A Legacy of Change
Robert A. Scott, who stepped down as president of Adelphi University at the end of June, says he feels confident that he is leaving the small Long Island institution in good shape.
When he took the helm, 15 years ago, Adelphi was in a depression: A predecessor had drawn widespread scrutiny for lavish spending, key academic programs were on the chopping block, enrollment had plummeted, and potential donors were put off.
“I was then the first president in four years to be in office for two successive Septembers,” says Mr. Scott, who is 76. “But I came in with the intention of staying, of being president, of building it back.”
During his tenure, a university news release says, Mr. Scott tripled the endowment, added nearly 150 full-time faculty lines, increased enrollment by 48 percent, and spurred a series of construction projects after a 30-year lull.
Mr. Scott also changed the conversation on campus spending. Unlike the controversial predecessor, Peter Diamandopoulos, who was the second-highest-paid college president in America in 1995, Mr. Scott ranked No. 102 of 500 chief executives of private nonprofit colleges in 2012, according to the latest Chronicle analysis.
To make those changes, Mr. Scott says, he had to first learn about the culture of Adelphi.
“Too many colleges and universities try to emulate the most prestigious institutions when it’s not in their DNA,” he says. “I didn’t want Adelphi to be a pretend something; it needed to be a real something. People had to be reminded of its strong heritage of professional programs, like teacher prep, nursing, social work, business.”
Once the mission was secured, everything else followed, he says.
Christine M. Riordan, a former provost of the University of Kentucky, succeeded Mr. Scott this month. He says he plans to work as a scholar at the New York Public Library and a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford before he returns to the Adelphi faculty, in the fall of 2016. — Sydni Dunn
In Search of Justice
Laura Rose
Danielle S. Allen
Danielle S. Allen, a political theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., became director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University this month. Ms. Allen, who will also have joint appointments in the department of government and the Graduate School of Education, told The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan in an interview that the initial focus will be on diversity, justice, and democracy. She took over from Lawrence Lessig, who mainly examined how big money influences politics. Following is a condensed and edited version of the interview with Ms. Allen.
Q. What was it about the job that particularly excited you?
A. The center has a distinguished tradition of engaging in important issues and supporting scholars whose work has broken open big questions. It enables work across disciplinary boundaries to tackle really hard quandaries of the present moment. This is a terrific opportunity to pull together a lot of incredibly smart, engaged people to expand the reach of efforts to understand how one achieves justice in conditions of great diversity.
Q. How will your expertise in citizenship and justice help shape the center’s discussions?
A. Today, questions about race and policing have taken on heightened importance, so public conversations about these topics have greater urgency. The goal is to figure out how to bring people together and to frame conversations that will help us collectively advance our understanding of how to do better in ethical terms on issues of diversity, race, fairness, and justice. One of the biggest challenges is sorting out what can the law do, what are the limits of the law, what can institutions do, and what can we as individuals do in our habits and practices.
Q. How will you, as someone who started out as a conservative Republican and later became a field organizer for President Obama, make sure the ideological spectrum is reflected in the center?
A. It’s important to make sure you have voices from different perspectives and people who disagree with each other in the conversation. We would hope that as we bring ethical issues to the surface, these conversations wouldn’t break down on partisan lines.
Immigrants Are Honored
Three higher-education administrators and seven academics are among 38 people being honored this month as “great immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The administrators are A. Gabriel Esteban, president of Seton Hall University, from the Philippines; Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, from India; and Ali R. Malekzadeh, president of Roosevelt University, from Iran.
The academics are Silvio Micali, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an A.M. Turing Award winner, from Italy; Franziska Michor, a professor of computational biology at Harvard University and a 2015 winner of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, from Austria; Azar Nafisi, an author and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, from Iran; Thomas C. Südhof, a neuroscientist and a Nobel laureate at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, from Germany; Abraham Verghese, a physician, professor, and author at Stanford’s medical school, from Ethiopia; Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a blogger, from Ukraine; and Arieh Warshel, a professor of chemistry and a Nobel laureate at the University of Southern California, from Israel.
‘Just Like Us,’ but Also Not
Donald B. Kraybill
Donald B. Kraybill
When Donald B. Kraybill first spent time in Amish communities in Lancaster County, Pa., he shared his manuscripts with several members before publishing so they could see that he cared about portraying them accurately.
More than four decades later, Mr. Kraybill has just retired as a professor of sociology and religious studies at Elizabethtown College, and as a senior fellow at its Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Known as one of the top scholars on Amish and Mennonite communities, he has written or edited nearly 30 books on those topics.
He has been quoted often in the news media about crises or legal cases involving the Amish, like the schoolhouse shooting in 2006 that killed or wounded 10 Amish girls, and the forced cutting of Amish men’s beards in 2011 by a renegade group. In retirement, he plans to continue doing research and collaborating with other scholars at the Young center.
Born on a Mennonite farm in Lancaster County, Mr. Kraybill, who is 69, says his familiarity with Amish culture helped him gain credibility — and being a Mennonite made him like a “religious second cousin.” Mr. Kraybill began studying his subject alongside John A. Hostetler, an Amish and Hutterite scholar at Temple University.
“Because I knew farming language and grew up in Lancaster County, It wasn’t like I was an outside scholar coming from another state or country,” Mr. Kraybill says. “They knew I cared about the truth.”
That focus helped Mr. Kraybill in his research over the years, especially as movies and reality television shows spread misinformation about the media-shy Amish community. He says the Amish are often “exploited” in mainstream culture because it is against their beliefs to retaliate.
Still, many myths about the Amish continue, he says, like that all Amish are farmers and Luddites, and pay no taxes. Two-thirds of Amish families have an income from a source other than agriculture, he says; many Amish use computers without the Internet, and the Amish do pay taxes, though many qualify for a religious exemption from paying Social Security taxes and waive benefits from that program.
“They’re just like us, but they’re not,” he says, because their way of life “is encapsulated in a different culture.” — Colleen Murphy
Obituary: Washington State U.’s President Dies at 59
Elson S. Floyd, president of Washington State University, died from complications of colon cancer on June 20, just a few weeks after going on medical leave. He was 59.
During his eight-year tenure, he oversaw significant gains in enrollment, an increase in research spending, and completion of a $1-billion fund-raising campaign. He obtained legislative support for the creation of a separately accredited medical school in Spokane, which is slated to accept its first class in the fall of 2017.
Earlier in Mr. Floyd’s career, he served as executive vice chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as president of Western Michigan University and of the University of Missouri.
Washington State’s provost, Daniel J. Bernardo, is serving as acting president.
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