Pace president focused, sure and charging hard

"I was a late bloomer," Stephen J. Friedman said by phone from his tower office at One Pace Plaza in Manhattan.

The Pace University president was speaking wryly of his 2004 arrival in academia as dean of Pace Law School in White Plains. In June, after a Westchester tenure marked by a rise in the law school's national rankings and the highest bar-exam pass rate for Pace students in more than a decade, Friedman took over from retiring David A. Caputo as president of the 101-year-old private metropolitan university. His appointment added another achievement to a multiply blooming career in law, business and public service.

In his five months on the new job, Friedman has brought his varied skills and experience as a lawyer, corporate executive, government official and published legal and financial scholar to a university president's balanced roles as leader, manager, strategic thinker, public face and fundraiser for an institution with an annual operating budget of $250 million to $300 million.

"I feel as though both these experiences" as Pace dean and president "have called on and drawn together almost everything I've done," he said. "Particularly coming new to academia, I'm not sure that this is something I would have done as well 20 years ago in the job."

A graduate of Brooklyn Friends School, Friedman, a lawyer's son, earned degrees magna cum laude both from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the distinguished Harvard Law Review. After graduation, in 1963 he went to Washington, D.C. as law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a jurist he much admires to this day.

With Friedman's appointment, Pace became one of three major metropolitan universities headed by former Supreme Court clerks, university spokesman Christopher T. Cory noted. Both New York University President John Sexton and Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger clerked under former Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Friedman's lengthy curriculum vitae includes public-service stints as special assistant to the U.S. maritime administrator, deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department for capital markets policy during the Carter administration and commissioner on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Friedman is a retired senior partner at Debevoise & Plimpton L.L.P., where he was co-chairman of the firm's corporate department from 1993 to 2000. Over two decades, he moved between that law practice and global insurance and investment companies, serving as executive vice president and general counsel of The Equitable Companies Inc. and its subsidiary, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, and as executive vice president of the E.F. Hutton Group Inc.

His strength as a strategic thinker ­ a skill needed by a university president, he said ­ might be suggested by his continued membership on the exclusive Council on Foreign Relations, the independent think tank. As university fundraiser, Friedman might tap his volunteer history with several nonprofit organizations, including the American Ballet Theatre, where he is a trustee and past chairman.

In his first months as president, "He has a bunch of planning processes well under way," said Pace spokesman Cory. Friedman has proven to be a willing listener, soliciting input from the university community and reaching out to business and community leaders in New York City and Westchester County to welcome their "insight, counsel and cooperation."

In a recent interview for the Pace alumni magazine, Friedman said the nearly 13,000-student university has gone through "quite a hard time over the last few years." He cited financial pressures that brought on a job freeze in the last year and declining enrollment, especially at the Lubin School of Business, as contributing to that down cycle.

"The university has had a shrinkage in core students, a shrinkage in undergraduate and graduate students in the last three to four years," he said from his campus office near New York City Hall. "That was reversed in the last year," when the entering class of liberal-arts students in the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences increased by about 250 students from the previous year, he said. Against the recent trend at other Pace schools, the Lienhard School of Nursing, whose "center of gravity" is the Pleasantville campus, Freidman said, doubled its enrollment in the last four years.

While launching a broad collaborative review of the university's long-term focus and direction, Friedman set out immediately to change its management culture, which he recently criticized as placing "too much emphasis on process instead of making things happen."

'On your desk'

In August, he sent an office memo to senior managers headed, "Nine ways to a new Pace management culture." "Please keep this symbol of our new management culture on your desk,"' he wrote as a preface to this list:

* Eliminate bureaucracy