A Tough-Talking President Tried to Fix a College. Then He Came Undone.

Michael F. McElroy for The Chronicle

H. Fred Walker was just seven months into his college presidency when he delivered a harsh monologue on the stage of Edinboro University’s student center.

“Whatever we’re doing, we’ve got it wrong,” Walker declared, in February 2017, at a town-hall meeting, “and it’s got to change.”

Walker, a systems engineer and a Navy veteran, had decades ago charted the course to a college presidency. His ambitions landed him in this rural northwestern Pennsylvania borough, a corner of the snowbelt that produces brutal winters far more reliably than it does college-going students. The town hall was a sort of public debut for Walker, introducing a blunt-talking character who has lost all patience with the deliberative do-nothings of the academy.

This is a university, Walker told the audience, that admits almost every applicant and graduates less than half of that dwindling flock. It is an institution that routinely raids its reserves just to survive another day. Edinboro, he said, is on the precipice of an abyss that can no longer be ignored.

“This should be alarming to everyone,” he said, according to accounts of the numerous news reporters whom Walker had invited to attend. “It is to me.”

The speech was but a piece of Walker’s highly orchestrated effort, reliant on the news media, to build public support for program cuts and the possible layoffs of tenured professors. The president said he fully expected faculty members and students to rise up in protest, and these grim public pronouncements were designed as a bulwark against those would-be forces of opposition. While Walker was outlining real challenges, his performance that day was, as he privately suggested to his lieutenants, an act of provocative theater that deliberately cast the university in the darkest of lights.

Edinboro, one of 14 universities that make up the Pennsylvania state system, faces the same demographic headwinds and state funding declines that afflict many public regional colleges across the nation. In the past seven years, its enrollment has fallen by 35 percent, and it is projected to dip below 5,000 next year.

The university, where roughly half of students qualify for Pell Grants, serves a significant population of first-generation students from working-class backgrounds, who require levels of support that even wealthy universities struggle to provide. Added to that mix are unionized faculty members, who, in 2016, joined in the first strike in the system’s 35-year history.

Nerves are raw. Anxiety is real. Exhaustion at Edinboro, which has cycled through five presidents in 10 years, is a natural state of being.

The president’s “path forward,” a 10-year plan to revitalize Edinboro, seeks to stabilize the university, albeit at a fraction of its peak enrollment, and to end the regular raids on budget reserves. Like many such plans, Edinboro’s cuts low-enrolled programs and places bets on familiar cash cows, such as a new master’s in business administration. Admissions standards will increase, and adult learners — the only real emerging market — will be targeted.

Elements of this approach, which prioritizes the needs of industry, are underway elsewhere in the Pennsylvania system, and similar attempts have been made in other states, including Louisiana and Ohio.

What is novel at Edinboro, however, is the degree to which Walker positions himself as a tough-minded truth teller, while shaping the public narrative to support his agenda. He is a man of his time, embracing a strain of leadership that makes a sport of outwitting opponents.

On several occasions, according to three sources with direct knowledge, Walker told administrators that they could best understand his strategy by watching Wag the Dog, the 1997 film about a spin doctor who deceives the public with a fake war that is played out on television.

The sources, who included two former administrators and a current one, asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations with the president, whom they said had made a show of transparency and collaboration to get buy-in for a predetermined agenda.

When asked about invoking Wag the Dog as a primer for his strategy, Walker at first said he had no memory of it. In a subsequent interview, however, the president said he did recall citing the film as an example of the power of the news media in shaping public opinion — not as a playbook for manipulation.

Walker’s presidency is predicated on projecting self-confidence and a strong sense of duty, but he appears driven by fear as well as principle. Fear, yes, that this 160-year-old university may not make it, absent radical change. But also the more personal fear that the faculty will turn on him. Fear of negative publicity. Fear that he will lose control of the carefully constructed narrative of his turnaround presidency, derailing it just as it begins.

Walker came to Edinboro from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he spent eight years as dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology. But it was his nine years in the Navy, which he joined as a 21-year-old in search of discipline and structure, that have most clearly informed his approach at Edinboro.

To sell his curricular restructuring, which would eliminate some favorite programs and potentially threaten faculty jobs, Walker devised an aggressive information campaign to head off a possible insurgency by forces within his own university.

The president convened “Working Groups” and installed as leaders several officers from the university’s ROTC, who were directed to assess the “financial and academic health” of the university. Their reports outlined Edinboro’s falling enrollment, low graduation rates, high attrition rates, and the bleak prospects for recruiting traditional, college-aged students in the region.

