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In the Eye of the Beholder
For decades, Yale has been skittish about professional public relations efforts, and the results have been decidedly mixed. With the arrival of Gary Fryer, a former counselor and press secretary to New York governor Mario Cuomo, the University’s image may be in for a buffing.
by Jon Zonderman
April 1994
Jon Zonderman is a graduate of Trinity College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he now teaches.
On Friday, January 28, Gary Fryer was finishing up his first week on the job as Yale’s new director of the Office of Public Affairs and special assistant to President Richard Levin. It had been a long week. Fryer and his wife Joanne had spent it living out of suitcases at the Residence Inn on Long Wharf; while he was getting acquainted with his new Yale colleagues, she began house-hunting.A snowstorm the night before had been followed by torrential rain. When Fryer arrived at his York Street office, it was under inches of water, which continued to pour onto his desk from a leak in the roof. Dozens of pink “while-you-were-out” slips were floating on the floor, as were the crib sheets on the people he was scheduled to meet that day. A few hours later, he walked into his first meeting with the University’s officers and joked, “I guess you guys weren’t kidding when you told me one big issue I would have to deal with was the condition of Yale’s infrastructure.” He drew knowing chuckles.
By that afternoon, Fryer was confronted with an issue that was far less of a laughing matter. Just a few days earlier, the University had announced that Yale College had received the largest number of applications in its history—welcome news after a slide in recent years.
But the news was wrong. The way Fryer explains what happened, the admissions office had counted the envelopes, opened a sample to make sure they were all applications, found that nearly all were, extrapolated this to a reasonable total, and made the information public. When the admissions staff later opened the remaining envelopes and discovered that many contained not applications but supplemental information, it became clear that, while the total marked an impressive 17 percent jump from the year before, it was not the record 23 percent Yale had first claimed."We could have waited until April and corrected the figure when we announced the number of acceptances,” Fryer said, speculating that few if any people would have remembered or cared about the earlier claim. But he heard from the campus stringer for the New York Times that the information was already in a story the student had submitted to the paper along with an interview with Levin.
The stakes had just changed dramatically. It is simply not appropriate to allow the New York Times—thickly populated with Yale alumni, from news clerks to members of the editorial board—to print erroneous information about Yale that Yale itself has put out. Moreover, no good public relations person allows the boss, in this case Levin, to be put in a position to get sandbagged months later with such discrepancies. The reporter was also at risk. “This was his first piece for the paper,” Fryer recalls reasoning. “Why should I allow him to lose credibility with his editor?”
It was clear that the information had to be corrected. And, once corrected for the Times it had to be corrected for everybody else. So calls were made to the Yale Daily News, the New Haven Register, and the Connecticut Post.
In Monday’s Daily News, both the admissions office and the public affairs office took a bit of a thrashing. But that was the end of the matter. Handled in a less professional fashion, it could have made Yale look very bad indeed. Like any public relations person, Fryer would have preferred pure good news, but guarding against the potentially bad is no less a part of the job.
It is a job Yale has traditionally had trouble doing well. Since the end of World War II, when the University first perceived a need to focus on its communications with the public through the media, its Presidents have been uncomfortable with the subject. On the one hand is what Henry (“Sam”) Chauncey, who was secretary of the University from 1970 to 1981, describes as the “sense that an institution like Yale is above public relations, that it’s a great place and the world just better accept that.” On the other hand is the instinct to get the good news out, or, as Kingman Brewster used to say to his public relations head, “get that on the front page of the New York Times.”
Yale’s first, tentative effort at modern public relations took the form of the Yale News Bureau, which was set up under President Charles Seymour shortly after World War II by University secretary Carl Lohmann and headed by Richard Lee, a former newspaperman. Lee busied himself mostly with day-to-day press-release writing, eventually switching over to New Haven politics, and ultimately rising to the post of mayor. Carlos Stoddard, a longtime friend of President A.Whitney Griswold's, was Yale’s first real policy adviser on public relations, spending about a day a week in the role of overseeing the news bureau’s efforts during the late 1950s and into the early 60s.
But it is only fairly recently that Yale has tried to create an overall public relations strategy worthy of the name. The Brewster administration, having put out hundreds of one-shot releases about “good things” going on at Yale—while it was being buffeted by protests against the Vietnam War, the Black Panther trial in New Haven, and the other events of the time that caught Yale and other universities in their wake, as well as the University’s own battles over coeducation—decided Yale needed a full-time director of public information.
In early 1973, Brewster turned to Stanley Flink '45W. A former Life magazine writer and television producer, Flink began the process of creating a coherent whole out of the University’s dispersed public relations efforts by assembling a photographic archive that covered Yale faculty members and every campus building (in all four seasons). He also created a series of documentary films that were used for recruiting and fundraising, as well as a weekly show on public radio, and upgraded the Weekly Calendar, a bare-bones listing of events and lectures, to a tabloid that included features on campus events.
