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How Yale Got Its Groove Back
The 22nd President of Yale is friendly, gentle, tall, and somewhat introverted. Central Casting would type him as a middle-school baseball coach in the Midwest. When he was inaugurated, ten years ago this fall, some Yale traditionalists derided his abilities as an orator. Where was the Bart Giamatti eloquence? The Kingman Brewster charisma? Could a fresh-faced 46-year-old economist from California (who has, in fact, coached his share of Little League) command a university that prizes the appearance of prestige nearly as much as the reality?
November/December 2003
by The Editors
As it turns out, if you can triple the endowment and renovate a quarter of the buildings in a decade, you don’t need to act like a dynamo. Being one is sufficient. Richard C. Levin’s spectacular success for Yale is visible literally in the bricks of the place. There’s a polished-oak glow of elegance and newness—the glow of money—in Sterling Library, William L. Harkness Hall, Osborn Memorial Laboratories, and other places that not very long ago were sunk in shabbiness. New buildings have risen around campus, and old ones have been equipped with advanced technology for pursuits like proteomics and molecular electronics. The faculty and administration have not only expanded, but expanded in ways that make good cocktail-party conversation. Yale these days is almost as likely to hire a former president of Mexico or an internationally known French nanotechnologist as a brilliant home-grown Milton scholar.
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Levin reoriented Yale’s cultural and intellectual compass in ways that look distinctly like the vision thing.
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The knock on Levin has always been that he’s a technocrat and not a visionary—a corporate manager, not a leader of souls. Yet in ten years he’s reoriented Yale’s cultural and intellectual compass in ways that look distinctly like the vision thing. Yale used to be less than preeminent in the sciences; now, neuroscience and biotech are among the first topics administration officials like to bring up at alumni functions. Yale and New Haven used to be locked in a financial and political battle to the death; now, Yale has recast itself as New Haven’s principal investor and number-one fan. Even labor relations have seen some improvement, the recent strike notwithstanding. Paul Bass '82, who as managing editor of the New Haven Advocate, the local alternative weekly, is one of Yale’s most relentless but thoughtful critics on the left, says of Levin: “He’s the first Yale president who ever personally negotiated a settlement to a strike. He has a real nuts-and-bolts, hands-on strength.”
Bass asks what Levin will do for a second act: will he, for instance, expand the New Haven programs? Other observers look to different arenas for the President’s next move. “The Corporation was looking for someone who could raise money and manage; rebuild and expand the campus; and restore faculty morale,” says John Morton Blum, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History. “Levin’s done all that in ten years. He’s also appointed many women, though I’ve seen less progress in minority appointments. But in the next couple of years he ought to do something new, and let Yale do something new. Yale should have at its base an intellectuality—the life of the mind—and this is what needs spurring at Yale.”
Rick Levin’s own choice for a second act is extremely ambitious: he wants to transform Yale from a preeminent U.S. university into a preeminent university of the world. Yale now has a research institute on globalization, offers need-blind admission to international students, and runs a fellowship program for leaders of civil society abroad. There are several dozen academic collaborations in China alone. When Levin goes to Fudan University in China to discuss the Yale-Fudan collaborative training program in genetics, it’s more than a bureaucratic courtesy trip. The administration reckons that Fudan will emerge as a global science power, and when it does, Yale wants to be right there in the headlines alongside it.
Will it work? There’s no telling yet. But all signs are that Levin will get his chance to try. When the Corporation marked the tenth anniversary of his appointment this spring, the slogan was: “Celebrating the first ten years.”
Below, we offer perspectives on the Levin Decade from two experts. Gaddis Smith—Larned Professor Emeritus of History, who is completing a book on Yale in the 20th century—provides an in-depth analysis of Levin’s residency in the larger economic and historical context. David Gergen, who has worked for both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and is a student of presidential leadership, looks back on his own service on the Yale Corporation for an insider’s view.
A Retrospective on the Levin Presidency
November/December 2003
by Gaddis Smith '54, '61PhD
Yale in the early 1990s was not in good shape. The physical plant was falling apart after years of irresponsibly deferred maintenance. Money for repairs had to be diverted from education. The endowment was up from the dismal low of the 1970s and early 1980s but not enough to meet the crisis. Faculty were sullen over mandated cuts in their number and cold vistas of stagnation. The national economy was in recession, and New Haven was suffering from the disappearance of manufacturing and the flight of middle- and upper-middle-income residents and retail stores to the suburbs. Large office buildings were empty and entire blocks almost deserted. The nationally publicized murder of a student in an armed robbery on Hillhouse Avenue in 1991 proclaimed that Yale within New Haven was a dangerous place. That year a former senior fellow of the Corporation told an interviewer, “Maybe New Haven is not an ideal place for a world institution.”
And then the wheels of Yale’s top administration came off.
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The Corporation elects presidents strikingly different from their immediate predecessors.
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President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. '63, '66LLB, resigned without warning in May 1992 in order to head a venture applying for-profit management to public schools. Schmidt had just dismissed the provost and accepted the resignation of the Dean of Yale College. The vice president for finance and administration also resigned to join Schmidt in the new enterprise. Soon the senior fellow of the Corporation also resigned because of legal difficulties faced by the company he headed.
