Gordon Gee has been awake for nearly four hours, and the Ohio State University president needs fuel.
Leaning over his kitchen sink at 8:30 a.m., Mr. Gee shoves a hand mixer into a fat, red Ohio State cup. The concoction of blackberries and a high-protein drink will largely sustain him during a day of nonstop glad-handing with students, alumni, politicians, and donors.
It is game day in Columbus, and the gridiron matchup between the Buckeyes and Purdue University’s Boilermakers is an occasion for one of higher education’s most eccentric and recognizable figures to do what he does best: “friend raising.”
From morning until late afternoon, Mr. Gee will rattle off self-deprecating jokes, pose for pictures with strangers, and hug any man, woman, or child who chooses to come within arm’s length. Today he does all of this in his signature bow tie and an audacious pair of gray trousers embroidered with little red O’s.
Everything that happens on game-day weekend at Ohio State is designed to reinforce the notion that Mr. Gee, 68, is spontaneous and a man of the people. He is actually neither.
Mr. Gee is a detail-obsessed hyper-planner who has spent much of his life in the luxurious bubble of a college presidency. He is largely insulated from the workaday worries of Ohio State students and alumni, who bleed scarlet and gray and seem to live for the respite of eight fall Saturdays in Columbus each year.
He is a teetotaling Mormon, whose lone vice appears to be a serious Diet Dr Pepper habit, which he says breaks with the “spirit but not the letter” of Mormon prohibitions against caffeine. He is baffled by the idea of a tailgate party that starts at 9 a.m., and yet Mr. Gee may work harder than any president in the country to identify with those who favor Bloody Marys to protein shakes.
“I don’t experience the university the way anyone else does,” Mr. Gee says. “I have a great office. I can park on the sidewalks if I want to, and I live in subsidized public housing.”
The president’s residence, known as Pizzuti House, is named after Ronald A. and Ann Pizzuti, who donated the 9,600-square-foot home to the university in 2000.
Located in Bexley, Ohio, an affluent suburb nine miles from Ohio State’s campus, the house is ground zero for Mr. Gee’s fund-raising operations, which have netted $1.6-billion during his five-year tenure. Walking through his dining room, Mr. Gee points toward a spotless wooden table surrounded by claw-foot chairs.
“There has been a lot of money raised at that table, I’ll tell you that,” he says. “There’ve been a lot of people who’ve said no, too.”
The residence is a lightning rod for critics, who were skeptical of the $2-million makeover the house received in 2007, when Mr. Gee returned to Ohio State for a second tenure as its president. (He first led the university in the 1990s).
In the span of three years, beginning in 2008, the university spent nearly $900,000 on entertaining at Pizzuti House, according to records obtained by the Dayton Daily News. That figure is part of a total of $7.7-million in discretionary spending for the president’s office, which includes money directly spent on private air travel and lodging for Mr. Gee.
But the $7.7-million total was not what generated national news this fall. Buried in those expenses were $64,000 for bow-tie cookies, pins, and other items branded around Mr. Gee’s signature neckware. While the money did not pay for the 1,000 “active” and 1,000 “retired” bow ties Mr. Gee keeps in his home, the headlines painted Mr. Gee as a man of excess in an age of austerity.
Customarily, he laughed it off.
“Can you imagine how many late nights and weekends with students, parents, and supporters it takes to distribute $65,000 worth of cookies?” he wrote in an e-mail. “Exhausting.”
Like Mr. Gee’s tastes, the president’s residence is eclectic, containing a mishmash of aristocratic and pop-art motifs. European antiques somehow blend harmoniously with a collection of more than 100 bottle caps mounted on a kitchen wall. Tucked in a corner, but impossible to miss, is a life-size sculpture of Johnny Cash, whose 6-foot-2 frame is reproduced out of 150,000 black Crayola crayons.
Mr. Gee’s favorite Johnny Cash song should come as no surprise.
“Of course, ‘Ring of Fire,’” he says. “Because I’m always in the damn ring of fire; I want you to know that. It’s my victory song.”
An Open Book
As a president, Mr. Gee dances so close to the flames that the occasional singeing is all but inevitable. His $2-million compensation, which makes him the nation’s highest-paid public-university president, presents an easy target for critics. His wry sense of humor, which has earned him the reputation of a gaffe machine, is a continuing liability. And his longevity in the public eye has left little mystery about his personal life.
Mr. Gee’s first wife, Elizabeth Gee, died in 1991 of breast cancer at the age of 46, leaving Mr. Gee to raise their adopted daughter, Rebekah, then 16. His second marriage, which ended in divorce in 2007, is the stuff of higher-education lore, and the details are now more public than ever.
In her new book, Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion, Constance Bumgarner Gee, Mr. Gee’s ex-wife, recounts her relationship with Mr. Gee, which began when she was a faculty member at Ohio State during his first presidency there. The 13-year marriage ended in 2007, when he was chancellor of Vanderbilt University.
Mr. Gee has also held the top job at West Virginia University, where he was named president in 1981 at the age of 36;, the University of Colorado system; and Brown University, where he served for just two years before his controversial decision to pull up stakes and head to Vanderbilt.
