Moving Past Ugly Words
Jabar Shumate, a new vice president at the University of Oklahoma, says he believes a shocking incident involving students there has provided an opportunity to improve social relations at the institution.
Last month a video surfaced showing members of the campus chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chanting about excluding African-American students: “You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me.”
The next day, David L. Boren, Oklahoma’s president, publicly severed all university ties with the fraternity, and the day after that he expelled two students who had led the chants.
On the last day of March, he appointed Mr. Shumate vice president for the university community, with oversight of diversity issues on its three campuses.
Mr. Shumate, who earned a bachelor’s degree in public administration from Oklahoma in 1998, says he didn’t hesitate when Mr. Boren called to ask him to lead the response to the incident. “I love the University of Oklahoma,” he says. “I really got my opportunities from serving as the student-body president here.”
After graduation, he spent two years as Mr. Boren’s press secretary, then won election to the state House of Representatives four times. In 2012 he began representing the state Senate’s District 11, which includes his home turf, in North Tulsa. The site of a race riot in 1921 and long segregated, the area is now a flourishing social and arts hub.
Along the way, Mr. Shumate earned a master’s degree at Oklahoma, in human-resource development. In office, he made public education his cause, creating opportunities for children in low-performing schools to attend charter schools.
Early this year he left the Senate to extend his educational efforts.
He is approaching his new job optimistically. “I look at the impressive actions of our students, who, when the incident occurred, came forward and said, ‘Not on our watch’ — that they would not accept bigotry and racism.”
That, he says, “laid out the blueprint” for what the university will do, starting with online messages of welcome to all, finding “tool kits” to ensure inclusive admissions and hiring, and in general being “intentional” about ensuring that prejudice repels no one from the campus.
“This is an inclusive place,” he says, “but we haven’t done a good job of highlighting what we do every day to make this an inclusive and diverse place.” — Peter Monaghan
Enough, Chancellor Says
U. of Nebraska at Lincoln
Harvey Perlman
When his peers told Harvey Perlman in 2011 that his institution was not, after all, their peer, it bothered him.
That year the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he had been chancellor since 2001, lost its 102-year-old membership card in the elite Association of American Universities.
Now, having announced that he will relinquish the chancellorship in a year, Mr. Perlman remains adamant in the university’s defense.
Beyond “the initial embarrassment of being kicked out of something,” he says, “I don’t believe the university has suffered in any measurable way.”
At the time, he said that Nebraska had been undervalued by AAU metrics that gave short shrift to agricultural research — a Nebraska focus — and took no account of research dollars at the university system’s medical school because it is not under the flagship campus.
Still, he says, the incident does illustrate some of the mounting challenges of modern-day academic administration, which include “increasingly onerous” regulatory requirements, efforts to hold down tuition fees, juggling of budgets, and much else that he says “distracts us from the core missions of the university.”
In a letter to the campus on April 1, he wrote that he had become “increasingly weary of many of the burdens and demands of this office.”
And because he is 73, he adds, some job candidates have balked at moving to Lincoln with a change in leadership likely but undeclared.
Since his announcement, officials of the university system and the state have praised him for such achievements as the creation of a research “innovation” campus, growth in enrollment, increased research outlays, and admission to the Big Ten Conference.
It’s not a bad record, Mr. Perlman allows, especially given that “I’ve always considered myself ‘the accidental chancellor’ " and an accidental law dean before that. In his campus letter he wrote, “I hope you will allow me to fade, quietly and without fanfare, back to the law school.”
Mr. Perlman has certainly been more humorous than the average university leader, nowhere more so than in a series of arch, deadpan YouTube spots — “Perls of Knowledge” — to which he was initially “dragged kicking and screaming” by the admissions staff, he says.
One of the best in that well-received series seems to riff on his trouble with the AAU: No, he says in the video, he will not more liberally declare snow days. Then students would want “it’s-too-windy-and-leaves-keep-hitting-me-in-the-face days, or the-sun-is-too-bright-it-hurts-my-eyes days. And then, boom, there goes our U.S. News ranking.” — Peter Monaghan
Presidential Material
Frederic W. Scott Jr.
William Antholis with Elizabeth Scott, a founding donor of the Miller Center
As he was growing up, William Antholis says, he was always made aware of “the large political forces of the 20th century” that had shaped his family, Greek immigrants uprooted by World War II.
Mr. Antholis, newly named director and chief executive of the Miller Center, an affiliate of the University of Virginia, recalls learning from his schoolteacher mother about the Hellenic roots of Western political culture. From the whole proud family, he knew that his grandfather was John F. Kennedy’s barber during his Senate years.
It’s no short way from being reared in a family of barbers and taxi drivers in New York, New Jersey, and Washington to heading the Miller Center, a leading institute for the study of U.S. presidents and of political and policy history and analysis.
After undergraduate studies at Virginia, he went to Yale University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on UVa’s founder, Thomas Jefferson.
He went on to work at the White House in the Clinton administration and at the German Marshall Fund. During the past 10 years, he was managing director of research programs at the Brookings Institution. One of his two books is on China’s and India’s variants of federalism.
The Miller Center, which he joined in January, has been a touchstone throughout his career, Mr. Antholis says. When he heard that Gerald L. Baliles, a former governor of Virginia, was retiring as its leader, “it felt like a natural for me.” It also meant working closer to home; he and his family have lived in Charlottesville since 1999.
Among Mr. Antholis’s priorities is to increase the reach of the center’s programs, including its extensive oral histories of presidencies from Jimmy Carter’s on, and its hoard of tape recordings made secretly by six presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon.
He also wants to continue the Miller conferences that remind American policy planners and theorists that, as he puts it, “we are not the only government in the world with a stake in world order.”
All that, while continuing to remind people that, “as I like to say to my Greek friends, ‘Before there were Greeks in America, there was Greece in America, thanks to Mr. Jefferson and his friends.’ " — Peter Monaghan
First Male Chief
The same month that La Salle University gets its first female president, its chief academic officer will become the first man to lead another Roman Catholic institution. Joseph R. Marbach, who has been provost and vice president for academic affairs at La Salle since 2010, will be the first male president, as well as the first lay president, of Georgian Court University, a 107-year-old institution in New Jersey.
He will succeed Rosemary E. Jeffries, a member of the founding order, the Sisters of Mercy. During her 14-year tenure, Georgian Court went coeducational and attained university status. — Ruth Hammond
Feminist Economist Dies
Barbara R. Bergmann, a professor emerita of economics at the University of Maryland at College Park and at American University, who was a major contributor to feminist economics, died on April 5. She was 87.
Ms. Bergmann introduced the first two courses in gender and economics at American. She was vocal about gender and racial inequality and examined social policies on poverty and child care. One of her best-known books, The Economic Emergence of Women, examines the movement toward workplace gender equality.
Apart from academe, she worked as a senior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Kennedy administration and held other government positions.
She helped found the International Association for Feminist Economics and presided over several academic organizations. She was the 2004 recipient of the Carolyn Bell Shaw award of the American Economic Association for improving women’s status in economics.
Ms. Bergmann continued to conduct lectures and publish articles into her retirement.— Anais Strickland
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