Transcript: Big man on campus
An audio interview with Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

July 16, 2008
Steve Pelletier, higher education writer and consultant
Dr. Stephen Trachtenberg, President emeritus of the George Washington University

STEVE PELLETIER: On behalf of AGB Online, I'm Steve Pelletier. With us today is one of the leading voices on American higher education, Dr. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, President Emeritus of the George Washington University, where he also holds an appointment as University Professor of Public Service. Dr. Trachtenberg was president of GW for 19 years. Prior to that he served as president of the University of Hartford for 11 years. Dr. Trachtenberg's latest book is titled Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education.

Dr. Trachtenberg, welcome.

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Thank you, Steve—delighted to be here.

STEVE PELLETIER: Very good. I'm going to jump right in by asking what you hope to accomplish by writing Big Man on Campus and how has the book been received so far?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, it was cheaper than psychotherapy and so I hope to achieve clear mental health.

I think there is some truth to that effort at humor. Wrapping up three decades in higher education, I had a variety of issues I wanted to address and this gave me a chance to talk about some of them and get some questions asked and some answers provided. So far the book has been well received. All of the reviews have been more generous than I anticipated. As you can imagine, I think, anyone who writes a book... once it's gone you sit there sort of in a fetal postiion curled up waiting for somebody to reject you and to say nasty things about the book, but so far it's been great.

STEVE PELLETIER: Very good.

Big Man on Campus touches frequently on the many inherent tensions with which a university president must contend. In that a president is just one person, is it fair to expect a university leader to balance the many often competing interests that he or she faces regularly? How can a governing board help a president and a leader's multiple roles?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, the answer to your question is no, it's not fair but that's not sufficient. Whether it's fair or not, you've got to get in there and roll up your sleeves and recognize that being university president is not a spectator sport. It's a blood sport—a contact sport. We need, as in rugby, all the allies we can get—all the teammates we can get. And yes, one hopes that the board of trustees is standing shoulder to shoulder with the president, addressing critical and also congratulatory stakeholders and constituents. In hard times, you need your board. In good times, things will take care of themselves.

STEVE PELLETIER: In Big Man on Campus, you state that if you want to get things done, you have to risk being wrong. Elsewhere you cite instances where you could have been more effective if you could have acted more expeditiously. How can a president work with boards to take more risk and act more quickly?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, what you want to be doing is anticipating the worst all the time. I know that is a slightly melancholy and pessimistic point of view. And I'm not saying you have to walk around with a dark cloud over your head, but the time to put the roof on the house is on a sunny day, not a rainy day.

So, for example, people frequently say to me, “all of the issues in the world come up for discussion in a university campus” and I'll say, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian question, and the question of conversations on campus—the middle east—and all of that is true. And so I spent an immense amount of time with Islamic students, with international Muslim students, as well as domestic, working with Jewish students. And during the holiday of Ramadan, one of the Muslim holidays, I persuaded, originally—my suggestion, but ultimately the kids ran with it on their own— the Jewish students to host an Iftar, a “break fast,” which is part of the Ramadan holiday. And we started doing that year after year and there were relationships built between these students over something they shared, which was a meal and celebration of the holiday they could all understand. And so, when daunting issues arose on campus, there were already bridges built between the two communities. You don't wait until you have a problem to start dealing with it.

STEVE PELLETIER: You characterize the Lawrence Summer experience at Harvard as a failure of leadership on the part of the board. You also write that the problem with voluntary boards is that there is very little downside for getting it wrong. Could you elaborate on what you mean by boards getting it wrong? Should there be more transparency on work done by university boards?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Yes, I think boards need to understand their responsibility more clearly and they need to provide starch to an institution. Keep it from doing things that are harmful to itself. You're right, I have the Harvard example—I also talk about Gallaudet where the board of trustees acceded to campus disruptions, rather than making it clear to the students and the faculty who were opposed to the president that the board of trustees had selected after an extensive collaborative process, that the way you protest the election of a president that you don't like is not by rioting in the streets and closing your university down.

I myself am old enough to remember when Al Gore was President of the United States. And I witnessed his office disappear right between his fingers as a result of a ruling from the United States Supreme Court. That did not result in riots in the streets. Americans believe in law, they believe in order, they believe in due process. There are ways for the students at Gallaudet and the faculty at Gallaudet to express their concern with the president. But once a president has been chosen—once George Bush was chosen for President of the United States, America got behind him in greater or lesser degree, of course. Some of them had reason to celebrate later and others to regret the outcome. But, surely that's true at Gallaudet as well. And at Harvard.

I think the boards of trustees at both of those institutions, and many others, didn't understand their need to support the academic culture, the academic way of doing things in a sufficiently robust manner.

