October 10, 2001: Features

Moving forward, looking back

President Shapiro sat for an interview in June, a week before he left office.

J. I. Merritt ’66 represented PAW.

PAW: One of your stated reasons for coming to Princeton was the opportunity it offered, as a small and independent university relative to a large state school like Michigan, to shape its educational and institutional agenda. Have you been able to do that?

HTS: What I recall saying – and what I certainly felt – was that the presidency of Princeton offered a wonderful opportunity to focus on undergraduate education. Nationally, the post-World War II era had seen a tremendous expansion in higher education, particularly at the graduate and professional levels. But by the mid-1980s it was apparent to me and others that universities weren’t doing as good a job as they might educating undergraduates. In recent years that’s begun to change. At Princeton, of course, teaching undergraduates has always been important, and I was attracted by the chance to build on that tradition. I feel very good about the spectrum of new initiatives we’ve put in place to enhance undergraduate teaching. It’s important that your resources match your rhetoric, and we’ve been able to create and fund programs that make it as attractive for faculty to revitalize their teaching. The 250th Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, for example, provides departments with teaching grants that are on a par financially with research grants. Faculty compete for them, and they are making a difference.

On a personal level, when Vivian and I decided to make a gift to the Anniversary Campaign, we chose to endow the prize given each year to freshmen and sophomores with distinguished academic records. It was another way of expressing how important we regard undergraduate education.

PAW: What have you enjoyed most about the job?

HTS: The people I’ve worked with over the years – administrators, faculty, alumni, trustees, students.

PAW: What least?

HTS: The unrelenting pace and insatiable demands on your time. It was a real challenge saving time for reflection. People make very legitimate demands on your time, and you try to accommodate them, but for your own sake and the university’s you have to seize time for yourself to think deeply about what you are doing and where you are going as an institution. I’ve always managed to do that in August, when Vivian and I retreat to the cabin we’ve owned for many years in the woods of Northern Michigan. The cabin now has a fax machine, and thanks to a laptop computer I get e-mail there, but I still save some hours of the day for myself. Modern technology is wonderful, but we’re all so plugged in now. On the road I carry a cell phone but almost always leave it off.

PAW: How many e-mails do you get a day?

HTS: Probably a hundred. No one screens them, and I try to look at them all and respond to most. That’s one of the worst things about being away from the office, even for a few days – you come back and can find 400 messages waiting for you.

PAW: What will you miss most?

HTS: The daily excitement of dealing with interesting issues and people and doing so on a timeline. I will also miss the extraordinary variety of issues that cross a president’s desk, from the sublime to the ridiculous – from articulating a vision for some aspect of university life to helping decide whether to cut the cost or the size of a slice of pizza sold at the Frist Campus Center.

PAW: When someone once asked your predecessor Harold Dodds *14 what he would miss most about being president, he said with a straight face, "Reading The Daily Princetonian every morning."

HTS: I’m sure I will, too! However, I’m not a great reader of newspapers, campus or otherwise. I like to set my own agenda, and many of the issues raised by the news media have half-lives or a few days. If you chase them you can wind up going down unproductive roads.

PAW: Do you think Princeton is a better place than it was when you arrived?

HTS: Whether it’s better or not I wouldn’t want to say, but I can say that it is a different place. Any great university is changing all the time, because sustaining its distinction requires that it always be in a process of becoming. Princeton has certainly become more attractive to the people we want to be part of it – in this year’s undergraduate admissions we have the highest yield ever, the highest number of Academic 1’s, the highest percentage of underrepresented minorities. As for gender equity, it’s a measure of what we’ve accomplished that no one even talks about "the ratio" anymore – we have achieved essential parity in the numbers of male and female students.

PAW: What do you feel best about?

HTS: I’ve mentioned the renewed focus on undergraduate teaching. Financial aid is another, related area. The growth of our endowment has enabled us to substantially eliminate any financial barriers that would keep an admitted applicant from coming to Princeton. We’ve done that for undergraduates, graduate students, and international students. A great private university has a social responsibility to make its resources available to students of motivation and achievement, whatever their economic status.

