David Ward Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Leadership

A leader of a university strikes me as being somebody who has to lead, but also be a manager. Let's talk about those two roles. What are the skills required to be an effective leader of a campus?

To know the product. The biggest thing is to recognize that what we're about is the agitation of young minds, and the advancement of knowledge. And if you don't have a kind of gut relationship to that, which can happen if you appoint, for example, a corporate executive from the automobile industry, [you can't succeed]. I really do think there's a need to have perhaps participated, for however briefly, in the experience of teaching and research. If you don't have that, a pure management skill can't replace it. So what I call "know the product," or know what we're about.

I think the second thing is to recognize the unique culture, which is very, very agile, and very individualistic, and very, very creative, in the university. And that that is the culture. It's not the culture of a bureaucracy, even though we sometimes behave that way. It's not the culture of a widget manufacturer; it's not even the culture of an arts institute. It's a very unusual culture, which is very adaptable, very agile, and if you can recognize its strengths you can do good things. If you recognize that it's a problem, then, I think, you can be paralyzed. So that would be number two, to recognize that the culture is, in fact, clearly a positive place to do change, if you want.

And then I think the third thing about an institution is to understand it's a very, very weak communication structure, so that if you don't have a strategy to communicate effectively, either personally or through some system or other, you will very quickly be isolated, because everybody's too busy; most people don't have time to read things [not related to their work], they're too busy doing research and teaching.

So I think those three points you have to face almost immediately. Those are challenges that you have to face. And that really means that you have to have some inner conviction about the nature of higher education. If you don't have that, I think you'll just end up minding the store for a few years.

So it's a plus to have been an insider to this institution?

Well, that's a good question. My view is the more unique the culture and perhaps the more esteemed the culture of the university, the more likely an insider will succeed. So whereas, I think you can perhaps transfer certain skills down the system -- so a person could be a provost at UCLA and go to, I won't say where, but somewhere else that is perhaps not so esteemed, and do very well, it's very hard to move up the system and do very well, unless, perhaps, you previously had an appointment there. You could, perhaps, have been a dean and gone somewhere else, and then came back as a chancellor.

On the other hand, I always believed the truly great institutions need an outsider every so often; that there's a sort of inbreddedness that develops, and it's up to the Board of Regents and perhaps the faculty themselves to recognize that from time to time you need an outsider. But on the whole, I do believe that the more distinguished, the more esteemed an institution is, the tougher it is for an outsider to run it.

In terms of actually running the place, I get the sense from reading your speeches and interviews that you feel strongly that there has to be a plan, a vision for the future, and that has to be communicated. How do you do that?

My way of doing that was to recognize that there are certain problems that you have; to start with problems -- some people would argue, crises. In my case, it was to say it does seem to me that we make a case that we do outreach, research, and undergraduate education, and we orchestrally tie them together, but we never ask whether we do a very good job of doing that. My belief is that when I became provost, people were not as satisfied with outreach and undergraduate education as they were with graduate education and research. And there was the beginning, I think, of a certain resentment in the state legislature, in the public, among some of our undergraduates, particularly in the late eighties, that there was a problem. I also got a feeling that members of the private sector weren't sure that our knowledge transfer was as effective as it might have been earlier in the century. Government also felt a little alienated from us.

My view was to take that problem and say, "How do we resolve it?"And the means to do that is to create a plan to solve it that has high legitimacy and high autonomy; that is, it's our solution, it's autonomous, but it's got great legitimacy inside. How do you do that? Well, what I did was take the accrediting exercise, which is usually viewed as very formal and inconsequential. I took the self-study that precedes the accreditation exercise and tried to see if we could develop a strategic plan and vision out of the self-indictment that came out of that accreditation review. Our self-study did say that we didn't treat freshmen as well as we could. It did seem that were not as mission-driven as we should have been. I then drafted a strategic plan derived from the findings of that self-study, and then peddled it around the campus. And it was negotiable. After about two years -- it wasn't that quickly -- everybody came up with the feeling, "Yeah, this is a good thing to work on for the next five years. There are some bounds here. There's some direction here. And it will be good for us." Eventually, the contrarian culture that had been skeptical of the plan concluded this was a good idea. And it began to address real problems.

The second reason was that the faculty and administrators also recognized that the state was squeezing us, and it was very hard to explain to them what we were doing in their language. The strategic plan was very easily adaptable to meet outside needs, so that even though it had got its original legitimacy on the inside, it began to improve external relations, and then that helped on the inside.

So that's how it was developed. And it was really the first strategic plan the campus had ever had.

There were, in short form, four things that you embraced in that plan: emerging technology, pursuit of global connection, breakdown of boundaries between programs, expansion of learning experiences beyond the campus. So, in other words, it was stated in simple language, so all the constituencies could understand it, but the bottom line was, there was meaning to each one of these.