It was imperative to Walker’s strategy that the findings be unimpeachable, so he had them validated by an independent consultant. It was equally important, he said, that the results be highly publicized. To that end, the president invited state and local news reporters to cover the process. Their reports, Walker said, helped to ensure that, once the painful choices arrived, “the faculty wouldn’t be able to get the narrative and twist it into an unhealthy story.”

“I knew I would never be able to reason with the faculty,” the president says. “I knew that I was going to have to then prevail upon a lot of other people around me, including legislators, to say, ‘This guy is being honest. He’s being open and transparent. He’s operating with a high level of integrity. He’s bringing external validations. He’s doing everything he said he was going to do,’ so that I could prevent the bad behavior before it ever started.”

Michael F. McElroy for The Chronicle

Walker envisioned his bleak town-hall presentation as part of a “boot camp” strategy, but it left many professors feeling that he had unnecessarily beaten up on the university.

“I had to break this place down to its lowest element before I could start to build it back up,” Walker said. “We know this in the military as the boot-camp experience. I had to very publicly make the case that we are where we’re at and we’re not in a good spot. And I had to short-circuit or defeat any counteropinions about that, which I did in the press. The second piece of that strategy was coalition building.”

The coalition, the president believed, had to expand beyond professors, whose “knee-jerk reaction is to throw out the president with a vote of no confidence” anytime there is a proposal that they don’t like. If such a vote were to happen, Walker said, there would be “the smell of blood in the water,” and meaningful changes would be impossible.

Other college presidents will privately grouse about how professors often retreat to their basest survival instincts when talk of program cuts and layoffs gets underway. But seldom do they discuss these calculations as nakedly as Walker, who, over the course of numerous interviews, described the university’s faculty both as necessary allies and as obstacles to be navigated around.

Never were those tensions more apparent than last spring, when Walker put professors on notice that their jobs might be in jeopardy.

As the leader of a college swimming in red ink, Edinboro’s president has few good options. About 65 percent of the university’s expenses are tied up in employees’ salaries and benefits, which are negotiated at the state level through collective bargaining. The university can rely only so heavily on lower-paid adjunct professors, whose numbers are contractually capped at 25 percent of all faculty.

But a president, if he or she dares, can choose the path of “retrenchment,” which allows for the layoffs of tenured faculty members if programs are eliminated or in cases of financial exigency. The process invites all manner of legal challenges, offering little guarantee of financial savings but every assurance of discord.

Walker’s time spent wrestling with whether to move forward with layoffs, which played out over the course of five months last spring and summer, offers a particularly striking portrait of his decision-making process and the degree to which it is driven by his calculations of how best to manage public opinion. The episode, which The Chronicle reconstructed through interviews, public records, and a confidential memo, reveals a president torn by a desire to project toughness without squandering goodwill on campus or generating negative publicity.

If a president in Pennsylvania even considers retrenchment as an option, he or she has to inform the union with a formal letter. In effect, even the contemplation of such an extreme measure invites panic.

“It’s a nuclear bomb, but it’s the only bomb I had to work with,” Walker said.

Walker issued a retrenchment letter to Edinboro’s faculty union in March 2017, citing both extreme financial conditions and changes in programs. He was particularly anxious about the university’s future, he said, because Frank T. Brogan, then the system’s chancellor, had suggested months earlier that the dire state of the system’s finances might require the merger or closure of some institutions.

The president says that issuing the letter was no idle threat; he was serious about laying off professors if need be. At the same time, email records show, Walker’s administration debated how a decision either way could be leveraged to shape the public narrative about Edinboro. Was it more important, they questioned, for Walker to project strength by laying off a few faculty members, or for the university to look resilient by averting that same outcome?

The savings from layoffs, administrators reasoned, might be offset by the enrollment declines that Edinboro could expect from all of the bad news coverage. The university administration was, at this point, trying to pivot from Walker’s doom-and-gloom “boot camp” rhetoric to a more positive story of a university bouncing back.

“In a very competitive market, there are too many other schools ready to pounce on negative information about a competitor to draw students away,” Michael J. Hannan, the provost, wrote in an email to colleagues last July. “We don’t have an Ivy League reputation where prospective students won’t care about negative stories since the value of the name on the degree will be worth it.”

The trade-offs of the two paths were laid out explicitly in an internal memo, marked “confidential” and provided to The Chronicle by a university insider, which suggested that going forward with the layoffs “demonstrates resolve.” The memo, which Hannan wrote, also questioned whether getting rid of a few professors would “fulfill the expectations” of the university’s Council of Trustees, a governing board to which Walker shows considerable deference. (The system-level Board of Governors, not the council, has hiring and firing authority over the president.)

Timothy S. Wachter, a trustee, said that the council did not insist on layoffs. At the same time, he said, the trustees wanted Walker to have every option at his disposal.

