June 2006

“By Invitation”

President Trachtenberg’s Remarks to the GW Board of Trustees, May 19, 2006

I’m Not Going Away, And I Want To Help

I think we all remember our chairman [Ambassador Charles T. Manatt] quoting on more occasions than we can count the words of Gene Tunney, the great prizefighter: “Always quit winners.” I never quite knew what you meant, Mr. Ambassador, until recently when I—and all of us—had the enormous pleasure of seeing both our men’s and women’s basketball teams have record-making seasons and go to the NCAA’s March Madness. Only 20 other universities had both genders in the tournament this year. That is special.

It reminded me of the Greek farmer whose son triumphed in the Olympics. The crowd cheered him and carried him around on their shoulders. But when a second son also won his competition, the crowd cried out, “Die now!” In other words, he was at the pinnacle of happiness and things couldn’t possibly get better. So, die now and die happy.

It’s a wonderful story, possibly even true. But I no longer believe that. More to the point, I don’t believe that things can’t get even better at GW. They can and will. It is my hope to contribute to the betterment of GW for many years to come. Like the hippo at the corner of 21st and H streets, I am not going away.

I am not retiring. I am leaving university administration, stepping up to the faculty, and enjoying the restoration of my first amendment rights. Consider this. When I arrived in 1988, Lilien Robinson was chair of the Faculty Senate. Professor Robinson was just reelected to serve in that capacity next year. I took the occasion to congratulate her, to observe that she will have that position when I relocate to my new office next year—and that, as a member of the faculty, I have plans to unseat her. I figure the Faculty Senate could use new blood and, I reckoned, that no rational person could resist voting for me. Who, after all, knows the dark secrets and lore of the administration better than I? It’s like a former senator becoming a lobbyist, only better.

And I could be helpful. You, the trustees, have a daunting challenge staring you in the face as you search for a new president for GW. After nearly 30 years as a university president, first at Hartford and then here, I have seen how the job has gotten harder—sometimes, I think, almost impossible. The Soviets, paranoid to the bone and suspicious of everything American, used to say, “Can it be coincidental that the average American university president’s tenure is only five or six years?”
Coincidental or not, let’s look at the facts. The days of long-serving presidents may be over, alas. In the last year or so, we have seen conspicuous examples of presidents at some of our best universities leaving after shorter and shorter terms in office, sometimes under uncomfortable circumstances. About two-dozen esteemed universities are embarked on searches right now. We all know about Harvard, Case Western Reserve, and Cornell. We could also add Wellesley, UCLA, Northeastern, and Leslie—and it’s worth noting, but only in passing, the crises at American and Gallaudet. May nothing like that ever befall GW.

Of course, this ratchets up competition for good candidates. Yet many observers of higher education (governance) are concerned about the shallowness of the pool of first-rate candidates to lead universities. This is worrisome, but it has also led to some innovative, if unconventional, thinking.

For example, the Jesuits have been preeminent in Catholic higher education, yet when Georgetown last sought a new president, they found a distinguished layman, not a priest, to head the school for the first time ever. Likewise, Yeshiva in New York appointed a layman, not a rabbi, for the first time in its history. Perhaps these religious institutions are on to something. They are certainly being flexible and discarding habits that have governed them since their foundings.

Although novel, their choices should not surprise us. The qualities that define a president these days have changed, and consequently the broader the thinking of those searching for a new leader the greater the pool of talent they will have to explore. And consider what some of those qualities are. A university president must have the:
- iron endurance of Cal Ripken,
- intellect of Leibniz, the last man to know everything,
- money sense of J. Pierpont Morgan,
- inventiveness of Thomas Alva Edison,
- spontaneous rhetorical ability of Winston Churchill,
- diplomacy of Dag Hammarskjöld or maybe Bismarck,
- ability to get out of tight situations of Harry Houdini,
- conciliatory powers of Abraham Lincoln,
- story-telling talent of Stephen King,
- loving-kindness of Mother Teresa,
- virtue above suspicion of Caesar’s wife,
- luck of the Irish, and
- patience of Job.

And all this is just enough to, maybe, get you called back for a second interview.
Now, I’m aware that all the people I cited, with the exceptions of King and Ripken, are dead. Please do not infer from my list that I think these qualities—virtues even—have also died. Far from it. But to find them all in one person who also can deal with young students, with older alumni, with those who are not always equitable, like the neighbors in Foggy Bottom, with poets and magical thinkers, like the faculty, as well as with solid citizens and the salt of the earth, like the Board of Trustees, is no small undertaking. That’s a lot of water to carry, and most candidates have only two shoulders.

Let me put it this way. No university should set the bar so high that even an Olympic polevaulter cannot clear it. It is important not to project onto any candidate, let alone the successful one, so many expectations of so many disparate qualities that the person can only flop. Some of those qualities will have to come from others—from the vice presidents and the deans, chiefly. If that is the case—and I humbly submit that it should be—then GW can look forward to the continuity of a long-serving president.

