Roles of aUniversity President

The appointment as president of a major research-intensiveuniversity does not come with a clear and concise job description.Therefore, let me provide background and introductionby talking about how I viewed and experienced what can be characterizedas at least nine jobs.

1. College president. When I was recruited as president of Stanford,I did not realize that the most visible job I was taking on wasa job that almost everybody in the country referred to as "college"president. The designation "college" president suggests a nineteenth-centuryimage of somebody who walks around a small campus in atweed jacket with leather patches on his elbows to chat with facultyand students and admire the fall colors. And, indeed, there werequite a few people who thought the only thing I did in the summerwas to get ready for the first football game of the fall. When I readin the newspapers that I was a "college" president, I was remindedof the image conjured up by Daniel Webster in the oral argument ofthe Dartmouth College case: "Yes, sir, a small college and yet thereare those who love it."

It is true that, as far as public attention is concerned, the focusis mostly on the undergraduate side of universities. The "college"aspect of a university president's job makes itself especially felt withrespect to most "hot button" issues involving undergraduate education,such as admissions, curriculum, tuition costs, and athletics.

The undergraduate experience in the United States, and in theUnited States only, significantly includes college athletics, especiallyfootball and basketball. For the president this may involve suchhigh-visibility issues as who will be the football coach, and on whatterms, or worrying about the so-called friendly rivalry betweencompeting athletic teams that so easily can turn distinctly hostile.

When I first arrived at Stanford, I was somewhat infamousfor—perish the thought—not caring about football. After all, I cameto Stanford from the University of Chicago, which is known as aformer member of the Big Ten. I was quickly taught a lesson aboutthe significance of football. When the time came to pick the oneperson who had the greatest impact on Stanford in the first year ofits second century, the student newspaper chose Bill Walsh, who, atabout the same time I had been chosen as president, had returnedto Stanford as the football coach. "Bill Walsh has had more of aninvigorating effect on campus than the university president," JuneCohen, the Stanford Daily editor, told the New York Times. "Casperhasn't come out with anything that's gotten people real riled up orreal excited," she continued.

Time demands of the athletic enterprise can be quite significantand include attendance at games, but also issues involving compliancewith one of the most elaborate, micromanaging regulatoryentities ever designed: the National Collegiate Athletic Association(NCAA). The pinnacle of my career in public life probably was aposition I held (on account of se niority) for the last two years of mypresidency: the chairmanship of the then-Pacific-10 athletic conference.My first meeting as chair dealt with the question of whether thePac-10 should employ baseball bats made of wood or of aluminum.

To most people, outside and inside the university, the presidentis an abstraction: the responsibilities of the office are ill-understood,the person occupying the office seems distant to most. Frequently,one becomes a figment of the imagination of journalists (both theprofessional and student variety). If the president is a recruit fromoutside the university, as I was, there will be a fair amount of distrustof his or her grasp of the "true" nature of the particular institutionthat has become his charge. Does he really understand "what Stanfordis all about"?

In the case of Stanford, major regional newspapers still maintaineda regular Stanford beat (and national and foreign media paida lot of attention). Under these circumstances, one could not helpbut be concerned about how motives and purposes get attributedin and by the press and how statements come to be overinterpreted(and silences misconstrued). Harold Shapiro, president first of Michiganand then of Prince ton, discontinued reading campus and localpapers upon becoming president because he did not, he said, wantothers to set his agenda. While this abstinence served PresidentShapiro well (he was a great president), I decided I better read thepapers in order to find out what I had supposedly done the daybefore so that I could set my own agenda all the more clearly.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial many years ago, Albert R.Hunt had this to say about "college presidents": "Few callings facesuch demanding and compelling claims from constituencies with solittle in common—students, faculty, alumni, contributors, athleticboosters, local communities." Hunt barely scratched the surface.First of all, his list of "constituencies" can be extended to state andfederal governments, businesses and unions, religious organizations,even foreign countries. When the Stanford Band, known—in its ownwords—for "loud music and burning political satire," overreachedat a football game against Notre Dame (did the members of theband have free speech rights?), I heard from the Trustees of NotreDame (they demanded that I apologize, which I did), the San Josediocese, the Ancient Order of Hibernia, the United Irish Organizationsof Nebraska, and newspapers in the Republic of Ireland.

More to the point, the categories Hunt mentions are themselvesdivided and subdivided into myriad interest groups. I sometimessaid at alumni meetings that I would drown in contradictionsif I attempted to reconcile all the advice I received from alumniabout curriculum, student and faculty rights and obligations, campusarchitecture, university investments, or what the university's prioritiesshould be. Hunt said the claims of these (often self-appointed)constituencies are demanding and compelling. They are certainly,much of the time, demanding.

Land use provides a prime example. Leland and Jane Stanford'seight thousand–acre stock farm near Palo Alto became theuniversity's campus (therefore Stanford's nickname, "The Farm").The university has developed about one-third of its lands. Much ofthe "green foothills" of the Santa Cruz Mountains constitute theso-called academic reserve. Some would like to bar the universityfrom ever building there. Let me quote from a missive concerningthe foothills. It came from a group calling itself, among other things,"a network of students, faculty, staff and alumni": "As alumni, wehave special standing and special power to influence Stanford'sdecisions.... To a great degree, we are the University, and theUniversity is ours." Who, you might ask, empowered these particularindividuals to speak for the university or, for that matter, forpresent and future Stanford students, for Stanford alumni in theBay Area, Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York City, not to forgetthose in Hong Kong and London, and not to mention the Board ofTrustees and its special fiduciary duties under Leland and Jane Stanford'sfounding grant?

2. University president. Even more than a "college president,"I was a university president with responsibility for teaching and research,academic clinical care, and a dizzying number of "productlines." The university president serves as the chief executive officerof a major corporation with a bud get that, in the case of Stanford,exceeds the bud gets of many countries in the world. In my years aspresident, faculty numbered almost seventeen hundred, students inexcess of fourteen thousand, and staff, in the university proper, ninethousand. All of these categories have grown in size since then.

More than half of Stanford's students are enrolled in graduateand professional programs. In addition to the Ph.D. programs inthe School of Humanities and Sciences, doctorates can be earned inall six other schools. Graduate education also leads to professionaldegrees in law, business, education, medicine, and engineering. Researchfunded by outside sources, mostly the federal government,constitutes about 30 percent of the university bud get. There areresearch centers and institutes, including the SLAC National AcceleratorLaboratory, a federal facility on Stanford land that is operatedby the university under contract with the Department of Energy.The university owns two hospitals.

A university president is a CEO under very special conditions.Under normal circumstances, a business CEO has both fairly far-reachingpolicy-making and executive powers, a university presidentnot much of either. In the contemporary university (as distinguishedfrom earlier times), the president is an authority with limited directpower who, nevertheless, is accountable or held to be accountablefor virtually all activities of and in the institution.

A faculty member once sent me (for "the humility section" ofmy quotations file) the following item: "When [then] Harvard professorof government James Q. Wilson was informed that his namewas on a list of those being considered for a university presidency,Wilson wrote to Harvard colleague Harvey Mansfield that he wasnot interested in being president of anything. Mansfield is said tohave written back: 'You're probably wise not to be interested in apresidency. The job is more difficult than important.' "

Students, if they bother to consider the subject at all (whichthe majority wisely don't), think of the president as a fairly obscurecelebrity of some kind, or as a ser vice provider known as "the administration."Some suspect that the president is part of, or at leastin bed with, the hegemonic establishment. Some, whose parents payfull tuition (a minority) and who have an exaggerated notion of whatproportion of expenditures per student are paid for by tuition, believethe president is, as an undergraduate solemnly advised me, their "employee."With a lot of effort, the president may succeed in becominga human presence on campus to whom the students relate as a person.In my case, that took at least two to three years.

Sometimes there is not even a hope of success. A friend of mineon the Harvard faculty once mentioned the name of Drew Faust(the current Harvard president) to his granddaughter, a student atHarvard and the offspring of two Harvard alumni: "She asked whoDrew Faust was and I answered, 'the president'; whereupon she saidto me: 'I didn't know Harvard had a president.' "

Given the considerable ambiguities and uncertainties concerningthe president's role, I was taken aback when I read the prospectusfor the first Stanford bond offering during my presidency. It said:"The Founding Grant provides that the Board shall appoint thePresident of the University. The President prescribes the duties ofprofessors and teachers, sets the course of study and the mode andmanner of teaching, and exercises all other necessary powers relatingto the educational, financial and business affairs of the University.The President appoints, subject to confirmation by the Board, thesenior officers of the University, except that the President of StanfordManagement Company is appointed by the Board of Directors withthe concurrence of the President."

