Oct. 4, 2001
Part II: A Conversation with President Stephen Joel
Trachtenberg
President Discusses Changing Universities, GW's Campuses,
Endowment, and Athletics
ByGeorge!:
GW recently announced the formation of the College of Professional Studies
and GW Solutions. Why was this new school created? Is it an answer to
the role of higher education — thought advancement versus career
training?
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg: Yes, to some
extent. Universities tend to be slow-moving creatures. They are sort
of an anchor on the ship of societal progress. Ours are a deliberative
community. Universities reject fashion. They’re committed to style.
This is a good thing, but there come moments when it is important to
be fleet of foot, where you have to develop a program more rapidly than
the conventional university culture requires. We needed an instrumentality
within the University that protected the classic quality of the rest
of the University and at the same time allowed us to respond to the
marketplace. We were finding that there was an inherent struggle taking
place. We thought if we can carve out a small enterprise and put it
in this context, then we will have the best of both worlds.
ByG!: You mentioned protecting the
classical elements of higher education. Protecting them from what?
SJT: From the whims of change. We want
change in the University to be a result of thoughtfulness, not something
that’s reflexive or too responsive to external stimuli. So you
want, for example, to be able to put together a short course for a local
company that needs some business training. But, you don’t want
that culture necessarily to be insinuating itself into the curriculum
of the business school itself, which is preparing people not for tomorrow’s
jobs, but for careers that are going to last for 40 years. So you want
to be able to go very fast and sometimes you don’t. What this allows
us to do, we think, is to deal with the things that have to be done
quickly and lightly, but at the same time, stay rooted to the essential
truths of what a university stands for. It is a way to stay committed
to your values and still be flexible.
ByG!: How has GW fostered the growth
of research in terms of advancing our position as a first-tier research
institution?
SJT: It’s been climbing up year by
year. We’re now among the top 100 universities in the country in
terms of federal research funding. The most dramatic leap forward you’re
going to see in the next several years will come from the medical center,
which has always been top notch as a teaching institution and a clinical
institution. But it has been so focused on those two targets that it
has served more as a community medical center than it has as a potential
location finding a cure for cancer. The faculty we’re recruiting
now are every bit as committed to teaching and practice as those in
the past, but we are putting a greater emphasis also on research. If
you take a look at the resumes of the faculty appointed in the last
three to five years, you’ll see more extensive research accomplishment
— bigger grants, more of them — than some of their older colleagues.
ByG!: This year, GW will celebrate
the 10-year anniversary of the Virginia Campus. A few years ago, Mount
Vernon College was welcomed into the GW family. What is being done to
foster and stimulate a sense of community and shared identity among
the three campuses?
SJT: Well, I think we’re never going
to have completely one identity. The Loudoun County campus is only one
of several campuses that we’ve got in Virginia. They have affiliation
with GW, but they develop personalities and characters of their own.
There will be more and more interaction with the Virginia Campus over
time as we build out that campus with more faculty commuting back and
forth, doing part of their research and part of their teaching there
and part of their research and teaching here. People will have two offices.
Many of the Foggy Bottom faculty were reluctant to go out to Virginia
when we first opened that campus and they never felt at home there.
But when you recruit somebody new and you say to him or her that they
are going to be appointed to these two campuses, my advice to you is
buy a home either in the District or someplace between here and Virginia
so you can come here Monday, Wednesday, Friday and go there Tuesday
and Thursday. Then, you’re sending a different message. And of
course, technology is going to make conversation and interaction increasingly
fluid between the two campuses. Our George Washington University at
Mount Vernon College campus is just a short jog away from Foggy Bottom.
We have a shuttle that runs back and forth. When we finish the current
phase of the build-out there, which should happen by January, we’re
going to have a physical capacity to be in compliance with Title IX.
We’re going to have playing fields much closer. I think students
will go over for soccer, field hockey, rugby, and any number of field
sports. We’re going to have 12 tennis courts, six of them covered.
I think people who are interested in playing tennis are going to find
it very convenient to jump on the bus and go over there. The dining
room now seats about 300 people. The food there, dare I say it, is some
of the best university food I’ve ever eaten. I think a lot of our
students from here will want to go out there for Sunday brunch and things
like that. There’s going to be place to study in the library. We’re
going to have the connections in place for technology. There’s
going to be a new pub. There’s new housing for students that I
think is some of the best student housing in America. So between one
thing and another, that’s going to become a very attractive venue.
We have plans for continuing improvement of that campus that go on for
another decade, but this piece will be a great new piece and a great
leap forward.
ByG!: Going back to the Virginia
Campus, GW has a fair amount of property out there. What are the plans
to expand that facility beyond the National Transportation Safety Board
building?
