In the official history of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Shirley Ann Jackson will very likely be remembered as a trailblazing president, whose unparalleled vision and determination transformed a respectable regional private college into a nationally recognized research institution.
This is the reason, her supporters on the governing board say, that Ms. Jackson earned $7-million in 2012, making her the nation’s highest-paid private college president that year, the most recent for which federal tax forms are available. This is the explanation, her backers say, for Ms. Jackson’s perennial position as a front-runner in the college presidents’ pay race, routinely earning over a million dollars a year.
But Ms. Jackson has been a polarizing figure, clashing publicly with professors and battling behind the scenes with her cabinet members. To many people who have worked closely with her, Ms. Jackson’s well-compensated 15-year run as president is a striking example of the tremendous accommodations that some college boards are willing to make for leaders who present themselves as change agents.
Trustees often heap money and praise on such presidents, dismissing any critiques as the whimpers of those defending the status quo. Few college leaders, however, have been as effective as Ms. Jackson in cementing the narrative of an alchemistic presidency to such lucrative ends.
Ms. Jackson’s $7-million payday in 2012 is a testament to how far Rensselaer’s board has been willing to go to keep her. About $5.9-million of that money came in the form of a deferred-compensation payout, which was set aside over a 10-year period and could have been forfeited had she left for another job. Such arrangements, often described as “golden handcuffs,” are a common retention tool for college presidents.
A hefty compensation package has helped to retain Ms. Jackson, who is by all accounts a brilliant theoretical physicist with an intense strategic focus. But her pay, when considered in the context of her often tumultuous tenure, also provides a case study in the things that money cannot buy.
It cannot buy good morale.
It is no guarantee of good governance or effective board oversight.
It cannot put a college on strong fiscal footing.
It doesn’t ensure a president will have the common touch.
Ms. Jackson’s pay has engendered intense debate about her value to Rensselaer. Supporters will point out that her imprint is impossible to miss on the campus, where a building boom and a hiring spree have raised the institute’s profile. Those outward markers of success have kept the board happy, and may help to explain how the president of Rensselaer—an institution with a $617-million endowment last year, which fell outside the top 100—came to be paid on par with, if not better than, leaders of the wealthiest private colleges in the United States.
But a consistent countervailing narrative exists. In this version, which was relayed to The Chronicle by more than 15 former vice presidents, high-level staff members, and professors at Rensselaer, Ms. Jackson’s paycheck is explained by her own shrewd efforts to shape perceptions of her record. These former associates say she has fed trustees rosy information, played down trade-offs of her vision, and publicly admonished any associates who would attempt to upend the story of her transformational presidency.
Those who challenge Ms. Jackson seldom fare well. David V. Rosowsky found that out quickly. Shortly after he was named dean of the institute’s School of Engineering, in 2009, he approached the president with some troubling data. Engineering programs have been the jewel of the institute throughout its history, but the school’s reputation had slowly deteriorated over the previous decade, the dean told Ms. Jackson in a cabinet meeting.
The institute regularly trumpets the school’s rankings in U.S. News & World Report, but that story had become less and less a point of pride by the time Mr. Rosowsky had arrived. On Ms. Jackson’s watch, the undergraduate program had fallen seven spots, to No. 21. Things were worse for the graduate program, which had taken a 15-slot dive, to No. 32. (The downward trajectory has continued in recent years.)
A plan to reverse the trend, Mr. Rosowsky told the president, ought to be presented to the Board of Trustees.
Ms. Jackson thought otherwise.
“She was incensed by the notion that David, as a new dean coming in, was going to show that during her tenure the rankings had dropped,” a former vice president says. “He was not only browbeaten but roundly told he would not report things that way. This instance might be particularly glaring, but the general idea of all these rehearsals was for Shirley to take any information out that she didn’t want the board to hear.”
Most of the former top-level administrators at RPI who spoke with The Chronicle would do so only on the condition of anonymity, saying they still feared retaliation from Ms. Jackson because of her broad influence not only in higher education but also in politics and business. She is a director on numerous corporate boards, including IBM and Marathon Oil. She joined RPI after serving as chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a position to which she had been appointed by President Bill Clinton.
Ms. Jackson declined to comment for this article. So did Mr. Rosowsky, who was named provost of the University of Vermont in 2013.
As the dean laid out his concerns before RPI’s cabinet that day, one of Ms. Jackson’s closest advisers and chief defenders chimed in, as he often does. Curtis N. Powell, the institute’s vice president for human resources, told the dean that his plan was not fit for board consideration.