As to the first point, all I can say is "Dream on!" Concerningthe areas of greatest importance at a university—faculty appointments,admissions, and curriculum—all the real power necessarilyis from bottom up.

If the last sentence of the quotation suggests that my responsibilitiesas to the investment policies of the Stanford ManagementCompany were somewhat attenuated, a rude awakening came in thefirst few months of my tenure, when the university's outside auditorsadvised me that I was responsible for the performance of StanfordManagement Company since, legally, it was nothing other than anadministrative unit of the university, not a separate corporation.

Given that, to a large extent, faculty and students are and actas in de pen dent agents, the notion of independence is popular withsome university staff as well. When the provost, Condoleezza Rice,and I appointed a new director of an administrative departmentearly in my tenure, a decision that had important policy implications,the comment in a staff meeting was: "Well, I hope she [the newdirector] understands that she is not working for the president andprovost."

Under conditions that occasionally look like structured anarchy,as the CEO of a major corporation, the university president isnevertheless responsible for compliance with laws, regulations, andrules that apply generally to individuals and business corporationsand then with those that specifically address higher education. Nota year goes by when the federal government (which has no substantivejurisdiction over higher education to begin with) does not passseveral laws or regulations to attend to some perceived or real shortcomingof colleges and universities. I estimate, conservatively I shouldstress, that at least fifteen cents of every tuition dollar goes to unreimbursedregulatory compliance costs.

Stating the situation abstractly does not give the full flavor. Letme list the major legal issues that I had to deal with over eight years:

• federal government indirect cost rules (that is, thecharges for overhead at the university and medicalcenter);

• state environmental protection regulations intendedfor refineries and other industrial producers but appliedequally to student chemistry experiments;

• Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement regulations;

• coding of health care procedures for purposes of reimbursement(with large financial and reputational costsattached to possible errors);

• federal civil rights statutes (including such matters asthe prohibition of gender discrimination in athleticsprograms);

• federal affirmative action regulations;

• state civil rights legislation;

• contract disputes with the Department of Energy aboutthe Linear Accelerator Center;

• local government and land use laws running the gamutfrom campus traffic and density of development to sizeof buildings and use of trails in Stanford's foothills;

• employment litigation, with 150 or so cases pending atany given time, almost all involving disputes betweenstaff employees and their supervisors, including allegedwrongful termination, sexual harassment, OSHA investigations,and similar matters;

• faculty grievances and faculty discipline.

There are general laws, such as those prohibiting drinking bythose under age twenty-one, that pose particular enforcement challengesin a university environment: Attempting to deal with themconscientiously without creating a police state atmosphere presentsextraordinary difficulties in a population of young people who havejust come of age and who, for the first time away from home, areout "to find themselves."

3. Trustee. The third job of a university president is being atrustee of a trust established in perpetuity. A university president isin fact the leading fiduciary for his or her institution; he or she mustmaintain what is excellent and, simultaneously, be a change agent.One has fiduciary duties not only for the present but also for thefuture in a setting in which some incumbent faculty and students findit hard to understand why the university does not devote its resourcesprimarily to the present generation, given that generation's many excellences,legitimate claims, and clearly articulated preferences.

The fiduciary duties are manifold. Important among them aremaintenance of the endowment and of the physical plant. Thesetwo can be in conflict with each other, and trade-offs can be badlymiscalculated if, for instance, holding down endowment payoutleads to substantial deferred maintenance bills for a rapidly deterioratingbuilding stock.

Fiduciary duties include—at least to my mind—campus architecture,given its lasting impact. The world often forgets that thevisual art we are most exposed to on a daily basis is architecture:architecture pure and simple and architecture in its sculptural potential.It has the wonderful, but also frequently distressing, qualityof being inescapable. This is why, to me, competitive architecturaldesign is so important in the exercise of good stewardship at ouruniversities—maintaining the physical endowment that has beenhanded down to us and, then, renewing it as needed to meet thechanging nature of teaching, learning, and research, but also aesthetics.

Among the fiduciary duties is concern for the reputation ofthe institution. I mention it because the task is quite demandingin light of myriad voices on campus, each of which believes that itscause trumps all institutional causes and that it must speak and beheard even if, in consequence, the institution might suffer severedamage. When a university president raises a cautionary note aboutthe "free-for-alls," he or she will frequently be accused of being anautocrat or worse.