STEVE PELLETIER: In your book, you mention that you asked the GW board for more humane treatment of your successor. What did you mean by that and why did you consider it necessary to raise that issue?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, I was being slightly tongue in cheek of course. What I meant was that college presidents, and my successor is no exception in this regard, are being driven to raise more and more funds in order to feed the institution. And this is daunting and I anticipated that with a new president coming in, the university would have ambitions and would want to take the institution to the next level. That's why we bring in new presidents—to help us focus on the future, to help us define where we want to go, and to write the next chapter of the institutional history. And I had just left office—during my tenure, we had gone from $200 million in endowment to about a billion four hundred million dollars in endowment. And, this gives people appetite. And I thought, my goodness, they need to have a certain amount of compassion for this new man coming in not knowing his constituencies, not yet having a vision for the institution. They had to work with him, and understand he was not a magician.

And there tends to be a lot of magical thinking in universities, that if you get somebody who has been successful someplace else, they will be instantaneously successful in the new place. And that's not necessarily true. You have to build relationships, you have to build trust. The new president has to go out and meet the alumni. And what I was essentially saying to the board is, for goodness sakes, (a) give the person some time, (b) be sympathetic, be empathetic and work with him. Don't simply say, go out and raise money and go back to your own lives.

STEVE PELLETIER: On the subject of money: that's a universal theme throughout your new book. What's the best role that a governing board can serve in helping a president raise money and to help in fundraising? What should trustees be doing that they're not doing today?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, they should be writing out bigger checks. (Laughs) I'm largely serious there. I mean I recognize that that's not the value that every single person brings. There are some that serve the institution in other ways. But, increasingly, I believe that if you're on the board of the university, it needs to be your primary charity and philanthropy that you are most generous to. And if you've got other things, well that's fine. Nobody is expected to cut off their synagogue or their church and things of this sort. Or the hospital that saved their daughter's life. But, if you're accepting that seat, you need to understand that you have to give the money partly because the institution needs that money and partly because the optics are important. It's very hard to raise money for an institution where the board of trustees is not philanthropically generous. And, you need to go with the president to visit potential sources of philanthropy. You need to go to see rich people. You need to go to see foundation officials. You need to go to see corporate officials. The president cannot be a hunter and gatherer for the entire institution all by himself or herself.

STEVE PELLETIER: Big Man on Campus talks about the inherent tension between the faculty and the president and the inherent difficulties of shared governance. Given the current system, are there steps that boards can take to help a president work more effectively within the constraints of shared governance?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, yes. Absolutely. Part of this is—and you won't think this is too radical if I talk about education. I don't think boards understand what their presidents do clearly enough. I don't think they understand what faculty do clearly enough. I don't think they understand their institution as clearly as they could and should. For many of them, it's merely a meeting two times, three times a year for a day or so and they are not willing to give it the time it takes to read documents and to read the literature of higher education to really familiarize themselves with this very complex and slightly arcane world, called universities.

Secondly, I think it's important to help the president working with the faculty, the faculty need to understand that there is no light between the president and his or her board. If trustees go around the president, they strip the capacity of the president to serve as the executive of the institution. If you don't like a president, get a new president. But as long as you have a president serving, you've got to stand with that person.

And of course I think faculty need to spend more time studying the institutions in which they earn their livelihood. Too often, historians are experts on 19th-century revolutionary history in Europe, but not informed enough about the goings on and the complexity of their own institution. And so they are the world's authority on some narrow portion of their discipline, of the universe, but not as informed, up to date, as knowledgeable about the state of higher education in America—the state of their own university—the issues that the admin and others are dealing with. And this includes people who are on the faculty senate. There is no reason why there needs to be an adversarial relationship between university presidents and faculty. Their goals are largely the same. But faculty need to understand that, and they need to understand that when a president says no, and particularly when a president says no to a good idea—that individual is not choosing between a good idea and a bad idea, but he or she is choosing between five good ideas and only has the resources to say yes to one. And so, you end up saying no four times and people think you're foolish. You're not foolish—you're poor!

STEVE PELLETIER: Given that so much of a president's role is focused anywhere but the classroom, how can a university president stay engaged in issues of teaching and learning and the curriculum?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: They've got to read all the time. You've got to read in general about higher education. You have to read as much as you can written by your own faculty. I can't sit down and read physics papers, but I can read most of social sciences and the humanities. And you need to be talking to your faculty all the time. Some of your time has to be invested in socializing with faculty. Having groups of faculty over to your home for dinner. Meeting with them. And occasionally teaching. Giving either a public lecture annually, or on your own subject of your own interest. Or sitting in on seminars and classes and teaching to students. Being a university administrator is, of course, a calling unto itself, but it is informed by perception of the heart and the purpose of the university, which after all is scholarship and learning. We don't administer these places merely to administer them.