President Schmidt said he was willing to remain in Woodbridge Hall until a successor was installed, but the Corporation told him to leave immediately. Howard R. Lamar '51PhD, a universally respected senior professor of history, agreed to be acting president while the Corporation conducted the most thorough presidential search in Yale’s history. Faculty members joined the committee for the first time, and Marie Borroff '56PhD, Sterling Professor Emerita of English, was its executive secretary.
Throughout the 20th century the Corporation had deliberately or instinctively elected presidents who were all strikingly different from their immediate predecessors. In 1992-1993 the search committee and the Corporation looked for someone different from three predecessors whose leadership had been flawed in different ways. The Corporation did not want another Kingman Brewster '41, a liberal provocation to conservative alumni, with a propensity to spend more money than Yale could afford. A. Bartlett Giamatti '60, '64PhD, had emphatically been not Brewster, but his confrontational style and psychological fragility had been disastrous. He was a distinguished scholar of comparative literature but ill-prepared to deal with the sciences and the professional schools. Schmidt had been not Giamatti and not Brewster. He had pulled Yale back a step or two from an economic precipice, but had never gained the confidence of the faculty, seemed distracted and remote, kept Manhattan
as his principal residence, and made some unfortunate appointments. And he had jumped ship. All three had grappled with the problems of Yale’s relationship to New Haven, but the relationship was still in disarray.
Now it was desirable that the next president, so as to depart from all these unfortunate precedents, be familiar with Yale; grasp economic problems and how to solve them; understand the status of faculty and be respected by them; and be calm in times of crisis, ideologically in the middle of the road, ready to bring new vigor and understanding to the problems of New Haven, and committed to the presidency for the long term. In April 1993 the Corporation announced its choice of Richard C. Levin, professor of economics with twenty years on the faculty and a longtime resident, along with his wife and children, of New Haven.
Rick Levin, 46, was a native of San Francisco—the first Yale president from the West—an undergraduate history major at Stanford, and a 1974 Yale PhD in economics. After serving as chair of the economics department, in 1992 he had become the dean of the graduate school. His research as an economist dealt with the impact of technology on economic growth, including the role of patents and issues of intellectual property. As a member of the 1991-1992 restructuring committee, organized to specify the cuts necessary in the size of the faculty, he was well versed in the problems of the university. The Corporation had picked a man of even temper and capacious and organized memory, open in thought and person; an administrator who recognized talent in others, listened to what people had to say, and responded to messages immediately. Levin had the technical skills of an economist. He also had insight drawn from eclectic reading and perspective based on his passion for early American history.
Testimonial
November/December 2003
by David Gergen '63
In his runaway bestseller, Good to Great, leadership guru Jim Collins finds that the CEOs who transformed their companies in the 1980s and '90s were not the heroic figures we might suppose. Rather, they built “enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.” They were intensely ambitious but channeled their personal drive into lifting their institution, not themselves.
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In only about one of every ten cases did a Levin appointee disappoint.
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Reading that analysis recently, I thought of the six years (1996-2002) I served on the Yale Corporation under Rick Levin. I was accustomed to the politics of Washington, where leaders sometimes substitute words for action and confuse motion with progress. Rick had the passion and will of a political leader, but he was different: quiet, unassuming, little interested in splashy headlines, more interested in sharing the glory with others.
Every fall, when the Corporation held its first meeting, Rick passed around a list of his top ten objectives for the coming school year. He asked for reactions and, where he agreed, would modify the list. We would return to pieces of it in subsequent conversations, but the serious accounting came at the final meeting in the spring, when he would pass out the same list and carefully review the progress. Usually, he had achieved more than he promised, but I was equally impressed when he pointed out where he had fallen short. This was a leader who was trustworthy.
Over time, I noticed that he had another talent: a keen eye for selecting others. Whenever a deanship or another key position came open, he seemed ready with a couple of top candidates he had already thought about with considerable care. Where appropriate, of course, he would consult the faculty, as well as students and other constituencies. But in the end he formed his own judgment. The Corporation found he had exquisite taste; in only about one of every ten cases did his choice disappoint. He was also determined to bring more women into the front ranks, and Yale has been very well served by them, including two provosts in a row, the secretary of the university, and the general counsel (and, may I add, his incredible wife Jane). No other university has a better team.
One lesson I learned in Washington was how important it is these days for a leader to solicit the views of everyone surrounding him. We live in such a diverse society that no single individual or group has a monopoly on wisdom; rather, one gains understanding by sifting and blending the perspectives of many. That was precisely Rick’s approach. Of course, there are issues on which he feels strongly: he is a staunch advocate of making Yale a more global institution and an equally staunch foe of unionizing the graduate students. On most issues, however, he avidly sought the opinions of every Corporation member. He would often listen to a recommendation he initially thought wrong (I was among a few on the board who could irritate that way), but upon reflection, over the next few weeks, might alter his opinion and move in a new way. He was engaged, as author Warren Bennis would put it, in “deep listening.”
In years to come, Rick may not win all the national media acclaim he deserves. His is a quieter leadership. But in his own, gentler style, Rick Levin has become the dean of major university presidents. He has done more to lift up Yale than any leader in its modern history.  |
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