The Professional President

The president of Brown University blows into a room like a gale fresh off the Great Plains.

“Hi there! How’re you doing? I’m Gordon Gee!” he calls out to a stranger planted in the middle of his large, bright office. Mr. Gee race-walks over, stretches out his hand, and apologizes for his late arrival. He’s been in New York, he explains, raising money. A very successful trip.

E. Gordon Gee (the “g” is hard) has raised lots of money since arriving at Brown two years ago. He also has reorganized the administration, authorized a review of all academic programs, announced a new program in brain science, approved a $78-million life-sciences building, and joined alumni gatherings in 25 cities. By all accounts, he’s an energetic, enthusiastic leader.

But is he the right leader for liberal, intellectual, way-cool Brown?

A Utah-born, teetotaling Mormon, he loves sports, wears bow ties (“they make it harder for the faculty to hang you”), compares his appearance -- not without reason -- to Orville Reddenbacher, and calls out “Hi there!” to anyone who looks remotely college age. He warms up audiences with self-deprecating jokes, talks faster than most people can think, and doesn’t mind stirring things up by championing potentially controversial ideas and programs that he considers important, such as a new, interdisciplinary, “values initiative” that will, over the next three years, include classes, lectures, and seminars on topics such as “What elements make up a good life?”

Even his professional background is unexpected. Brown is a small, Ivy League university where almost four-fifths of the 7,700 students are undergraduates. Mr. Gee arrived after serving for 17 years as president of three large, public institutions -- West Virginia University, the University of Colorado System, and Ohio State University -- all better known for big-time sports and, in the cases of Ohio State and Colorado, for graduate programs rather than for liberal-arts excellence. He turned down the University of California presidency in 1995 to stay at Ohio State.

His academic credentials also raised a few faculty eyebrows at Brown -- he holds a law degree and an Ed.D., but not a Ph.D. He has never served as a provost or dean of a faculty, although he was a professor at two law schools and an administrator at three before assuming his first presidency at age 37.

Even if Mr. Gee doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of an Ivy League president, members of the Corporation of Brown University, its governing board, praise his leadership skills. In fact, during the presidential search he preempted the issue of his background by asking, “Why is the Brown search committee looking at someone who has been at public universities all his life, is politically on the conservative side, and is a Mormon?” recalls Stephen Robert, chairman of a capital-management company and Brown’s chancellor, a post equivalent to board chairman.

“We all laughed,” Mr. Robert adds. “It was very disarming.”

Mr. Gee’s background may be unconventional for an elite university, and it certainly stands in contrast to the intellectual who preceded him here, Vartan Gregorian, a noted authority on Armenian culture and history. But while most presidents have at least some roots in scholarship and teaching, experts note that universities also are hiring more people who have held previous college presidencies, as well as people from nonacademic backgrounds, including politics, business, and the law. Boards want leaders who can respond nimbly to the rapid changes in higher education and who can manage increasingly complex institutions.

“When the trustees appointed him, they appointed a person with such experience in such important areas,” says James O. Freedman, a former president of Dartmouth College, who came there after leading the University of Iowa and serving as law dean at the University of Pennsylvania. “He comes knowing all the business about the N.C.A.A. and about federal regulations. He has probably worked through budgets until he is brain dead.”

The Brown search committee considered Mr. Gee’s resume a plus, several members say. Anyone who had haggled with legislators in three states, reorganized Ohio State in the face of deep budget cuts, and led a $1-billion capital campaign there should be able to handle Brown, they reasoned.

Indeed, during Mr. Gee’s first full year, fiscal 1999, Brown raised $109.1-million, about the same amount as in the previous two years combined. He also has begun to tackle some difficult issues -- such as improving alumni giving rates and seeking money to guarantee need-blind admissions -- that people here have long considered important. And he moved quickly to settle two lingering, embarrassing lawsuits. One involved a student accused in 1996 of rape, who said Brown had committed a breach of contract and reverse gender discrimination by finding him guilty of “flagrant disrespect” for engaging in sex with a woman who had been drinking heavily, even though he said the sex was consensual. The other suit was filed in 1992 by female athletes, who said that Brown’s plans to reduce a budget deficit by cutting funds for women’s gymnastics and volleyball teams, along with two men’s teams, violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, because women’s sports were already underrepresented.

Many professors and students praise Mr. Gee’s warmth, energy, and zeal for the job, and believe he will move Brown forward in important ways. Others, however, don’t quite know what to make of their kinetic president.

Mr. Gee is known for sending birthday cards to faculty members, penning personal notes to hundreds of alumni, donors, and other Brown friends, inviting students to dinner, and even bunking in the dormitories. Even the Federal Express delivery man calls out “Hi, President Gee,” from his truck during a Saturday round. Mr. Gee rarely loses his composure, although he did bristle when a reporter asked if he was a “professional president,” and he occasionally mutters that something, such as a protest during parents’ weekend, “irritates” him.

