A President's Third Year

Avoiding a Sophomore Slump

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By Robert A. Weisbuch

Sophomore year. For students, that's the year no one knows how to treat you. College is no longer so fresh, but the major hasn't kicked in; puberty's left town, but adulthood is still a train stop away. For pitchers, it's the year when the rookie phenom goes on the disabled list with a career-ending injury.

Wonder if either, or both, pertain to college presidencies?

What I do know -- in my second year as president of Drew University -- is that the proverbial clock is ticking. It is time to move from rhetoric to action, time to produce. Happily, I am confident of our direction. But while I'm ready to lead, I'm not sure everyone is ready to follow.

As I was reintroduced to scattered applause at the first college faculty meeting of the new year, I realized that my new colleagues still react to me as if I have two heads. Many are befuddled by how my encouragement of new ideas -- the head with the smiley face -- coexists with an insistence on higher standards for just about everything -- the second head, the one with the pruney expression. The faculty is just not sure where I really want us to travel.

As I write this, I've been putting the final touches on a long-planned address that should make the course clear. Drew is going to create multidisciplinary centers to bolster intellectual life beyond departments and schools. We're going to work more closely with the K-12 system, another gesture to help us see the academic landscape more wholly. We will add faculty members to improve our intellectual diversity and range; and create new master's programs, such as one in teaching, that will bring the liberal arts to the practical arts for our students. Longer range, we're discussing everything from how to strengthen graduate education at a small university to how we foster an overall concept of civic engagement.

I'm as excited by those prospects as I've ever been about anything in my professional life. But my colleagues don't universally share my enthusiasm -- yet. When I characterized the exciting year ahead by quoting Wordsworth on being young at the advent of the French Revolution -- "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" -- one observer noted that that particular historical period ended in a reign of terror.

As for the students, they want me to want them.

Last March, I attended a helpful forum at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on being a president. Two superb veterans gave the same key advice: Don't let development always take you out of town in your first year, and don't let the crush of planning and paper keep you in your office. Get out, get known, own your campus.

That's exactly what I didn't do. I did teach a course to get to know students, based on the idea that the most real relationship is a working relationship, and it worked. Through the 16 smart, totally neat students enrolled, I did come to understand the entire cohort much better.

But many of the other 2,000 students not in my classroom came to think of me as reclusive and aloof. Compared to my predecessor -- the most popular political figure in recent New Jersey history -- I guess that is understandable.

Governor Tom Kean, as president of Drew, had been so student-involved that, distinguished as he is, he became known as "TK." The students were in mourning over TK's departure: Elvis had left the auditorium, and one student wrote in the campus newspaper that, in comparison, I was as exciting as his shower slippers. (I wanted to send him a pair of huge Mickey Mouse slippers I had received from my wife as a joke a few years earlier, but presidential dignity stopped me.)

The trustees and alumni have been warmly welcoming, my best audience. But as we head toward a capital campaign, I worry if they will soon see me as a formerly law-abiding fellow who turned into a scaly pickpocket.

All of that has brought my two heads face to face with a simple fact: I like to be liked, and that is not really a perquisite of a college presidency. In fact, it can lead to disaster.

Most of us who have become college presidents have been liked. It's hard to get the job if you've been consistently despised in your previous roles, though I have seen a few such cases -- cases, by the way, where the president was controversial but decisive and successful. Meanwhile, I have seen a lot of nice guys and nice gals finish last -- or not get to finish their terms on their terms at all.

A president is more parent than friend -- parent not of the faculty or students but of the institution -- and must have a parent's indifference to anything but the ultimate good of that fragile child, the university itself. We all know about parents who try to be their kids' friends, but we also know about parents who brutishly attempt to imprint their ambitions and ideas upon their children. We presidents are in a situation where we must provide direction in one sense and take direction in another.

So being deliberately unlikable probably isn't a good idea, but doing a Sally Fields isn't either. If they really like you, you are probably failing miserably as that institutional parent.

One of my administrative colleagues, perhaps noticing my wish to be liked, suggested I hire a provost, "someone you can throw to the wolves." That wasn't quite my idea, and, instead, Pamela Gunter-Smith, the distinguished biologist from Spelman College who has just joined Drew as provost, and I readily agreed to do the tough stuff together. Two heads -- or, from the faculty point of view, four -- are better than one or, um, two.

Our faculty challenge is to improve governance while encouraging innovation. That has a bland Latinate sound to it, but it won't be a bland accomplishment if we can pull it off. I have a big red Staples Easy Button on my desk that, when you punch it, says in a nerdy male voice, "That was easy." This won't be. If professors get too hung up on the ratcheting up of standards and the changes that requires, then controversy will swamp an interest in developing new programs and courses. But without the higher expectations, all innovation will take place upon a trapdoor.

My job this second year -- and I write about it only because my chief virtue is in being ordinary, and I expect my second year stands for the second year of many, even most, university presidencies -- is to convince faculty members that progressive innovation and blue-chip standards belong together and that my two heads are actually one.

As for the students, I've never thought of myself as a politician and have never asked anybody to vote for me, but I am ready to hit the campaign trail. I am making time to be out there every day, and the campus is seeming just a bit more like my expanded home. And the trustees and alumni seem to be picking their own pockets very generously.

But underneath all that, the desire for widespread if barely meaningful affection won't (and perhaps shouldn't) disappear by edict.

The pitcher in the sophomore slump learns how to prevail on the mound with a perpetually sore arm. The lost sophomore finds direction in a major, and the president learns how to live with, perhaps, a little less love and a little more accomplished reality.