The Calculated Value of a President With a STEM Degree

Dustin Thomas Chambers for The Chronicle

T hirteen years ago, when James W. Wagner, an engineer turned administrator, introduced himself to alumni of Emory University as the new president, he was uniformly greeted with one question: Was he there to start an engineering school?

After all, why else would Emory, which has always fashioned itself as a classic liberal-arts institution, hire away the provost of Case Western Reserve University, an institution popular among engineering majors? Why else hire a researcher whose career highlights have included developing a device to measure urethral pressure, if not to double down on science, technology, engineering, and math?

No such school was planned. Emory had simply opted for a leader fluent in the quantitative, complex realities of science. It wasn’t hiring a charismatic fund raiser or a public intellectual. It was hiring an experimentalist.

It’s a route that many research universities have chosen over the past decade: Some 27 percent of doctoral universities in the United States are led by presidents with degrees in STEM fields, according to a 2011-12 survey by the American Council on Education, the most recent data available. That’s a proportion larger than any other, including the social sciences (21 percent), education (18 percent), and humanities (15 percent).

At the country’s most influential universities, scientific dominance in the presidency is growing: At the 115 doctoral institutions with the highest research activity, nearly half are led by STEM researchers. More than 40 percent of the members of the Association of American Universities, an elite club of research universities, are led by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians — and that’s excluding technical-focused members like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While some of these leaders are known for their disciplines, like Stanford University’s departing president, John L. Hennessy, a computer scientist, many keep their pedigrees in the background. Think of Mark S. Wrighton, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, who has methodically built up his institution for two decades. (Chemist.) Or Robert J. Zimmer, who has led the University of Chicago for a decade. (Mathematician.) Or Robert A. Brown, who has moved Boston University into the ranks of elite research institutions. (Chemical engineer.)

The sciences, at their best, value failure and share an openness to ignorance. For the scientists who do end up as university presidents, nearly all of them see their leadership as a continued form of experimentation.

Call it hypothesis-driven management, says Mr. Wagner, at Emory. Don’t come in saying, “I’m so confident, we’re going to change the world,” he says. “Let’s run the experiment.” And if the decision fails, find a way to learn from it.

A STEM presidency can present challenges. Scientists are not always fluent in the rest of the liberal arts. And STEM presidents mostly seem to thrive in situations where they can be deeply involved in the grit of metrics and problem-solving. Rarely, says Mr. Brown, do leaders from backgrounds like his do well in roles that are more external-facing.

“If you’re looking for the charismatic leader, I’m probably a pretty poor pick,” he says. “On the other side, in terms of articulating a plan for the university and carrying it out consistently, we’ve done really well.”

While scientific presidents have a quiet influence on academe at the research-university level, they are rare throughout the rest of higher education. Sixteen percent of baccalaureate institutions are led by such presidents, according to the ACE survey (the next one goes into the field this month). And only one-tenth of the more than 600 members of the Council of Independent Colleges are led by scientists.

Academe needs more scientific-minded administrators, says Joanne Berger-Sweeney, a neuroscientist and president of Trinity College, in Connecticut. “The scientific skills that you learn are really lacking in higher-ed administration.”

Two Cultures

Mr. Wagner will end his tenure at Emory this summer, and during a recent visit he reflected on how his training has influenced his performance in office. Like any president, he has stocked his wood-paneled office with artifacts; his just happens to include a vintage artificial knee and hip from his time researching implant materials. He passed by them on his way to a volume of charts.

“So, I have to explain this,” he said. “You see how geeky this is?”

The charts are a dashboard of metrics he developed when he started as president, all tied to the goal of the university’s becoming a “destination” — for students, parents, scholars, and patients. Arrows tinted green or red point toward welcome or worrisome trends, compared with peer institutions.

“Do I suspect that a historian would have come up with this?” He chuckled at its fastidiousness. “Probably not.”

Mr. Wagner included patients in the metrics for good reason: Nearly 70 percent of Emory’s budget is tied up in its medical center, which, like its peers, has faced tough economic conditions as a result of cost controls stemming from the Affordable Care Act. Its problems, he said, have occupied a large part of his attention over the past four years.

Such institutional complexity, common to large universities, is well-suited to the linear thinking of scientists, several STEM presidents said.

“We engineers believe nothing improves unless you measure it,” said C.L. Max Nikias, an electrical engineer who is president of the University of Southern California. “We know nothing is perfect. It’s always an approximation.”

Methodical minds require temperance, though, which is one reason that Mr. Wagner hired Earl Lewis, a social historian, as provost at Emory. (Mr. Lewis left in 2013 to lead the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.) They’d sit and talk about problems the university faced and contrast their habits of thought. “Jim, you’re thinking like an engineer again,” the president said Mr. Lewis would tell him. “This parallel processing isn’t working for me,” Mr. Wagner says he would respond.

The humanities in particular present terra incognita for scientists. It dawned only slowly on Trinity’s president, Ms. Berger-Sweeney, that her faculty might not be swayed by charts alone.