Right, and it didn't really attack the existing strength of the place. In other words, what we tried to do was stretch ourselves and extend ourselves by these goals. This assumed that departments were in good shape, they were delivering knowledge in effective ways. But that alone would not be enough. I think the key breakthrough which made the strategic plan visionary, rather than ordinary, was a statement that I made that was something like this: that a mission is doing what you should do well. A vision is imagining what you should be doing five years from now -- a moving target -- and doing that well. That was the stretch of this plan, to move it from simply saying, "We will do what we're already doing," to "We will do some things differently. We won't simply do what we're doing now better, we will actually do some things differently."

We can't talk about all of these, but let's focus on one. One of the insights that you brought to this job was where the university, because of its emphasis on disciplines, wasn't doing all that it might do or become all that it might become. You talk about disciplines being mine shafts, so that part of the task became breaking down interdisciplinary barriers. How did you go about doing that?

First of all is to say there are many faculty out there who share this value. They've been there forever -- they go back to Alexander Von Humbolt of Germany; there's nothing new about it. So the question is, how could you tap into the strength that was already there? And there were areas of campus where it was there. I chose, actually, three areas where I thought there would be responsiveness. The first of these was the coming together of area studies as global or international studies. I had felt, as a geographer, that the area studies were almost becoming parodies of departments, rather than what they ought to be -- encouraging, in a sense, a fuller global view of the global village. I found that, in fact, area studies people are very responsive. They're by nature interdisciplinary, and although they're concerned about how much money goes to Asia versus Europe, in the end, with the right leadership, [integration] was possible.

The second area was the arts: how music, theater, the new digital revolution in terms of arts, how was that coming together? And again, I think they were just waiting for authentication. They, too, created an arts institute for the first time, and began to work together, and also to serve the community in a very, very different way than they had.

The final area was driven more by the intellectual changes of the time, and that was the rise of genetics, or of various kinds of microbiology, which just simply redefined the disciplinary boundaries. I didn't do that; it was an explosion in the transformation of knowledge itself. And the departmental structure in biology was simply obsolete -- it certainly happened at Berkeley, and you created the Biological Sciences. We had very similar challenges. So we simply tried to harness these changes, and then highlight them. And then, of course, we began to get other proposals to collaborate.

My final act as chancellor was to create and authorize, with the help of significant appropriation from the state, a cluster appointment program, where 150 positions were held in a bank, and could be got at by department chairs and program directors only if they allied with other programs and made a proposal for a five- to ten-year commonality of related research agendas. That program proved to be a great stimulus to creating interdisciplinary work within the departments, rather than having them resent interdisciplinary work.

You said in a speech as chancellor, "It's a matter of how you infect the change that is already within the culture."

All I did was either accelerate or put exponents on change that was already there. If it is not there already, it's very hard for an executive to initiate something that doesn't exist in the culture. I think you can do that in the private sector, but in the university, if it's not embedded within the culture, if it's not there as a virus somewhere, it's almost impossible to do it.

The University of Wisconsin is the product of a state and its culture and its politics. Talk a little about that. That is, the part of your program that had to be defining Wisconsin's niche, both in the international intellectual community, but also within the state.

The most interesting thing is that the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is generally ranked, in terms of research artillery, third or fourth. Michigan and Berkeley, we would agree, have a little more strength across the board faculty-wise, but we're in the top five. But then you say that this is a state of five million people. This is like having a great university in Norway compared to Germany, if you think of Wisconsin and California. How can a state that's very average in wealth, that has gone through the rough economy of the 1980s, still have a university this good? Part of it is, of course, federal funding, but there is a sustained threshold level of state support. What began to happen is that the state worried that in supporting this reputation, it was not committing itself enough to undergraduates, to the students who were coming from Wisconsin high schools. So one of the special challenges we faced was the idea that you've got to balance out this commitment to research with some sort of commitment to undergraduate education. And that was a very real challenge that Shalala recognized when she arrived. The intensity of the interest of the legislature in our research mission diminished as they felt we weren't doing a very good job with undergraduates. Once we began to do a much better job with undergraduates, the legislature began to be very happy about the research. You cannot get credit for this active research institution without treating freshman well.

The second thing was that they didn't think that our knowledge transfer was working to the benefit of the economy. In 1988, the Rust Belt still seemed to be spreading, and that was when we began to develop -- well, pretentiously -- a mini Silicon Valley. Biotech firms began to develop, information science firms, and by the mid-nineties, there clearly had been a kind of new knowledge revival in Wisconsin, in and around Madison, in particular. So that, too, seemed to be of value.

