There are three distinct dangers to your character in becoming a university president. (There may be 30, but these are the three I’ve noticed so far in my first year.) One is aggrandizement -- “Gee President Weisbuch that’s a really distinguished bald spot you have there” -- which can puff you up. One is denigration -- “He missed our rugby match, that uncaring bureaucrat” -- which can bring you low.
The third, and most serious, is getting externalized to the point where there is no inner self left, which can lose you a soul.
As a child, I imagined my soul as a tennis ball inside my ribcage. That image persists in my adult life, and so when I dreamed recently about a microphone chasing a tennis ball, I didn’t need to dust off my Freud. The constant mouthings of a university president -- walking and talking, talking and walking -- mean that after a while you wonder if there is any “you” left.
The walking part is fine, as it counters the weight gain you otherwise would achieve on all of those gooey desserts, the one part of the meal you actually eat because it is still there when your after-dinner talk is completed and your nerves are calmer.
But as for the talking, well, that is something like managing a sustained manic fit. My friends, colleagues, and former students all know how much I love to talk -- far in excess of their wish to listen. They don’t all know that talking was my way out of a crippling shyness as a kid, my entry into the world. As a teenaged disc jockey, I could render personhood as a voice, without that awkward body along. But in this new life, it’s a whole format, WBOB, all talk all the time.
Here is the schedule for an average day when the soul may depart. (I’m playing a bit with an actual day by substituting one event for another, duller meeting; but the rhythm of the day is authentic and usual, as every college and university leader can attest.)
7 a.m.: Breakfast One is a meeting with the provost search committee to clarify the position requirements and discuss reporting lines. I’m expecting to munch on my croissant while our superb search consultant carries the day, especially as I’ve already written the memo on this. But my colleagues expect me to say something, so I emphasize a few points. At length. I am surprised the committee listens with rapt attention when I want really to say, I dunno, what do you think? Which they then tell me, which occasions discussion, which engenders further response from me.
9 a.m.: Breakfast Two, this time with the Board of Visitors, regional business people who introduce students to civic life. I had expected this to be an informal meeting but it turns out a formal talk is expected. So I skip the second croissant, and am off and running on our agenda to complement Study Abroad with Study Beyond, an effort to apply academic learning to social challenges. Great, says one interlocutor, but what about student drinking? Which is OK, because just yesterday I participated in a meeting with our dean of student life where our policy on alcohol was an issue. But what I say now is different. Drinking is the effect, I say, whereas the cause is the lack of a sufficient ideal about what a college community should be. That thought may be startlingly unoriginal but it is new to me; though, while I register my discovery, my interlocutor doesn’t buy it and suggests stiff jail sentences as a better solution. “How about slop-bucket duty for a weekend?” I think but do not say and thankfully we are on to another question.
10 a.m.: As I am walking over to the graduate school to greet a conference on Willa Cather, I panic, realizing I have not prepared remarks. Just then, a staff colleague hands me notes, which I read while walking, thinking about how to personalize them before deciding not to. The chairman of our board, Barbara Caspersen, and her husband Finn have purchased for the university an important, recently discovered cache of letters from Cather to a friend. I should be merely the conduit of this news, I decide, and stay within the written guidelines. But just as I am enjoying the first speaker and the start of the second -- half because they are interesting speakers and half because I am not doing the talking -- I must leave, very quietly, for I am due at . . .
11 a.m.: . . . the theological school to open the interdisciplinary conference on spiritual faith and the environment. I’ve got no prepared remarks for this one either, and no aides to hand me anything, but a sudden thought from somewhere deep in the unconscious is stirred by the playful and progressive environment of the school. I retell a book I read five years ago to my youngest son, Two Crazy Pigs, in which said pigs mess with all the cows and hens in the barn until the mean farmer and his wife evict them, at which point the cows stop giving milk and the hens no longer lay eggs, suggesting that messy exuberance, like the interdisciplinary nature of this very conference, is the key to fertile life. Thank God, indeed, that even in this setting, everyone laughs instead of looking for a straitjacket. The succeeding speaker refers to the crazy pigs and makes them actually relevant, which pleases me, as I was not sure they were so at all. I just love the book. Again, longing to stay but must leave for . . .
Noon: . . . a lunch meeting with University Senate.
Before lunch, let me interrupt this day for a brief meditation that the typical day doesn’t afford me. What I am realizing is this: As an English professor, I can’t live with having staff assistants write what I will speak. At most, I will ask for bare-bones assistance and then flesh it out myself, hopefully adding an idiom that is recognizably me.
But the real news is this: I simply do not have time to write the speeches at all. Once in a while, yes, for the big occasions. But for medium events, I rely only on short reminder notes, a word or two for each of six items. For small meetings, I’m back to being that teen disc-jockey on a Top-40 station, hoping the ad-libs are sustained by what we all achieve in the classroom and on the campus.
As DJ’s in those days, we played the hits over and over. At the University Senate, I am painfully aware that I am making points many of my colleagues may have heard before, six or eight times. I know about repetition for emphasis but this has gotten out of control. Remarks that may, on a first occasion, have seemed refreshing now reveal the president’s limits. It’s like how I felt when Joey Dee and the Starliters followed up their wonderful hit “Peppermint Twist” with the sound-alike “Spearmint Twist” or whatever.
Throughout the afternoon, which includes a haircut for the Katrina Relief Fund, a meeting with the Student Government Association (“I asked my 16-year-old son Mike this summer what I should do as Drew University president, and he said, ‘Let the students run the place’” -- not eloquent but a crowd pleaser) and an executive board meeting of the Alumni Association, the talking continues. Even during the haircut, I am photographed by two local newspapers and interviewed. And, meanwhile, there are policy decisions to be made, students and trustees to see, even a course (more talk more often!) for next term to begin to plan.
6 p.m.: It’s time for a dinner for major donors and parents of current students. And so, walking back to Mead Hall, I am not shocked to hear the cry of the inner child for just an hour of the solitude I still prize. Sad that that solitude now comes only in moments like this one.
But then that evening, at the dinner for parents of current students, when I am giving yet another variation on what I have come to think of as This Semester’s Speech, two happy internal events occur. While speaking about why we made SAT scores optional, I find myself developing an idea about measuring student achievement as distance traveled, from one’s social beginnings to the present, as the best index to predicting a person’s capacity in the future. I find the thought as I say it; and I believe it.
That happens a few times during the day; and what happens more often is someone else saying something stunning that elicits a shock of recognition -- in this case the testimony of a parent of a learning-challenged student accepted into Drew, and succeeding mightily here, despite some low scores.
That is the second positive aspect of all the talking: all the listening, interacting, and learning that takes place. “Better than loneliness,” I tell anyone who pities the pace.
And the final positive awareness of the day is that almost every aspect of The Speech has changed from what it was in September. Then it was, we want to do this and that. Now it is also about what my new colleagues have begun to do to achieve this and that. It’s not all talk anymore.
So maybe that is my new notion of a self: That it needn’t evolve in solitude. It gets discovered and lives in experiential moments, not only in discourse but also in what actually happens. Sartre, you of all people, you discredited reductive guy, welcome back into my belief system!
The evening speech concluded, I ask for questions. Immediately there are none, so I raise one and off I go again, talking and walking. That’s OK with me, it’s even exhilarating, so long as once a day I can get silent and envision the shining place of engaged learning that is our students’ future at Drew. Guess that was during the haircut.
Robert A. Weisbuch is the president of Drew University, and the former president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is chronicling his experiences as a first-time university president.