A President's Third Year

Pacing Myself

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By Robert A. Weisbuch

"We appointed you," someone on the presidential search committee at Drew University confided to me, "because you have so many ideas. We almost didn't appoint you because you have too many."

Most of "my" ideas come from other people, but I have a tendency to try to enact them, partly out of a notion that I did not want to be one of those people for whom there are always more reasons not to try something. That's accompanied by a conviction that the skepticism that enables academics in their intellectual pursuits sometimes lames them in their institutional life.

Given my penchant for innovation, I could easily rush change in my first year as a university president and botch the job. Yet when I began meeting with faculty members at Drew last summer, they expressed a frustration that too many hundreds of committee hours had resulted in not much at all, that perfect governance had sometimes resulted in a stall.

So, here is what I am learning. Where you can go fast, zoom. As a new president, you pack a few "Get Out of Jail" cards. Choose a few spots where hope will outweigh opposition. On all else, work not on consensus -- consensus arrives just after Godot -- but on refiguring the process.

We zoomed a few weeks ago at Drew when we made the SAT optional for admissions applications, allowing students to submit some graded work as an alternative.

Hardly a radical move, it follows upon evidence by a host of colleges like Bates, Hamilton, Holy Cross, Middlebury, and Bowdoin that such a decision improves the applicant pool, raises student quality, and encourages applications from high-potential students of color.

The longer I live with the decision, the better I like it. Messages were favorable, 60 to 3, and the thank yous alerted me newly about the ugly culture that has been created around those exams. That's not the fault of the Educational Testing Service or the College Board but of an entire society that has cheapened thought and merit into fake-objective numbers.

While my point here is about the rapidity of the decision, the substance is of interest too because it treats a sore subject on the campus. I took this job because, as Roger Martin, the president of Randolph-Macon College, put it a few years ago in an article he wrote for College News about his student experience here, "Drew more than matched an Ivy League education."

But Martin's generous remarks follow upon his acknowledgment of initial disappointment in not being admitted to an Ivy and occur in an article titled "U.S. News & World Report Got It Wrong." We don't get the ranking, the renown, the number of applications, or the yield such praise would imply -- not nearly.

When I sought advice on the SAT decision from a friend who consults students on college choice, he suggested making the test optional as one step, and our enrollment-management people suggested likewise. They told us we would end up with more applicants of a higher quality.

Once practicality pointed to the issue, idealism grasped it. Why do we admit students in such an impersonal way, one of my administrative colleagues asked, when we claim to treat them so personally once they are here? Shouldn't our admissions process partake of our campus ethic?

An internal study last year had shown no correlation between the test scores and the success of our students, but significant correlation between that success and high-school grade point averages. (My guess is that if you do well in a poor high school, that is usually a school in a neighborhood with difficult circumstances, and so your academic success speaks to your persistence and ambition as much as the A minus at a "better" school.)

I suggested that we require students who don't provide SAT score to submit additional letters of recommendation. When Dean Paolo Cucchi came up with a much better idea -- the submission of graded course work -- that made up my mind and convinced the rest of our top administrative staff. But what about faculty members, students, trustees, and alumni?

The dean's elected faculty council was divided on the issue but mildly favorable. Some colleagues urged more deliberation, but the internal study and supportive studies from the other universities made the unease less than compelling. And the fast-approaching admissions season gave the issue enough urgency that I decided to go with the decision.

Making SAT scores optional was not the first or even the 10th item on my list of priorities but it proved one that interested the whole community and gave us a taste of innovation with little loss of communal judgment. I announced the measure as a pilot too, allowing me to forward the notion that we can afford to innovate only if we promise to assess carefully.

The reaction has surprised me, not only the smaller-than-expected number of protests but the interest of news media and the extraordinary enthusiasm of alumni -- especially when I explain that quality is the driver of this decision, that if it succeeds it will be harder, not easier, to be admitted to Drew. (That fact may mute some of the gratitude we heard as well.)

We've been doing some zooming on a few other fronts, too. Our talented faculty, for example, is not pulling in the same amount of external grants as our peer institutions. I discovered that we had an excellent grant writer here who required a grant entrepreneur as a partner, and so I took the relatively inexpensive move to hire such an individual. We've also been bringing in several distinguished scientists to help us think about strengthening that area and contemplating a new laboratory facility.

But other matters almost got me to the zoom that is doom. As is the case on most campuses, governance policies exist here that were arrived at over long years by a highly democratic faculty practice. But some of those policies strike me as insufficient or simply wrong, in terms of assuring professional standards and good incentives.

As I mulled over those policies on a rainy weekend, I became more and more adamant. Immediate action seemed to be required. I needed to be bold. "Change this policy or I will impose my solution," I found myself rehearsing in the shower to an imagined faculty meeting.

Timely help arrived, sparing Drew the spectacle of Son of Coriolanus. David Grant, president of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, called me on another matter. David is the Elvis of institutional assessment. When I was at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, I asked him to speak to graduate deans for whom the very word assessment was anathema, and he won them over. He does that by presenting assessment as a richly complex and humanizing enterprise, about as far as possible from reductive quantification as one could wish. For him, assessment is a kind of culture.

I was moved by David's call to recognize that my simple formulation -- Drew is too democratic for its own good -- was a misnaming of the issue. What I wanted was not less but better democracy, more self-reflective and capable of decisive outcomes. And that mattered more than the particular policies.

David came to the campus, gave the talk, and wowed a packed house. In the course of it, he asked us to graph our issues into those time-honored quadrants, divided into important and not important vertically and into urgent and not urgent horizontally. At that point I realized that my issues were very important but only moderately urgent. There will be time, I thought.

I had a moment of panic in leaving the talk. What if we do all this assessing and the outcomes are opposed to mine? Then, I thought, I will have been saved from having been wrong -- wrong not in the abstract but wrong for Drew at this moment.

Fast is fun, and a little of it can provide a lot of lift. But, just as slow cooking makes for better brisket, the big stuff on a campus is better taken slowly -- so long as dinner does get served.