I will say, without an appeal to false modesty—which you wouldn’t believe coming from me, anyway—that the accomplishments during my presidency have a lot to do with many factors and many other actors. But I think the most significant component of the successes the University has enjoyed over the last 18 years have been the comparative calm and, as I said, continuity of one president for a nearly a generation. It is my hope that my successor will serve for many years. Five or six are simply not enough, especially because, as I see it, the next order of business for GW is a long-term capital campaign—and you don’t want a change at the top while that is happening.

Our endowment is now at about a billion dollars. If someone had said we would have this much when I first arrived here, I would have said you were much more prescient and far-sighted than I ever was—and could you please put me in touch with the dead. Yet here we are with a billion bucks—about half of what we really need to have.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, some 60 universities in America have endowments of $1 billion or more—“or more” being about $25 billion more in the case of Harvard. Recently, The Chronicle listed 22 universities that
are embarked on capital campaigns to raise another $1 billion. Actually, it’s more than that. Missing from the list is my beloved Columbia, which I hear wants to raise $4 billion.

GW can’t be shy. We have to get on that list, and the sooner the better. As you know, this is not money for money’s sake or for bragging rights. If you look at the U.S. News & World Report rankings, whatever you may think of them, all the criteria they use are really surrogates for money, more specifically for endowments. How do you get a more favorable faculty-to-student ratio? How do you attract and retain the best professors and the best students? How do you build and maintain the best IT infrastructure or the best library? How do you build the best facilities and maintain them, too? How do you deliver the services that increasingly demanding students insist on? Simply, how do you provide the resources to address and expand our academic and social missions? The answer is an even bigger endowment.

Now, GW—in the short term, at least—faces a difficult problem in raising cash for the endowment.

The University has no long tradition of giving similar to the traditions of the more classic residential universities and colleges. Until quite recently, GW was a commuter school. Moreover, while those students had a great educational experience, they had it—or perhaps served it—with modest facilities
and in dreary, uninspiring surroundings. To call the GW streetscape of 20 years ago “utilitarian” was charitable. The words of the 1956 yearbook still applied: it was the invisible “concrete campus,” and looked more like Moscow than the District of Columbia. And to add another problem, for many students in that not-so-long-ago, GW was a safety school, the place where students who did not get
into Harvard or Bryn Mawr, Williams or Princeton came for want of something better.

That is our history—and we have to be sure it is not our future. It will take time for the newer crop of GW graduates to be in a position to be generous: We haven’t turned out the legions of entrepreneurs and rich lawyers that Harvard and Yale have over centuries. But, with cultivation, I think they will be generous. I will tell you why I think this is true.

Today, 80 percent of the students who arrive here as freshmen are coming to their first-choice school. That’s right: They wanted GW first and foremost. Our faculty and facilities are infinitely better than they were 18 years ago, and the campus has become, I think, quite handsome. It is homey, but no longer homely. All to the good.

But we must, as I said, not be shy, and we must realize that we are on our own. We do not have any industry to speak of in the District of Columbia. The business community here, while robust, is no match for businesses in, say, New York, Boston, or Los Angeles—nor does greater Washington have the deep pools of wealth you will find in those cities and others. And, of course, we get no municipal assistance, like the Regent Scholarships in New York.

So, we have to build our wealth on our own. I think our biggest selling point is something you have heard me say before: It is our fortunate location that is our real patrimony. You remember that charming little history of the University we published a couple of years ago. Its title, you recall, was The George Washington University In and Of the District of Columbia, perhaps more a foundational statement than a title. But it reflects a truth we all understand.

And this truth, I believe, should be at the heart of our thinking, our planning, our admissions, our self-definition. In every enterprise we undertake, we should ask this question: Are we maximizing our location?

Let me give some examples of what I mean. We no longer have a veterinary school nor a dental school. We once did. They make no sense today—given our location. But we do have medical, business, engineering, and law schools, not to mention arts and sciences. Are they maximizing what they teach with a sense of integrating instruction to our location? For instance, in civil engineering, there is a core of study that is absolutely necessary. But perhaps it would be best to tailor civil engineering at GW to focus on urban enterprises. What I mean is this: If our civil engineering program—which I take as one example in the place of many possible others—is doing what every other civil engineering program in the country is doing, then we haven’t really figured out what we are doing. We need all our programs to distinguish themselves in terms of our location and our mission.

I look forward to this coming academic year with a sense of excitement. I truly wish the search committee Godspeed and remind them—as if they needed me to remind them—that they are filling one of the preeminent positions in contemporary American higher education.

I look forward to moving across the street, to teaching, and to being involved with the University as appropriate and in civic enterprise. I want to help, always, when asked.

That is what I said recently when Francine and I pledged $50,000 to the School of Public Policy and Public Administration—and indeed in the past when we have given other gifts. I want to help. As I will say in front of thousands of witnesses at Commencement two days from now, I don’t intend to kibitz—and I won’t. But I intend to do my job this coming year and to participate afterwards—as one of the family. Having been welcomed into the GW family has been one of the great delights of my life—and will be always. Always. Thank you.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu