Commentary

Taking Office

Robert Weisbuch
President of Drew University

From The Chronicle of Higher Learning where Robert Weisbuch chronicles his first year as a university president

I wonder if I can follow my own advice.

For eight years, presiding at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, I've been telling my fellow academics how they have been messing up and what to do about it. Everything looked different once I left academe for the foundation presidency, which allowed me to turn those new perceptions into programs.

Free of the democratic processes of faculty governance, I've exclaimed about the hereditary stupidities of universities, the mind-boggling molasses of faculty committees, and the cowardice of placing a shallow harmony above institutional good just to keep some unreasonable colleagues pacified. Of course at the foundation, I didn't have to live day after day with faculty colleagues, reasonable or unreasonable.

Jeremiah had a lot of fun, but did he ever work for a living? I haven't gained anything like prophetic standing, but just enough academics have heard from me that failing to behave in accord with my railings would be humiliating. And even if no one else took notice, I would know.

Because now I am back. I fell in institutional love with Drew University and have had the heady luck to be chosen as its new president. During my 25 years at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I was a professor and an administrator rising through the ranks, but I left in 1997 to lead the foundation. Drew will be my first stint as a university president, and I'll be chronicling my experiences.

Drew is a great place; in the words of many, "the hidden gem of American higher education." After two days of an on-campus audition, I liked the place so much I asked members of the selection committee at the debriefing if I could just stay and interview the next finalist with them.

But of course Drew is not perfect. And even a few weeks into the job, I begin to feel every possible temptation not to be bold.

I have two nightmares. One is of becoming the guy who is saying with shrill arrogance, "Follow me, gang," while no one is following at all. In the other, I just quietly submerge myself into a ragtag crowd, as undistinguished as any other.

A new president of a university is supposed to murmur that he or she will spend the first year listening. The campus will utter its wishes which the president then will enact, as if the president were simply a collective consciousness.

I plan to do a lot of listening, but I also think a college president ought to arrive with something to say. My new colleagues will change those sayings mightily, translate some into the historical lexicon of the place, ignore others, embrace a few. So, I am here both to listen and to lead. The James Carville of my consciousness keeps whispering to me, "It's about the dialectic, stupid."

In just a few weeks as president, already I have been stunned by the amount of unexpected information that I receive, information that doesn't so much run counter to my beliefs as to constitute whole new ranges of concern.

On my second day on the job, one of our seniors, an extraordinarily fine student and person, lost her life in a terrible accident, the maddeningly arbitrary victim of a drunk driver. In the aftermath of that horrid moment, I was heartened to witness dozens of Drew students travel across several states to attend the memorial service for her, relating to each other and her family with a closeness that was deeply moving.

Both a student's death and the communal response constituted experiences I have never written or thought about, and I found the medical dictum drumming in my head, "Do no harm." There is something precious at Drew and I must not damage it. Both the shocking experience of a student's death and that thought of cautious conservation were not on my original agenda.

Another instance of surprising information -- this time of a happier variety -- came a few days later during a telephone call from the head of the music program, telling me that one of the nation's renowned chamber music ensembles may wish to make Drew its satellite home in New Jersey and offer concerts and educational programs here -- for a price. When have I ever considered an offer like that?

Suddenly I am not simply an academic Jeremiah but a village mayor. Any number of human faculties I haven't tested before are coming into play. Great, but might integrity of belief exit through the other door?

For as all the happenstance is happening, and amid the autumn arrival of students, I struggle to hold to my sense of what matters most. What matters most at Drew is going from very good to great, which this place absolutely has within its reach. It is a lovely, deeply democratic culture, but at times it has paid for its comfort at the cost of declining to make difficult decisions.

I know that I want to create more of a culture of assessment and reallocation. I know that I want to do whatever it takes to recruit more professors, staff members, and students of color. I know that I want to help make our place more a participant in the continuing life of the disciplines, their discoveries and controversies. I know that I want to make Drew more of what it already is as a private university with a strong public mission.

And I want us to be hell-bent for quality, however we agree to define it. Oh hell, truth to say, I want to labor with my new colleagues to reinvent the liberal arts and help to create a new and amazing university under these Jersey skies.

And I'm going to get to all that sometime today, right after we discuss increased financing for the fencing team and the complaints about the shortage in married-student housing.