A President's Third Year

Deal or No Deal?

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By Robert A. Weisbuch

As the presidential hunting season peaks, with Cheney-like accidental woundings of the ego in so many campus lairs, I'm sharply reminded: The best thing about being a university president is not having to try out to become a university president.

It was a year ago that I drove myself to an impersonal Hilton and spoke to the 15 or so members of Drew University's presidential search committee. When a representative of the search consultant called me the next morning, I blurted out an apology for my abysmal performance before he got a chance to tell me I had been made a finalist.

At some level, I knew it had been an enjoyable dialogue. But somehow defensiveness had made me misinterpret the panel's reactions. It was like that old Clearasil commercial. They weren't laughing with me, they were laughing at me.

"No, Bob, they actually were laughing with you," the representative told me, and now I faced another decision. Deal or no deal?

That happens to be the name of a particularly disgusting new game show -- I know it is disgusting because I watch every episode -- in which 26 boxes are packed with different sums of money. The contestant gets a mystery box and then progressively learns the contents of the others, trying to determine if he has a sawbuck or a zillion dollars in his. Intermittently, he is tempted to cut the game short by accepting a proferred sum.

That is almost exactly like the presidential search process for candidates. At any point you can say, Gee thanks, it was great to get to this stage, but I am going to take my current winnings, drop out of this nerve-fraying contest, and remain in my current position.

I was tempted to do just that. I had passed the preliminaries in another search a few years earlier, "kept going," as they say in quizland, and lost it all. It was a superb institution -- let's call it Humbling College. I was undecided and so was the college, so it flew in my family for a mutual look-see. After the visit, I believed, wrongly again, that the job was as good as mine. I started asking for all sorts of special benefits, and whatever chance I might have had probably evaporated before the finals even began.

That was a public search, embarrassing in its publicity to me and to my organization, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. I prized my work and my colleagues there. And I wasn't in the role of a dean or a provost in a large bureaucracy -- I was the leader, and my curiosity about another position was deeply unsettling to my staff and trustees. I am not certain they ever recovered full confidence in me.

The finals at Humbling might have been subtitled, Marathon Man. Each of us was put through three days of interviews and public addresses. I repeated myself again and again, to the point where some of the trailing trustees began to mouth my catch phrases mockingly -- not a good sign. But I couldn't quite make up 12 different talks.

The problem wasn't just the talk, it was the walk. I have a mild arthritis so the way that I walk, which seems to me pretty natural, strikes others as a limp, and several trustees began to ask about my health.

"Do you run every day?," one asked. "From what?" I responded. Another asked my wife, Candy Cooper, who is a journalist, what we like to do for fun. Given the emphasis on athletics at Humbling, we later determined that an effective response would have been, "Oh we like to compete in decathalons." Instead, Candy replied, "Well, we have a little boy, so on weekends it's great if we can stay in our bathrobes until after lunch." Wrong answer.

I was asked about my hobbies. "Wine collecting," I said, to a grimace, and then, more hopefully, "and baseball." "What position?" I was asked. "Box seat," I laughed -- and laughed alone.

Next was a dinner where Candy and I, seated apart, had to move from table to table with each course. I found that totally discombobulating, especially at the end of a long day. My conversational jones was weakening leaf by lettuce leaf, until it melted entirely with the ice cream.

Then I gave the required after-dinner talk. "You said diversity is job one," said one trustee in opening the questioning, "and as you spent many years in Michigan it is understandable that you would employ a Ford Motor slogan. But what would you really do first?"

That was an interesting moment, for I knew the right answer. The right answer was, "gain the confidence of the community by doing a lot of listening." But it was all going so badly that something in me just refused that response. "I'd really work on diversity," I said sullenly, "because it is the most important issue in higher education."

I believe that. But I spoke with a certain shrillness that made some of the more conservative trustees sense that the spirit of Che Guevara had entered the room. In fact, as the three days went on, I became more and more dogmatic. "Well, they're getting the real me," I told Candy. "Bobby," said my wife and best friend, "you just sound so unwise."

