JOHN D. ELROD February 23, 1996 Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is February 23, 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with President John Elrod of Washington and Lee University. But we're not going to talk about being president; we're going to talk about being dean. You came to this place at a really interesting time, into a very interesting position. I'm going to start by asking what probably seems like a very simple and silly question: what does the dean do? What are the responsibilities of the dean? Elrod: My job as dean was to be responsible for the academic program, the curriculum, and the faculty, to put a fine point on it. Warren: Come on. Aren't you going to expand upon that a little more? What does a dean do day by day? How were your days occupied? Elrod: I can't help but compare it with this office. This office is quiet by comparison. In a way it's like a sleepy little street, whereas the dean's office is the very busy intersection through which passes on a weekly basis almost every aspect of the university, at least having to do with student life, academic life, faculty, academic programs. And it is an extremely busy place, which, if you're not careful, will leave you little, if any, time to be reflective and proactive, because so much of what a dean does is just reacting to what walks through the door. My day would begin every day at eight o'clock with John Wilson, and John and I and the associate dean, whoever that happened to be-and in my time it was 1 Pam Simpson, then Tom Williams, then Larry Boetsch, then Lad Sessions. Each of those served three years. Pam was at the very end of her time as associate dean when I got here. In fact, she served four years. We'd sit for an hour and we'd talk about the upcoming business of the University, pending business of the University, or we would talk about books or music or sports. Conversation would occur every day that the three of us were in town, which I'd say was four days out of five, and it ranged over a very wide range of topics. Then at nine o'clock, the day would formally begin, and I would have appointments with department heads, appointments with faculty members who wanted to come and talk with me about particular problems that they had or things that they were trying to accomplish. Sometimes I initiated those appointments; sometimes they did. Department heads were usually rattling a tin cup and asking for money or plotting a strategy as to how to deal with a difficult problem that they were dealing with in the department, sometimes curriculum, sometimes personnel. I had a fair number of people coming through my office from outside the University-alumni, parents, representatives from other schools and colleges who were here trying to find out something about Washington and Lee in order to make a comparison with the institution from which they came. I would spend a fair amount of my time in committee meetings. I've never stopped to think about it, but I would say at least twenty-five percent of my time out of my office in committee meetings, and by committee meetings I mean the standing committees that I served on or chaired, the ad hoc committees, of which there were many over my time as dean, and also then in a variety of departmental meetings, sometimes the whole department or sometimes a subdivision of the department. I would spend a fair amount of time on the telephone talking with my fellow deans in the law school and in the commerce school, and it will come as no surprise 2 to you to hear me say that there were problems that cut across all three divisions, and especially in my later years as vice president for academic affairs, I would initiate conversations with those two deans who were working on policy which was going to have University-wide implications for the faculty. I spent not as much time as I would have liked talking with students who would come in with academic problems or sometimes looking for money to support a speaker that an organization that the student representative was trying to bring to campus. For example, John Branham was in my office as president recently, trying to scrape up enough money to sponsor Cornell West's visit, which, by the way, was superb. So I often saw students in that context. Then I guess the other major block of time in the office was from 5:30 until 7:30 or 8:00, when I cleaned out my "in" boxes. As you know, the "in" boxes that one has, or that I had, had grown over the years. I started out with what we'd now call just a hard-copy "in" box, just correspondence, but then I had, after a while, as everyone else, an e-mail "in" box. My practice was to deal with e-mail first, then the regular "in" box and then phone mail. So I would try to get all of that done on a daily basis by eight o'clock in the morning so that then my day was free to do all these other activities which I've been very generally describing to you. Warren: Those electronic things have complicated our lives, but I sure find them useful. Elrod: Oh, I do, too. I'm not complaining. In terms of that block of time from 7:30 to 8:00, it seemed like it was more time-consuming because I had more things coming in, not just memoranda, not just letters, but also then e-mail messages which sometimes were nettlesome and complicated, but they had to be dealt with just like a memorandum does. But from an administrative point of view, what all this has done is