By Robert A. Weisbuch

Remember me? The half-joking, half-cranky guy who used to write columns for The Chronicle on being a college president? I'm still here, somewhere, that fellow with the large if controversial perspectives, if only I could locate me/him.

My last column, "We're All in This Together," appeared in the spring and focused on the economic downturn and the challenges of dealing with salary and hiring freezes. I haven't had time to write since.

Anyone remember Sanforizing, that anti-shrinking process from the 50s? I think I forgot about it, because my world appears to have shrunk and me along with it. As I move from one local crisis to the next piece of gossip, as I wage battle with discount rates, tuition increases, class sizes, endowment droop, and other matters that didn't invade the precincts of my tender intelligence until I came to Drew University four and a half years ago, I feel sometimes like the victim of a cosmic practical joke, the one where the "s" gets lost from the word "cosmic."

"I can't quite fathom that you are both that guy who writes the column full of good values for The Chronicle and the president who freezes my salary at Drew," said a young colleague last year. Now I have solved his dilemma by becoming just the latter.

Emerson writes grandly that the only sin is limitation, in which case, oh Lord, have I sinned. So how do I regain my scope? My sole recourse is to imagine that this very process of shrinking into the intensely local is itself a universal.

I know it is such when I meet with a president from another university and note that leader's outsized emotion over some matter that, for the life of me, cannot engage my real empathy. That's terrible, I mutter, sounding vaguely sympathetic but really meaning it is terrible that my discussant is so worked up over something so absurdly inconsequential. Naturally I have my own set of such issues and get the same artificial reaction from fellow presidents as I go into my rabid-dog mode.

By grasping that this narrowing is a problem, we might also gain empathy for staff and faculty members who are exposed to any broadening perspectives far less than we are. As president, I at least hear from a range of Drew graduates, a spectrum of current students, and a mix of faculty members from all areas of the university, and from town and state figures as well. My world when I was teaching American literature was far more constricted. I might have been reading Emerson and even applauding his boast, "I unsettle all," but I was also living wholly within the very particular, even peculiar, tribe of English professors, so that even the inhabitants of bordering disciplines, like classics, say, or film studies, seemed not neighbors but a world away.

Of course there is a virtue in a narrowed perspective, both in a president of a particular university or a faculty member in a particular discipline, and it is an important one. It is intensity. Someone has to care to the brink of monomania for an institution or a body of knowledge if it is to survive, much less advance. Yet we presidents, in particular, are expected to provide the bigger picture, without which the institution becomes weirdly insular.

And so I want to borrow the idea of a student who wrote a thesis at Drew a few years ago mourning the loss of a porch culture, the kind of neighborliness that is often sacrificed in suburban living. I've actually experienced the renewal of porch culture. I live away from the campus, and in our neighborhood for several years we would, at most, wave stiffly from house to house. Then Tom and Janet and their three moppets arrived along with their 1997 Lincoln limousine. Tom started giving the neighborhood kids "rock-star drop-offs" to school via the limo. The family held hot-dog tastings in the summer and turned their front yard into a skating rink in the winter. Charmed, John and Melody began mojito nights on their literal front porch. Now we all, 10 or 15 families, help one another with child care, support one another when someone loses a job, celebrate almost anything we can think of together. This is good.

We can achieve a version of porch culture in academe, but it means leaving our comfort zone. Most of the national meetings I attend hurt as much as help because the great majority of them bring together people leading institutions of the same kind. If we really want to understand a bigger picture, we probably need to avoid our obvious peers and meet instead with leaders of a whole range of institutions, from day-care centers to graduate schools.

And we also might meet more often with representatives from sectors beyond academe, people who, unlike our alumni trustees, may not hold a special brief for one's own institution.

Likewise, if we want our colleagues on the faculty and staff to take a broader perspective, we need to build some inviting porches for them, including one of our own, where they can share the administrative view and understand better why we are doing these terrible things to them.

The cure, in other words, to institutional and disciplinary isolation is a little something called life. I'm going to look for more of it. Consider this column a porch and come on over to suggest some other places where we might seek that "life" thing out.

Robert A. Weisbuch is president of Drew University and a former president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is chronicling his experiences as a first-time university president.