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 cars at the Phoenix Airport Hertz. "Can't be," I thought to myself as my 10-year-old raced toward it. "She wouldn't."
But she had. My executive assistant had fulfilled my request — "Hey, I'll pay the extra tab for a convertible" — with the brightest, begging-for-a-ticket Mustang on the planet.
And so my wife Candy, my son Gabe, and I arrived at the annual Presidents Institute organized by the Council of Independent Colleges on the most unpresidential wheels imaginable. ("A Buick," my lawyer had advised when I was negotiating my contract with Drew University. "That is the correct auto for presidents." "Fine," I said. "I'll take a '58 Roadmaster with the four portholes and the huge fins. Otherwise, forget it.")
That's me, Bob the anti-president, I thought proudly. Except after that Mustang-arrival moment, everywhere I looked I saw myself in hundreds of barely distorted mirrors, just another gray rental Buick.
We're old, we presidents — for the most part, we are in our 50s and 60s. When we see friends from our grad school days — for me, that would be Tim Summerlin of Schreiner University — we are surprised that they don't still look 23. But then Timmy didn't even recognize me. "What happened to your hair, Bushy?" he wailed.
We are indeed gray or shiny on top with white chassis. We're mostly guys and the gals, perhaps 10 percent of us, have the same look — nearly all of us are Caucasian. But that figures in an educational system in which, to its huge shame, only 7 percent of the Ph.D.'s produced annually in the arts and sciences are African American or Hispanic, although those groups make up a third of the grad-school-age population.
We presidents all offer the same ride, too — smooth, a little stodgy, and soft. We are great if unoriginal conversationalists. Like any good rental, we're simple. Just turn the key and we go, though slowly. Our laughter is measured and our complaints — the faculty, the faculty in English, the trustee who wants the university to become more like a corporation, oh, and the faculty — are issued with wry humor and sighs of empathic recognition.
Every once in a while, personality breaks through like a welcome twist on a mountain road. "I was so nervous about that issue," said one dynamic leader of a small college, "I walked around campus feeling like barfing."
While my wife is off at a presidential spouses session, I join Ursinus College's quietly brilliant president, John Strassburger, and the Education Conservancy's inspired leader, Lloyd Thacker, on a panel concerning the college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. With a friendly audience unfriendly toward the rankings, I decide to go tangerine, code orange. I talk about how even if you want to drop out of the rankings, you can't, because the so-called newsmagazine keeps ranking you whether you like it or not. Quitting the U.S. News rankings is like resigning from death and taxes, I note, adding "U.S. Noose then."
I quote a fellow president's wonderful remark about how he fills out the reputational survey, a full quarter of the ranking computation, "to reward my friends and punish my enemies." And I mention the entire absence of diversity figures. I go on to quote a particularly cold and nasty response from the magazine to a Drew query and conclude with my equally frank reaction.
This is definitely unpresidential and childish, but on this matter we presidents for once have located our anger, and it is good momentarily to be emotionally free. What is presidential is that I stay up much of the night worrying about whether I should have said any of that, just as I will be awake tonight wondering whether I should have repeated it in writing.
In the afternoons, the presidents and their spouses explore Arizona, which turns out to be, like everything else that week, only moderately interesting. The Council of Independent Colleges' Rick Ekman puts together a great three days, with expert alternations of business and respites, but the truth is we're all just dulled out from the hyperemotional fall semester.
I know that in other areas of life, presidents are very emotional and even irrational and flamboyant individuals. Still, I find myself wishing that colleges and universities were led entirely by temperamental ballerinas, say, or professional wrestlers.
On the final night of the conference, two of my very favorite people are honored. Marvin Suomi has been a trustee at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation since I led it and is now a trustee at Drew. The other honoree is Eugene Lang, of Project Pericles, the I Have a Dream Foundation, and Swarthmore College, who will receive an honorary degree from Drew this May. Both of those corporate leaders have a lot more pizzazz than the academic leaders in the audience, me included. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
On Sunday morning, we cash in the Mustang. The weather had been frosty, and the convertible top had remained in place, but it had been worth it in giggles. I love my wife and my son, I think to myself. I love losing my dignity for a few guffaws. I love everything immoderate and spontaneous.
But on the plane home, I buckle up.