“It took me a while to realize that for some of my colleagues in other disciplines, the narrative was as important, if not more important, than the graphs and analysis,” she recalls.

Humanists can profit from a president who comes from the sciences, especially at public universities, says W. Kent Fuchs, a computer engineer and president of the University of Florida. His state Legislature is focused on STEM education for its putative benefits to local economies. With his background, Mr. Fuchs needs to spend less time emphasizing science in talks with lawmakers — his support is taken as a given. “I can speak out on behalf of the arts, humanities, and social sciences,” he says. “That goes a long way in terms of relationships internally.”

That’s not to say humanists don’t maintain a healthy suspicion of a scientific leader. On a campus tour, after pointing toward the headquarters of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mr. Wagner walked through several glossy new buildings, for chemistry and biology. Did some faculty members argue as they were built that he might favor science? “Always. Always. But that’s standard on every campus,” Mr. Wagner said.

The next stop, he pointed out, was a new building shared by an ethics center and theology school. “The humanities get their cut.”

Every background comes with blind spots. For presidents from STEM fields, that can mean ignorance of problematic statements that a humanist might have caught. For Mr. Wagner, the most painful point of his presidency resulted from a 2013 column he wrote for Emory’s alumni magazine, in which he described the difficulties of reaching agreements and praised the Three-Fifths Compromise of the U.S. Constitution, which counted each slave as 60 percent of a person to determine a state’s representation in Congress.

The backlash was immediate and severe.

“To embarrass the university that way was a huge disappointment,” Mr. Wagner said. It was “culturally incompetent” of him not to understand that the example would be inflammatory. His initial apology was mistaken, too: he apologized but also sought to explain his flub. Soon enough, he said, “I learned the difference between seeking to be excused and seeking to be forgiven.”

If Mr. Wagner didn’t have an engineer’s background, might he have had a bit more cultural awareness earlier on? Possibly. But then, in another moment of crisis, would he have been as hands-off when his hospital took in the country’s first Ebola patients, in 2014, despite intensive news coverage and hate mail? Possibly not. People are not, of course, automata of their backgrounds. Many paths lead to success or failure.

Burned Bridges

Most STEM presidents seem to share one point: They never planned to be administrators, particularly at liberal-arts universities.

It “was never one of my ambitions,” says Robert J. Birgeneau, a physicist and former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. His dream was to win a Nobel Prize, he says. “I often joke I failed at that and became a university president.”

Scientific goals stop many from delving into academic leadership. Few scientists can run a lab while serving as president. And unlike, say, history or literature, once you’re out of science, it’s nearly impossible to go back. Fields move too fast and competition is too fierce. Every scientist on the administrative track faces that decision point, says Mr. Brown, at Boston University.

His decision came when he became dean of engineering at MIT. “I’d crossed the bridge, and the bridge was burning behind me,” Mr. Brown says. He could run back then or never.

He decided to follow the administrative path, he says, when he realized that his first thoughts of the day were of how he could help his colleagues, not of the modeling of energy through materials. “In terms of my research career,” he says, “I had to let it go.”

Several scientists have kept up laboratories while serving as presidents, but they are the exceptions. Santa J. Ono, a molecular biologist and president of the University of Cincinnati, keeps a lab and blocks regular time for it. Mr. Birgeneau ran a small lab at Berkeley — lab meetings were on Saturdays, and whenever a hole opened in his schedule, he’d tell one of his graduate students to rush over.

Many STEM presidents feel that their leadership roles simply aren’t valued by their scientific peers. Mr. Ono was teased mercilessly by a friend for his defection. (Ironically, that friend, Mark S. Schlissel, a physician and biologist, now leads the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.) The skepticism is unfortunate, Mr. Ono says, because the team nature of modern science forces training in leadership that scales up well across the university.

“When you have problems and challenges,” Mr. Wagner said, “it’s not one person’s challenge — it’s everybody’s.”

The risk inherent in administrative jobs also limits scientists’ interest in going after them, especially outside the largest research universities. Why take on a job that ends a research career when outside events could derail your presidency?

“Scientists are pretty satisfied members of academia. We get a lot of recognition for the work we do,” says Ms. Berger-Sweeney, at Trinity.

For STEM researchers who have found themselves considering offers from headhunters, Mr. Brown has one bit of advice: Make certain the research bug is out of your system.

“It’s what you’re thinking about in the shower in the morning,” he says. “If you’re still thinking about your research in the shower in the morning, you should still be a researcher.”

As Mr. Wagner’s tenure winds down, he finds himself often comparing Emory with crosstown Georgia Tech. He might have been a more natural fit there, where a linear, analytical, problem-attacking mind-set is common.

“I harbor a concern that some of the important purposes of the university may not be well served by” those habits, he said. Creativity requires resources and time, especially in the humanities. It’s one of the major lessons he’s taken from Emory. “There is a necessary inefficiency,” he said, “required for us to do our jobs.”

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Paul Voosen is a senior reporter covering the sciences. Write him at paul.voosen@chronicle.com; follow him on Twitter @voooos; or see past work at voosen.me.