An Interview with President-elect Jeffrey Lehman

President-elect Lehman is preparing for the 'joys and challenges' of CU

Lehman

On Dec. 14, 2002, Jeffrey S. Lehman '77, dean of the University of Michigan Law School, was appointed Cornell's 11th president. He will assume the post on July 1 of this year. During January, the Cornell Chronicle interviewed President-elect Lehman[pronounced Lee´-man] about issues in higher education relating to Cornell, his preparations for leading his alma mater and his plans for the future.

How has your life changed since your selection as Cornell's next president?

My mailbox and my e-mail in-box have been flooded with the most extraordinary expressions of support for Cornell. People in Ithaca, in New York City and around the world feel a profound love and respect for our university, and it is deeply moving to be the recipient of so many offers of assistance. Over the next few months, I will be devoting most of my time to ensuring that I leave Michigan in the very best condition possible. And I will also be doing all I can to prepare myself for the joys and challenges of my new role as Cornell's 11th president.

How would you describe your management style?

I try always to keep in mind that people who make their careers at great universities have chosen to do so because they want to be part of something that is vitally important to human progress. They tend to work very hard, and they tend to care deeply about what they do. That means that an academic leader is less a "manager" than an orchestra conductor. My role is often to help a group of driven, talented individuals be effective and satisfied in their work while cooperating with one another to serve a larger cause.

In making the transition from faculty member to dean at Michigan, what hurdles did you encounter and what lessons did you learn that might serve you well in the transition you will be making this summer when you assume the presidency at Cornell?

I had been a member of the Michigan faculty for seven years before becoming dean. So I knew the Law School very well -- the faculty, the culture, the students. I lived at Cornell as an undergraduate student. I am going to spend time learning about the institution as a faculty member and as an administrator. I plan to spend my first months talking to people and listening to the various elements of the Cornell community.

What significant changes did you help accomplish during your tenure at Michigan?

I was very fortunate to be dean at Michigan during a time when the faculty was willing to try a lot of new initiatives, to change and take risks. As it turned out, many of these changes were very successful. I am especially proud of the initiatives that the law school launched in the areas of transnationalism, clinical education, public service and teaching of legal writing. And I think the broader lesson about being willing to risk failure when changes are called for is an important message that I will carry with me at Cornell.

More and more of a university president's time is consumed by what can be broadly defined as "fund raising." How do you view this trend? How do you hope to address it as president?

Universities do exceptionally important work for our society through teaching, research and institutional service. And it is unbelievably expensive to do that kind of work at the highest level. Of course, that is the level at which we all expect Cornell to perform. It is simply not possible, nor is it appropriate, to ask students to bear the full cost of that enterprise, so we ask others who believe in what we do to contribute to the cause. I think that a university president must be personally and deeply committed to development. A president is uniquely positioned to help attract the resources that are needed to sustain the university's excellence, while at the same time ensuring that charitable support is being directed toward activities that are truly important to our central mission.

Did you have much opportunity to do that kind of fund raising as dean?

Absolutely. In this regard, Michigan and Cornell are very similar. Both institutions have been blessed with deeply committed alumni who are committed to giving back to their alma mater. At Michigan we have been very fortunate to receive substantial private support for all kinds of activity -- scholarships, professorships, research support and facilities funds, as well as gifts that can be directed as a particular need arises. I am looking forward to being intensely involved in similar activities at Cornell.

What is your vision for Cornell of the future? To help achieve that vision, do you have specific priorities, or areas that you want to emphasize, as you move into the presidency this summer?

It's important to start by recognizing where Cornell is today. Today Cornell is recognized as one of the handful of truly superb, comprehensive research universities in the world. To maintain that position of intellectual leadership in a rapidly evolving world, we must be constantly asking ourselves what kind of contributions that world needs from its great universities. I don't anticipate launching any bold new initiatives in my first year. But I do expect to be completely immersed in a process of intellectual engagement through which I can learn what kinds of initiatives will be appropriate in the second and third years and beyond.

Do you feel that we cannot predict what is coming, just over the horizon?

Well, we shouldn't be too arrogant about predicting the future. I think if we look back on what we were predicting in 1988 about today's world, I doubt any of us had it exactly right, and most of us would have missed some very important developments. At the same time, I do believe that we can see many trends, many forces, that are likely to make a big difference in our world. Rapid advances in science and technology will continue apace, and they will bring with them a whole host of new ethical, legal and social challenges. I think that globalization will continue to accelerate in all dimensions -- socially, economically, politically and culturally. But the impact of these changes is very hard to know. That's part of what makes it exciting to be alive.

What do you think are the most significant issues facing research universities today in terms of student life, both for undergraduates and graduate students?

Today students have an extraordinary range of opportunities for intellectual and personal development on campus. We need to make sure that it is easy for them to recognize those opportunities and take advantage of them. Cornell is and should be a very comfortable place to grow up; but we don't want it to be so comfortable that a student can just drift through without seeing the many opportunities there are to really challenge yourself in new ways.

One of the most significant initiatives that has been undertaken at Cornell in recent years is the North Campus residential initiative. The goal was to increase the common experiences for all freshmen and to help integrate their intellectual and social lives. Do you support those kinds of goals for undergraduate residential life?

