The Producer

"Transform Yourself," beckons the slogan advertising Metropolitan College

ALSO SEE: Join an online discussion about whether colleges should hire presidents who have executive experience in business or politics but who lack traditional academic credentials. Stephen R. Greenwald

of New York, and that phrase has been a mantra for the institution's president, Stephen R. Greenwald.

Four years ago, he left a career as a movie producer and film-industry executive to become president of the small private college based in lower Manhattan. Most of the students are minority women in their 30s who work full time and are the first in their families to attend college. They take classes mainly at night and on weekends, motivated by the promise that Metropolitan's accelerated degree programs can help them attain better jobs and transformed lives.

Mr. Greenwald, 63, has made big changes at the college, including offering new degree programs and making a controversial move to give contracts, rather than tenure, to faculty members. He also has taken steps to involve the college more in issues facing the city, and even made the unusual move of hiring a man who used to sell books on the streets of Greenwich Village to oversee college forums on urban issues that bring together national experts with students and city dwellers.

The president's methods appear to be working. The tuition-dependent college's enrollment has increased by 40 percent since he arrived, to about 1,700 students. The institution -- which also has satellite campuses in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island -- even changed its name last fall, at his instigation. The college had spent the previous decade of its nearly 40-year history as Audrey Cohen College, named in honor of its founder.

Mr. Greenwald's own transformation in becoming the college's president has been equally dramatic. For the previous 30 years, he had worked as a tax lawyer, then a Manhattan real-estate and film deal maker, and finally a movie producer and executive. A slightly built man, he was tough and resourceful enough to hold his own in industries known for being full of sharks.

Myriad Roles

About a decade ago, he says, he had a kind of "midlife moment," where he started to question his career in the film industry and look for something with "more social significance." He joined the college's Board of Trustees in 1993, and as he became more involved in the institution, he found a sense of purpose.

"I felt that there was a contribution that I could make here," he says with an ironic and self-deprecating laugh, afraid of sounding corny. "This was part of my metamorphosis. What had been missing was a sense that I was doing something that would have lasting value."

While he was a top executive with the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group from 1985 to 1990, the company released more than 20 movies, including Blue Velvet and Crimes of the Heart. There was also fare like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Raw Deal. None were real blockbusters at the box office, and to make financial matters worse, the company presold the films' video and foreign-distribution rights in order to have cash to make the movies, Mr. Greenwald says. "Our business model was flawed, in retrospect."

While the company had generated millions of dollars by going public, it had overspent. In 1988, when the financial situation became grim, the company's high-flying chief executive officer and founder, Dino De Laurentiis, left the company. Mr. Greenwald took the helm, and several months later, the company declared bankruptcy. Mr. Greenwald oversaw the sale of the company's assets so that all of the creditors were paid. Shareholders in the company, including Mr. Greenwald, weren't so lucky.

After he left De Laurentiis Entertainment in 1990, banks began to hire him to oversee the sale of assets of other movie companies that had run into financial trouble. "I had gotten this reputation of coming into companies just before they went bankrupt," he says now. "Like Dr. Death."

Those experiences helped prompt Mr. Greenwald to begin to re-evaluate his life. "I became disillusioned in some respects with the film business," he says with another rueful chuckle. But his services were still in demand, and he enjoyed the challenge and adrenaline. "It's a high-risk business and a difficult business. You need to be aggressive. It's not for the meek."

He continued that work but began taking classes in legal philosophy at New York University to earn a master's degree in law, later writing his thesis on racism in laws regarding the death penalty and illegal drugs. He joined the board of what was then Audrey Cohen College in 1993, after he became friends with a trustee. And he began to take on pro bono legal work on behalf of death-row inmates appealing their convictions, because he had long opposed the death penalty.

But he was still in the game as a movie executive, and in 1994, he became president of Vision International, a film-distribution company. He would write papers for his law classes in hotel rooms at events like the Cannes Film Festival and fax them to his professors.

Meanwhile, he was gradually becoming more involved as a college trustee, and he began to shift which roles he emphasized in his juggling act.

Moving Beyond the Founder

The college traces its history to 1964, when Ms. Cohen began a program, called the Women's Talent Corps, to help train low-income women for occupations such as paralegal, teachers' aide, and social worker. That program became the foundation for the College for Human Services, which was chartered in 1970. The college was renamed to honor her in 1992.

Ms. Cohen developed a pedagogical method still used at the college, in which students apply the skills and knowledge that they have learned in class to their workplace, and then analyze the results. She also adapted the model for schoolchildren, and the college continues to license and oversee it in about 15 elementary and secondary schools across the country.

