GRAD: ON THE RECORD: President Sheldon Hackney 1981-1993

DP: As you prepare to leave office, what do you consider your most significant contributions to the University, and what do you see your legacy as being?

Hackney: I'm not really very good at talking about my contributions. I can tell you what I have worked hardest on and that would be, in fact, quite easy. Undergraduate education ranks at the top of the things I have concentrated on and put resources into and tried to get the University community to focus on. And I think we've made tremendous progress there. As the discussion in University Council revealed yesterday we still have a long way to go. The outside review committee has pointed to a number of things we need to be better. Mainly, it has to do with getting more faculty involved in undergraduate life. We have more faculty involved in teaching introductory courses now, and more faculty living on campus than 10 years ago. But it would still be much better if we could get a higher proportion of the faculty much more deeply involved, thinking of themselves being successful only if they are in contact with students more than they are now. That's the big thing. I have, with the provost, encouraged faculty appointments at the highest level of quality and I think the tremendous strides there in bringing into the University faculty scholars of the utmost quality, and I'm pleased about that. I've worked very hard to try to build a sense of community at the University, and again I think we've done well there, though not well enough yet. And also I'm obviously quite pleased with what we've done in West Philadelphia; that has been a new and exciting extension of the University's dimension, if you will. International things are just beginning, though we are well along in the way of internationalizing our student body. The faculty's always been quite peripatetic. So all those things I'm quite pleased about. The major disappointment -- if there is one -- is that we still have not learned at Penn to celebrate ourselves adequately. This is a wonderful place and it has characteristsics that are really quite special in American universities. And Quaker nature sort of gets in the way of being able to sit back and enjoy what Penn is. I thought the 250th celebration would help do that -- and it did for a while -- and maybe even there is a residual effect, because people now are talking about how we are too self-critical. I would like for Penn to realize -- though not to give up the self-critical nature, because I think that helps us get better -- but occasionally and more than just once a year we should say to ourselves in some dramatic way, "Gee, this is a good place and I'm glad to be here."

DP:Take the average undergraduate graduating in 1981. How does this student's experience differ from the average person graduating in 1993 and how do you think it would differ for the average graduate in 2003?

Hackney: That's a difficult question because the University develops on a continuum, so I think that if you were at the University Council meeting yesterday you would have heard a number of complaints and suggestions about how to make life better here. If you looked at the undergraduate experience in 1981 as compared to 1993 we would be better on each dimension that was brought out yesterday. That is, there are more faculty living on campus now; a sense of self-confidence in the University is much higher now than it was in 1981; the amount of extra-curricular cultural life is much more intense now than it was then. There is more stimulation, more academic stimulation. The curriculum has changed in every undergraduate school. I think we're just operating at a higher level of quality than we were in '81, and it was a great university in '81 -- and I'm not putting down the past University at all. And I think we'll be better in 2003.

DP: What's the next step to get to the next level? People say Penn went up a tier but there's still another tier.

Hackney: There is another tier. I think we need to keep doing more of what we've been doing -- steady pressure. Universities change very slowly; they're very conservative institutions. They're also very resilient institutions. We worry a lot about the fragility of universities but they tend to be extremely stubborn and resilient and difficult to damage in the long run . . . So persistence is a virtue here, and steady application of resources and attention and leadership in a particular direction. So undergraduate education, I would urge, is still the uncompleted piece. One needs to do that while making sure the professional schools remain extremely strong. They have historically been Penn's strength and they still are. We want to keep them strong because our appeal, I think, and our distinctiveness is in the combination of extremely strong professional schools with a liberal arts core that is without peer. And because we are interactive in our intellectual habits here, having strong professional schools and a very strong liberal arts school on the same campus is bound to lead to intellectual opportunites that aren't available elsewhere.

DP: University life is a hard thing to put into words. The quality of university life for undergraduates and graduates. Some students see a deterioration of our social life over the last couple of years.

Hackney: They're mainly talking about the alcohol policy --

DP:But also should the University now provide something to substitute that with?

Hackney: This is connected to my notion that we need a stronger sense of community and we need events that pull people together as Penn people, as individuals, out of their own little social group and their own little clique so they can celebrate themselves as part of the Penn community. So yes, I think it would be a very good idea if there were University-wide events, and there were during the 250th celebration. DP: Can you make a community of 20,000 people?

Hackney: No. That's why we need these smaller groups that students belong to. That's why fraternities and sororities offer an option that a lot of students enjoy. The college houses are also quite popular. They create a small sense of community. The performing arts groups, the DP itself, the athletic teams all provide some students with those smaller groups that they really feel identified with. Those things are extremely good and necessary, but you also need other University-wide things that bring people together outside, pulls them outside those small affinity groups, if you will, into a University-wide identity . . . So even though you can't have 20,000 best friends, you can have a sense of obligation to other people here in this special community because you are a member of it.

DP: With regards to university life, it seems that many of the problems of the past year have really come out of that office: Residential Living is very problematic, tensions on campus, sleeping guards. What would you do to change the situation?

Hackney: I don't have any magic fixes. It may be a matter of accident that those various pressure points happened to explode in this single year. So I wouldn't rush to judgment that we have a big problem there. DP: What type of leader do you think Penn needs during the 90s and into the future? Your strength is fundraising -- you raised a billion dollars.

Hackney: I think I made other contributions than that.

DP: But that's the general view, you're a master fundraiser. Not that you don't do other things.

Hackney: Money's important, but only because money is convertable into all sorts of things. The Revlon Center is very important for the kind of building of a strong sense of community enabling this community to work together. We can't do that if we can't raise money. We are going to do that. I wouldn't rank that at the top of the list.

DP: So your ideal president would contain what characteristics?

Hackney: Look like me. No, I don't know. Clearly the job of University president can be done in number of different ways. The person has to be able to recognize what she or he does best and then get help with the other things. So I wouldn't prescribe exactly what kind of president. I am hoping for a vigorous and good one that will help Penn prosper. I think there are good people out there and I don't think we'll have much trouble.

DP: When your four year stint is up with the National Endowment for the Humanities, will you come back and teach history?

Hackney: Yes, I plan to come back and teach history.

DP:Picture yourself writing a history of the Hackney era and you have to write the title. What would it be?

Hackney: I can't do that. I'd have to think about that a bit. I'm not a headline person. What would you say? . . . It has been a very exciting period for me, obviously, and for my wife. It's been very intense; I think it's been very intense and exciting for the University as well, as we have tried to learn how to live together as an increasingly diverse community. Diversity is something we've worked on really hard. We've become more diverse and we have tried to develop both groups and understandings of ways of working together and supporting each other that have been new. Transitions like that can be turbulent, and we are going through a period of turbulence just as American society is. And I think we are way ahead of society in coming to grips with what it means to be a pluralistic community.

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