“He is a funny guy who is not pretentious and doesn’t take himself too seriously, which is unusual with college presidents. People find that refreshing,” says Darrell M. West, the chairman of Brown’s political science department. “I think the question mark is, What kind of change is he going to bring to the institution? It’s too early to tell.”

Wendy J. Strothman, secretary of the Brown Corporation and an executive vice president at Houghton Mifflin, says she has heard a range of faculty opinions about Mr. Gee, and still considers him “absolutely the right person for Brown now.”

“He has come in and opened the doors and windows and encouraged people to ask really important questions about the university,” she says. “Where are we going? What are we going to be in 5 or 10 years? What are the impacts of financial and technological changes in higher education? How do we balance this remarkable thing we’ve had for so many years -- both our undergraduate and graduate programs -- how do we keep it going and maintain its quality?”

Four presidencies are rare in academe, although Mr. Gee got his start younger than most people. Still, most presidents tire of the constant pressure and the public nature of the job. Then there’s the difficulty of being a passionate advocate of campus after campus -- something Mr. Gee insists he’s been able to do. Almost as physical proof, his desk is covered with paperweights and other memorabilia from the universities he has led, and an Ohio State megaphone rests beside it.

While successful presidents must cherish the academic enterprise, experts say, they also must attend to things like commercial spinoffs, rapid changes in technology, and changes in the demography of students. They have to recognize that donors and grants-makers reward entrepreneurship and wise use of limited resources. And they must worry about positioning the institution to compete with its traditional peers as well as newcomers like for-profit colleges and distance-learning programs.

“The next set of years is going to be fun, but bumpy. I think the game is going to go to those people who are not just foolish advocates of change but who are more than willing to step up,” says Frank Newman, former president of the University of Rhode Island and of the Education Commission of the States. He also recently joined Brown’s governing board and is working on a project there about higher-education policy in a changing world.

Still, faculty members at Brown say, a president also must understand the traditions and treasures of the institution he leads. One reason Mr. Gee has stirred some mistrust here is that he arrived with no Brown ties and soon began talking about change, prompting fears that he wanted to change too much too fast.

“A lot of people talk about a poor fit with the university,” says one professor, speaking, like all of Mr. Gee’s strongest faculty critics, on the condition of anonymity. “He did well in very large institutions, but he has kind of put layers of bureaucracy between himself and the faculty, which his predecessors have not done. Brown is above all a small place that is kind of cozy, in which there are very good people doing research who care deeply about teaching, too. It’s sort of like a compact broken.”

Mr. Gee says he admires Brown’s traditions, including a culture that welcomes faculty members’ views and the spirit of innovation that spawned the beloved undergraduate curriculum, which encourages interdisciplinary study and gives students broad latitude in designing majors. But, he adds, success should not breed complacence. Faculty members need to think creatively about how new programs can arise from existing strengths.

“We’re talking about a place that does many things very well,” he says. “But we also are talking about a place that needs to strengthen its academic core both at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level, and that means we are going to have to make some choices.”

“Let me state my unequivocal view, and that is that if at Brown we cannot do it and be counted among the very best, that means we simply shouldn’t do it.”

Faculty wariness crystalized this fall around two issues related to change: turnover in the upper administration and Mr. Gee’s drive to “reinvent and redesign” graduate education in a way that breaks down many traditional departmental walls.

After pretty routine turnover the first year of Mr. Gee’s presidency, people began to voice fears of instability last summer when he announced that three key administrators -- the provost, the senior vice president for development, and the vice president for alumni relations -- were leaving or being reassigned. That those changes were announced while many people were away from campus, that Mr. Gee had hired the provost only a year earlier, and that the development chief was a long-time friend of the president’s deepened the mystery.

Mr. Gee has since explained that each change was made for a different reason. The development chief took an executive post in business, and continues to counsel Mr. Gee. The former provost has moved to a newly created job developing and promoting Brown’s museums, centers, and institutes. And the alumni vice president has been replaced by a Brown graduate, a qualification Mr. Gee considers essential with a president who is not an alumnus.

Nonetheless, the turnover in the provost’s office left many faculty members concerned about academic direction, especially since Mr. Gee’s first appointee had replaced someone who held the job only three years. Mr. Gee acknowledges that his own background makes a provost with a strong academic record particularly important. In November, he named Kathryn T. Spoehr, the former dean of the faculty and an alumna who had served as interim provost since the summer.