SJT: The NTSB building is the facility
we presently have online. I think we have to take it one chapter at
a time. But there are limits to what we’re going to be able to
do in Foggy Bottom. There’s still room for some modest growth.
But the fact of the matter is we are committed to leaving historic Foggy
Bottom in the condition it is in. That’s what the community wants
and that’s what we want. We talked a little bit about the hospital
site, but after you get through with that and the other construction
we’ve indicated, there aren’t a lot of places to go. We’re
not going to do very much jumping across Pennsylvania Avenue. We’re
not going to do very much movement in the direction of Watergate. I
would like to get a boathouse for our crew teams built at some point,
but that’s not going to be a dramatic catalyst in terms of changing
anything. We can’t move to the State Department, so over time the
University is going to have to take a look at what we can relocate.
Some have said, again, that technology plays a role in answering that
question. It’s premature, but one can imagine a registrar’s
office that consists of a desk and the entire back-office operation
is located in Virginia. A student comes in, he or she goes up to the
desk, and the person behind the desk asks, “How can I help you?”
You give them your name and number. And they go online and do their
business with you standing there. And maybe you don’t even come
in, but you do it from your room. Maybe you do it from your computer
in Paris while you’re on your junior year abroad and you key into
a facility that’s in Virginia. That would liberate space on campus
for student and faculty use that is presently being consumed by the
management and operations of the University. We presently lease about
400,000 square feet of space in Washington, over and above the space
we own. That’s a lot of square feet. It would be nice to be able
to stop paying rent and move some of those programs and facilities out
to Virginia and to facilities of our own.
ByG!: ByGeorge! recently reported
that GW has reached the 80 percent mark in the Centuries Campaign. Universities
are always raising money for their endowments — it’s a function
of a university. How much is enough?
SJT: We are in no danger of enough. Let
me give you an interesting example. Princeton has about a $1.5 million
endowment per student. Prudent investment practices would argue that
they have about $75,000 income per year per student from their endowment.
By contrast, GW’s endowment is about $50,000 per student. What
you have at Princeton is an annual income of $75,000 per student and
GW with a principal in its endowment of $50,000. I think we’re
1/3 or 1/2 of Johns Hopkins. Smith College, which is an undergraduate
women’s college, which I think has a very reputable master’s
degree in social work and maybe some other modest graduate programs,
has an endowment which is greater than ours. And this includes the medical
center and the law school. So we are so far from having an endowment
sufficient unto our mission that if I wasn’t a cheerful sort of
fellow, I’d despair. What is remarkable is the extraordinary things
our faculty and students do and what we accomplish as a University without
a big slug of cash.
ByG!: How should a university balance
student demands for services, new equipment, and smaller class sizes;
faculty requests for higher salaries and expanded benefits; and parent
demands for low tuition bills?
SJT: The first and most important component
of a university is its people. So, you take the steps that you need
to attract and retain the best professors, the best staff, and the best
students. But, once you’ve done that, what you discover is that
paying the faculty salaries is the cheapest part of the deal. Once you’ve
gotten that person, you have to give them the tools they need in order
to do their work, which is frequently a laboratory, computer hook-up,
or resources used to travel. We are regularly rolling a boulder up a
steep and slippery hill and every time it looks like we’ve gotten
the boulder to the top, we’re condemned to watch it roll back down
to the bottom and you’re obliged to start all over again. There
is a line in the Talmud that talks about man’s obligation to do
the Lord’s work and to make the world a better place. And of course,
the minute you reflect on that, you recognize that in your lifetime
you are not going to complete this mission. And the Talmud says that
in the face of that, you are nevertheless not relieved of your duty.
Recognizing that you’re not going to get your job done doesn’t
absolve you of the responsibility to keep trying — and that’s
the way it is with universities. They get better generationally, not
overnight. Their improvement is an accrual. If somebody gave us $1 billion
tomorrow, it would nevertheless take five to eight years to reflect
the impact of that bequest. If you want to put up a new building, it
would take you five years to get the permits and put up the building
even though you have the cash in your hands. Ours is a business of attrition
and incrementalism with periodic jumps. People who expect magic bullets
in universities are largely disappointed.
ByG!: Every year after Commencement,
the rumors swirl that it’s the last year of Commencement on the
Ellipse. Will we continue to hold graduation on the Ellipse?
SJT: Some day that rumor will be right.
But I don’t have any knowledge of any plan to take us off the Ellipse.