“You’ve been here a hot minute, and you’re telling us the School of Engineering is not going to make it unless you have 50 more faculty,” Mr. Powell recalls telling the dean. “You don’t go to the board with your hand out.”
“He was the one who got upset,” Mr. Powell continues. “He was like, ‘Who are you? The vice president of HR?’ "
Mr. Powell, in fact, was one of Ms. Jackson’s early hires, and he is among the few people who seem comfortable speaking their minds to the president without fear of reprisal.
Once a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, Mr. Powell is known on campus as “the assassin” because he tells people when the president wants them fired. Many of her harshest critics, he says, are simply upset because they could not cut it at RPI and had to be dismissed.
“Some of these disgruntled employees—and I’ve had to deal with them, I had to transition them out of here—some of them are poor administrators,” he said in a recent interview.
His bluntness, former staff members say, reflects Ms. Jackson’s desire to have a people manager who is more of an intimidator than a conciliator. Executives in similar positions are often more guarded in personnel matters. Mr. Powell, in contrast, freely criticizes his former colleagues.
“Some of them lack the capacity to adapt to differences in strategy,” he said. “Some of them are arrogant; they have to have more money, more positions. Some of them are very distrustful and cynical, which was very difficult to deal with. Some of them were very defensive when you provide feedback.”
The feedback that Ms. Jackson often provides to her cabinet members, who number about a dozen, is described in some quarters by a different name: “abuse.” The president does not use profanity, but her anger is difficult to miss, one former vice president says.
“It was brutal,” he says. “The eyes got real big. I’d seen that on a handful of occasions. The other times in my life I’ve seen it, somebody was about to throw a punch. You could just see the temperature going up, the blood pressure going up. And bam!”
What followed, the vice president said, were often-lengthy rants in which Ms. Jackson would excoriate administrators in front of their colleagues. She would tell individuals, “You need to step up your game.”
To keep staff members in line, Ms. Jackson never lets them forget the power she wields, a former member of the leadership team says. “You could play a drinking game for how many times you heard, ‘You know, I could fire you all.’ "
At one budget-planning meeting, a former vice president recalls, Ms. Jackson “unloaded” on William A. (Bud) Baeslack III, dean of engineering. She was convinced that Mr. Baeslack had hidden money in his school’s budget that ought to be under the central administration’s control, the vice president says. The dean recalls the incident as a “clearly tense moment,” but he describes it as a “misunderstanding.”
“I was treated professionally,” says Mr. Baeslack, who is now provost of Case Western Reserve University. “A couple of times she called me on the carpet, I deserved it. A couple of times I didn’t.”
When Ms. Jackson arrived at RPI, in 1999, the institute was at a low point. Two previous presidencies had ended on sour notes, and RPI trustees felt that no leader had truly harnessed RPI’s potential. Ms. Jackson made clear that her presidency would be different, scoffing at any notion that the institute was no better than a small outpost of the State University of New York.
“We’re not SUNY-Troy,” a former vice president recalls her saying. “We’re RPI. I’m an elitist, and I’m proud of that.’”
That was exactly the kind of swagger the trustees wanted, and they were willing to pay to get it.
“When we selected Dr. Jackson, the board wanted to have a transformative agent,” says Arthur J. Gajarsa, who chairs the Rensselaer board. He retired in 2012 as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
“Of all of the candidates we interviewed, she was the unanimous choice.”
When vetting Ms. Jackson, the board members heard nothing of her divisive style, Mr. Gajarsa says. If they had, it might have given them “food for thought,” he says, but the trustees remain convinced that Ms. Jackson’s talents offset any deficiencies she may have in interpersonal relations.
“We’ve talked about it,” he says, “and the board is still of the judgment that she is doing the management that is required. Anytime you’re a change agent in any institution, you’re going to be challenged by the establishment.”
It is easy to see why the board was so enthused about Ms. Jackson’s candidacy. Her background, after all, is the stuff of history. In 1973, she became the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and more than 50 colleges have awarded her honorary degrees.
The president’s pedigree served as a source of inspiration for a campus that desperately needed a jolt. When she first addressed the institute, in 1999, Ms. Jackson received a standing ovation.
“We thought, Oh, my God, a scientist, a woman, a black woman, this has to be good for RPI,” says Jane F. Koretz, an emeritus professor of biology. “It was downhill ever since.”
The atmosphere on campus changed in small but meaningful ways once Ms. Jackson was hired, Ms. Koretz says. Professors, for example, used to look forward to an annual holiday party where they could speak with trustees informally over cocktails. The president transformed that event into a highly scripted dinner with canned speeches, which Ms. Koretz interpreted as evidence of Ms. Jackson’s excessive formality and her desire to keep the board from having frank conversations with faculty members.
