When I got my first message from Jim Garland, it was in the form of fan mail about a column I’d written on how hard it is to write. I had no idea who he was, except for what his email conveyed — that he lived in Santa Fe and was working on a novel. It was not going well, as he told me in an insightful and funny way.
We corresponded for a while before I finally Googled him. He was, it turned out, a physicist and a former president of Miami University of Ohio, and had written a book in 2009, Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for Public Universities. We went on to have many exchanges about writing, and I’m delighted to share some of his thoughts here. He is now retired from academe, which means he can be blunt about the state of administrative writing.
You were a physics professor who also held administrative positions in academe — center director, department chair, vice president, dean, university president. How did your writing evolve as you moved up the administrative ladder?
My writing changed because my jobs changed. Physics rewards laser beams who focus on narrow topics and explore them in excruciating depth. Academic administration rewards big-picture floodlights who can bring diverse points of view together in service to multifaceted goals. Truthfully, I did my deepest thinking as a beginning assistant professor, writing obscure papers on the quantum-mechanical properties of solids at liquid-helium temperatures. Over the years, I became shallower and broader, and by the time I left academe, I was worrying about the seating arrangement of donors in the president’s football box.
The landscape of academic administration is strewn with land mines. Half the letters a university president receives begin, “Dear Idiot.” There is the fourth-generation alumnus who wants us to fire the basketball coach; the angry billionaire who didn’t give us all that goddamn money so his low-wattage progeny would receive Cs; the faculty nudist who believes the rec center’s dress code impinges on his civil rights (true story).
Administrative challenges are complex, and with high stakes. Therefore letters, position papers, op-eds, speeches all have to be written with a careful eye to tone, balance, clarity, and purpose. There are times when one has to equivocate, or be blunt and forceful, or express deep sympathy, or draw a line in the sand, or be stiffly formal, or warm and cordial, or occasionally, believe it or not, funny.
Such skills appear not to be at the forefront of the physics-Ph.D. curriculum. So I learned mostly from the school of hard knocks. My writing not only became more readable, with shorter paragraphs and punchier language, but, paradoxically, also more cautious. The woods are full of angry combatants with lawyers, so I learned to anticipate unintended consequences and precedents. I often asked my staff to comment on my drafts. (“Jim, what are you thinking? You can’t say that to a United States senator!”) Every college president needs people like that. I like to think my writing became better, livelier, and more imaginative. For sure, it became more fun.
How effectively do universities communicate with their constituencies? What frustrated you about administrative writing?
Too much administrative writing is generic, stereotypical, and clichéd:
- The alumni magazine that assumes its readers are fixated on the football season and that shows happy, smiling students in earnest conversation with their professors.
- The commencement speech that tells the graduates to follow their passion.
- The presidential address that touts good-news teaching awards, and how the school has an undying commitment to excellence.
This is pablum, endlessly recycled, and dull, dull, dull. Most recipients just tune out or throw this stuff away.
What did you talk about in your presidential addresses?
My most important address was my annual State of the University speech, given early in the autumn semester. I began with the usual overview of the prior year — awards, recognitions, accomplishments — but then I picked one topic to explore in depth: grade inflation, raising student expectations, “cargo-cult administration” (academic processes that go through elaborate motions and rituals but don’t do anything useful), faculty conservatism and the resistance to change, the growth of adjunct faculty, the balance between teaching and research, the stresses on early-career professors. I tried to lay out the issues in a reasonable and balanced way, with the goal of stimulating campus discussion.
What else should administrators be writing and talking about?
Parents and alumni would love to learn about the pressures driving up tuition, or how the campus deals with alcohol abuse and sexual assaults, or the pluses and minuses of speech codes, or the struggles professors have with helicopter parents. There is no shortage of issues.
Faculty members have unprecedented concerns these days: threats to academic freedom, political interference from trustees and elected officials, administrative bloat, declining department budgets, growing red tape, the decline of the tenure track, the pressure to publish and get grants, the intrusion of corporate business practices, declining academic rigor, and on and on.
Professors know (or at least hope) that their administrative leadership has thought deeply about these issues, but if all they hear are homilies and syrupy happy talk, they’re going to assume that their campus leaders are either scoundrels or mindless oafs. Or both.
I am alarmed at the polarization between faculty and administrators on so many campuses. The distrust and rancor and breakdown of collegiality is like nothing I’ve seen in 40 years. True, there are faculty members who will always believe their — fill in the blank: chair, dean, provost, president — is a jackbooted Nazi thug, but most faculty can be persuaded otherwise if administrators are willing to communicate honestly and intelligently with them.
It sounds like you’re saying that administrators should write about problems and bad news. Isn’t that risky? Won’t that just exacerbate the problems?
