We’re going to give the “how to live a better life” spiel the week off and consider matters closer to home. Specifically, I think it’s high time someone gave University President Dave Frohnmayer some well-earned kudos. Let’s face it: the guy’s had a really tough school year by any reasonable standards.
From the sudden heart arrhythmia he suffered in late October while in Maryland for a National Institutes of Health conference to negotiating with a committed group of student labor rights protesters to handling the fallout from supporting the University’s decision to join the Worker Rights Consortium, Frohnmayer has faced Job-like challenges and come through them all. If it’s true that the finest steel only emerges from the hottest fire, Frohnmayer must be like one of those shiny sabers on those Marine Corps commercials you see at halftime of Saturday afternoon football games.
Can you imagine being close enough to look death in the eye, enjoying a brief convalescence, and returning within a couple of weeks to reassume primary responsibility for a 17,000-student university with an annual operating budget of more than $300 million?
A little bit of history here: Frohnmayer attended Harvard at the same time my mom attended nearby Wellesley, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alma mater. Last April, home for the weekend, I pulled out a dusty old Harvard annual, circa 1962, and just for fun flipped through the pages and descriptions of the senior class. Eventually I came to a picture of an earnest-looking guy with slicked-back hair as per the fashion of the times. Next to the portrait was a caption. It read “Dweeb” in faded blue ink. I couldn’t believe that the president of the school I’d chosen over an old, established East Coast university had been considered a dweeb by my mom and her coterie of giggly college friends. I chuckled at the irony and told no one of my discovery, didn’t even ask my mom about it.
Funny that a year later, I can tell you that even though I have not met Frohnmayer, I respect and admire him. I like what he stands for. When he formally assumed the University presidency in October 1996, he had this to say: “We do not need a different university. But we must constantly dedicate ourselves to the development of a better one:
* A university that accepts no substitute for quality, and no excuse for mediocrity.
* A university that challenges itself every day to become better.
* A university that recognizes and realizes its essential and overriding goal of transforming lives through knowledge.”
Personally, I’m with him on all three counts. I relocated to the sunny Pacific Northwest because I felt that I had a better chance here of transforming my life and others’ than at Johns Hopkins. While the experience has been your typical academic up-and-down, I’m glad to know that I’m studying at a university where the chief executive, the person whose attitudes and actions filter down to 22,000 other community members, sets the kind of tone that Frohnmayer does.
By supporting the wishes of students and the University Senate to join the WRC, he supported a politically-correct decision with significant short-term political and personal costs. But he did the right thing, and while I wish that were not such a novel approach, it is in the corporate age, where money talks and values are something you talk about over coffee with your beatnik pals at Espresso Roma. By refusing to pander to Nike CEO Phil Knight and Nike, Frohnmayer may have cost the university short-term financial largesse — which always comes at a price — and a spruced-up stadium for our Saturday gladiators, but much more importantly, he followed his conscience and held firm when the backlash ensued.
The University will benefit in the long run from his brave and correct short-term act to an extent that increased attendance and revenues from the expansion of Autzen Stadium never would have provided. If that’s what dweebs grow up to do, then I say we all wear a beanie once in a while and let the inner geek in all of us step out and strut a little bit. Here’s wishing you a restful summer and a less turbulent 2000-2001 school year, Frohnmayer. You certainly have earned the right.