This was a situation that made me very uneasy, though I understood the University’s desire to be as responsive as possible to legitimate student needs and desires. I was opposed to the war, but I was not in favor of draft resistance. My own Southern sense of honor would have required me to accept a draft call even though I was against the war. On the other hand, I also thought that every eligible man deserved to know what rights and options he had within the system so he could make up his own mind about what to do. I proceeded on that basis. I was the chair of the local ACLU, so I easily found my way to qualified counselors in the region and arranged for them to staff a center in a university building where students could go for information. It was the policy of the center, of course, that there would be no advocacy of draft resistance, and so far as I know there was none.
As the unpaid faculty overseer of this activity, I was one of the people consulted by the Princeton undergraduates who organized a chapter of what became the Union of National Draft Organizations (UNDO). That summer, UNDO called a national meeting in Princeton. Hundreds of politically engaged college students would be coming to our picture-postcard college town. Where would they stay? There was certainly no room at the Nassau Inn. My wife and her friends, with enormous effort, enlisted scores of sympathetic Princeton faculty and townspeople who were willing to house groups of visiting UNDO students. However, when those students arrived in Princeton for the rally, hirsute and unkempt, they would have nothing to do with bourgeois hospitality. They brought their sleeping bags, guitars, and recreational substances, and they sprawled together on the soccer fields of Princeton, saving many a neat, clean, wholesome Princeton home from certain depredation.
I was on sabbatical leave during the academic year 1970-71, spending a good bit of time on the road doing research on the Civil Rights Movement. When I returned to full-time teaching in 1971-72, the mood on campus had swung dramatically toward quiescence. This was the period when the commune movement was roaring along. Young people disillusioned by the supposedly ineffectual attempts to change society through direct confrontation or through politics decided to build intentional communities that would live by alternative values, thus converting the world to a better way of life by demonstrating the superiority of cooperative values.
This was also Bob Goheen’s last year of a remarkable presidency that had transformed Princeton. To the surprise of very few, the Trustees turned to his provost, William Bowen, to become the next president of Princeton. That winter, President-elect Bowen asked me to meet him after a basketball game, a considerate bit of timing in that we were both Princeton basketball fanatics. I don’t remember who won the game that night, but I do remember that Bill asked me to take his place as provost when he moved into the president’s office that summer.
As Lucy and I talked about it that night and the next day, I realized that I was spending a lot of my time doing administrative chores of one kind or another, while also teaching and publishing. I constantly felt torn, pulled in different directions. Perhaps a stint as a full-time administrator would allow me to discover whether I liked that better than full-time teaching and writing. If I didn’t like it, I could always return to the faculty after five years and not be much the worse for wear. The new administration was especially rich in talent. I learned a lot from my colleagues, and I particularly learned from Bill Bowen, a remarkable academic leader.[5]
Unfortunately, in my third year as provost, the fall of 1974, before I had a definitive answer to the question of which university track I wished to run on, I got a call from Edmund McIlhenny who was chairman of the Tulane University Board of Administrators, that is, the trustees. He was looking for a new president and had been told that I might fit Tulane’s needs.
The lure of the South was great. If I were going to remain in administration, being president of a first-tier private university would allow me to make a contribution to my native region, a region that suffered then even more than it does now from an educational deficit. The universe of first-rate private universities in the South is extremely small. It consists of Duke, Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Emory, with Rice as a special case. Tulane, I eventually decided, was an opportunity that I could not pass up.
I labored five years in New Orleans in a tough environment, what in the business world would be called “a turnaround situation.” Tulane’s trajectory changed dramatically. I earned the usual number of enemies for doing what was necessary, and I made some mistakes that exacerbated the inevitable friction. When Penn came looking for a president to succeed Martin Meyerson, I was therefore receptive. The Tulane and Penn stories await a different telling. For current purposes, I need only note that when I moved to Penn in February 1981, I found myself in the middle of a huge controversy because the trustees had selected me rather than the inside favorite, Vartan Gregorian.
At Tulane, I had arrived as the exotic ivy leaguer, full of mystery and magic. At Penn, it was assumed by campus activists, the student newspaper, and the local press that I must be the opposite of Greg. After all, our appearances differ. He was short, plump, swarthy, charming, and ebullient; I was tall, slender, white, and reserved. Since he was liberal and creative, I must be conservative and managerial. Charisma is in the eye of the beholder. Given my later public persona, it is ironic that I spent the 1980s fencing with the “progressive” activists at Penn, who cast me as the oppressive representative of corporate America. It took me perhaps four years to break through those stereotypes completely and establish warm relationships with the dominant political center of faculty and students.
The point of this race through my resume is that, after applying to graduate school, I never had to hustle or to promote myself to get my next job. They came to me. This created a hazard of good fortune. Here I was in the winter of 1992-93, faced with a “what next?” problem of large proportions, without a lot of experience in finding jobs for myself, especially in Washington. I was therefore not surprised to notice shortly before Christmas that the Clinton cabinet had been filled without me. I was at least clever enough to realize that if I wanted to go to Washington, reticence was not going to work. On the other hand, I didn’t have a particular job in mind, and I didn’t know how to pursue it, even if I knew what I wanted.
Then, on December 2, I read in the newspaper that Lynne Cheney had resigned as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to become effective January 20, 1993, the day President Clinton would be inaugurated. Nothing could have made her political conception of the job more apparent. Ignoring that storm warning, I thought to myself, “Hmmm, that is a job I could do. It might even be fun.” I realized that I was at a great disadvantage in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering for jobs in the new administration. I did not even hear the gossip. So, I called Joe Watkins, who had been one of my assistants at Penn, and who had gone to Washington to work in the Bush administration. He was on his way back to the Philadelphia area with the hope of finding a way to run for public office as a Republican. He made an effort in the Republican primary for U.S. Senator, but the odds were too long. The Republicans missed a terrific candidate.
Joe dropped by Eisenlohr, the president’s house on the campus, in late December, bringing me the “Plum Book,” which lists all the appointive offices in the federal government, along with a lot of good advice about how to maneuver. He also reported that he had sent my c.v. to the Clinton transition office in the hands of a friend of his who is a Democrat, with the message that I would make a good chair of the NEH. I had also just learned that, without my asking, Judge Leon Higginbotham, a Penn trustee, had sent a letter on my behalf to Vernon Jordan. Joe’s advice was to flood the office with as many pieces of paper as possible. Chaos being the rule in such operations, you could never tell when a c.v. or a letter of recommendation would find itself in the right pile of papers at the right time to get one on a list of prospects. After his tutorial, I remember thinking that I was probably in the process of being humbled.
Lucy and I took our family, eleven in all, including children, in-laws, and grandchildren, to Club Med in Ixtappa, Mexico in early January for a wonderful week of sun and fun together. I went to the convention of the American Council on Education in San Diego when we returned. There I had a long talk with Tom Ehrlich, a close