So all of a sudden, two things had happened. A sense that knowledge transfer was benefiting society, and that knowledge transfer was benefiting high school graduates. Now, it was just fine to be a great research university. The triangle had to be put together. You couldn't just go out there and say, "We're just going to be primarily a research university." In California, of course, the research mission is divided among several institutions. But much greater pressure was put on UW Madison because in a small state, there can only be one research university. There's just not the resources there to have more than one.

As a manager, like at all universities, you must have had to focus on your funding, the base of the funding, the movement toward greater private support. And that must have raised, for somebody who comes out of the university tradition, a responsibility to navigate those waters while maintaining the integrity and identity of the place. What was the key there, in your efforts to manage the place fiscally in a responsible way, but on the other hand maintain its integrity?

First of all, again, to recognize that it was in the culture, and that what I needed to do was to change its magnitude. In 1911 we received our first major private gift from a governor of Wisconsin named Henry Vilas. So the most prestigious chairs on the campus were known as Vilas Professors. They had been endowed since 1911; maybe twenty of them by now. In 1927, WARF was formed, which is the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which is a conduit for the development of patents and licenses, and the creation of an endowment from the revenue. And in 1945, the University of Wisconsin Foundation was formed for philanthropic gifts. So the three elements of private support were in place by 1945. And during the period from 1945 to about 1985, because of the amount of federal and state support, these endowments basically provided between 3 and 5 percent of our revenue. But it was very critical. It was frequently the most prestigious chairs, the most prestigious graduate fellowships. It was the margin of excellence. So we'd been living with a public - private relationship for a long, long time, and between 1945 and '85, it was in this 3 percent to 5 percent range.

But in the eighties, we had doubts about federal research funding, and the state began to squeeze. The Wisconsin tuition is always low, so there began to be a squeeze. We certainly could use more of our private money; we could certainly raise more private money, because Wisconsin alums are successful, and they're very tribal, and so we are very successful in raising money. And so the real question that Donna Shalala and I faced was, "Right now we're unambiguously a public institution, but if we were to raise private support to 10 percent of our revenue, would it corrupt us?" We came to the conclusion that without doing that, we would not survive, and that we believed we could build in a margin of excellence that was now 10 percent, rather than 2, 3 or 4 percent. So we began a capital campaign. We began to strategically use our existing private resources. And ultimately, in fact, drove the amount of private support per annum to probably 10 percent or even 12 percent.

Then the question was, would the state just think of this as, "Great! Saving the taxpayer money!" Would they back off more and more? And what we kept saying was, "We don't mind substituting for the margin of excellence, but we don't want any of the private money going to core activities."

Parallel with all of this programmatic money was a great building boom that had to be done. We had a great backlog of capital investments. And so, here again, we had to decide whether the state had the bonding capacity to build the fifteen or sixteen buildings, which, when Donna first arrived on the scene and I was provost, [were needed]. So, again, we [asked ourselves], "Why not give the state a proposal where we would put up 25 percent -- a third, or half, whatever it may be?"

So we had two problems going on: we had an operating budget where we were growing the budget, and then we had this capital budget, which we knew was urgent because the biotech revolution was coming along, and between the instructional technology and the demand for instructional technology, we needed to invest. So we then said, "Well, maybe 25 percent, maybe a third." We began playing around with, "What is the threshold level of private support that will not deny our public character?" Well, of course, what happened is that we were so damn successful, that with the buildings, most of them were built with 50 - 50, rather than one-third - two-thirds, and we grew our private support in the operating budget probably close to 15 percent.

In my last two years, my biggest task was to finally sign a new contract with the state which said, "We've delivered on our side of the equation. Are you now going to agree that you will support the core needs of the campus, so that I can grow that side which is the margin of excellence?" And that was, I think, why I was able to declare victory as chancellor. The governor, a Republican governor who earlier had been very tough on the university, finally understood that the goose that was laying the golden egg, the private piece, could get to the point where these private supporters of a public university might say, "I don't want to substitute for public money, I just want to make a public university greater." Some of the alumni made those kinds of statements. And finally, the state for the first time in over fourteen years increased our operating budget, and we began to start agreeing that the threshold level of support from the state should be around a quarter of our budget. Of course, another almost 40 percent comes from the feds. And we would provide between 10 and 15 percent from private sources, and then, perhaps, 10 percent from tuition. And the state began to buy into this new contract.

So what they got out of it was a growth in the total budget of the university, an infinitely better university, but on the other hand, they now had to recognize that somewhere around a quarter of our revenue did have to be guaranteed by the taxpayer. I believe that contract is something in which there was broad bipartisan buy-in; but only the future will tell.

Next page: Lessons Learned

Related link: Former UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman's comments on reorganizing the biological sciences: Goals and Values: Leading Berkeley (2000)

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