Mr. Greenwald, as a trustee, suggested that the college offer a master-of-business-administration degree in media management because he had seen a need for creative people in the film industry to learn how to navigate its business and financial side. The board approved the program, which was the first M.B.A. that the college offered. Mr. Greenwald helped develop the curriculum. He also began teaching classes in the program as an adjunct professor -- and he continues to teach them now as the college's president. The program enrolls about 35 students a year, and as part of the course work, students attend the Cannes Film Festival each spring, accompanied by Mr. Greenwald.

He became the board's chairman in 1998, and in June 1999, when the college began searching for a new president, he stepped in as the interim leader. "I felt that I had a skill set that could help the college," says Mr. Greenwald, in his 14th-floor office at the main campus here in SoHo. For its campus, the college rents part of that floor and all of the 12th floor of the building, which has large windows and thick concrete pillars constructed to support printing presses for the publishing businesses that were housed here in past decades.

"I had become convinced that what we were doing here at the college was a very worthwhile enterprise," Mr. Greenwald adds. "We were really playing a role in transforming people's lives."

John S. Rodgers, the board's current chairman, says Mr. Greenwald asked the board to consider him for the permanent job of president. "We were thrilled," says Mr. Rodgers. "What we saw was a glint in his eye. He had become hooked."

Faculty members, however, who had been helping interview the three other finalists for the job, were less than thrilled, says Charles Gray, a sociology and psychology professor who is chairman of the Faculty Council. The new president, they say, had much to learn about academic culture. "There was a lot of animosity initially because we felt he was somewhat impatient, somewhat arrogant," Mr. Gray says. "After about six or seven months, that toned down, I have to admit. He became more collegial and open."

Mr. Greenwald admits that he had to adjust. "I was used to things happening fairly quickly," he says. "If I was president of a company and I wanted something to happen, I would just tell some people, and it usually would happen. If it didn't happen, then they weren't there anymore. That doesn't occur in a college."

The president still believes, however, that the administrative and financial side of a college is a business and should be run like one. But "the endgame is different," and dealing with faculty members is akin to "managing creative talent" in the film business, he says. "The key is being able to impose a sufficient kind of operational control without stifling the creative talent."

Street Politics

The college, when he became president, was undergoing an identity crisis of its own. Ms. Cohen, the founder, had died in 1996. The college then went through a "fallow period" when new programs weren't developed and enrollments declined, Mr. Greenwald says.

"Audrey had been a true founder, meaning that she had really dominated the college," Mr. Greenwald says. "The culture of the college had to change from a place that was really made in the founder's image to more of an institution that transcended any one individual. This is always a difficult cultural shift."

To further that shift and better market the college to prospective students, Mr. Greenwald and the trustees, following the advice of an outside consultant, changed the college's name last fall. The renaming was the subject of much discussion among the trustees, Mr. Rodgers says, but the board realized the need for a name that better reflected the identity of the institution.

The college wanted to add degree programs, and Mr. Greenwald believed the college's faculty structure needed to change in order to attract better professors.

The college had never had a Faculty Council, and he pushed for the creation of one in 2000. The faculty also had never had tenure or rank. In the early years under Ms. Cohen, students were called "citizens" and didn't receive grades. "Those were all wonderful ideals, but at some place, the marketplace and reality catch up with you," Mr. Greenwald says. The college already had begun giving students grades, years before his arrival.

Last fall, the college began offering faculty contracts and created the ranks of assistant, associate, and full professor, for which they had to apply. Professors had wanted a tenure system, says Mr. Gray, the Faculty Council chairman, and reluctantly agreed to the contracts. Most faculty members also disliked having to apply for rank, he adds. "It's somewhat demeaning after they have been here for such a long period of time."

Meanwhile, the college hired seven new professors this year and plans to hire more in the fall. The college now offers eight degrees, including four M.B.A. programs, and plans to offer two more master's degrees next January, in teacher-education and in emergency management.

Mr. Greenwald also has worked to increase the college's involvement in issues facing the city. Other universities have urban-studies programs, but often do not deal with how ideas and policies affect people who live in cities. "I want this college to focus on the problems of the city at a ground level, because that's where our students come from," he says. The aim is to give "the people most affected by the policy a voice in that policy."

To help accomplish that, Mr. Greenwald three years ago hired Hakim Hasan, an erudite street vendor who sold books in Greenwich Village, to be the president's "special assistant on urban affairs." "I thought he would bring a perspective to the institution and to me personally that I didn't have," Mr. Greenwald says. In 2001, Mr. Hasan became director of the college's Urban Institute, which organizes a lecture series on urban issues. Just blocks from the site of the September 11 attacks, the college also last year sponsored a conference for local businesses trying to recover.

Meanwhile, Mr. Greenwald still keeps a hand in death-penalty work and is now helping represent two death-row inmates in Alabama and North Carolina. He also remains a partner in a film-production company, Presto Productions. But those facets of his life are no longer at the forefront. The college has become his chief commitment.