As Ms. Jackson’s compensation grew, and her presence on campus faded because of her obligations to corporate boards, some faculty members became increasingly skeptical of her value to the institute. “When does she have time to be a university president?” Ms. Koretz asks.
Ms. Jackson serves on at least five corporate boards, from which she earned a total of more than $1-million in the past year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2012 a Chronicle analysis of corporate-board membership found that no other college leader had earned more than Ms. Jackson as a director of private companies. At the time of the analysis, she served on six boards, which analysts said exceeded any reasonable standard for a person also responsible for running a university.
Ms. Jackson’s race and gender had made her a historic choice for RPI, which is one of the few major research institutions that have been led by a black woman.
Some of her supporters see an undercurrent of racism and sexism beneath the critiques of her leadership style. Would a tough-as-nails white man be subject to the same scrutiny?
“I know some of the people that are white males who are not going to get direction from a black female. Period,” says Mr. Powell, the vice president, who is black.
Mr. Powell also argues that it would be beneath The Chronicle’s standards to write about Ms. Jackson in a critical way. “I don’t want to see it turn into some rag because of racist and sexist articles,” he says.
Some of Ms. Jackson’s toughest critics say they differ with her on matters of policy, not just personality or style.
Her biggest clash with professors occurred in 2007, when the institute suspended the Faculty Senate in response to its efforts to include contingent faculty members among its membership. The suspension, executed by the provost and backed by Ms. Jackson, was condemned as an affront to shared governance. The senate has since been reconstituted, and its president said recently that relations with the administration have greatly improved.
Tensions between Ms. Jackson and faculty members were running high before the suspension of the senate. In 2006 a faculty vote of no confidence in Ms. Jackson’s leadership was only narrowly defeated. At the time, professors said they were angry about changes in the pension plan and displeased that the president seemed unconcerned about a growing pay gap between newly hired and longtime faculty members.
Rather than interpret the vote as evidence of a troubled presidency, the board publicly cast it as an indication that major change was difficult.
More than eight years later, trustees respond to critiques of the president in much the same way.
Over the course of the past 15 years, some former members of Ms. Jackson’s inner circle say she has exhibited consistent traits: a desire for control, an imperial air, isolation from staff and students, an unbending attitude. Those characteristics have become more pronounced over time, people who have worked with her say, but glimpses were apparent from the beginning.
Consider, for example, the period in 1999 when she had yet to officially assume the presidency and just stopped by the office from time to time. One day a group of vice presidents was scrambling to find a place where they might talk for an hour. Shirley E. Gully, an executive secretary who had worked at RPI for more than three decades, suggested that the coffee table in the president’s vacant office might suffice.
When Ms. Jackson caught wind of that, she politely but firmly made her displeasure known. “She just looked over the desk,” Ms. Gully recalls, “and she goes, ‘That’s not to happen again. That is my office.’ "
Ms. Gully found that early exchange intimidating: “You thought you were doing a good deed, and all the sudden it wasn’t.”
When Ms. Jackson took office, she told Ms. Gully and other staff members that they would have to reapply for their jobs. Some staff members saw that as a hardball tactic, but Ms. Gully viewed it as a carryover from Ms. Jackson’s time in the federal government.
Ms. Gully, who was in her late 50s and nearing retirement, declined to reapply for her job, thinking it would be a “24/7" commitment. The president understood. She offered the secretary an alternative position at the same salary, winning her gratitude and respect.
“She could have bounced me out, and she didn’t do that,” Ms. Gully says.
Ms. Jackson would hardly be the first college president to make staff changes early on, and more than a few other leaders might also chafe at the idea of someone squatting in their offices. To some observers, however, those early episodes foreshadowed her highly formal approach and territorial nature.
Ms. Jackson’s rules are clear to everyone now:
Only she is authorized to set the temperature in conference rooms.
Cabinet members all rise when she enters the room.
If food is served in a meeting, vice presidents often clear her plate.
If a meeting is called for 8 a.m., Ms. Jackson may not arrive until 9:30 a.m. Everyone waits.
Ms. Jackson is always to be publicly introduced as “The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson.”
“It is the Shirley show,” a former staff member says. “At cabinet meetings, they all stand, they get her seat. It’s just weird. It’s not normal.”
The rituals of cabinet meetings are illustrative of the hierarchy that Ms. Jackson has imposed at Rensselaer, making even high-level administrators feel like attendants, according to several former vice presidents and staff members.