My only good moment was at a luncheon where I connected with a large number of terrific students. I dropped my tired speech, ad-libbed my views, stopped and let the questions roll. With those students, I guess, the part of me that is still an instructor who loves teaching took over. With the faculty and the alumni and the trustees, somehow, I couldn't drop the Elmer Gantry imitation.

And when I didn't get the job, when it went to someone absolutely right for the institution instead, it was still a blow even though I wasn't sure I really wanted the job. I felt the way I had in fourth grade, when I had a crush on a girl named Judy, gave her a book, and found it, hours later, floating down the creek in back of the school. It was like that.

Never again, never again, never again, I would chant while jogging on the treadmill, just to show those physical culturists at Humbling. Never again for a presidential search, especially a public one.

But Judy had not been my last date and now, with the opportunity at Drew, I was at it again. The search at Drew was also public. Once again, I honestly did not know whether I wanted the position, as I still loved my role at Woodrow Wilson. But I had a terrible longing to be on a campus once more, and Drew was a lot closer to my home than Humbling had been. And visiting Drew's gorgeous campus, this time incognito, love bloomed again.

But this time also felt like last time. There was my name in the local newspaper. There were three days of interviews and public addresses. Except this time, no one seemed to care if I couldn't run a seven-minute mile. "Click," my friend Georgia Nugent had told me about her interview at Kenyon that resulted in her presidency, "It just felt right." All during those three days at Drew I kept hearing a clicking.

The trustee leading the search committee, whose very name had struck fear in me since it is followed by a numeral, turned out to be a steely investor, yes, but an investor who writes very fine lyric poetry. Candy and he spent a very different audition dinner discussing writing, and both later told me they entirely forgot it was an audition at all. The board chairwoman, who in the preliminary interview had been unsmiling—”She hated me,” I told a friend—smiled often and warmly. (These are individuals for whom I now feel a strong friendship. It is odd and touching to be writing about them in that way, remembering a time only months ago when they scared the hell out of me.)

At the final debriefing interview, I felt natural enough to tell the search committee I so enjoyed myself that I'd like to stay and interview the next candidate with them. But in those rushed moments, you still cannot know your own mind. I left immediately for the airport, for I was scheduled to be on a panel at Emory University the next day, led by my friend Earl Lewis, Emory's provost. It wasn't until the next evening, when at dinner Earl asked, "So do you really want this job?" that I could say, to Earl and to myself, "Oh man, do I ever." I had stayed the course, and was ready to open that mystery box.

When all that took place I was 58 years old. Somehow that seems a strange experience to have at my stage in life, something more appropriate to youth. And indeed, except for my Humbling experience, it had been more than 30 years since I had endured such an extended audition. Humbling indeed, but what's wrong with that?

Which reminds me. When the local newspaper mentioned the finalists, it had been particularly painful because one of the others named was a dear friend, someone I have valued since grad-school days. The only consolation was that he and I are very different in style, so that if he was the right fit at that particular moment for that particular place, then I probably was not. We differ in another way. It took me something like two years to congratulate the extraordinary and perfectly apt individual who won the job at Humbling College. My friend called me on the day after we both got word from Drew. That remains, in fact, my sharpest memory of the entire experience.

My advice to presidential aspirants is not about how to answer one question or another. My advice is not to be, like my friend, transcendent, because most of us cannot be so. And it is certainly not to be like me, stumbling through Humbling and then drawn to Drew.

It is not even to be yourself, for "being yourself" is an intricate matter for any normally complex individual who has more than one aspect.

Perhaps the only advice is to admit that you are in a vulnerable situation and that this is the deal you struck with those twins, Hope and Risk. You might congratulate yourself for a certain courage in striking such a deal. And you could consider, too, that the twins are really triplets whose far stronger hidden sibling is Luck.