Shut Up, Mr. President

By Robert A. Weisbuch

In February I wrote a column for The Chronicle on the often-abortive relationship between K-12 schools and academe. Around that time, the major newspaper in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger, published a different essay of mine under the headline, "Kill State Tests," which simplified my position on standardized tests but served its attention-grabbing purpose.

Afterward, I received a bunch of positive letters, but I also received some gripes. One of my trustees at Drew University wondered aloud whether I should opine so controversially in light of my leadership role. As president, I cannot be Just Plain Bob but must be, to some extent, Collective Drew.

And a superb junior faculty member at Drew who has published a full, and, in some ways, favorable account of the No Child Left Behind Act worried in an e-mail message about our differences. I reassured him that I think of universities as places that thrive on such differences, where people on various sides of an issue should state their case with energetic passion. Still, it was hardly unnatural for my colleague to wonder whether, by differing with a president -- who in truth is not "just another colleague" -- he was risking his career or at least placing us in awkward opposition.

I sometimes joke that a president's brain, once fertile with intellectual complexities and now dulled by administration, resembles a ghost town, but occasionally a boozy gunslinger of a thought wanders through.

This presidential brain, useless appendage that it may now be, the cognitive equivalent of an appendix, nonetheless thinks a lot of things, in fact, and the public and the alumni know what it thinks. They know what it thinks about the SAT, diversity and race in education, the liberal arts (what they are and what they are not), college rankings by for-profit outfits, financial-aid trends, and the like. Regular readers of the Careers section know what this particular presidential brain thinks about many of those issues, too.

I tend to express myself strongly -- hyperbole to a humanist is the equivalent of data to a social scientist -- and personally. That seems right to me because I do remain a person. But a good friend has questioned the confessional nature of my Careers columns: "Why would you embarrass yourself like that?" (Indeed, a future column will concern the mistakes I have made in my presidency, boiled down from its original length, which rivaled War and Peace.)

More generally, my wife has suggested to me that what occurs to my brain need not inevitably come out of my mouth. "Wouldn't you want to experience how it might feel just once not to have an attitude?" she asks. It would feel, I believe, like counting the dots on acoustic ceiling tiles.

Blatant exhibitionism may explain a part of this, but not all. Never far from my thought is the constant refrain bemoaning the neutering of the university president. We regularly read essays that wax nostalgic for a past when college presidents indeed served as thought leaders on issues where they might reasonably possess an informed perspective.

That means choosing your shots carefully, of course. It will not do, for instance, for me to loudly support one of the presidential candidates. And while I have some great stories about colleagues past and present, you won't get them from me. Every one of my Careers columns, including this one, goes through a "protect Drew and the innocent editorial washer-dryer."

But here is my real question. Do you want college and university presidents to speak out or not?

At Harvard University, Larry Summers lost his job for doing so, and though what he said sounded illogical and sexist, I expect that he is neither; and most presidents don't even have the intellectual wherewithal to go near the issue he manhandled. At Columbia University, Lee Bollinger did the right thing twice, even if it added up to the wrong thing in the view of the majority, and he got scolded by everyone except for a few individuals who bothered to consult the First Amendment. At Duke University, Dick Brodhead said, with the greatest tact and sensitivity, all the right things based on all the wrong information -- for which he was not at all responsible. He was baited by a faculty that wanted him to say much more and then punished by the 20-20 hindsight of parents and alums who expected him to support students regardless of, well, anything.

Most of us presidents, though, deal with more local eruptions. There's a "news hole" in both print and broadcast media -- most definitely including an alert, hungry campus newspaper -- just waiting to be filled by a president's next impolitic remark.

If we presidents speak our minds and don't offend, we yet may appear to bully. At a small meeting of faculty members, I found myself in possession of an idea, one that was risky but attractive. I wanted my colleagues to respond frankly and so I began, "Let me speak for a moment just as a fellow faculty member and not as the president."

"You can't," said one of the gang I am apparently no longer a part of.

And, of course, he was right. But my concept of the presidency is not based on my being The Decider; sometimes, yes, but just as often I hope to be The Instigator.

It is difficult, though, to imagine how to do that -- how to offer ideas and encourage innovation in others, while not creating an innovation gulag, a sense that people should humor the leader or else. And so I took heart when Hillary Clinton said she had finally found her voice in New Hampshire, after many years of speaking publicly. Maybe I will find mine yet in New Jersey.

In the meantime, the multiple difficulties of speaking out explain why silence starts to seem like an attractive option even to a noisy president like me. Against that instinct is the wish of the university to achieve positive publicity and, thus, to court the press by encouraging the president to say something interesting enough to earn a quote but bland enough that few could disparage it.

And there is my own sense that, just as babies announce their existence with a cry, I feel most alive with my mouth open, saying what I think. That will lead to eventual disaster, I expect. Last month I dreamed twice that George W. Bush lent me a watch, and surely, Dr. Freud, that suggests that I am living on borrowed presidential time.

I have developed a sophisticated rule, then. It is, speak out only if you can't help it. Most of the time, I can help it.

But should we presidents be quite so careful, when, in fact, we represent not only our institutions but also the kind of learning our institutions practice? Whenever I stop myself from speaking my mind, I wonder whether a little bit of the definition of the liberal arts -- an education befitting a free person -- doesn't crumble.

Still, suck it up, I tell myself. Freedom exerts itself in relation to boundaries, and the university presidency is a pretty confining set of boundaries that nonetheless allows for significant moments of assertion. But if we must choose, let it be to say too much rather than too little.