STEVE PELLETIER: In terms of the university curricula writ large, you talk about the need for more consistency nationwide. Can you outline what you're looking for?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, if I say to somebody, “what is a bachelors degree?” I am as likely to get numerous answers as I am to get one. In fact, more likely to get numerous answers. So if somebody says I'm a college graduate, I'm not sure what that means. Does somebody who graduates from one institution actually bring the same skills and knowledge set to those words as somebody who graduates from another institution. Another institution half a mile across town? And the answer is generally no. Indeed I'm not sure if two degrees issued by the same institution necessarily represent the same thing.

So I think we could do with some consistency that ran through undergraduate curriculum from NY to CA. Now, not the entire thing of course. First of all people study music in one place and study physics in another. And so, there are clearly going to be differences among schools, among majors, among minors. But wouldn't it be nice if we had some confidence that everybody who graduated from a university had some collection of skills that inform their heart, that inform their hand, that inform their mind, that they could talk about American history, that they could talk about mathematics, that they could read a newspaper in an informed way? Couldn't we agree as a nation that there are a variety of things we'd like our university graduates to know? And once we've arrived at that—and it should be a modest list—I don't want to command the whole curriculum—there is a limited amount of time—then we ought to follow up on that.

STEVE PELLETIER: Early in Big Man On Campus, you talk about the frequency of turnover in university presidencies. What are some of the most important implications of what can be seen as relatively short tenures in the presidencies?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, it's a stuttering within the institution—stopping and starting. It's having to change the reporting relationships. It's having to reinvent the vision. Different people will want to make different kinds of commitments. Their priorities are going to be different. Somebody is going to want to build a science building and the other person is going to build a poetry center. So I'm a great believer if you find somebody who is pretty good—and great is great—but pretty good—you try to keep that person in place and you try to drive a vision that that individual has crafted with the participation of all the other stakeholders in the institution over time, because putting up a building is a five-year project—developing a change in curriculum is a four-year project. Time is constantly the enemy of university administrators. There is never enough time to get done the things you want to do. Universities are very slow to innovate, very slow to change, rooted deeply in medieval traditions and human resource habits. The concept of tenure is one that assumes a long period is going to transpire in changing the leadership in the institution.

So, all of this to say, we have the challenges of the 21st century and many of the instincts of the medieval period and reconciling that needs to be attended to.

STEVE PELLETIER: Finally, you suggest in Big Man On Campus that in the future, while universities will not disappear, they will experience change on almost every level. Can you describe some of the changes you envision?

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Well, I think distance learning is going to play a very consequential role in the future, particularly in masters degree education, and a lot of professional education, higher ed related to vocation, will be provided in this manner more and more. I gave a commencement address the other day at Excelsior College in Albany. There were 200 people in the audience graduating and 5000 graduates who were out there in America and around the world. They serve an awful lot of people who are in the military, and the uniformed services. And these people have taken their degrees online. I think you are going to see more of that.

I am not one of those people who see the end of the residential university. As long as 17-year-olds are as challenging and disagreeable, their parents will be glad to pay some money to ship them off to campuses and then boast at the country club, or wherever it is they are, about how much sacrifice they are making to send their kids to school. And indeed, many people are making profound sacrifices. I don't mean to make light of that.

Fact is, universities are not going to be the same in the decades ahead for all kinds of reasons—resource allocation being an important one. National resource allocation—we have a big bulge in people getting older, we have a broken social security system, we don't have health insurance for 50 million Americans, our national infrastructure needs help, our bridges are falling down, or air is polluted, our water is a challenge. We simply have a lot of domestic issues. And we have the young men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. We have to rebuild our armed services.

So, there's going to be a competition for America's limited dollars. Americans are a little skeptical about higher education. They want more transparency. They still believe they want their kids to be educated, but they are curious why it costs so much. We need to be able to make the case for higher education. We need to be able to talk about it in an enthusiastic and informed way. We need to have America believe we are on their side, as we are. And we need to regain total confidence, and we need to know that they've got a lot of things they have to pay for, higher education only one. And so, we've got our hands full in the years to come.

STEVE PELLETIER: Dr. Stephen Trachtenberg, author of Big Man On Campus, has been our guest on AGB Online. Dr. Trachtenberg, thank you.

DR. STEPHEN TRACHTENBERG: Thank you—the pleasure's mine. I always like to talk, I guess!

STEVE PELLETIER: Thank you very much!

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