The title of Ms. Gee’s book references a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, which contained the titillating charge that Ms. Gee had used marijuana at Braeburn, the chancellor’s mansion at Vanderbilt.
Ms. Gee, now an advocate for medical marijuana, says she used the drug to treat Ménière’s disease, a rare inner-ear condition.
“It was fair,” Mr. Gee says of the book. “It was humorous, and it really showed the kind of intense tension and pressure that one lives under as a public couple.”
“Would I have preferred that she not do it? Probably so,” Mr. Gee continues. “I don’t think anyone likes to have their private or public life exposed, but on the other hand I think she was very fair to me.”
Mr. Gee declines to comment directly on the details of the book, which includes the assertion that he viewed the Journal article as an orchestrated conspiracy on the part of a handful of Vanderbilt trustees and advisers. Ms. Gee also says that her former husband, so valuing the presidency and so embarrassed by the article, eventually cloistered her upstairs during events at the residence.
Mr. Gee says he maintains a friendship with Constance Gee, but he has taken up with another woman, who shares his love of country music. Suzanna Spring, a singer-songwriter who lives in Livermore, Calif., and plays in a band called the Front Porch, is Mr. Gee’s “significant other.” Despite the long distance, the optimistic Mr. Gee is convinced that “eventually it will work out.”
‘He’s the Man’
It is 10:30 on a Friday night, and the small house on 15th Street is a visual ode to collegiate drinking culture.
The walls inside are hand-painted with the names of breweries, and Natural Light cans are strewn about.
A dusty beer-pong table, emblazoned with an Ohio State logo at the center, stands on a wood-planked porch.
Bass-infused music blasts from small speakers set atop a long bar, which appears to be the pride of the residence.
Gordon Gee flashes a grin and ducks beneath a string of Yuengling pennants to ascend the front-porch steps. When he passes through the foyer and enters a black-lit room full of college students, Mr. Gee is greeted with girlish shrieks.
“That’s why he’s the man,” a partygoer growls above the giggling throng.
It is Taylour Hoyt’s 21st birthday, and her “No. 1 birthday wish” has come true. Just as she dreamed he would, a 68-year-old man whom she has never met has stopped by to say hello.
“The fact that he comes,” Ms. Hoyt says, struggling to catch her breath and searching for words, “this is what a president should be.”
Cellphone cameras are everywhere, and Mr. Gee will pose with students who do him the courtesy of resting their beers out of sight for a moment.
The camera-phone may have changed Mr. Gee’s presidency as much as any other single technological advancement of the past 30 years. The man cannot walk more than a few paces in public without being hounded by the student paparazzi.
At some point during Mr. Gee’s tenure, a photo with the president became an essential right of passage for every Ohio State student. To consider their undergraduate experience complete, all self-respecting Buckeyes need to have fulfilled two traditions: They must jump into the icy waters of Mirror Lake during Beat Michigan Week, and they must be able to furnish a photo with the Gordon Gee.
By getting out among students, Mr. Gee is taking a calculated risk. His media advisers and colleagues worry that these nights out could end in disaster. It does not take much imagination to picture Mr. Gee being on the scene of an alcohol-related incident, and it does not seem implausible that a photograph could make him appear complicit in illegal activity.
But Mr. Gee believes there is an immeasurable benefit to breaking out of the bubble and interacting with students where they live in a way most presidents seldom do. On a campus with 56,000 students, he manages to seem accessible to everyone. In some small way, a lawyer-turned-college-president, who has never touched a drop of alcohol, has become a fixture of student nightlife.
“Pretty soon the urban legend is that they all saw me,” Mr. Gee says.
The requests for Mr. Gee’s presence are filtered through the university’s Office of Student Life, and there is an unwritten rule that students having parties with underage drinking need not ask for his company. Mr. Gee puts a lot of faith in the two student volunteers who accompany him and help him steer clear of trouble.
“The folks in Student Life do a very good job of screening and making certain that the students who go with me keep me out of positions in which I would be compromised,” Mr. Gee says. “It doesn’t say it’s not going to happen, but I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
Nothing Left to Chance
Nearly 12 hours later, and 40 minutes until the Buckeyes’ noon kickoff, Mr. Gee bisects a crowd of fans and ducks through an inconspicuous door inside Ohio Stadium.
Room 2750-B is a place of privilege, designed to remind the nation’s top high-school athletes that they are visiting a stadium that breeds champions. The years of Ohio State’s seven national championships in football are denoted in block numbers across a long wall. Enormous televisions are tuned to ESPN Game Day, and the aroma of barbecue hangs in the air.
Mr. Gee knows what he wants, and it’s not a pork sandwich. He makes a beeline for a young man seated at a round table with a silver football helmet as its centerpiece. The president talks with the high schooler for about five minutes, as if they are old friends. Quietly he removes the youth from a mental checklist of dozens of people he expects to personally encounter today.
“That’s the No. 1 kicker in the country,” Mr. Gee says. “I know a lot about him.”