simply make the administrator more accessible and gives more people a claim on his or her time. When I was trying to get everything of that sort done 3 between 5:30 and 8:00, it just meant I had to work, I felt like, anyway, harder in that period of time to get it all done. Let me just clarify one thing, when I said the president's office is a sleepy street in comparison to the dean's office. [Laughter] Warren: [Laughter] I figured you probably would want to do that. Elrod: What I mean by that-and this has been, I suppose, the major surprise for me in my transition, though we're not going to talk about the presidency-is that the dean's office is incredibly filled every day with all kinds of people and problems. The president's office, while it is not entirely predictable, is more predictable on a day-to-day basis than is the dean's office, and it has far fewer people coming in it, because technically the president now-not technically, but in fact, at the top of a pyramid, and those people who easily have access to the president on an ongoing basis are those people who report directly to him, and that is far fewer people to whom I'm accountable than all the faculty and many students, which is the case when you're the dean. The problems are a different sort. They're more policy-type problems, they're more far reaching, they're less amenable to quick fixes, and they often require more contact and collaboration with a wider range of constituencies than when you're dealing with a problem or an issue as dean. Warren: That makes perfect sense. When you arrived on campus-I suppose there's never a boring time at Washington and Lee-but it was a particularly dramatic time. I'm thinking coeducation was in its birthing process, am I right, when you arrived? Elrod: The baby had been delivered. When I arrived here on the twelfth, I think, of July, having driven over two days from Ames, Iowa, in that trip we did not know, Mimi and our sons and I, did not know whether or not we were coming to an all- male institution or a coed institution, because we were actually making the trip on 4 the weekend that the decision was made by the Board of Trustees. I distinctly remember getting to our house, 207 White Street, about the middle of Sunday afternoon. I had not seen the house, by the way. Mimi decided to buy a house while I was in Iowa. She came out to look for a job and didn't find, a job, but she came back and had done everything but sign on the dotted line to buy the house. So I had come to a new house, as well, which I hadn't seen butwhich I liked very much. But that's beside the point. So we're standing there in the front yard. Lash Larue, who is an alumnus and wonderful professor of law, ambled across the street, and my first words to him were-I knew him-"Did we come to an all-male institution or a coed institution?" Because I did not know. And he told me that we had come to a coeducational institution. So that's what I mean when I say the baby had been delivered. That next year, of course, we were planning for the transition to coeducation. Pam Simpson, the associate dean of the college, and my colleague, chaired that committee. She was in the thick of it in terms of preparing for the transition to coeducation, and she was working with a committee of faculty and administrators. This may sound strange to you, but that was kind of something that was happening across my suite of offices, because I did not get myself involved in it very much. I wanted to get to know the faculty very well and to learn the curriculum and to learn how the place worked politically, and I knew that that was going to be the same whether it was all male or coed. I thought that this is how I must spend my first year. So all the preparation kind of happened to the side, as far as I was concerned, though Pam kept me up to date, and she and John and I would meet every morning. We knew what was going on. It was really to the side for me. My more interesting challenges were the faculty's hesitations about me. I had come from the Midwest. Even though I'm a native Southerner, I was an unknown, 5 really, to the faculty. John Wilson had been here only eighteen months, and he had stirred up coeducation, and he was still basically unknown, too. He was also from the Midwest. John may have told you, we were known as the Midwest Mafia. Warren: No! Elrod: The two of us were called that. [Laughter] Warren: No, I hadn't heard that. Elrod: And I, at an early administrative meeting at Skylark in September or October, right after I arrived, had said in this group, when I was asked, "What do you think?" I said, "I think the faculty is a little sleepy." And that word got out to all the faculty that I had said that they were not asleep, but a little sleepy. So that put me a little bit more on the defensive. So what I was really concentrating on in that first year was, just to repeat myself, trying to get to know the faculty well, trying to absorb what this curriculum was all about, and simply trying to understand how things got done. Warren: What did you mean, that you found the faculty to be sleepy? And what did you do about it? Elrod: [Laughter] Well, you will have to be discreet in the way that you'll handle this. I'll try to say it as carefully as I can. When I say "the faculty," of course there are going to be exceptions here, but the faculty didn't put as much value as I thought it should on research and publications. I