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| Thursday, September 18, 2003 |
First Person
Goodbye Prague
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Ever since I heard a lecture by Frank Keppel, the U.S. commissioner of education under President Kennedy, I knew I wanted to be a college president. He told us: If you want to be offered an interesting job in the United States, you must first rise to the top of a pyramid of power. After years as a professor and as a college administrator, I finally made it to a college presidency in 2001.
The choice was a difficult one: Keep my deanship and my tenure as a full professor at Shepherd College, a fine liberal-arts college in West Virginia, or give it all up for the presidency of Anglo-American College in Prague? I went with my old dream, and soon, I was in Prague.
I knew that the Czech Republic would be an exciting place in which to live and work. After a half-century of totalitarianism -- there had been only three years between Nazi and Communist rule -- the country had opted for democracy. The president of the country was Vaclav Havel, a writer and genuine hero, and the setting in Prague couldn't have been more beautiful.
The main campus of the college is just a block from the Charles Bridge, in the heart of Mala Strana, the "Greenwich Village" of Prague. Classes are held in the beautiful Embassy of the Knights of Malta, next to democracy's Lennon Wall, and the streets round about are cobblestone, crowded with tourists from around the world, and full of life day and night.
Moreover, the members of the search committee were wonderful. They were looking for someone who had been around higher education a long time and who could be innovative. The college, at 10 years old, needed to find its niche. The faculty is top quality, the students motivated, and the curriculum excellent. It has three schools -- business administration, humanities and social sciences, and legal studies. In 2001, it became the first private, non-Czech (all the teaching is in English), undergraduate institution to earn Czech accreditation.
It seemed like a perfect choice for me, too. I had applied for college presidencies while working as a vice president of Southeastern University in Washington, only to twice run up against a problem after making it to the shortlist. "Well, all the candidates are qualified, but this one has the experience as a college president and that one does not. Let's go with the experienced fellow." My conclusion: I'd take the job in Prague for two or three years. It would be a "résumé builder." I would establish my bona fides as a successful college president and then seek to land a similar job in the States.
So now it is two years later and time for me to begin hunting for a new presidency. Why do I want to leave Prague, given the great allure of the city? The answer is that, as in all endeavors, there are good and bad aspects of the job.
Let me run through some of the good points. First of all, I've built a leadership team. It includes Mitchell Young, a bright and scholarly American, with years of Prague and Anglo-American College experience, who became vice president for academic affairs, and Martin McGoldrick, a highly creative and dynamic innovator, who became vice president for institutional advancement. I found that the best part of the job became working with these two partners.
Second, we were able to expand enrollment, from around 250 students when I started to about 380 this fall. Our curricular offerings have grown by about a third, with more than 88 courses scheduled for September. We have built partnerships with colleges and universities worldwide.
Third, we are about to resolve an accreditation problem with our legal-studies program, the weakest part of the college. The program had been prevented from growing by the apparent hammerlock on accreditation held by the few established ex-Communist law schools that don't welcome competition, even though it is clear that thousands of Czechs want to enter a program like ours. Within months, we hope to have this rectified when our legal-studies degrees become validated by the University of Wales.
Fourth, I have been able to attract some prominent Americans and Czechs to our governing board. Foremost among these has been U.S. Ambassador Craig Stapleton. He has worked assiduously to raise our profile in the Czech Republic. One major event he sponsored was a seminar at Prague Castle on the role that Western-style higher education and our pedagogy is playing in the Czech Republic. On the board, too, is Marc Weiss, a former professor at Columbia University and a Clinton administration expert who now heads the Prague Institute for Global Urban Development. Recently, he brought the eminent British urbanologist Sir Peter Hall to lecture at the college.
Fifth, I have been able to produce a considerable surplus in the budget for the first time ever. We are winding up the fiscal year (it ends August 31) very much in the black, with the ability to undertake many important new steps. And, as I did last year, I can award bonuses and step increases to almost everyone on staff without having to worry about making ends meet.
I could go on, but let me make this final point. Last May we succeeded in having our name changed. This is not an easy task in the Czech Republic. We are now officially a "vysoka skola" -- best translated as a "university." And my idea to create an American-style, scholarly, samizdat-laden presidential library for Vaclav Havel -- and in honor of the movement for freedom and democracy in this part of the world -- looks just about ready to take off.
So, why not stay forever, as the going is getting better and better? The major reason is that my family wishes to live in the United States, and I wish to live with them. My wife, Shakun, is an immigration lawyer who has a practice in the States, and my son, Danny, age 12, prefers American schools. So my family and I have shuttled back and forth as best we could. Whenever Danny had a school break, he and my wife have come to Prague. Alternately I have gone to Washington. We've never been separated by more than a month or so, but it has made for some very large phone bills.
Then, too, there are the downsides to the job. I don't want to be negative, but here are some of them:
First, no one ever compliments anyone here. Try saying such things as "That's a great idea" or "What an excellent, well-done job" -- routine elsewhere but here considered to be insincere. As a sociologist, I think that the Czechs have been so ground down over the past century by foreign and oppressive regimes that they don't really think in their hearts that they are excellent -- even though I find many of them to be just that -- and neither, they think, is anyone else.
And second, they feel that it is their duty to tell anyone proposing any innovation whatsoever of all potential pitfalls, somehow assuming that you would never have thought of these dire possibilities yourself. Perhaps Aeschylus should have placed Cassandra here.
Third, people in Prague don't seem to trust others. This is a country where bank checks are not used. It's either cash on the barrel or electronic transfers between bank accounts. With checks, you have to trust that the other person actually has the money in his or her account to cover the obligation. This lack of trust extends to many aspects of interpersonal relations and makes the development of academic partnerships between institutions here more formal than would otherwise be the case.
Fourth, most of us in the realm of American higher education believe in the adage that a rising tide lifts all boats; we think innovation can be a win/win situation for everyone. That sort of thinking doesn't fly here. For many of the people I have to deal with here as president, the view is always that it's a fixed pie and, "I want to know what share of it I personally will get." Surveys show that the public perceives bribery and corruption to be a major blemish in the Czech Republic, and it's no wonder.
Finally, in spite of the fact that this is a wonderful nation with many truly heroic figures helping to raise the country from the depths of totalitarianism to membership in NATO and now, the European Union, occasionally one finds a rotten apple in the Czech Republic. As a karmic payback for some error I must have made in a previous existence, I've got one individual here whose speciality is making up egregious stories out of whole cloth. He seems to operate on the assumption that he when he flings the dirt with reckless abandon, some part of it will stick, and he will emerge in the public eye as the Czech who saved the institution from these foreign interlopers.
So, given the pluses and minuses, my family's wishes, and the plan I adopted several years ago, it's time to say that "our work is done here, partner" and move on. Earlier this month, I wrote to the trustees saying that this academic year would be my last and that I wanted to "graduate" in June.
My hope is that an American institution will look at the wonderful progress that's been made here in the past few years and want to achieve the same results itself.
So, I'm taking out the résumé and brushing it up a bit. What will this year hold? Probably an exciting new journey to someplace fulfilling. But where?