Every university of Cornell's size and complexity has to find ways to enable students to participate in a variety of sub-communities. By doing so, students come to understand themselves from multiple perspectives and develop themselves in a variety of ways. I love the idea of housing all first-year undergraduates together, cutting across school and college boundaries, and then having students self-select into different ways of organizing residential subcommunities in their later years.

What about students living off-campus; how would you make them feel that they are having a community experience?

There are lots of student organizations, both formal and informal, that offer students a sense of belonging, a kind of collective identity, during their undergraduate years. For me as a student, a very important subcommunity was Alpha Phi Omega, which is a nonresidential service fraternity. The university's job is to provide the road map; each student has to find his or her own way.

We are interested in what the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision on affirmative action might mean for Cornell and, more broadly, what it will mean for universities. Can you talk about the case a bit?

This is, of course, a very large topic that cannot be fully addressed in a short interview. Let me just say here that I expect the Supreme Court will use this case to reaffirm the Bakke precedent that has provided higher education with a foundation for diversity the past 25 years. Every great university, including Cornell, enjoys the benefits of teaching students in a racially integrated community, and this case is obviously a landmark opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to those benefits.

What is your response to President's Bush's statement on the case? How do you expect his intervention to affect the case?

In his speech, the president spoke out in support of diversity and against the use of quotas to achieve diversity. We agree with both those positions. Unfortunately, the president's staff gave him an inaccurate picture of how our admissions policy works; he, therefore, devoted most of his statement to an attack on quotas, which is not the issue that the Supreme Court will be confronting. The real question is whether universities will be permitted to continue to rely on the Bakke compromise -- a policy that allows schools to make limited departures from the ideal of colorblindness in order to obtain the pedagogic benefits of racial integration, benefits that could not be obtained otherwise. I believe that, at the end of the day, the court will decide that the importance of respecting long-standing legal precedent is a value that appeals to all nine justices.

President-elect Jeffrey Lehman '77, right, speaks with Dale R. Corson, left, professor of physics emeritus, who was Cornell's president when Lehman was an undergraduate, and trustee Edwin Morgens, chair of the Cornell board's Presidential Search Committee, in the Statler Hotel Ballroom, Dec. 14. Robert Barker/University Photography

As a result of this case and also some of your other activities in academia, you've been visible nationally. Will you continue to play such an active role on national issues as president of Cornell?

I expect that as Cornell's president I will be engaged in matters of fundamental concern to the world of higher education. That's what drew me into the national discussion of affirmative action -- along with being a defendant in the lawsuit. Some of the concerns will be highly visible, and some will not. But one of the most important parts of this job is to speak up on behalf of the values and beliefs that sustain higher education. Affirmative action is certainly one of those.
Read the sidebar about Lehman in the media spotlight.

As a major research university, Cornell, like others of its stature, has to maintain a balance between the sciences, the humanities and the professions. And there has been some discussion on campus about how well that is happening here. How do you think that balance can best be maintained?

The key underlying principle is that we have to sustain an uncompromising commitment to true excellence at the faculty level in every domain. Energy and dynamism and innovation all begin with a spark of insight in the mind of an individual professor, and our challenge as set forth by Ezra Cornell is, at the university level, to provide fertile soil for the germination of such insights in every field of intellectual pursuit.

Currently, minority students represent 29 percent of Cornell's undergraduate population, and approximately 12 percent are underrepresented minorities. Is this an appropriate level of minority representation for Cornell?

The essential question here is academic: Is Cornell preparing students to be leaders in a world that is multiracial, multiethnic and multireligious, where success depends critically on the ability to hold multiple perspectives on an issue in one's mind simultaneously? That question is not simply a matter of numbers. It is a matter of how numbers and the institutional culture interact. So I can't tell by looking at numbers whether we are where we need to be or whether there is more work to do.

In his recent State of the State speech, New York Gov. George Pataki announced that state appropriations across the board will be less than they were in previous years. Do you have strategies at this time, or thoughts, on how you would deal with shrinking state funding and how you would explain Cornell's important role in the state?

Cornell is a special treasure for the citizens of New York. And as a university we have benefited enormously from our truly unique partnership with the state. In difficult economic times, which we are facing, we need to identify ways in which a strategic investment by the state might simultaneously promote our mission and contribute to an economic recovery in upstate New York and statewide. I look forward to working with the governor and with other state officials to strengthen the partnership that has served all of us so well for so many years.

To end on a lighter note, what kinds of leisure activities do you enjoy, when you get a chance for leisure activities?

That's the toughest question you've asked me. I am a techie, and I love tech toys, so I try to keep up on the latest developments in the worlds of telecommunications and personal computing. I read PC Magazine. I love books and movies and sports. I like to cook, love gourmet food, but my work leaves me far too little time to work in the kitchen. So I read the Williams-Sonoma catalog. My family is important to me, and I try to blend my work and home lives in such a way that each can be part of the other.

What books have you read recently; what kinds of books do you like?

I like to read around in a whole range of areas. I recently re-read a James Baldwin book, Notes of a Native Son. I read a relatively new book by Philip Reilly called Abraham Lincoln's DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics. I laughed out loud at parts of David Sedaris' book, Me Talk Pretty One Day. I recently tried to read a book called The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.

It was a struggle?

There would be pages when I was following the argument, and then I'd get lost. I'm hoping that when I get to campus I'll be able to find a patient soul who can help me to get a working nonscientist's appreciation for astrophysics.

January 30, 2003