On the question of graduate programs, Mr. Gee says the process must involve choices because Brown has relatively limited resources. Its $1.2-billion endowment is the smallest in the Ivy League. In the National Research Council’s 1995 ranking of doctoral programs, Brown placed among the top 15 programs for only 9 of the 29 disciplines in which it was ranked. In contrast, Princeton placed among the top 15 in 27 of the 29 disciplines in which it was ranked.

Some professors complain that the president has been too slow to provide details about what reinvented graduate programs will look like. Some want assurances that graduate education won’t blossom at the expense of the beloved undergraduate curriculum, which has made Brown one of the hottest colleges in the country. Others worry that Mr. Gee is trying to push certain proposals through too fast.

In November, faculty members complained that the brain-science program had been announced the previous month without first being reviewed by a key faculty committee and approved by the full faculty, as is required for new programs here. Mr. Gee called the omissions an innocent oversight, and apologized at a faculty meeting. But the incident left some faculty members shaken and worried that the president didn’t understand the importance of faculty participation at Brown.

Professors say that no one questioned the academic merit of the brain-science program, which includes research for graduate and undergraduate students. The program brings together 78 professors in 10 disciplines, including neuroscience, computer science, applied mathematics, and cognitive and linguistic sciences. Undergraduates and most graduate students will earn degrees in one of the participating disciplines, but their research is interdisciplinary.

Many faculty members did feel, however, that the approval process was important because Mr. Gee often promotes the new program as the kind of bold, interdisciplinary model that will thrive in Brown’s reconfigured graduate universe.

“If his approach were more cautious and slower on some of these developing projects, there would probably be a longer period of adjustment allowed by the faculty,” William O. Beeman, an anthropology professor, said shortly after the November faculty meeting at which he pointed out the procedural error. “I think he is smart enough and talented enough to do this. But he is going to have to find a way to approach this atmosphere more effectively than he has so far. We aren’t cutting him much slack because he is trying to move ahead quickly.”

Some professors worry that the high-profile program, which will cost $47.5-million over five years, coupled with the expensive life-sciences building, will drain resources from other disciplines, such as the humanities and social sciences, a fear Mr. Gee says is unfounded. Still, seven new faculty members will be hired for brain science over five years -- positions that many departments would love to have.

The program, created by the participating professors, has since been reviewed and retroactively approved without dissent by the faculty. Mr. Beeman says now that Mr. Gee responded to the brouhaha well by explaining his actions to the faculty. For example, his administration made clear that the building was planned independently of the academic program, and explained how Brown plans to pay for the building, in part by floating more debt, raising more money, and using funds recovered from indirect costs on federal grants (although the notion of more debt worries some professors).

Meanwhile, the universitywide academic review continues apace. Brown has 53 departments, many of them very small. The process invites outsiders chosen by departments and the dean of the faculty to review clusters of departments in related fields, such as physical sciences or modern languages and literatures. From the reviews and subsequent internal discussions will come recommendations about which graduate programs to strengthen and which to phase out.

Mr. Gee and Ms. Spoehr acknowledge that such reviews create anger and a sense of winners and losers, but they say professors in scaled-back programs will still work with graduate students. They just may teach them through new, interdisciplinary programs. The ultimate result, the president and provost predict, will be more entrepreneurial programs, like brain science, and a stronger university that benefits all departments.

Tensions and criticisms like the ones that surfaced this fall don’t rattle Mr. Gee. He’s heard them all, and more, before. At Ohio State, for example, he trimmed 110 academic departments to 95. At Colorado, he had to explain why, shortly before leaving for Ohio State, he gave thousands of dollars in deferred compensation to top administrators after clearing the move only with the board chairman, and why he signed a 15-year contract for football coach Bill McCartney. He survived those incidents and, with typical optimism, he predicts he will also succeed at Brown.

Still, he acknowledges that his adjustment to Brown -- and its to him -- has been rockier and taken longer than he expected. He unabashedly admits that “Brown took a real leap of faith” when it hired him. For one thing, his predecessor, Mr. Gregorian, was a scholar who was director of the New York Public Library before coming to Brown for eight years and now is president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Mr. Gregorian was particularly popular with students, although some faculty members consider Mr. Gee a more able administrator.

When asked at a Cleveland alumni gathering about following Mr. Gregorian’s presidency, Mr. Gee responded: “He did a wonderful job. We’re very different personalities, and we have different priorities. It’s never easy to follow an icon.”

“There’s always going to be some comparison, some for ill and some for good. I will slowly make my way through that. He has been very supportive.”

In some ways, the Brown president’s office is like an overlay of Mr. Gee on Brown tradition. On shelves lining one wall, books peep out from behind rows of pictures showing Mr. Gee with President Clinton and Vice President Gore, Mr. Gee with his arm around his daughter, Mr. Gee with medical students, with the women’s basketball team, and with a group of undergraduates.

