only to find that my name had not been entered into the security computer. Was this a subtle message? I was rescued from this purgatory by Leslie Maddin who happened by and recognized me. She is the daughter of a retired Penn faculty member, and she was then working in the Office of Presidential Personnel, though in a different area from the one interested in me. She quickly found Bill Gilcher and Susan Reichly, and they all took me over to the White House Mess, where Jan Piercy met us for breakfast.
We had an interesting conversation about the NEH and the other cultural agencies. After a very long time, I finally asked, “Am I going to get the nomination?” “Oh, yes,” they laughed, “we thought you knew.” I suppose I should have understood that Jackie Trescott was the White House messenger.
As David Morse had guessed, they had been trying to hold the NEH until the NEA and the Institute for Museum Services were also ready to announce. They finally realized that those decisions were so indefinite that they should go ahead with the NEH—but going ahead did not really mean going ahead. They normally did not announce an “intention to nominate” until after the FBI background check. In this case, however, they would try to get Bruce Lindsey to approve going public before the check was completed. Furthermore, I would have to be cleared by the general counsel of the White House. That would take about an hour of conversation with a lawyer after he had studied my personal data. A quick telephone call revealed that the general counsel had not received the forms that I had sent by Federal Express the day before.
I explained that my situation was increasingly uncomfortable on the campus. The Washington Post had reported on Thursday, the previous day, that my nomination was a “done deal.” A Daily Pennsylvanian reporter and photographer had ambushed me in 30th Street Station that evening as I was setting forth for Washington. It was very clever of them to figure out exactly what was going on. That picture and a story about my job interview in Washington appeared in the DP on Friday, even as I was eating breakfast in the White House Mess with the President’s headhunters. Furthermore, the New York Times had reported that same morning, Friday, that the White House was poised to announce my nomination. It would be good for me if the President’s intentions were public information so I could be definitive in announcing my own plans. They understood this, but they couldn’t promise anything.
I got back to Philly at 1 P.M. and was met by a university car that took me directly out to Kennett Square, near the Penn Veterinary School’s campus for large-animal medicine, to talk about Penn’s appropriation with State Representative Joe Pitts, the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee. He was, as always, very supportive. By the time I got back to my office on campus, about 3:45, the White House General Counsel’s Office had called to get my telephone numbers. They now had the forms and would be calling me. Before that could happen, however, about 4:30, Bill Gilcher called to say that at 5 P.M. the White House was going to announce the President’s “intention to nominate” me. Late afternoon on a Friday, I realized later, is the traditional time to make announcements that one hopes will be seen by as few people as possible. Nevertheless, I was delighted.
A few of my close advisors assembled later that afternoon to figure out what I could and should say in public.[8] That was relatively easy: “I am delighted to be chosen and, if confirmed, will be honored to serve.” I would then have to say to the university community that the trustees and I had given much thought to contingency plans and more would be announced about those shortly. Then I picked up Lucy and we caught a train for New York where we were to attend a large dinner party that evening that was part of the fund-raising campaign. The easy part of getting to Washington was over; the nightmare would soon begin.
2
The nightmare began the following Thursday morning, April 15, 1993. A number of black students, leaving angry notes signed “The Black Community,” took 14,000 copies of the DP out of their free distribution racks around campus. Black students, staff, and faculty had been angry with the DP for some time, accusing it of being insensitive and unbalanced in its coverage of the black community at Penn. I was not aware of it at the time, but confiscating the student newspaper had become a frequently used tactic around the country by groups with a grievance.
It was not even an entirely new phenomenon at Penn. In 1987, someone in the Wharton School administration absconded with all of the DPs in the distribution racks in Steinberg-Dietrich, the main Wharton building. An important group of alumni was visiting Wharton that particular day, and the DP in its great tradition of adversarial journalism had prominently featured on the front page a scandal involving a Wharton faculty member. On that occasion, I issued a stern warning that interfering with freedom of the press would not be tolerated. On another occasion, after the DP had turned its special reunion edition into a roundup of the year’s most negative stories, the chairman of the trustees had suggested to the student editor, whom he encountered among the reunion tents, that the editor could stuff the paper into one of his bodily orifices. It was not dignified, but I loved him for it.
By 1993, I had fought my own way to peace of mind about the DP, a tough struggle given the fact that the editor who assumed office soon after I arrived announced that the DP was the only moral voice at Penn and that it would tirelessly expose the immorality of the administration. Under his editorship and several that followed, the DP became very good at ferreting out scandal in the administration—whether scandal existed or not. Whenever I chided DP editors about getting some story wrong, they would reply that the paper regularly won top honors among college newspapers nationally. I pointed out that the judges were rewarding them for producing a well-written and interesting paper, but the judges had no idea whether the information in the paper was true or not. Nevertheless, over the years I discovered that the negative and sensationalist bent of the DP did not affect my standing with students or hinder the progress the University was making. Students seemed able to apply their own correctives to the paper’s bias. I was about to learn, however, that the outside world did not have the same sort of filtering mechanism.
So, when each year’s front-page announcement of the tuition increase was accompanied by a photograph of me from the DP’s archive smiling broadly as if I were enjoying gouging the students and their families, I simply thought of myself as being in on the joke. I tried to get my revenge in satirical speeches that the editors allowed me to give to the annual DP banquet in January. I remember in particular a skit in which I intoned a laudatory speech about the DP in my most florid presidential rhetoric, while the amplified off-stage voice of my assistant, Tony Marx, translated the pablum phrases into the insulting subtext. Despite the jousting, which I secretly enjoyed, I noticed that an unusual number of DP editors took my seminar on the history of the 1960s. When they weren’t beating up on me, they were terrific young folks.
A more serious problem was that there had never been many black student reporters or writers on the DP. Some slight progress had been made from time to time, but not sustained. There were no black reporters or editors in 1992 or 1993, but there was a black columnist, Maceo Grant, who wrote regularly about the lack of respect black students felt they received at Penn. The provost and I had encouraged the editors during our informal conversations with them over the years to do something about this situation, and we had advised them that simply waiting for black students to respond to the general invitation to students to try out for staff positions would probably not be enough. Many black students felt like intruders at Penn—outsiders—and they also thought of the DP as belonging to an in-group of which they were not a part. It was not likely that they would brave the imaginary barrier in large numbers without specific and personal efforts to bring them in.
It is also true that nothing appeared on the crisis calendar during my years as president of Penn more often than matters of race and cultural diversity, and I don’t think Penn was peculiar in that regard. One of the lessons of the
