COLUMN: Rodin: CEO and proud of it

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98Judy Rodin gets a bad rap. Yes, that Judy Rodin: Our blond-haired, power-suited, glad-handing, power-hungry, corporate-minded administrator in chief. Before you start chucking tomatoes at me and cursing my first-born, let me explain myself. The archetype of this style of leadership was Harvard's James Conant. He helped found the National Science Foundation, lead the cold war debates on arms control and advise presidents from Roosevelt to Eisenhower. According to legend, Conant would call the White House switchboard and announce, "It's the president for Mr. Roosevelt." The American intelligentsia still buys into this myth. The New Republic, for example, recently ran a piece lamenting the narrow focus of the modern university president, whom it described as nothing more than a 100-hour-a-week fundraiser and arbiter of bureaucratic disputes. My response is: So what? Why, after all, should we pine for the days when a university president was more revered for his intellectual temperament and cultural tastes than his ability to administrate and lead? I think we need a new frame of reference. Our university is undergoing a small renaissance under a 5th-year president who acts like a CEO. When our previous president, Sheldon Hackney, left to head the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1993, Penn was considered the academically inferior Ivy League school. High crime was making commuters out of most graduate students and departments were desperate for space. What's more, Hackney's politically correct response to campus censorship had made Penn a national laughingstock. Enter Rodin, whose public image is the antithesis of Hackney's. He is a historian by training and a Southern gent and intellectual by temperament. She, despite her important work in psychology, is perceived by many professors and students to be little more than a shit-grinning technocrat. Indeed, she breaks barriers in more ways than one: Not only is she the first woman to lead an Ivy League school, she's probably the first to be wolf-whistled in public and called a "paper doll president" in private. Yet Rodin has addressed the University's bread-and-butter issues. She has launched a Giuliani-style assault on crime and depressed real estate prices by spending generously on security and infrastructure. Since the fall 1996 crime wave, for example, more Spectaguard patrols and better night lighting have kept crime to a minimum. Fortieth Street and the 3900 block of Walnut now look clean and spiffy, thanks to a new diner and new, uniform awnings on storefronts. A few blocks east, a new Barnes & Noble bookstore and Xando coffee shop promise to become a de facto student center -- and one with an appeal to the non-Penn community. To revive Penn's flagging dormitory system, Rodin has outsourced its management -- unprecedented for a major university. Simultaneously, she has instituted a "college house" system that, in the long run, will restore some semblance of community living to campus. And most importantly, she has overseen an increase in the quality of liberal arts undergraduates, as evidenced by increased student selectivity and rising SAT scores. I'm not arguing things here are perfect. Undergraduate liberal arts education, especially, needs work. Most classes are still large and poorly taught -- often by foreign instructors who need an interpreter. Every time you turn around, the maze of distribution requirements is larger and more unwieldy. Learning the jargon of Penn's bureaucracy can be tougher than passing the foreign language exam. Departments routinely tailor courses solely to secure more funding, and grade inflation is as entrenched as the ivy on College Hall. But most of these problems are probably beyond the reach of the president. Rodin must cater to the needs of 12 schools -- only four of which teach undergrads -- and oversee a budget larger than that of some Central American nations. Given these conditions, she can be forgiven for focusing primarily on real estate and administrative efficiency. As she told Philadelphia Magazine this month, "The best a CEO can hope for is to have really talented people around her, and I'm blessed." Notice her use of the dreaded C-word. Rodin knows what her job demands, so why do we expect so much more? Other presidents are following in her footsteps. A few blocks east of Penn, for instance, a former businessman named Constantine Papadakis has resuscitated the once-moribund Drexel University. When Papadakis arrived at the liberal arts-cum-vocational school in 1995, enrollment was down by half, dorms and buildings were boarded up and faculty whispered that the school might close. Through aggressive recruiting and savvy, Rodinesque marketing, Papadakis doubled enrollment while increasing student selectivity and freshman SAT scores -- no mean feat, that. Rodin and administrators like her represent the future of American higher education. While Rodin may not whisper daily into Clinton's ear (despite her occasional Washington jaunts) or wax philosophical about the national purpose, she does her small part to make this monstrosity we call the University of Pennsylvania a little livelier, a little safer and a little more efficient.