Her interactions with students and faculty members are infrequent by design, a former member of the leadership team says. Most major-college presidents travel a lot, but Ms. Jackson’s lucrative positions on various corporate boards mean that she is frequently away from campus to attend meetings that have no direct relationship to her job as president.
Even when she is on campus, students are unlikely to see the president. Rather than walk the grounds, Ms. Jackson is often chauffeured from building to building in an Audi A8.
In 2011, RPI’s Student Senate passed a resolution asking that the Board of Trustees review Ms. Jackson’s leadership and consider her removal from office. The resolution criticized her “abrasive style,” “top-down leadership,” and a climate of “fear” it said she had created among administrators and staff.
Rather than meet with the students, Ms. Jackson responded with a written statement and pledged that one of her vice presidents would talk with them and “correct any misunderstanding” that had led to their criticisms. The board reviewed the resolution and responded with praise for the president.
The creature comforts of the college presidency that Ms. Jackson enjoys—car and driver, first-class travel, an expansive Georgian-style mansion—are hardly novel for leaders of major research institutions like RPI. But the luxuries and the president’s isolation have fed into the notion that Ms. Jackson leads a gilded life while the institute’s finances slowly deteriorate.
The Rensselaer Plan, a guiding document that has served as the blueprint for Ms. Jackson’s presidency, is a bold proposal that relies on significant borrowing for what the president and the board say will be long-term gains. Under the plan, the institute has hired more than 300 tenured and tenure-track faculty members and spent more than $740-million on construction and renovation, officials say.
The institute made biotechnology a key area for securing big research grants. During the first 13 years of Ms. Jackson’s tenure, research expenditures more than doubled, growing from $39-million to $92-million, according to the most recent data from the National Science Foundation.
Fourteen years after the Rensselaer Plan’s approval, however, bond-rating agencies remain unconvinced that the fruits of this aggressive strategy are sufficient to offset its costs.
Shortly before Ms. Jackson was named president, in 1999, Moody’s Investors Service upgraded RPI’s bond rating to A1, characterizing the institute as a low credit risk partly because of its “modest future borrowing plans.” On her watch, however, that rating has been downgraded twice; Moody’s now describes the outlook for RPI as “negative.”
RPI’s debt stands at $828-million, more than six times what it was when Ms. Jackson took office, Moody’s reports show. That figure includes tens of millions of dollars borrowed to pay for a pension plan that was put in place before her arrival.
“Everyone is always concerned about the amount of debt any individual institution takes on,” says Mr. Gajarsa, the governing board’s chairman. “But you have to look at the reason we took on that debt. We’re borrowing money not only for campus expansion, but for the pension fund.”
One of the signature capital-spending projects of Ms. Jackson’s presidency is the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Construction of the facility, which officials say cost $200-million, was characterized by delays and cost overruns.
The center, designed for interdisciplinary activity, is open to artists and researchers for public projects. Many on the campus, however, see it as an opulent but unwelcoming structure that students can look at but not touch. “There’s a feeling that it’s not really a building that students and faculty think they can use,” a former leadership-team member says.
But a current member of the leadership team describes the center, which is known as Empac and opened in 2008, as “visionary.” Critics of the facility, the administrator says, fail to recognize that it will break down traditional silos on the campus.
“It’s probably been a learning curve on the part of certain individuals and groups within the institute who were unfamiliar with the transformative opportunities afforded with Empac,” says the administrator, who adds that he is uncomfortable being identified in an article critical of the president.
The cost of these transformative opportunities started to make some of Ms. Jackson’s colleagues uneasy years ago. Russell Giambelluca, who served as assistant vice president for finance from 2003 to 2009, says there was a time when Ms. Jackson’s ambition served Rensselaer well. At a certain point, however, it was the trustees’ responsibility to rein her in—and they have not, he says.
“What was the deal there? Come on,” Mr. Giambelluca says. “The results were so good they were drunk with them. Nobody would tell her no. "
Mr. Gajarsa says the trustees do hold the president accountable. “Every board member can speak up, and there is no reason to hold back. The board, believe me, is very, very intense.”
Asked when he and the president had ever disagreed, Mr. Gajarsa does not answer. Such matters are “private,” he says.
Publicly, the board has nothing but praise for Ms. Jackson. In a news release issued in July, Mr. Gajarsa argued that the president was worth every penny of the $7-million she earned in 2012.
The board, he says, “will do everything in our power” to keep Ms. Jackson in the job.
Sandhya Kambhampati and Mary Bowerman contributed to this article.