I also feel very good about the range of academic programs – from the Postdoctoral Fellows in the Liberal Arts to the Center for the Study of Religion, the Program in Finance, the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and so forth. In nearly every area of academic inquiry I look around and see a heck of a lot going on, an incredible energy.

Finally, there’s the physical revitalization of the campus. There’s a great deal of new construction on campus and renovation of old spaces, particularly undergraduate dormitories. Construction sites can be annoying and temporarily disruptive, but they are signs of a healthy, dynamic place.

PAW: One could argue that being president of Princeton is like being CEO of General Electric or manager of the New York Yankees – the institution behind you is so strong that if you do your job in a reasonably competent way you’re going to be successful. Does leadership at the top of a great institution really make much difference?

HTS: Leadership is important, but you have to remember that it occurs at many levels, not just at the top. At a university, it’s especially critical at the level of academic department heads. Our departments with the most dynamic leaders are also doing the best in terms of the quality of their research and teaching.

PAW: By almost any measure Princeton is in exceptional shape. So what is left for Shirley Tilghman to do other than to maintain the status quo?

HTS: Plenty! Although much has been accomplished in recent years, I can’t think of a single area where we’ve completely met all our objectives, so Shirley will have no shortage of challenges. The world is changing more rapidly than ever, and Princeton will have to keep pace. The other top-ranked universities with whom we compete won’t be standing still, and if we do they will leave us behind.

PAW: Alcohol abuse is something you and the trustees have addressed aggressively over the years – you’ve made this an issue since early in your administration. It remains a problem, even though there is some statistical evidence that policies you and the trustees have put in place are having a positive effect. Does its intractability discourage you?

HTS: I think we’ve begun to make some inroads. The trustees have wisely decided to deal with it with a thousand small steps – there is no magic bullet. No university has solved this problem. At Princeton there are many more nonalcoholic social events sponsored by student groups, for example, and awareness of the issue is up. Ultimately it is a societal problem. I speak to high-school teachers all the time, and whether they teach in public or private schools they tell me that alcohol abuse is their biggest problem.

At least people now recognize excessive drinking on campus as a problem rather than something that just goes with the college experience. In my first few years here most people were in denial about it – look at the uproar over the keg ban. It just wasn’t an issue, and I still encounter the occasional student who tells me it’s no big deal, that only 2 percent of students could be considered alcoholics and the rest are O.K. I’ve been in intensive-care facilities with students who were there because they abused alcohol and have wondered whether they were going to make it. That kind of experience shapes your thinking.

PAW: Princeton’s eating clubs have been a campus fixture for more than a century, and every administration since Woodrow Wilson’s has viewed them with, at best, ambivalence. What’s your own view of the clubs and their future?

HTS: Clubs will probably always be a part of Princeton life. For many students, certainly, they are an enjoyable and fulfilling part of their undergraduate experience. Among the most positive things about the clubs is that they’re student-run, and they put on some wonderful activities. Unfortunately, the clubs are not always responsible with respect to alcohol abuse. That situation is improving – clubs no longer have open kegs during the week, for example, and they are better about combating underage drinking – but like the campus generally they still have a long way to go.

Perhaps the biggest issue facing the clubs is economic. It’s very expensive to operate and maintain a building year-round when it’s only in use for eight months. There used to be 16 clubs and now there are only 11, and they need larger memberships to bring in the revenues required to survive.

PAW: When plans for a campus center were still under discussion, you observed that such facilities tend to be either very good or relatively ineffective at encouraging a sense of community. The Frist Campus Center has been in operation for a year now. Do you think it’s living up to its expectations? Do you use it?

HTS: I do, and all of us who’ve been involved with the center from concept to reality have been overwhelmed by its success. Its facilities were booked completely within weeks of its opening, and the number of meals served there jumped 50 percent from the first semester to the second. At lunchtime you see faculty, staff, students, townspeople eating there – it’s a place where all elements of the community feel at home. If this first year is any indication, it will more than fulfill the expectations we had for it.

PAW: Princeton, which 35 years ago was still an all-male and overwhelmingly white university, has made great strides in affirmative action. During your tenure, more women and minorities have entered the ranks of senior administrators. Some years ago, you put in place a policy that encouraged academic departments to hire more women and people of color, but in some departments at least they remain significantly underrepresented. What’s your view of this issue?