Mr. Gee makes a habit of knowing a lot about lot of people. Before the sun was up this morning, he was reviewing a list of about 80 people who will be seated in the president’s box at the game. Among them are prospective donors, two former Ohio governors, and John H. Glenn Jr., the former U.S. senator and astronaut, an Ohio native.
Mr. Gee is known for his astounding name recall, but the fact is that he prepares rigorously to seem to know everyone he sees.
“I don’t believe in leaving anything to chance,” he says.
The Most-Difficult Issue
The midgame view from the president’s box, down into a mass of 105,000 fans, provides some sense of the pressure that Mr. Gee feels every day. When Buckeyes are happy, they are very happy. But when they are angry, they are very angry.
It was not until last year that the president came to fully appreciate how quickly his fan base, and public perception nationally, could turn on him. In a painful news conference, he was asked if he had considered firing Jim Tressel, the Ohio State football coach, who had been suspended for two games for committing a major rules violation.
“No, are you kidding me?” Mr. Gee replied. “I’m just hopeful that the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”
In the eyes of college-sports skeptics, Mr. Gee had committed a true gaffe, which is to say that he had accidentally blurted out a completely honest answer. This was proof positive, many columnists surmised, that the tail truly wags the dog in college sports, where coaches can bring down presidents more easily than the reverse.
Mr. Gee scoffs at the far-reaching conclusions many drew from his remark, but he concedes that his joking presentation was an indication of how greatly he underestimated the severity of the problems within the football program.
“Out of my 32 years, I will tell you this very pointedly: That was probably the most difficult issue that I’ve dealt with,” Mr. Gee says. “Because it involved so much public commentary, so much press, so much pressure internal and external. It involved the brand of the university. It involved issues that were more complex than I really fully understood.”
The nearly three months that passed between Mr. Gee’s bungled news conference and Mr. Tressel’s resignation featured rolling disclosures about Ohio State players receiving improper benefits from a local tattoo parlor. What’s more, evidence mounted that Mr. Tressel had known of the allegations and had not reported them.
“I stumbled out of the gate,” Mr. Gee says. “I didn’t take it as seriously as I should. I did not move as swiftly as I should.”
But when Ohio State did move, the president emphasizes that it was he who did the moving. Mr. Gee was leaving on a trip for Arizona when he says he called Gene Smith, the athletic director, and gave the green light to “make a coaching change.”
Mr. Smith was the one who personally broke the news to Mr. Tressel, but Mr. Gee later called the coach, whom he considered a friend. Mr. Gee says he told Mr. Tressel, “I’m sorry this has happened, but we just had to move on.”
The president’s story, as related to The Chronicle, appears to break with the coach’s and Ohio State’s public narrative that Mr. Tressel had come to the decision on his own. In his statement, Mr. Tressel said he and university officials had “agreed” that he should resign, and Mr. Smith said the coach had “decided to resign.”
“I made that decision,” Mr. Gee says. “There’s no doubt about it. I do know this: No one doubts that I’m in charge.”
After a short pause, he repeats it. “No one doubts that I’m in charge. The Tressel decision ultimately came from me.”
Mr. Tressel had 10 seasons with the Buckeyes and had guided the team to its first national title in 34 years. But in the end he became a threat to the institution, and by extension a threat to Mr. Gee.
So he had to go.
Those are the cold calculations of one of higher education’s greatest survivors, who says his three decades in leadership have cost him dearly. The nonstop nature of the job has cost him any sense of personal space, and at least contributed, he says, to the dissolution of his marriage to Constance Gee.
“I have no balance in my life,” Mr. Gee says.
He also acknowledges that, despite his efforts to bring a human touch to the presidency, “it’s very difficult to be terribly close to people.”
In the company of a mass of students or football fans, Mr. Gee is a hail-fellow-well-met. He is a grandfather figure to many who cross his path.
But Ohio State University’s president may be distant by design.
Somewhere along the line, Mr. Gee became the job he wanted. He became the president, and left little room for anything else.
Gordon Gee’s Favorite Words, Noises, and More
After two days of interviews over a recent game-day weekend, E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, agreed to answer one more series of questions. Here are his responses to a questionnaire used by Bernard Pivot, a French television host, and popularized on Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio.
Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Agile.
Q. What is your least favorite word?
A. Conservative.
Q. What turns you on?
A. Ideas.
Q. What turns you off?
A. Complacency.
Q. What sound or noise do you love?
A. Great music.
Q. What sound or noise do you hate?
A. What we heard last night. Bad music. (Mr. Gee makes routine appearances at bars frequented by students. On October 19, he visited a dance club called Charlie Bear, where rap music was blaring.)
Q. What is your favorite curse word?
A. Hell.
Q. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
A. Symphony-orchestra conductor.
Q. What profession would you not like to attempt?
A. Engineer.
Q. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
A. Welcome.
Correction (11/13/12, 9:25 a.m.): The name of the university where Gordon Gee became president in 1981 is West Virginia University, not the University of West Virginia. The text has been corrected.