With a promise to try to restore tranquility in his first 100 days, Mark Yudof began vigorously selling himself Tuesday as the right person to lead the University of Minnesota, even while admitting he's a little nervous over the politics involved in the presidential search.
Yudof, the only remaining finalist for the job, got a good taste of Minnesota on his first full day in the state.
Among other things, he toured campuses in Crookston and Duluth, met with student leaders in Minneapolis and did a round of interviews with the Twin Cities media.
In an interview with the Star Tribune, he said it's time to end the acrimony at the university.
Toward that end, he said, he would not try to make any more changes in tenure policy.
Yudof, the provost of the University of Texas at Austin, praised Minnesota's commitment to the university, calling it "a 150-year love affair."
But he said he won't take a pay cut to take the Minnesota job. And he's watching the selection process for a new football coach, saying he wants to see Minnesota in the Rose Bowl.
Here are excerpts from the interview:
Q. Is this your first visit to Minnesota? A. No, I've been here a number of other times, and not just in connection with the presidential search. I used to be on the admissions committee of the American Bar Association, and we met here once or twice. . . . It's a lovely city, a great city. It's no great secret that it's one of the great attractions of this job: Minneapolis and St. Paul, a great metropolitan area.
Q. Why do you want this job? A. Well, I think I'm in a very good position at the University of Texas, but I prefer to be president, to run the show the way I think it ought to be run. . . . I know you've had an uproar about tenure and closing a college and so forth.
But if you actually look at the fundamentals of the University of Minnesota, it's today the 23rd-ranking research university in America, according to the National Research Council poll. And I think it could easily go way up. It has a genuinely good faculty. I'm not saying it's even across all departments, but it's well-known for the quality of its faculty. It's in a metropolitan area - that has to help. That's better than being in a predominantly rural area where it's hard to make the connections with industry and government and so forth.
And I've said this many times: I like the support the people of Minnesota have given this institution. I know there's always the year-to-year wrangling over budgets and so forth, but this is virtually a 150-year love affair. You'd be hard-pressed to find a state that gives the per-capita contributions that are being made in Minnesota. I mean, I think in the last couple years, Minnesota has raised more money than Texas, and we have four times your population.
I also think of myself as a very strong administrator. I've put in accountability systems and performance systems in Texas. I've delegated authority because I don't believe you can create great universities with top-down management. . . . I don't want to oversee the writing of every check and every hiring decision. What I want to see is how the school or college is doing at the end of the year, and have performance measures.
Q. Are you nervous about the politics here, given the governor's involvement over the weekend, and two candidates dropping out? A. I think there's some nervousness about politics, and hopefully when I speak to the governor, we'll get that settled. I wish the other candidates had stayed in, but I can't say I'm all that concerned. I thought I was the best candidate. I'm contacted all the time about presidential searches. I think once people meet me and look carefully at my record, they shouldn't worry about that. I understand why you'd want more choices, but I do want the opportunity to talk to the governor and assuage some concerns he may have.
Q. What do you want to know from the regents? In other words, are there are any kind of make-or-break issues that you're looking for in making your decision? A. I think the first goal, if I were appointed to this job and accepted, is to sort of put all the acrimony behind us and press very hard on the notion that we're all part of one community. We need to be pulling in the same direction. I hope to move rapidly to . . . get the difficult circumstances of the last year behind us. That was one of the judgments I made: Were these debates sort of surface blemishes or did they run deeper?
My conclusion was that they were more at the surface and that with the right leadership, these groups could be brought together. I would want the regents clearly aboard on those issues. I think they are, but I'm going to find out for sure. I talked to the chairman. I think he's very committed to allowing the president, with the normal checks and balances and faculty involvement, to run the university. You don't run the university through the Board of Regents. They make the policy and the president carries it out, the day-to-day stuff.
I'd like to talk about football coaches because I'd like to go to the Rose Bowl. I think that would be very good.
Q. The governor will want to hear that one. A. If the governor's willing to pay a million dollars for a football coach, I can't imagine how much a good university president is worth. It's beyond my comprehension.
Q. I've heard some concern expressed that you're sort of the perennial candidate. You withdrew at the last minute from the searches at both Illinois and Iowa. What makes the Minnesota job different than either of those two positions? A. It's hard to get into all the reasons . . . but I'm really not the perennial candidate. The problem is that you can't even consider a job without it being leaked to the newspaper and people descending upon you. It's not like the corporate world, where you can sort of consider things and mull them over. If you even look at the campus and see what it's like, you're already there and you have no choice but to publicly go forward or publicly withdraw.
I would say that Minnesota's of the quality of an institution that in some cases I didn't think the others were. I'm not referring to any one specifically, but that's one's thing.
Again, it's important, the quality of living, for myself and my family. I think Minneapolis is much better. I think it also comes at a better time in my life. I guess the biggest thing here is, though, is that I see almost unlimited potential in this university. I think it can be dramatically moved up. And it's just no fun being in a place where that's virtually impossible.