thought that the faculty was content to do a good job in the classroom, and they were strongly tied to the institution, but I didn't feel that the faculty was pushing itself and trying to advance their own scholarly commitments and responsibilities, and I didn't feel that the faculty had as strong a commitment to its profession or to its discipline, I want to say, its academic discipline, as I thought it should. Strong commitment to the institution, but not quite as strong a commitment to, say, doing scholarship in English literature or doing scholarship in philosophy, knowing who your colleagues are out there nationally who are important and writing the important books and articles, and 6 reading those and trying to respond to them, and trying to be innovative and original yourself. That just wasn't a front-burner kind of issue for the faculty, and I thought it should be. So that's one sense in which I meant it. The other sense was the faculty, I thought~ needed to be tougher with itself with respect to making sure that high standards of scholarship and teaching are articulated and preserved when it comes to making judgments about whom is to be hired, whom is to be reappointed, whom is to be promoted, whom is to be tenured. Those are profoundly important issues with respect to the overall quality of the faculty. And what few people understand is that the dean doesn't have a lot to do about that; it's really the faculty that handles there matters. The only way that the dean can get the standards jacked up and then a willingness for the standards to be enforced and maintained with respect to these personnel decisions is to try to get the faculty to do it for itself. I think there was less of that than I thought would be appropriate for an institution of this quality. Warren: How did you go about that? Did you light a fire? Was there a meeting? Elrod: You just start talking about these things. First, I will put it this way. I had a record myself. I was proud of the fact that I had two books published by Princeton University Press on Kierkegaard and a number of articles, and I had some considerable activity in a number of professional organizations. All that was profoundly important to me with respect to what I wanted to accomplish for myself as an academic. I brought that with me, and that was known. I then just began, whenever I had the chance, talking about the connection between scholarship and teaching, and I profoundly believe, by virtue of the experience I've had in the philosophy department at Iowa State University, and I believe this to this day, that a faculty as a whole has a better chance of being an outstanding faculty if the faculty, as a whole-of course there's going to be 7 exceptions, but also have their own academic interests and passions which they pursue with great commitment and determination. I'm just convinced that the best teaching faculties are faculties that have passions that take them out beyond what they have to do to be very well prepared for class. You've just got to really care about your field-and it has a kind of magnetic attraction to you-and it demands time and energy and commitment and thought. So that's what I tried to talk about, and I'd do it sometimes with department heads, I'd do it one on one. l would often say to a faculty member, "Have you ever thought of applying for a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend or these NEH research fellowships for a year? Fantastic." Or, "You haven't been to a professional meeting, did I hear you say, a year or two years? Look, here's some money. Go to the APA or go to the MLA," and encourage, wherever you could, people to write papers to present at professional meetings, tell them that you'll cover their research costs. We had a little Glen grant program [phonetic] here which supports summer research, and it was spending about eighteen thousand or twenty thousand dollars a year when I got here; now it spends a hundred thousand dollars a year. We had the R. E. Lee program, which was giving money away, or I will say allocating money, for students to do less than serious research at any time during the year. We changed that and said, "Look. We're going to take·this R. E. Lee money, we're going to put it all in one pot, and we're going to give it to students in the summer who can get proposals approved just like faculty, and if they don't get proposals approved, they don't get the money. But if they do, they get a nice stipend which they can put in the bank, plus room and board, so that when they finish, they've got something to show for their summer, a research product as well as some money." Then we also formed a committee to rewrite the promotion and tenure guidelines, and that forced the faculty to-I won't say "force," but invited the faculty 8 to think seriously about, "What are our standards for tenure and promotion? Really what should we be expecting of ourselves in the classroom? How do we know when a person really is a good teacher? What evidence is there? What should we expect with respect to scholarly output? Are we going to be a publish-or- perish place? No, we're not, and we aren't now, but if we aren't, what kind of expectations are we going to have for scholarship, and how are we going to measure those? How are we going to support young faculty who come here and have a desire to do research but have heavy teaching loads? How are we going to