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Who’s Next?
What should Yale be looking for in Levin’s successor?
November/December 2012
by Diana Jean Schemo
Diana Jean Schemo, a former education reporter for
the New York Times, is a founder of 100 Reporters, an online journalism
project.
Ask Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who specializes in
negotiating contracts for college presidents, about the qualities Yale should
seek in its next president, and his answer is straightforward: “the ability to
walk on water.”
The overarching challenge for the person who takes
over from Richard Levin ’74PhD next summer, Cotton explains, will lie in
stepping in after a long tenure that is generally regarded as highly
successful. He predicts the expectations will be “sky high,” and all but
impossible to meet.
“His successor will be judged not by [Levin’s] first
year, but by his 21st year as president,” says Cotton, vice president for
higher education at ML Strategies, LLC. People will assume that the new
president is “starting at the same level the outgoing president left on.” It is
not unusual, he adds, for new presidents in such situations to last only a few
years in the job.
Nannerl O. Keohane ’67PhD, who has served as
president of both Wellesley College and Duke University, considers the Yale
presidency “the most protean job: mayor of a large city, fund-raiser,
manager—this job requires everything,” she says. But the bedrock quality that
she and others identify as essential for Yale’s next president is a deep
familiarity with the culture of the university and a commitment to the
institution that will resonate with alumni and the university community.
Ideally, many say, the next president would be an alumnus and a hands-on
manager who will roll up his or her sleeves and work alongside the faculty,
staff, board, and alumni.
“It’s a distinctive place, and people who went there
are passionate about that,” Keohane says.
For his part, Edward Bass ’67, ’72ArtA, believes the
university’s next president “must be a scholar and educator who can command the
respect of the faculty and inspire its members to work with him or her in
moving the university forward.” Bass is senior fellow of the Yale Corporation,
the university’s board of trustees, which will choose the new president. “At
the same time, he or she must be a skilled manager and CEO who can steer the
operations, finances, and long-term strategy of a very large-scale enterprise.”
At least a few people in the Yale community would
like to see some changes to the Levin approach. Victor Bers, a professor of
classics who has clashed with the administration over Yale-NUS College and
other issues, said he is hoping for a president who would lead in partnership
with the faculty. Bers has openly criticized Levin for what he describes as “a
top-down leadership style.”
“What is wanted is somebody who cares about what is
actually done here in the teaching and the research and is not going to be
swayed too much by a need to imitate for-profit corporations,” Bers says.
“Obviously, we are a private university dependent to a considerable extent on
private donations, and Rick has raised a lot of money,” he notes. Still, Bers
says that the next president should lead with a strong moral compass and not always
follow cues from alumni or donors. “We saw in Kingman Brewster somebody who was
willing to do a lot of things that the alumni did not favor.”
The next president will have to balance these
countervailing tensions. Academia generally has moved toward a more corporate
approach to management, as a way to bring some systematization to institutions
made up of disparate, semi-independent departments. Yet Yale’s identity lies in
the quality of its faculty, its students and their achievements, and in the
alchemy of scholarship and how to foster it.
“How do the nation’s top universities evolve as
knowledge becomes increasingly available in clouds?” asks James Johnson
Duderstadt ’64, former president of the University of Michigan. “Nimbleness is
a very important attribute. Change will be a powerful force, and Yale has to
develop the capacity to respond to change.” Given technological advances,
scholars in any given field may collaborate more with colleagues across the
globe than across the hall, creating new ways of tackling problems and new
avenues to discovery. The most successful presidents at institutions like Yale
provide an environment where experimentation and excellence can flourish. “All
of these good things are never top-down,” Duderstadt adds. “They work from the
bottom up.”
As for the legacy question, Keohane, for one, does
not believe Yale’s next president will be jinxed by Levin’s record. Quite the
opposite.
“You’re very lucky to have a strong predecessor,” she
says. “If you’ve had a weak predecessor there are an awful lot of messes you
have to clean up. Rick isn’t leaving any messes for his successor to clean up.”
The Search For a Successor
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Who will succeed Rick Levin? The decision will be
made by the Yale Corporation, the university’s 18-member board of trustees.
Within a day of Levin’s announcement, senior Corporation fellow Edward Bass
’67, ’72ArtA, announced the formation of a search committee, chaired by trustee
Charles Goodyear IV ’80 and including seven other trustees and four faculty
members.
The committee has hired a search firm with
significant higher-education experience. It also quickly set up formal channels
for input from all segments of the Yale community: forums on campus and online;
designated committee members serving as liaisons to faculty, alumni, students,
and staff; and “counselors” from each of those constituencies to gather input
for the committee. (Trustee Donna Dubinsky ’77 is the committee liaison to
alumni. Former alumni association board chair Michael Madison ’83 is the alumni
counselor.) Some students and alumni have complained that their role in the
search is too limited, but the committee, which is under a tight deadline, is
pressing forward.
There has been surprisingly little public speculation
about likely candidates, with one predictable exception: psychology professor
Peter Salovey ’86PhD. Salovey is currently provost—his four predecessors in
that post have all gone on to lead major universities—and he served previously
in two other big jobs at Yale, dean of the college and dean of the Graduate
School. Given that five of the last six Yale presidents were appointed from
within, Salovey has to be considered the odds-on favorite. But nothing is
certain at this point. Henry “Sam” Chauncey ’57, secretary of the university in
the 1970s, says that in every search since 1950 in which there was an odds-on
favorite, that candidate did not get the Corporation’s first offer. There are
many other potential candidates, from the obvious to the dark horses, and the
committee will surely have plenty of applicants interested in one of the
highest-profile academic jobs in the world.  |
