The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005, Friday

Copyright 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

June 24, 2005, Friday

SECTION: MONEY & MANAGEMENT; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: In a Surprise, Cornell Chief Steps Down

BYLINE: JULIANNE BASINGER

BODY:
Alumni at Cornell University sat in a hot tent, fanning themselves and shifting in their folding chairs as Jeffrey S. Lehman gave a speech typical of a college president during reunion weekend. He recounted the institution's accomplishments, hailing his "fellow Cornellians" and praising the "towering ambition" and "genius" of Ezra Cornell, the university's founder. He expounded on the university's creation of departments in new fields like biomedical engineering. He cited professors and students who had won awards. Student applications were up, press coverage had increased, and alumni donations were at an all-time high.
Then he came to his conclusion. Mr. Lehman, who had been Cornell's president for only two years, said he was quitting his job over differences with trustees about the university's future. Audience members sat up in their seats and gasped.
"Over the past few months, it has become apparent to me that the Board of Trustees and I have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision," he told the 700 alumni, faculty members, and college officials in the audience. "These differences are profound and it has now become absolutely clear that they cannot be resolved."
The shocked alumni gave Mr. Lehman a standing ovation. The chairman of Cornell's Board of Trustees, Peter C. Meinig, then stepped to the podium. He said that Mr. Lehman's predecessor as president, Hunter R. Rawlings III, would return to be interim president until a permanent replacement could be found, and he thanked Mr. Lehman for his work over the past two years.
"We believe that this decision is in the best interests of Jeff and the university and all of its constituents," Mr. Meinig said later that day in a written statement.
Even so, short-term presidencies can cause big problems for colleges, and Mr. Lehman's presidency is the shortest in Cornell's history. He will step down on June 30. As president, he had built alumni involvement and support, and student applications had increased by 17 percent this year. Fund raising was at an all-time high. Cornell received $386-million in gifts last year, ranking behind only Harvard and Stanford Universities.
His announcement left many people on the campus speculating about what might have gone wrong. Some people wondered whether the sudden departure of the university's chief development officer for Yale University, in April, was a factor. Then, too, the president faced accusations of cronyism this spring in the search for a new dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And questions had swirled around Mr. Lehman's hiring of his wife, Kathy A. Okun, to be a senior university adviser with an office in the main administration building.
But trustees, and Mr. Lehman, chalked his departure up to differences with the board.
"He and the board came to separate conclusions as to the strategy for achieving Cornell's long-term vision," said Edwin H. Morgens, a trustee who was chairman of the presidential-search committee when Mr. Lehman was hired. "There were differences of viewpoint as to how to achieve that vision, not just with the chairman but with other board members." Mr. Morgens said he could not provide further details because the board had signed a legal agreement of nondisclosure with Mr. Lehman, which authorized only the president and the board chairman to speak on the matter.
Some people on the campus, however, say that Mr. Lehman had earned a reputation of making his mind up before consulting anyone, and of sticking to his guns regardless of what was said in any consultations he did have.
Mr. Lehman, in an interview last week, said he and the trustees clashed over strategy, and that the personnel issues were not a factor in his decision. "Trying to inspect individual blades of grass will not give the real forest that's at issue here," he said. "The differences between me and the board were profound, and they were at a strategic level. It became clear to me that these were not little things that we could work out.
"At some point, I do have to decide what's best for Cornell. I have to take responsibility for making the decisions that are within my control."
The Board Game
Many people at Cornell, including the board members, were enthusiastic about Mr. Lehman's promise as a leader when he arrived. He came with stellar credentials. Now 48, he graduated from Cornell in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He earned a law degree and a master's degree in public policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and later served as dean of the law school there for nine years. He attained national prominence for his leading role in Michigan's defense of its race-conscious admissions policies and was personally named as a defendant in a lawsuit challenging the law school's policies as discriminatory. In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law school's admissions practices in a 5-to-4 decision.
But a university presidency presented challenges Mr. Lehman had not experienced. Learning to work with a board is one of the biggest and most important hurdles that first-time presidents like Mr. Lehman face, says Judith Block McLaughlin, who studies college-presidential transitions and directs a seminar for new college presidents at Harvard. "Most people who have not been a president before have not reported to a board; they've reported to an individual," Ms. McLaughlin says. "You're reporting to a large number of people, and the need to work with those individuals so that they end up coming together as a board is a very different experience."
The roles of a president and a board are also different in quality from other supervisory relationships, she says. "The president both educates the board and is evaluated by the board." At Cornell, Ms. McLaughlin continues, "there clearly was a way in which the process of connecting did not occur."
Cornell's board is large, with 64 regular members and 4 ex-officio members, including New York's governor, the speaker of the State Assembly, and the president of the State Senate, who also have voting privileges. Mr. Lehman faced a formidable task as a new president in forging relationships with all of those trustees.