support?" So this redrafting a new set of promotion and tenure procedures forced us all to rethink what the standards ought to be for this and how to go about measuring them, and what counts as evidence. That whole process took eighteen months to two years. So it was just a collection of a lot of little things, not any one thing or not any one big moment that just, I think, over time changed us. Now what we find, I'm happy to say, is a faculty which is serious about scholarship, which does a good job at it, which puts great pressure on the administration for support, and this is especially noteworthy in the young people who are now being hired, who are pushing us hard. For example, a leave program during the probationary time for tenure-track faculty members. That is, we have a rule now, no one who is untenured, even if you're tenure-track, is permitted to have a paid leave. You've got to get yourself tenured, you've got to pay your dues, and then we'll give you a leave. Well, now we've got these young faculty saying, "Look. You want us to do scholarship, you want us to do research. We have a passion for it. We've got the bit between our teeth. Help us to do this. Give us some time. Make sure that we get funded in the summer. Help us to write grant proposals. Give us the opportunity to take a term off during our probationary time at just the right point for us to get a 9 good chunk of research done so we'll have more to show when the time comes for us to stand for tenure." So it's all of those things and probably more. It's wrong, too, for any one person to get credit for it. The leadership out there in the faculty, department heads are fantastic people, and they got the spirit and they began pushing it. It's much harder for them to do that than for me, because they're right down in the department with people who are living with changing standards and new procedures. It's kind of easy for the dean to do that, because he doesn't have to brush up against people every day who are having to go through this. And it is a little bit frightening for most, not all. But those department heads are right there, and they took the leadership. We've really made some great progress in the last ten years. Warren: You're very easy to interview. I don't even have to ask the questions and I get the answers I want. I'm interested to hear you say that no particular credit is due anywhere, because one of the things Frank [Parsons] and I have been talking about a lot is something called the [James G.] Leyburn Plan. Are you acquainted with the history of the Leyburn Plan? Elrod: I know the name of it, and I know Frank thinks that it has been implemented over time, but I confess to you that I read it when I got here and didn't think about it again, so I couldn't tell you probably in the way that Frank has, exactly which aspects of it are in place and which aren't. Warren: He very much thinks that you brought it into fruition. Elrod: Really? [Laughter] Warren: Frank is going to be going back and talking to people who were there at the time the Leyburn Plan was presented. I'm curious whether the Leyburn Plan was called the Leyburn Plan at the time, or whether that's what it's become over the years. Will we look back at this ten-year period as the Elrod Plan? 10 Elrod: I don't think I had a plan. I'm not an administrator in that sense that I come in with a full-blown plan. I didn't have one. All I knew when I got here, based on my own experience, was that I thought teaching was a profoundly important factor in the success of our society, and I felt you needed smart people doing it, who loved their fields and who loved students, and whose lives revolved around finding out things and telling others what they found out, and helping others to figure out how to find out things. That's kind of what I had when I got here. I learned in my time here a lot about education, a lot about teaching, a lot about the relationship between scholarship and teaching, because this institution was different from the institution that I came from, a state university with 25,000 people. It was very different from my undergraduate institution-well, different, maybe not very different, which was a distant memory to me. So I just think that my ten years here, I would say, was, from my point of view, a nice mix between my talking to the institution, if I can put it that way, and the institution talking back to me, and something coming out of that conversation which seemed to work and make a difference and, in the long run, I hope, improve the institution. So people wouldn't, I think, say the Elrod Plan, no. Leyburn came from Yale. He had a plan and he had been here five minutes before he started talking about this plan. I admire that way of doing things. It's just not my way. I suspect Frank is right. I suspect we have pretty much realized what he had in mind. But I'm just not that way. I'm more a tinkerer, I guess, just sort of going from one day to the next and being guided by a few large ideals, but not having an Elrod Plan. I would have never dreamed, for example, that I was going to work as hard as I did, that the college would be as successful as it was, in putting together the interdisciplinary aspects of the curriculum, which a lot has happened in that area. It wasn't remotely in my mind that the sciences were in trouble and needed work, and I didn't even know that until I had been here two years. 