An art collector with an eye for colorful abstractions, he has hung a huge, geometric painting behind his desk that completely dwarfs the staid 18th- and 19th-century portraits of Brown forebears hanging on other walls.

Mr. Gee says he thought that, when he came to a smaller university that was less in the public eye, he would have blocks of time to think and write about higher education and the role of presidents. He has found the opposite. He works just as hard as ever, and his days are just as full.

While he no longer has to juggle as many demands from the public and politicians, he does have to take much more direct responsibility for making decisions. He can’t hide behind a budget-cutting legislature or a phalanx of vice presidents and their assistants.

“The president of a public university is many times an arbitrator. But here you actually walk across the campus and someone says, ‘What about X?’ and you can actually say, ‘Let’s build X’ or ‘Let’s hire X,’” he says. “Recently, this has required me to rethink my own approach to the presidency.”

In a conversation some weeks later he elaborates: “I think the challenge for me is to feel comfortable at Brown and for Brown to feel comfortable with me, while we both don’t change. I feel our comfort level is way up. I am very sensitive about those kinds of things.”

Any discussion of Mr. Gee’s reception at Brown must touch on his exuberant personality. Mr. Gee loves sports and considers football games an opportunity to bring all parts of the community together. It doesn’t matter that he’s no longer in the Big Ten, where presidents build bragging rights on packed stadiums and bowl games, or that Ohio State’s stadium holds 90,000 fans, compared with 20,000 at Brown’s.

Early in the game against the University of Rhode Island, when most fans were chatting and ignoring the cheerleaders, he was on his feet cheering and yelling. “Don’t hibernate!” he called to the Brown Bears. “If you don’t tackle, we’ll pull your scholarship. Wait, we don’t give those things.” By halftime, when Brown led 27 to 3, he had become a standup comic. Turning around in the half-filled stands, he announced: “What do you think? Aren’t I a hell of a president?” People applauded.

And he started a telephone interview with a reporter by exclaiming: “I’ve reached the peak of my academic achievement! We won the Ivy League championship in football. For the first time in 23 years, we tore down the goal posts. I had to show them how to do it.”

While many faculty members and students find his gregariousness refreshing, others wonder privately whether it is genuine. Similarly, some professors question the sincerity of his frequent praise for Brown and its faculty as “magnificent, world-class, and wonderful.”

Mr. Gee says people have to take him as he is. “How did the people in Colorado react to me? How did the people in Ohio react to me? It takes about two years to get used to me,” he says.

“But I wear well in the long run because of the fact that I’m a good listener, which I take a lot of pride in. And I adopt the issues of the institution and try to understand them. And the other thing is the fact that I become passionate about a place.”

It’s clear that he relishes his eccentricities. How else could he joke that his energy makes him seem like “an antelope in a telephone booth?” But he also believes his quirks and jokes make others more comfortable around power.

“People’s expectation of a university president is a tall, gray-haired, gravelly-voiced stoic. And look at me. I’m very disappointed when I look in the mirror every morning, myself.”

Nonetheless, he adds, “I am the president of Brown. It’s a wonderful place. But I am who I am. I’m serious about what I’m doing, but I’m also going to enjoy what I’m doing.”

BORN:

February 2, 1944, in Vernal, Utah.

EDUCATION: B.A. in history, University of Utah, 1968; J.D., Columbia University, 1971; Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1972.

ACADEMIC CAREER: President, Brown University, January 1998-present; president, Ohio State University, 1990-98; president, University of Colorado System, 1985-90; president, West Virginia University, 1981-85; law professor and dean, West Virginia University, 1979-81; professor and associate dean, Brigham Young University law school, 1975-79; assistant dean for administration, University of Utah law school, 1973-74.

LEGAL CAREER: Judicial fellow and senior staff assistant, U.S. Supreme Court, 1974-75; judicial clerk, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, 1972-73.

SAMPLE OF PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES: Chairman, Council of Ivy Group Presidents, 1999-present; chairman, Association of American Universities, 1997-98; chairman, Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities, 1995-98; member, National Collegiate Athletic Association presidents’ commission, 1995-97.

CORPORATE BOARDS: Allmerica Financial Corporation; Citizens Financial Group, a regional banking company; Hasbro; the Limited.

PERSONAL: Married to Constance Bumgarner Gee, an assistant professor of education and public policy at Brown. He has a daughter in medical school at Columbia University. He rises at 5 or 5:30 every morning to exercise for 90 minutes -- half of it aerobic -- before work. He carries two briefcases, one for work that day and the other for documents about longer-range projects. He reads three daily newspapers -- The Providence Journal, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal -- and faithfully reads The Wilson Quarterly. He favors biographies, especially Truman, by David McCulloch. But he also recently enjoyed The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, and Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, for their insights into the human spirit.

http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A38