmm, the minimalist to it. No, no, she says, shaking her head. Realizing her description can't convey what she saw, she admits that she knows very little about art.

She knows quite a bit more, however, about fundraising, and she reaches quickly for the book to her right, a thick, thumbed vo >;lume: the Smith College alumni directory She glances for the woman's last name and does not find it. Maybe it's under her maiden name, Dunn muses. More important, maybe she feels enough fondness for Smith to donate a painting or two, perhaps even some cash (a prospect that would grow more likely were the woman, with a little encouragement, to return to finish her degree). Completing the background check, however, is someone else's job. For the moment, Dunn has done her work-she went off for a drink with >; a few friends and unearthed a prospective donor.

She and Nygren press on to another subject-gifts already given. There is the presentation of the painting by George Inness that should be arriving soon. It is an important work; better yet, it arrived with a $100,000 donation. Dunn asks Nygren to drum up a little fanfare at the museum gallery to honor the donor. They speak of donors and potential donors; they thumb through the alumni directory a few more times. At one point the director assures Dunn

>;that he has told a prospective donor that the prints she wants to give are not in lieu of giving money to the capital campaign. "The shadow loves you," Dunn murmurs with a laugh.

The shadow for Mary Dunn-and most of today's college presidents-is the constant specter of money. For Dunn's eye is caught not only by great paintings but by any cash donation that may come her way. In fact, she must raise $6 million in the next three months to meet a deadline for the construction of a new $12 million science >; center. ("I think we'll die first," she says.) And that's just one small part of Smith's five-year campaign to raise $125 million-a goal that has dominated much of Dunn's presidency since it began in 1985. This is an enormous fundraising effort for a school whose enrollment has never exceeded 3,000 students, and in the past month-anda-half it has kept Dunn on the road almost 50 percent of the time.

Is this really any way to run an academic institution? The job of college president should involve a lar >;ge amount of intellectual leadership, including recruiting talented faculty, weeding out tenured deadwood, and championing curricular reforms. (See "How to Be a College President," page 20) Instead of having time to pursue this intellectual grail, most college presidents are left dashing for the Eastern Shuttle in pursuit of the next big deal.

Antisemites and backwoods boys

American university presidents haven't always been too busy to think about education. During the latter part of the 19th centur >;y and the early decades of the 20th century there were presidents whose leadership, intellectual and otherwise, was never in question: Charles Eliot of Harvard (1869-1909); William Harper of the University of Chicago (1891-1906); Woodrow Wilson of Princeton (1902-1910); and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia (1902-1945), among others.

To be sure, their success was due in part to the moment. Gone were the ecclesiastical ties that had bound many institutions from their founding in the 17th century through >;the Civil Wan

American industrialists were pouring their fortunes into new schools-the University of Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins.

But it wasn't just the times; the men left their mark as well. At the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins (1929-1951) established the Great Books program, which today deserves emulation. His contemporary, Nicholas Murray Butler, saved Lionel Trilling's job at Columbia by intervening with the WASPish English department dons who wanted to deny Trilling tenure because >;he was a

Jew. True, these and other presidents also had power that is unknown today. Woodrow Wilson could dismiss faculty at will.

Today, presidential leadership may seem less monumental, but it can still be strong. Take, for example, John Sawyer of Williams College (1961-1973), who rid the school of its backwoods boys club image by dispensing with the entrenched fraternity system and admitting women.

More often, however, the race for funds has become the sine qua non of the academic institution. >;More than 60 of the nation's colleges are now trying to raise more than $100 million each for what are called "capital campaigns." And the presidents of three universities-Stanford, Boston University, and New York University-are each seeking more than $1 billion. Some are on a continual fundraising roll; when B.U. reached its goal of $200 million a year ahead of schedule, John Silber, the university's president, immediately set his sights on $1 billion by the year 2000. In opening the drive, Silber said >;that B.U. could "stand still or go ahead. We're at the takeoff point to become one of the ten best universities in the nation." Silber talks about education the way many college presidents do: "best," they imply, gets measured in money, not knowledge.

When governing boards go hunting for presidents, it's often the candidates' fundraising, rather than academic, talents that catch the eye. Such might have been the case in 1984, when the regents of the University of Texas began a search to replace Peter >;Flawn, the retiring president of

U.T. Austin. In the end, the choice came down to two candidates, both at U.T. Austin: Gerry Fonken, vice president for academic affairs and research, and William Cunningham , the dean of the business school. While Cunningham, whose doctorate was in marketing, had all the seemingly essential exterior graces, he was viewed as no great intellect by the faculty. But Cunningham had done a terrific job raising funds for the business school. If he could sell the mission of th >;e business school, why not the whole university?

Butterflies and massages

The college president's life is, of course, going to be more fragmented and frustrating than The Fantasy allows. College presidents, not without a trace of self-pity, liken themselves to mayors. Joseph Duffy, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says his job includes, among other things, running a bus line and providing housing, food, and custodial services. In addition, presidents almost inevitably play a >; role in the life of the town where their institution is located. And, as if that didn't tax their time, few can resist invitations to sit on corporate boards, another prestige-enhancer. Some brave ones, like Dunn, will even try to teach a course, but it's usually a short-lived attempt"I don't read as much [in her field of American colonial history] as I used to," she said. "I am not prepared enough."

This potpourri of prosaic presidential concerns inevitably breeds frustration"Fragmentation" is how Pe >;ter Pouncey, president of Amherst College, describes it. "It's a great job for the butterflyminded," he says. "You get to do something for about a minute and a quarter'" Adele Simmons, until recently president of Hampshire College, says being a college president means thinking in 15-minute segments. And, sure enough, Simmons thinks that way-as she ran down for me the many activities of her day, her schedule included time for a massage.