Q. Some are saying we need a bold president at the U of M. What's the boldest thing you've ever done at UT? A. Well, I don't think you'd win a congressional medal of honor for any of these, but I have, without naming names, decided that administrators weren't doing their job well and we needed to replace them. Universities often are not very good at passing on the torch to new administrators. I've done that successfully.
I think the performance-based instruction I put in, and a new way of calculating faculty teaching loads, was something that never had been done by anyone in Texas. . . . I thought that was pretty bold.
I see myself as relatively decisive and pushing for new initiatives.
Q. Does it make sense for a research university to have a General College where it's teaching remedial classes? That's been a huge issue in Minnesota. A. It's a little premature for me to have a real firm position. But in general, I like to think of Minnesota as the national university of Minnesota. It seems to me that you have to have a relatively high degree of access if you're going to have the type of political and financial support to do the mega-things, the international computer centers, the scientific research and the medicine and so forth.
So I'd start with the idea that there is special obligation toward access. Whether the General College is the right mechanism, I'm not sure. My feeling is the regents put that to rest with their last vote, but there seems to be a continuing debate about it. . . . It can't be all things to all people, but I genuinely think the access question is different. . . .
I don't see the access and the quality of research as being options. You can't give up either of those two missions. The only question is how do you achieve them with the least amount of friction and conflict. That I don't know the answer to. I was concerned about the low graduation rate from General College, and I saw the dean had some explanations, and I'd like to talk to him about it.
Q. Would you touch the tenure issue with a 10-foot pole? A. Well, probably not, but I'd say a couple things: I think it really is behind the university. One of the reasons I put my name in when there was a lot of controversy in the paper: I thought to myself these people on all sides are just too smart to allow this to sabotage the presidential selection process. I thought the Sullivan II was a good plan. . . .
I can't say it won't flare up again, but I think it's behind us for awhile.
Q. You're earning $200,000 right now in Texas? A. About that, roughly.
Q. Is salary going to be an issue here? President Hasselmo now is earning $178,000. You have no state income tax in Texas. A. I don't think it'll be an issue, but it is a situation where you don't expect to move for a pay cut. My impression is that the regents want to recruit a good president. People need to understand that the salaries of the top 30 research institutions like Minnesota need to be competitive. It's not first on my agenda, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's something that needs to be worked out.
Q. How would you try to improve the U of M's public image, and what would the first 100 days of your administration look like? A. Well, a lot of it would be to restore tranquility, reduce acrimony, enhance civility and to get to know the relevant actors, the people you have to know well to bring the university forward. The second thing, of course, is to continue articulating the mission of the university, be very public about it, meet with alumni, try to reassure them that the place is in very good shape.
I don't know if it would be over in the first hundred days, but I'd certainly want to evaluate the management structure, particularly on the Twin Cities campus, and make some - not hasty, but some reasonable - decisions about personnel. I don't see a massive turnover, but I think a new president is entitled to get his or her people in place.
And it depends on where we are in the budget cycle, but I'd like to be a major participant in that. I've done that in Texas.
Q. If you get the job, would we see you at the '97 Legislature? Or would you wait until next summer before you move in? A. My preference would be to be somewhat involved. It's long distance, but you can't start too quickly to sort of establish those trusting relationships. I would very much try to do that, but I still have a job in Austin.
Q. Anything else you want to say to the people of Minnesota? A. Well, I think we covered most of the ground. If I were to describe my goals, the ones I'm most concerned about are first of all, the diversity goals, which I've made a lot of progress on in Texas. I'd continue that. The movement to be more welcoming and friendly to students, whether it's advising systems or registration systems or small classes in the first year. Those are big priorities of mine. And the third has to do with research.
I guess I would say one thing: I don't know if it's been picked up by the media. The way I view universities in the 21st century is that the wealth of the country is going to be more in intellectual property rather than real property. It will be on CD/ROM more than in industrial production or even agricultural production. A great university is mainly dependent on its people and the ideas they develop, and technology transfer. That's something that needs to be emphasized. It's people like Bill Gates who are the giants of business in this part of the 20th century, as opposed to steel or oil or whatever. And I think universities are set up pretty well to deal with that. They've always been in the idea business.
1/3 Mark Yudof
- Present position: Provost and executive vice president at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994.
- Born: 1944 in Philadelphia.
- Education: B.A. from University of Pennsylvania; law degree fromUniversity of Pennsylvania, 1968.
- Faculty positions: University of Texas at Austin.
- Administrative positions: Associate dean and dean of law school at Austin.
- Family: Wife, Judith, and two children: Seth, 24, and Samara, 18.
- Best known for: Helping create new policies on tenure, admissions, budgeting and a program to honor outstanding teachers; promoting affirmative action.
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