When Mr. Lehman took office as president in July 2003, he said he planned to spend the first year learning about Cornell, and he did. He went through a formal process that he named a "Call to Engagement," asking alumni, professors, students, and trustees to share their ideas about the university's future. Last October he issued a report on the results of his survey. But he emphasized then, in his introduction to the document, that the report was "not intended to suggest a direction for Cornell over the coming decade."
His plans for the university were more far-reaching. He outlined his aims in a state-of-the-university speech a few weeks later. He wanted Cornell to become a more "transnational university." He called for Cornell to look for opportunities for new campuses abroad, such as the medical program that the university had just opened in Qatar. And he advocated that the university build "intensive partnerships" with peer higher-education institutions in other countries.
Mr. Lehman also talked about a "Revolutionary Cornell," calling for the university to focus on taking a leading national role in the study of genetics and the issues raised by that research. He also advocated adding faculty members in interdisciplinary areas to delve into the cultural and environmental effects of advances in technology.
He and the trustees say that their relationship derailed over how to pursue that strategic direction for the university.
In his resignation speech to the alumni, Mr. Lehman likened the situation to an airplane trip to Bali, where the pilot and co-pilot each want to go different directions to reach their destination. The "transnational" plans and the focus on disciplines related to genetics and technology, he said in an interview last week, were Bali.
Mr. Meinig agreed with that assessment. "The differences with the board had to do with how to get to that long-term vision," he told The Chronicle. The chairman declined to detail what those differences were. But he said that the trustees and the president had "good communication," and that ultimately they just disagreed on "the approaches." Neither the president nor the board wanted to compromise.
Concerns on the Campus
Personnel issues also aroused concern among some trustees this spring, although Mr. Meinig said last week that those issues had not led to the president's resignation. In April, Inge T. Reichenbach, Cornell's chief development officer, left with only two weeks' notice, just as the university was in the early stages of a major capital campaign. Ms. Reichenbach, who had been at the university for 25 years, became Yale's vice president for development. Her imminent departure from Cornell prompted several trustees to fly to Ithaca to try and persuade her to stay, but to no avail.
Ms. Reichenbach did not return telephone and e-mail messages last week seeking comment. Mr. Lehman declined to comment about her departure.
People on campus speculated about whether Mr. Lehman's wife, Ms. Okun, might have been a factor in Ms. Reichenbach's exit. Ms. Okun had been an associate vice president for development at Michigan, and after Mr. Lehman hired her at Cornell, she attended most executive meetings and advised the development office. Mr. Lehman denied last week that his wife's presence in the administration had created problems.
But most presidents know that hiring a presidential spouse has pitfalls, says Harvard's Ms. McLaughlin, even though that spouse may be well qualified. "Because of this intimate relationship of the spouse to a president, it puts other people in awkward or uncomfortable positions," she says. "Your ability to express concern, express differences, is severely limited."
Several trustees also visited the Cornell campus this spring when a furor erupted over the hiring of a dean for the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Presented with two finalists for the job, Mr. Lehman passed over a popular internal candidate, Harry C. Katz, and offered the job to the other finalist, Jan Svejnar, a business and economics professor at Michigan, prompting criticism from Cornell students and professors. That led Mr. Svejnar to withdraw his candidacy, and Mr. Katz, a professor who directed the school's Institute of Collective Bargaining, was named dean.
Still, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a Cornell professor of industrial and labor relations and economics, says that incident alone was not enough to have derailed Mr. Lehman's presidency. "I can't believe that was an important factor," the professor says.
Regardless, the trustees and Mr. Lehman had been successful in keeping their difficulties to themselves, so the president's resignation came as a shock to the campus. "Cornell is a relatively stable place," says Kenneth A. McClane Jr., an English professor who served on the presidential-search committee when Mr. Lehman was hired. "All of us were surprised."
Searching Again
Mr. Lehman plans to take a yearlong sabbatical to be a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington. Because he received a tenured professorship in Cornell's law school when he was hired as president, he may then return to the Cornell faculty.
Mr. Meinig said he plans to appoint a search committee this summer to look for a permanent president. He observed that Cornell was fortunate and would have a stable transition because Mr. Rawlings had agreed to serve as interim leader. Mr. Rawlings, a classics scholar, was Cornell's president for eight years, until 2003, when he returned to the faculty and Mr. Lehman took office.
Cornell's professors and students will continue their work no matter who is president, but even with Mr. Rawlings in place, Mr. Lehman's short tenure will disrupt the university's campaign and strategic plans, says Mr. Ehrenberg, whose scholarship has included books on academic governance and higher-education economics. "There is going to be a loss of momentum in fund raising," he says.
A short-term presidency is always troublesome for a university, agrees Shelly Weiss Storbeck, managing director of college-presidential searches for A.T. Kearney Executive Search. The university will have to go through the time and expense of another presidential search. And in cases of early exits, boards have to account to candidates for what went wrong, Ms. Storbeck says.
"Usually there's a little soul-searching going on in a situation like this," she continues. "They will need to have some explanation to satisfy the kind of candidates they want."
Stephen Burd contributed to this article.