What’s risky is to sugarcoat problems or pretend they aren’t there. I don’t think faculty members expect their administrative officers to have all the answers. They know the problems are tough and often intractable. What they want is leaders who are insightful, reflective, and trustworthy — who understand life in the trenches and share their values.
What they don’t want is simplistic, glad-handing opportunists who spout jargon, platitudes, and evasions. Unfortunately, in this academic climate, that’s going to be the default assumption about campus leaders unless they demonstrate otherwise.
So that’s where the communication skills and writing ability come in. Did you give terrible addresses to students and faculty before you figured out how to do it better?
Yes, I did, and I don’t want to talk about it.
What specific advice would you give to senior administrators?
Don’t talk down to your constituencies. Treat them as intelligent, well-educated adults, and share the complexities of your job and its challenges. When you’re delivering bad news, explain your reasoning and the other options you explored. Ask for their opinions and suggestions, and then actually listen to what they say.
Let your readers see what you care about and are passionate about. Good writers know how to do this without coming across as braggy or manipulative. If you’re going to succeed at your job, you need to be a good writer, too. If you’re not, then you’ve got a deficit in your education that you’ll need to compensate for.
Did you have a speechwriter?
Most of the time, I wrote my own speeches, although I had a wonderful director of communications, who prepped me.
But I’ve always enjoyed giving talks. When I was a physics professor, I wrote up some notes for my grad students on how to give presentations at conferences: Don’t stare into space like a zombie. Avoid looking like you just dragged yourself out of the lobby bar (even if that’s true). Skip the canned humor; the anecdote that convulsed your buddies the night before over a pitcher of beer may have quite a different effect on the stone-faced strangers watching you in the cold light of morning. A secretary in the department persuaded me to submit my writeup to Physics Today, where it appeared as “Advice to Beginning Physics Speakers” (July 1991). It became my most widely read and cited publication and has been translated into five languages.
I was obviously pleased, but it’s a bit unsettling to think that my chief legacy to the human race may be advising speakers to check their fly before they step up to the podium.
Given that presidents and chancellors usually have speechwriters and others who can write policy statements, correspondence, opinion pieces, commencement addresses and so forth, what advice would you give to new university presidents about their writing?
As a university leader, you’ll give several hundred speeches a year. Many will be short remarks to conference attendees, alumni groups, visiting dignitaries, student organizations, and so forth. With guidance, your staff can prepare these remarks for you, and with a bit of experience you can probably ad lib many of them. You don’t want to sound stupid, but mostly it’s just your presence at the event that matters. So long as you are reasonably articulate and seem friendly and happy to be there, you’ll do fine.
What deserve your full attention are the speeches and written communications with real substance. Your statements about crises (campus unrest, scandals), bad news (budget cutbacks, layoffs, salary freezes), hot-button social issues (sexual assaults, gender discrimination), and institutional policies (tenure criteria, speech codes) will impact greatly your campus reputation.
Assuming that your verbal skills are up to the challenge, it’s best to craft those words yourself.
That said, don’t be too hard on yourself if things occasionally break bad. My first challenge as a university president was to change our teams’ nickname from Redskins to Redhawks — a hugely controversial move that enraged thousands of alumni and resulted in lawsuits and death threats. “What’s a redhawk?,” I was asked by a reporter at a news conference announcing the change, and I proudly explained that the red-tailed hawk was indigenous to the area and a fierce predator and fighter.
And then, inexplicably, I added, “The redhawk is not some little wimp bird like a cardinal.” The next day, the governor’s office called me: “President Garland, do you realize you’ve insulted the state bird of Ohio?” I won’t go into what the Audubon Society said about me.
Don’t overlook the opportunity to write essays on topics that will interest your community and show your human side. If a good friend died, write about her life and what she meant to you. If you love crossword puzzles, write about that. Don’t be shy about mentioning your favorite poem, song, or movie, or how you love dogs or were moved by a concert performance.
I wrote a “president’s report” column for our campus newspaper and used the opportunity to comment on life and my community, but never on my formal job. My most successful column was about the closing of a local rock-’n’-roll station that our students worshiped, and what rock music had meant to me when I was their age.
But this kind of writing is not easy. Your words need to be confident, clear, and evocative, moving but not sentimental, and never maudlin or melodramatic. They need to show emotion when appropriate, but they shouldn’t be emotional. Practice — and a good editor — can help you.
You want your readers to have a sense of who you are as a person, what you feel deeply about, why you care about them and your campus. If you can pull that off, then your readers will like you and cut you some slack when you make mistakes and decisions that disappoint them, as you most certainly will. Of course, if most of your decisions disappoint them, then perhaps you should explore other career options.