“Stanley was terrifically proactive,” remembers Chauncey, who was Flink’s immediate superior. “He participated in discussions not only of what needed to be reacted to in the press, but issues that might become newsworthy. And he worked as a liaison with the information efforts of all of the individual graduate schools.”
Eventually, some came to feel that Flink’s efforts to create an all-embracing information enterprise overstepped his brief as head of public relations. From 1977 to 1979, he added to his University duties the role of interim editor of this magazine, which since its founding in 1891 had been separate from Yale. And many questioned whether the head of public relations should be editing a periodical put out by an independent alumni publishing company. Today Flink says that while the magazine came to reflect his style, there was no active effort to “spin” it to please Woodbridge Hall. “There wasn’t time for trying to make a power play,” Flink says.
After Brewster’s departure in 1977 to be U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Flink stayed on through the presidency of Hanna Gray and the first year of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s tenure. When Flink left, in 1979, the Giamatti administration undertook a national search for a replacement and hired Walter Littell, a former city hall reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, longtime writer for NBC News, and public relations man who had worked for Nelson Rockefeller and a variety of corporations and institutions in New York City.
If Flink struck some as a Broadway impresario, Littell seemed more like a city editor out of a Ben Hecht play. Chauncey, who hired Littell, felt he matched Giamatti’s lower-profile, walking-around style. “Bart wanted a good personal relationship with the press, as well as a good institutional relationship,” Littell recalls. “And selling Bart was not exactly a hard sell.”
As part of his assignment, Littell set out to improve the print side of the public information office. “We tried to take out some of the hype, to set up the kind of coverage a wire service bureau provides, and to make the [renamed] Weekly Bulletin and Calendar less of a court circular,” he says. Littell hired a full-time science writer, and began circulating pieces originally written for the Bulletin and Calendar to a variety of outside media.
But Littell was never inside the policy loop, with either Giamatti or his successor in Woodbridge Hall, Benno Schmidt, the way Flink had been with Brewster. And that hurt the University. During the strike by the service workers' unions in 1984, Giamatti’s attempt to manage personally not just the negotiations but the press relations was widely considered a fiasco. Schmidt at first fared somewhat better. But his decision not to move his family from New York City to New Haven dogged him (giving rise to the T-shirts emblazoned with “Where’s Benno?”), and he eventually hit serious opposition—and negative press—over the abrupt changes at the School of Organization and Management and what were viewed in some quarters as high-handed attempts to restructure the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Schmidt might have been expected to understand the nuances of dealing with the media better than he did. An alumnus of Yale College ('63) and a 1966 graduate of the Law School, he had become a specialist in the First Amendment, teaching at the Columbia law school and eventually becoming its dean. He spent a decade with the long-time head of CBS News and journalism professor, Fred Friendly, team-teaching a course at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism on law and journalism, and had worked with Friendly on the “Media and Society” programs that became a staple of public television. He certainly had been around the communications block.
But Schmidt’s attitude towards public relations remained thoroughly Old School, as he indicated in a 1989 interview with this magazine: “I think one tries to do a good job, and one tries to make it first-rate, and then leaves it unadvertised it’s not necessary, or even effective, for the most excellent institutions, as it’s not necessary or effective for the most excellent people. Yale has always rested its reputation on substance, and not on publicity for its own sake.”
Schmidt’s image continued to erode, and Littell felt himself further and further outside the loop. In 1990, feeling that he had worn out his welcome, he left to take a position with the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He was succeeded by Martha Matzke, a journalist and cofounder of Education Week magazine. Matzke had been on the job only a few months when a Yale undergraduate, Christian Prince, was shot to death a block and a half from the President’s house. Handling the fallout from that tragedy occupied much of Matzke’s time, and there was no way to put it in a positive light. Meanwhile, Schmidt was proceeding with his controversial plans to restructure the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and encountering stiff resistance. Yale’s problems with aging facilities and growing deficits were reaching the national media, but Matzke, like Littell, had trouble getting into Woodbridge Hall. She says that she often had to answer calls from reporters about administrative matters on which she had not been briefed. Matzke’s access did not improve during the presidency of Howard Lamar, and she finally moved on to a job in Washington with the American Federation of Teachers.
From his first months in office, Richard Levin betrayed a very different approach to how Yale projects itself to the public. As the new President put it in this magazine last October, “Public relations means much more than what kind of story appears in the New York Times. Just how we answer the telephone makes a difference.” Moving deliberately to augment his leadership ranks, Levin began looking for compatible personalities to manage what seems to be emerging as a cabinet-style administration. “Levin seems to be the first President of Yale to fully comprehend the complexity of managing the institution,” Chauncey says.
