When Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University, bought a life-size bronze sculpture of a hippopotamus, it was up to Helene Interlandi to find a home for the hippo and have it transported to the campus.
Today the sculpture sits on a marble pedestal in front of a campus auditorium, where visitors pose next to it for photographs and students rub the hippo’s nose before exams for good luck.
Hippo-handling is only one of Ms. Interlandi’s many responsibilities as secretary of the university and Mr. Trachtenberg’s personal assistant. She also manages the office of the president (and its six-person staff), meets with the Board of Trustees, coordinates the president’s calendar, serves as Mr. Trachtenberg’s liaison to faculty members and other administrators, handles inquiries, and writes correspondence, among other things.
As managing an educational institution has become more demanding and complex, college presidents are increasingly turning to assistants like Ms. Interlandi for help.
“The issues, concerns, and problems that pour into a college or university can no longer be dealt with by one person operating with a loyal and faithful secretary,” says Mr. Trachtenberg. “It really calls for a team. And the presidential assistant is one part of that team.”
The duties of a presidential assistant vary from campus to campus, but his or her role is defined more by the needs of the president than by the size or type of the institution. On some campuses, the assistant may sit on the president’s cabinet, double as secretary to the governing board or director of diversity, and act as the president’s chief policy researcher. Sometimes, those duties are divided among several staff members.
While no two P.A.'s are alike, they are united by their devotion to the president and the institution. “You have to be willing to serve,” says Pamela Parsons, assistant to the president of Bridgewater State College. “I could be directing a group of 30 people on a committee and giving them assignments at one meeting, and end up taking minutes at the next meeting because it seems like the appropriate thing to do. You can’t have delusions of grandeur or say, ‘I’m the assistant to the president; I don’t do those things.’ You just do whatever it takes to make things happen.”
Although presidential assistants have been fixtures at some larger institutions -- Mr. Trachtenberg was an assistant to John Silber, Boston University’s legendary president, in the early 1970’s -- the field is growing. The National Association of Presidential Assistants in Higher Education -- which held its annual meeting in conjunction with the American Council on Education’s conference last month -- was born in 1987, when five presidential assistants met in a coffee shop to plan a session on the topic for the next A.C.E. conference.
Membership in the group has grown to more than 620, but Sharon McDade, an assistant professor of higher education at George Washington University, estimates that there are at least 2,000 assistants at colleges and universities today. According to the results of a 1995 survey she conducted for the association, more than half of the 800 respondents were the first to hold the position at their college, and nearly a third had held the job for less than two years.
Presidential assistants have diverse backgrounds, according to the survey. Some, like Ms. Parsons, have secretarial backgrounds; others held administrative positions, such as associate director of student affairs or assistant director of public relations, before taking their current jobs. It is also increasingly common for faculty members to serve as P.A.'s for a couple of years and then return to their posts, or to use the position as a steppingstone to another administrative job (nearly a quarter of assistants hold faculty status, the survey found).
Some, like Mark Curchack -- an assistant professor of anthropology-turned-executive assistant to the president of Beaver College -- say they simply prefer the broader scope of the job. “Faculty, in many respects, are extremely narrowly focused,” he says. “As executive assistant to the president, I get my bloody little hands into almost everything. You can’t think of a more broadly focused job than the one I’ve got.”
A successful P.A. is organized, able to handle multiple tasks, and an excellent writer and communicator. But that’s just for starters, says Pamela Transue, president of Tacoma Community College and a former assistant to the president of the University of Washington. “To be effective you have to be able to think like, talk like, write like, and behave like the person you are representing, and so you become a kind of an alter ego.”
Not surprisingly, presidential assistants are a well-educated bunch. According to the survey, two-thirds of them have a master’s degree or higher, and a growing number have Ph.D.'s or J.D.'s. While a graduate degree may be beneficial -- especially when it comes to dealing with faculty members -- it’s not critical, says Buff Schoenfeld, assistant to the president of Western Washington University and chairwoman of the assistants’ association. “It gives you cachet, but it doesn’t mean you’re doing your job any better,” says Ms. Schoenfeld. (She has a J.D. as well as master’s degrees in public policy and political science.)
A presidential assistant has to be someone you can trust, says Mr. Trachtenberg. “This is the person who gets to see you when your guard is down, in private moments when you don’t have your public face on.”
You also need a person who can tell it like it is, he says. “They may call you Mr. President in public, but in private they level with you in ways that others can’t or don’t.” Like about what you’re wearing. A few weeks ago, when Mr. Trachtenberg was headed for a television interview, he donned a cap promoting George Washington’s women’s basketball team, which was playing in the N.C.A.A. Final Four championships. His assistant told him: “You look like a dork. Take off the hat.” So he did.
Since a presidential assistant’s office door is always open, says Ms. Parsons, one must always “be prepared to be pleasant and cheery, even though it’s the last thing you feel like doing. You’re representing the president, so you always have to be up. You can’t come in and say: ‘I’m having a bad day. Leave me alone.’”
The salaries for P.A.'s may range from less than $20,000 to more than $90,000, the survey found, depending on the job description, institutional type, and the assistant’s educational background. Those at public institutions tend to earn more than their colleagues at private or religious institutions. Male presidential assistants and those with doctoral degrees also earn higher salaries.
Although P.A.'s are sometimes mistaken for paper pushers or misunderstood by those who don’t know what they do, their enigmatic role has certain advantages. “I revel in the fact that nobody knows what I do,” says Mr. Curchack. “It’s very important that the mystery be out there. People fear us a lot more because they don’t know what we do, but they fear what we might do.”
The job is particularly alluring to people who want to have a central role at an institution without being on the front lines. But it’s not for everyone. Those who crave attention or formal recognition should consider another line of work.
While a P.A.'s future used to be tied to that of the president, these days more of them are surviving presidential turnovers. Many P.A.'s are choosing to stay in the position longer, even though the opportunity for advancement is sometimes uncertain. “It’s not a line position, so there’s not an obvious next step up the institutional hierarchy,” says Tacoma Community College’s Ms. Transue. “You’re kind of hanging out there in a very central role but without a clear career path ahead of you.”
Many P.A.'s move into other university administrative roles. Some, for example, become directors of public relations or vice presidents of advancement. But for those who don’t want a career as a P.A., it’s not always easy to know what to do next, especially if you’re a generalist, as many of them are. It can turn into a dead-end job “unless you define a clearer niche for yourself,” Ms. Transue warns. “Work with your president to see if there is some way that you can be assigned some direct responsibilities within the institution,” she says. “That can be a good steppingstone to another position.”
Notably, many presidents worked as presidential assistants at some point in their careers, including Kenneth A. Shaw of Syracuse University, Mr. Trachtenberg, and Ms. Transue. Yet, while 20 percent of the P.A.'s surveyed by Ms. McDade said they would like to be presidents one day, only 6.4 percent thought they had a good shot at the job.
Ms. Transue is one former assistant who made the jump. A co-founder of the assistants’ association, she spent seven years as a special assistant to President William P. Gerberding of the University of Washington before becoming executive dean at Portland Community College, and then moving on to the presidency of Tacoma Community College.
“For me it was an excellent apprenticeship because I had the opportunity, truly from the inside, to find out exactly what’s involved in running a large and complex educational institution,” says Ms. Transue. “I realized that it was time to move on when I bought groceries and wrote out the check and signed it ‘William P. Gerberding.’ I thought, ‘This is probably a sign that it’s time to start thinking about my own career.’ ”
ALSO SEE:
A list of presidential assistants who became presidents