“Edinboro University is not an employment agency,” said Wachter, a lawyer, who served two previous Republican governors, Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker. “It’s a university. We’re not here to employ people. We’re here to educate people. If we’re not educating people with programs that are in demand, then we need to realign.”

But think of the power, Walker’s team imagined, in letting the president be the hero who had saved faculty jobs. What political capital might that afford?

Within Walker’s administration last summer, there was a growing sense that averting layoffs could be a valuable bargaining chip, helping Walker to shape the story of his curricular restructuring with the assistance of Edinboro’s faculty-union leadership. If professors could be assured that their jobs were safe, the memo stated, Walker could “insist” that the union tell its members to accept program cuts without making a public stink.

Once layoffs were no longer on the table, the memo stated, the administration could press the union “to manage faculty/department pushback for program discontinuations, supporting positive messaging at the University (e.g., argue against faculty/student protesting, involvement of alumni, etc.).”

The memo contained just five arguments in favor of retrenchment, compared with 14 against it.

Unbowed, Walker said he took a hard-line stance with the union.

“Now we’ve got this retrenchment letter on the table,” he recalled telling the union’s leaders. “So either we need to fundamentally cut the shit and get moving forward, or I’m going to start laying people off. How would you like to proceed? I said, ‘Look, I will not blink.’ "

Marc A. Sylvester, the union chapter’s president, described considerably less colorful exchanges with Walker. He said that their dialogue was never contentious, and that he agreed only in the abstract that professors were generally pleased to help the university with recruitment and retention efforts.

“I remember using the words ‘I can’t sign a blank check here,’ " said Sylvester, who is assistant chair of the mathematics and computer-science department. “We can find ways to work together.”

Walker said he finally backed off the idea of layoffs because he determined that Edinboro’s faculty had already been sufficiently downsized by attrition. The university, he told trustees in another memo, could make a clear case for laying off only five full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty members — a pittance compared with the 73 slots that Edinboro had lost because of retirements and departures in the preceding five years.

Though he backed down from retrenchment, Walker managed to extract from the union a considerable concession. To avoid negative publicity, the union’s leaders agreed with Walker to keep quiet about the full scope of the program cuts. Under the informal arrangement, it was permissible for professors to discuss with students the elimination of individual majors. But students and the faculty members at large were never to see a comprehensive list of what programs had been jettisoned or even learn how many majors had been shuttered. Academic majors that had once existed simply “went dark,” as Walker put it.

As ever, optics were at the forefront of Walker’s calculations about keeping the program cuts secret.

“It would have been a bloodbath in the press,” he said.

News leaked about a few programs, particularly the beloved music major. But Edinboro did not acknowledge that it had done away with 31 degree programs or concentrations within majors, some of which had scarcely any students, until The Chronicle obtained the information through a public-records request. Anticipating this article, Walker sent out a campuswide email this month, listing the programs that the university had cut.

By and large, Walker’s plan to evade negative publicity about the program cuts was successful. If it had not been for a single student, he said, who helped to start an online petition to save the music major, there might never have been a local news story about Edinboro’s ditching programs.

“And let me tell you about this one student,” Walker told a Chronicle reporter over lunch recently.

The student, Walker said, did not really care about the music program all that much. Rather, Walker said, this young man was grieving a death in his family and needed a way to distract himself.

Dylan C. Hollingsworth, the student whom Walker referenced, said he was aghast that the president appeared to misrepresent his sincere motivation to preserve the music program.

“For him to say that I am trying to save a department as a distraction from my brother’s death is completely disrespectful,” said Hollingsworth, a music-performance major. “I’m kind of at a loss for words.”

On a Tuesday morning here in Edinboro, Walker and his executive leadership team gather for a meeting in Reeder Hall. They sit around a long table, staring quizzically at a projection of a multicolored cube, topped with a mortar board.

The cube, divided into six distinct layers, is a graphic representation of what Walker bills as the “EU Experience,” a student-centered approach that prescribes improvements inside and outside of the classroom. It contains targeted areas for investment, such as “experiential learning,” “athletics and wellness,” and “co-curricular activities.”

Someone at the table wonders if the image is stretched too wide. Was all of the white space around it intentional? Is that how it will look on the website? What if the cube had a “vector coming out”? Can we add some bagpipe music?

As enrollment has dwindled at Edinboro, there has been a growing recognition that the university, somewhere along the way, lost its sense of community. Students, drawn mostly from nearby counties, often head home on the weekends, leaving the campus a veritable ghost town. Much of what is missing is theoretically contained in the cube.

Among professors, there are pockets of cautious optimism that some of these changes could help turn the university around.