HTS: We’ve made progress but have a long way to go. In general we have not achieved our goals. In my opinion, Princeton’s faculty is not yet sufficiently diverse, particularly with regard to underrepresented minorities and to women in engineering and the physical sciences, where they are still present in unconscionably small numbers. As for underrepresented minorities – blacks, Latinos, Native Americans – however attenuated, racism remains a reality in our society, and affirmative action is an appropriate moral response to it.

PAW: Isn’t part of the problem that minorities are underrepresented in the pools of potential faculty members?

HTS: That is a problem in certain disciplines, but it’s not an excuse. Even if you accept the constraints of the pools, we can still do better. Again, it largely comes down to leadership at the departmental level – department chairs know who the best people in their disciplines are, and those who have made minority recruitment a top priority have made real progress in diversifying their faculties. At the presidential level, you can provide incentives to departments to do better in this regard, for example by rewarding them with additional fellowships for their graduate programs. We’ve done that sort of thing but have to do more. Shirley Tilghman and I agree we must find ways to make it so rewarding for people to act right that they will.

PAW: The university recently decided to expand the size of the undergraduate body by 125 students per class and add a sixth residential college. Is Princeton in danger of becoming too big and losing the special spirit that’s due at least in part to its small size relative to other major universities?

HTS: The trustees debated this at length. When I tell presidents of other large universities that it was an issue here, they tend to roll their eyes. Their reaction is, "An increase of 10 percent is nothing! Why do you even bother to announce it?" It was an issue because we care so much about preserving Princeton’s essential character and sense of community. Our 7-to-1 student-faculty ratio is as low as it’s ever been, and because the faculty will grow the ratio won’t change. Princeton’s enrollments have been steady for 30 years, the longest period without growth in their history. Will we be as close a family with 1,275 students per class as we’ve been with 1,150? I think so.

PAW: Your immediate predecessor, William G. Bowen *58, recently coauthored a book on intercollegiate athletics titled The Game of Life. It challenges academically selective schools – both small ones like Princeton, for example, and big ones like Stanford – to rethink their commitment to sports, arguing that a kind of creeping overemphasis on athletics can distort a school’s educational mission. Have you read the book, and do you share the concerns it raises?

HTS: I have read it, and the authors make many good points. I have a perspective on these issues as someone who’s headed universities in both the Big Ten and the Ivy League and who has sat on the executive committee of the NCAA.

First of all, you can’t talk about intercollegiate athletics without looking at athletics in grades kindergarten through 12 and in the many privately sponsored leagues for soccer, ice hockey, and other sports which have become such a part of our culture. At every level, sports has become increasingly organized and professional. At the college level, TV has commercialized the major sports, and the distinction between amateur and professional athletes is now much harder to maintain – so much so that I seriously doubt that intercollegiate athletics can survive in its current form. University presidents aren’t happy with the system but recognize the futility of trying to reform it, so it just drifts along.

Problems in the Ivy League exist in a more mediated form, but they are real nonetheless. The Ivy presidents and athletic directors meet twice a year, and not once can I recall a meeting without someone wanting to extend a season for one team or another by adding practices or games, invariably with the argument, "Our NCAA competitors have longer seasons, so why can’t we?" Here at Princeton a few years ago, I sat in on a freshman seminar on intercollegiate athletics taught by Hal Feiveson of the Woodrow Wilson School and Jeff Orleans, the executive director of the Ivy League. Just about all the students were recruited athletes. When I asked, "How many of you would have come to Princeton if it were a Division III school?", not a single hand went up. These are great kids, but it was clear to me at least that they thought of themselves as athletes first and students second.

One obvious manifestation of the commercialization of college sports is the advertising you now find in our athletic venues. Maybe I’m too stodgy on this issue, but I’m really not in favor of them at Princeton – when people attend a sporting event here I want them to know this isn’t the Meadowlands. We had a debate on whether to allow commercial signs in Princeton Stadium, and one proponent told me they would be good for the players, who actually wanted them because that’s what the pro venues have! I can assure you that the revenues they generate are trivial – mostly it’s about getting as close to the professional model as possible. I insisted that at least the signs be in orange and black.