For a person whose job is putting out the word about that institution, Gary Fryer is about as un-Yale as one can get. The son of a New Jersey milkman, and a graduate of Seton Hall University, Fryer, 42, spent four years as a reporter for the Recorder in Amsterdam, New York. He followed that with a six-year stint as director of communications for the Civil Service Employees Association, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, the oldest and largest union representing New York State’s public employees. In 1982, the union endorsed Mario Cuomo over then-New York City mayor Koch in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, and put its full muscle into Cuomo’s campaign. Fryer worked closely with the candidate’s son and de facto campaign director, Andrew Cuomo, and in 1983 was asked to join the administration’s press office. A year later, he became deputy director of communications. Fryer went on to run the media end of the governor’s 1986 reelection campaign, and in 1987å rejoined the administration for the second term, becoming media director and counselor to the governor. In 1990, he resigned from the Cuomo administration, feeling that he was “getting a little stale” and looking for a change. He was also looking for a breather. Fryer and his first wife had divorced in 1983, and he found that being single made it easier to work the grueling schedule the Cuomo administration required. After he remarried, the marathon pace became more of a burden.
But after three years in the insurance industry as a senior vice president and then chief information officer for a holding company, Fryer found that he missed the excitement of communications and policy work. “The insurance business is a little limited in terms of day-to-day excitement,” he says.
When he left the Cuomo administration, Fryer accepted an appointment to the board of trustees of the State University of New York. He says that his 18 months on the board reaffirmed an already deep feeling for higher education. When he decided to leave the business world in 1993 to search for a way to “spend time in a way that would be more fulfilling,” a friend put him in touch with the executive search firm that was looking for a candidate for the Yale public relations job.
After a long talk with Levin and interviews with the other University officers, Fryer headed back to Albany with high expectations. “At Yale,” he remembers thinking, “there were world-class minds and people who seemed to fit as a team—a captain and a crew—and who had a terrific sense of collegiality and a clear understanding that there is real value in trying to increase the intersection between policy and communication.”
When the offer came, Fryer didn’t hesitate. His wife left her job with a state agency that helps structure student funding. His one regret was moving so far away from his 14-year-old son, who lives in the suburbs of Albany with Fryer’s ex-wife. But he expects to see him every other weekend.While he was still with the Cuomo administration, Fryer was among the handful of senior aides to the governor who had a hand in major policy making, and as such had a sense of the policy before having to create an image for it. In such a role, which he hopes to emulate with Levin, Fryer believes he can be a down-field spotter, thinking through for University leaders how various constituencies might respond to various policy options and how to create a coherent, long-range set of policy steps that will produce a minimum of misunderstandings and hard feelings.
Admitting that “the policy stuff is much more fun than just doing the press relations,” Fryer also understands that press relations is the basis of his job at Yale, as it was with the Cuomo administration. Tim Russert, who preceded Fryer in the first Cuomo administration and is now a commentator with NBC News, held the title of Counselor to the Governor and Director of Communications. Fryer asked Cuomo if he could rename it Counselor to the Governor and Press Secretary. “There’s no shame in saying you’re the press secretary,” observes Fryer. “I like the press.”
Reporters who have worked with Fryer seem to appreciate the fact. He gets high marks for integrity and honesty. “Unfortunately, I have nothing bad to say about him,” says Adam Nagourney, White House correspondent for USA Today, who as Albany bureau chief for the New York Daily News sparred frequently with Fryer. “Gary had a tough job, putting himself between a very difficult client like Mario Cuomo and a very difficult Albany press corps. He’s one of the most decent press guys I’ve ever worked with.”
Nagourney believes that because Cuomo sometimes answered his own phone and talked to reporters without first checking with his press people, being on the inside was essential for Fryer. And even when the boss spoke more bluntly than his press secretary might have advised, or went outside the bounds of what might have been a predetermined position, Fryer didn’t let it bother him. “It took a while for Gary to get into the big-picture policy stuff, but once he did, he did it well,” Nagourney says.
There are some who doubt that Fryer will be able to stay as close to Levin as he was with Cuomo. Over the long haul, says Stephen Kezerian, who worked in the news bureau and the office of public information from 1948 until his retirement in 1985, and was deputy director under both Flink and Littell, “no President of Yale has ever or will ever take advice on policy from his public relations man. We’ve all gone to meetings, and helped shape messages. Flink was on the inside for a little while. Littell was for a little while. But no matter how hard they try to stay close, the job deteriorates over time into what it is: being the messenger.”
Chauncey is a little more philosophical. Every Yale President since Griswold, he says, has had late-term difficulties, usually having to do with funding, faculty reorganization, or facilities. It’s natural, Chauncey says, that some of that tension is transferred from the President’s office onto the shoulders of the public relations director. If the lifespan of a college president is getting shorter, Chauncey argues, the life span of a public relations director can be expected to shrink even faster.
Fryer seems to understand that. “Three to four years” is his best guess for the duration of his tour, he says. “I’d love to retire from Yale 20 years from now, but I just don’t think that’s realistic.”
What is realistic, he says, is that the Levin administration genuinely wants to stay connected to its various constituencies. “If I didn’t get a sense of openness, of substance and not just rhetoric, I wouldn’t be here. They want to do things the right way. I told them, 'I’m too old. I’ve been around too long. If you don’t want to do it the right way, I don’t have the time to play with you.' They offered me the job.”  |
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