Talks and Articles

rtmp www.drew.edu vodpresident SOTU2009.flvRight4x3 President Robert WeisbuchState of the University AddressOctober 14, 2009 As Prepared for Delivery Last weekend Drew hosted Parents Weekend, and this led me to ponder the best advice parents can give to their children.  One phrase suggested

Fellow seniors, Drew class of 2009, this is your day. It is your day of celebration but it is also your day of departure, and so it is a moment of both joy and sadness. For me, who came in with you—and I must have done something wrong, because I don’t get to graduate--, you are a special class, all mine, and I am going to miss you.

Robert Weisbuch, President, Drew University 1. Given this chilly climate for administrators—salary freeze, hiring freeze   I turn for relief to that dusty ghost town in my mind’s geography, the one labeled Intellect.  This turn has been further encouraged by

Annual Address to the Community, September 24, 2008 In my first two State of the University addresses, I asked you to dream into being a Drew University that directs our traditions of liberal arts learning and social idealism toward a

With these words I inaugurate the Class of 2012.  But the truth is, we don’t think of you as a class but as 400 unique individuals.  Our job is to help you to locate what is most remarkable in yourself,

State of the University Address Drew in the World, The World within Drew September 26, 2007 "We are not put in the world to sit still and know we are put in it to act." Woodrow Wilson The state of

What would it mean for our university to take a lead in a renaissance for the arts and sciences? I've used that phrase before to state an ambition we might set not only for Drew but for all universities and for the nation. While the number of students whose degrees are in the liberal arts has decreased sharply over the last forty years, in the culture at large there is abundant evidence of a great hunger for the subject matter of the arts and sciences. How can we take that interest into the academy and recapture the center of higher education for real education, the liberal arts?

Whitman's friend Thoreau titled a famous chapter in Walden “Where I lived and What I Lived For.” Where we live at Drew is in a forest 45 minutes from one of the world's great cities. Our dual location speaks to the two parts of what we live for.

I can't wait to get here every morning. It is true that I leave the house singing, for the generosity, the hope and the high spirits in which you have greeted me have amazed me. But even my distended ego knows that this enthusiasm has more to do with your love of the university. So too I am thrilled to be the excuse for bringing us all together; but what really matters is that we all are here together, experiencing ourselves as a community of scholars or learners, as a community of coworkers who are also a community of friends. I hope to gather you each term for town meetings where you will be the speakers and I the listener. Our university senate, which we will revivify, will then take the issues raised at our town meetings as part of their agenda for discussion and eventual action. Today only, it's my turn to introduce myself and to give you my sense of this university's reason for being.

We're All in This Together How the frigid economic climate is creating a certain human warmth on our campuses By ROBERT A. WEISBUCH Man, it's cold in here. Salary freeze, hiring freeze. But then there's that hot little secret Some

How to Avoid Becoming a One Hit Wonder A Top 10 Hit Parade for New Presidents I’m now in my second term in office, having just signed on for another five years at Drew. How would I grade my first

Face to face with myself over college tuition BY ROBERT WEISBUCH I guess I should hate myself. I’m both a tuition paying college parent and a tuition charging college president. As a parent, I gasp at the bills for my

In February I wrote a column for The Chronicle on the often-abortive relationship between K-12 schools and academe. Around that time, the major newspaper in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger, published a different essay of mine under the headline, "Kill State Tests," which simplified my position on standardized tests but served its attention-grabbing purpose.

We've tried military style discipline, standards and tests. We've tried vocational ed ... Could we now give inspiration a try? By Robert Weisbuch  We are now approaching the possible end to the latest huge and reductive experiment with American K

From the issue dated November 16, 2007 My First Sit In Wasn't I, just a few short decades ago, on the other side of this desk? By ROBERT A. WEISBUCH

What's Liberal? And Why Arts? By Robert A. Weisbuch As I write these words, I am sitting outside my cabin on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee. It's a portrait of ideal nature with moving parts, for this is a family

Just Another Gray Rental Buick At a conference for presidents, a relative newcomer sees himself in hundreds of barely distorted mirrors By ROBERT A. WEISBUCH Tangerine orange shocked the eye as I looked down the row of otherwise gray rental

My colleagues here at Drew didn't like my idea for making the university's name better known. I proposed a split-screen ad with, say, a bulldog on one side and a splendid photo of our gorgeous campus on the other. "Not Drool ...," the copy would read, "Drew. A university in a forest 30 minutes from Manhattan." Another version might feature Drew Carey in an outlandish shtick costume. "Not Drew Carey. Drew University." You get the idea, and you also must get why it was not merely rejected but actively scorned by our communications director.

Core may be a bore and a snore, but when I arrived as president of DrewUniversity last year, our College of Liberal Arts was scheduled by edict to re-examine general-education requirements. I asked for a one-year postponement and brought in my favorite educational historian, Robert Orrill, to lead us in a faculty seminar, hoping to lift the conversation beyond the usual vulgarity of "Trade ya an English requirement for one in physics."

Sophomore year. For students, that's the year no one knows how to treat you. College is no longer so fresh, but the major hasn't kicked in; puberty's left town, but adulthood is still a train stop away. For pitchers, it's the year when the rookie phenom goes on the disabled list with a career-ending injury. Wonder if either, or both, pertain to college presidencies?

This year, as I live through my first year as a university president and become more familiar with the intricacies of the admissions process, I weep for all of us. College is intended to sponsor an engagement with ideas and, just possibly, the development of character. Yet our recipe for achieving that is an anti-intellectual witches' brew of lousy values.

As the presidential hunting season peaks, with Cheney-like accidental woundings of the ego in so many campus lairs, I'm sharply reminded: The best thing about being a university president is not having to try out to become a university president.

There are three distinct dangers to your character in becoming a university president. (There may be 30, but these are the three I've noticed so far in my first year.) One is aggrandizement — "Gee, President Weisbuch, that's a really distinguished bald spot you have there" — which can puff you up. One is denigration — "He missed our rugby match, that uncaring bureaucrat" — which can bring you low. The third, and most serious, is getting externalized to the point where there is no inner self left, which can lose you a soul.

For a new president, half the battle is learning when to move fast and when to take it slow. "We appointed you," someone on the presidential search committee at Drew University confided to me, "because you have so many ideas. We almost didn't appoint you because you have too many."

I fell in institutional love with Drew University and have had the heady luck to be chosen as its new president. During my 25 years at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I was a professor and an administrator rising through the ranks, but I left in 1997 to lead the foundation. Drew will be my first stint as a university president, and I will be chronicling my experiences in these pages.