I’ve heard that the parks department wants to build an underground
parking garage and so they are going to have to put us off for a year
or so while they dig it up, put in the underground parking garage, and
then put the sod back. I don’t know if that’s true. One can
imagine it being true and if that happens, then we’ll go someplace
else. I could also imagine that one of these years we will have a repeat
of what happened in 1995, and we’ll get rained out or lightninged
out and it won’t be possible for us to do it. Then, maybe, the
students will be agreeable to doing the less romantic but more practical
thing, which is go indoors. The only spot in the city that is sufficient
for our size crowd is the MCI Center. Thousands of people seem to go
to ceremonies there on a regular basis and have a satisfactory time.
I grant you there is something special about the Ellipse, the White
House, the Washington Monument, and as long as the
weather holds up, you’re a winner. But if you get lightning, you
go home a loser. I don’t have any control, notwithstanding the
fact that a lot of people in 1995 thought I did and told me so. My guess
is it will go along as long as it can go along and then if we have a
big storm, maybe the next year’s graduating class will say, “Whoa,
we want the certainty of being indoors.” There are attractions
to being indoors. You don’t have to worry about rain or lightning.
You’ve got plumbing and your sound system is all set up. You’ve
got comfortable seats. We could arrange with the vendors things to eat.
You don’t have to park, you can just take the subway. So there
are all kinds of benefits. The other side is you do it outdoors. It’s
a wonderful, romantic, historic place, but you’ve got a risk factor.
I’m prepared to remain outdoors, I just don’t want to get
blamed if people get wet. We can have modest rain, make people miserable,
but they’ll live through it. But think of the storms in Washington
during the middle of August where the rain was pouring down and there
were torrential floods. Could that happen in May? Yes, it could. And
there would be nothing anybody could do. There’s Plan A and there’s
Plan B. There’s the outdoor plan and the indoor plan. You can’t
have both because the cost of the setup is too great. I can’t lease
a hall that holds 25,000 people, set it up, and not use it. People ought
to be prepared to say I’m willing to take the risk or I’m
not. If it were up to me, I would take us indoors. But, I have consistently
had student leadership and trustee leadership who have said, “Gee,
that’s such a wonderful, historic place. It makes us special.”
And I say, “Yes, you say that because you’re not up until
4 am following the weather bureau and trying to figure out if it’s
going to rain.”
ByG!: This spring, the Knight Foundation
Commission released a report suggesting major ways college athletics
should change. Some of those principles were scholarships for four years
instead of one-year grants, reducing the length of seasons, making teams
ineligible for postseason play if they don’t graduate 50 percent
of the team. What are your thoughts on this and do you think it will
be implemented?
SJT: Some will, some won’t. After
you’ve been in any line of work for awhile, you learn that people
of good will are constantly coming up with ideas about how things can
be done better. When they’re done with their reflections, they
issue a report and then they go home. They leave it for other people
to implement their suggestions. Some of their suggestions are better
and some are worse. We won’t know the real efficacy of the report
for 10 years. If a person interviewing the president of a university
10 years from now asks about the Knight Commission report, then we’ll
know it was a success. University president offices have shelves, and
on those shelves sit dozens and dozens of reports telling university
presidents what they need to do in order to make the world a better
place. With all due respect to the very capable people who issued that
report, the real question, as always, comes down to will and resources.
In a world of infinite resources, everything is possible. That’s
not the world I live in. So I think we ought to try to do as much as
we can because a lot of the issues that they raise are important and
some of them are scandalous. If I had to try and foresee the future,
I think you’re going to see greater and greater separation between
big sports universities and the institutions that are less driven by
their athletic agenda and that see it as ancillary to their academic
agenda — like GW. We care about sports, we play to win, but we
have no illusions that we are responsible for entertaining or providing
pride to the entire population of a state or a city. I’ve gone
to NCAA games where some fans seem to me to have gone over the top and
lost their understanding that it’s a basketball game. It’s
not a test of actual virtue or right and wrong or justice or some of
the bigger issues of our time. It’s a basketball game. It’s
fun, it provides a certain amount of pride. It’s great for school
spirit, but it’s a basketball game. It has to do with 10 young
men or women running up and down a court and dropping a ball through
a hoop. I hope I don’t sound un-American. I love to watch GW basketball.
My wife loves to watch GW basketball. When my kids lived at home, we
went all of the time. We now continue to go regularly. I have nothing
but the highest regard for (men’s basketball coach) Karl Hobbs
and I wish him well. I feel the same way about (women’s basketball
coach) Joe McKeown. As I travel around the country, I boast about them
all of the time to the alumni, but it’s a basketball game. If I
had to choose between GW being the place to find the cure for cancer
or GW having an NCAA basketball championship, and it would be a hard
choice, I’d go with the solution for cancer. Yeah, it would be
nice to make the Final Four.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