“I think Dr. Walker’s doing his best, really,” said Suzanne McDevitt, president of the University Senate. “I think he’s honest without being alarmist, and I think he has the best interests of the institution at heart.”

Still, McDevitt said, the president has walked into an institution exhausted by turnover, where “people are just going to try to wait it out — keep their heads down.”

In that context, Walker’s “cube,” like his “Path Forward,” his “Working Groups,” and his “Transformation Commission,” have left some professors outside of Reeder Hall wondering how they fit into what sounds to them like a marketing ploy. He is not the first president to come into the university with a new graphic.

“There’s a rush to create a kingdom,” said Cynthia Legin-Bucell, a recently retired psychology professor. “The kingdom is these task forces — the plans you can put on the internet. It’s a failure to recognize that it doesn’t have to be a kingdom. It can just be people doing their jobs well. And if we do our jobs well, we will attract students, and students will be successful.

“If you look at schools who are really thriving,” she continued, “those are schools who do the basics really well.”

Talk with just about anyone at Edinboro, and they will say that the university that Edinboro could have been looks a lot like Slippery Rock, another Pennsylvania state university, about 65 miles south of here, that has managed to thrive. But poor management decisions, particularly the move toward a nearly open-access admissions standard, are thought to have made Edinboro appear less desirable.

Walker would not disagree with that, and he has made the tightening of admissions standards a key component of his plan. But his acidic rhetoric about the university’s shortcomings, and an approach that often confuses as it tries to inform, undercut whatever common ground the president might otherwise have with some faculty members.

“There is concern from faculty about where are we going as a university,” said Umeme Sababu, chairman of the department of history, politics, languages, and cultures. “There is a concern that many of our departments, unfortunately, feel competitive with each other. There’s low morale among faculty with the uncertainty of the university. There are task forces that have been meeting for the past two years, but it’s still not clear where we are going.”

Now, back to that cube. As Walker and his team debate the image, the vice president for enrollment management offers what may be the first purely positive comment. I like it, William Edmonds says; it could help with student recruitment.

“Hold on a second,” Walker interjects, “because you’re now ‘Mr. Retention’ as opposed to just ‘Mr. Recruitment.’ "

Edmonds sinks into his chair.

The episode provides a subtle example of how Walker asserts himself in strategy sessions, engaging in a style of professional development that risks the appearance of condescension.

Michael F. McElroy for The Chronicle

Walker, scanning the room, finds another detail that troubles him. Why, the president asks, is Allan J. Golden, interim vice president for finance and administration, not wearing an Edinboro lapel pin? Golden is “out of uniform,” Walker pronounces.

The comment passes with a bit of nervous laughter and crosstalk, but Walker can’t seem to let it go. Later that evening at the president’s residence, over a dinner of scallops and steak, Walker presses the issue of the lapel pin yet again. Golden is “out of uniform,” Walker repeats.

Golden, who has more than three decades of experience in higher-education administration, at last explains why: I do not have a pin, he explains, and I cannot wear what I haven’t been given.

The matter of the pin dies over dessert.

It remains to be seen how Walker’s story ends. He likes to remind people that things may get worse before they get better. Edinboro, Walker often says, is headed toward the lowest point of the “Nike swoosh,” which means the upward trajectory is soon to come.

This story, however, ends just as it began: with the president telling a reporter what to write.

In November, Walker flew to Washington to pitch to The Chronicle what he first described as the story of a university that was radically transforming under his leadership. It was the story of a man playing “three-dimensional chess,” he said, in sharp contrast to the myopic careerists who had preceded him.

He cast himself as the leader in a dramatic saga describing how he had stared down unionized professors, who would “rather see a university close than make a concession.”

But Walker was “prepared to go right to the brink” with them, he said. His presidency, he explained, existed in a kind of maelstrom, where, “all of the sudden, the logic or the ethics book doesn’t work.”

In recent weeks, it began to dawn on Walker that he might not like a story about himself that was not of his own design. A sampling of his on-the-record comments, summarized by The Chronicle in an email, elicited dread.

“I REALLY hope,” he wrote in response, “you do not choose to use incendiary language to present me as a chest-pounding boor as that was not my intent or desire when describing how I perceive a strategy and approach to engaging with the difficulties on my campus.”

The next day, a phone call. You are not really going to report what I said about boot camp, are you? Nor that bit about the union, either? “Are you going to say something like that?”

“I don’t apologize for the way I think,” Walker said, “but I don’t always use the words publicly.”

And then, an emotion that Walker had never expressed in hours of previous interviews.

“I feel really vulnerable,” he said. “I hope you try to preserve my future. I’m going to see whether I’ve cut my throat professionally for a whole career.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.