11 Warren: Tell me about that. Elrod: Oberlin College has a very good institutional research program, and they were trying to do some research which they could use to convince the National Science Foundation that the teaching colleges in the United States, the better ones, anyway, were causing a higher ratio of their graduates to go to graduate school in the sciences than were the large universities, public and private. In other words, you understand what I'm saying? As a percent of the graduating class at Oberlin College, more students were going to do Ph.D.s in the sciences than that percent of Ohio State University, in the same state. So what they were doing is a lot of detailed and intricate research to show that this was so, and in the process they developed a set of criteria, four or five, which they thought could be used to really rank the top liberal arts/ science departments in the country. There were fifty of them, and Washington and Lee was not even on the list. I can remember when I read that and I kept looking and looking, and I just couldn't believe that we weren't there, and we weren't. So we had a lot of work to do. We had to build a new building. We had to build a new complex. We had to hire new faculty who had a commitment to the laboratory and to doing the research in the laboratory. We had to hire faculty who were committed to doing research with undergraduates, and we had to find undergraduates who were interested in science and would be willing to do research with faculty. We had to increase by a tremendous number of dollars the external funding that we were drawing to the University to support our teaching and research programs. And we had to increase the number of students who graduated from Washington and Lee and went on to do Ph.D.s in order to get into the company of these top fifty. So we went to work on that, and we developed a five-year recruiting plan to increase the quantity and the quality of students studying science, and we stopped it 12 after three and a half years because it was so phenomenally successful. We built a $22 million science complex. We did a very good job of hiring young faculty who came here with the idea of teaching science through research and who thought that the way in which they could most effectively teach, especially their majors, is by drawing them into their laboratories and having them help them to do their research. We've done an excellent job in supporting the development of faculty through our own funds. We've done an excellent job in creating two new science programs, a cognitive science program and a neuroscience program, both interdisciplinary. And we've done a very fine job, I think, of encouraging all science faculty to establish research programs whose outcome were publishable articles and who saw all of that activity as essential to what they were doing as teachers of undergraduates. But I couldn't have dreamed that that was going to be important when I got here. I wouldn't have dreamed that it was important to do Russian Studies, to strengthen East Asian Studies. I wouldn't have dreamed that we needed to computerize language instruction and that we needed half a million dollars from the Pew Foundation to do that. I wouldn't have dreamed that we needed a phased retirement program to try to provide incentives for senior faculty to move out of teaching in a way that didn't make retirement so threatening. So I guess what I'm saying to you is I think, at least for me, before you set up big plans, you let the institution speak to you about where it is and what it thinks it is and where it wants to go, and then you just kind of respond to it as best you can. Warren: That's certainly what I'm doing these days. I identify with that. [Laughter] Elrod: [Laughter] You're doing a lot of listening, like right now. I'm sorry my answers are so long. I'll try to shorten them. 13 Warren: Oh, no, no. It's wonderful. It's a sign of a good interview when my name doesn't appear. You also mentioned strengthening the interdisciplinary aspects of the school. Tell me about that. Elrod: Departmental boundaries and disciplines are, up to a point, justified, but when you get beyond that point, they're arbitrary and unrealistic. For example, if you take biology and chemistry and you get at the introductory level, you can teach an introduction to biology if you teach an introduction to chemistry, and you can spin off those introductory courses, the subfields, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and you can do the same in biology, botany, neurobiology, field biology, all the others, human biology, reproductive biology. So that their distinctiveness makes sense at a certain point, but the more sophisticated disciplines get-I'm going to say biology and chemistry get-the closer they get to each other. And so it struck me that one of the ways to keep life interesting in an undergraduate college is, wherever you can see faculty from across disciplines looking at each other and beginning to talk to each other, here is new territory, here are new colleagues, not just departmental colleagues, but they're colleagues in another department, here are new courses, here are, in a way, a new field. You get Ed [Edwin D.] Craun teaching medieval literature, and you get George Bent teaching medieval art, and then you create a medieval studies program, and all of a sudden literature and art come together and they create something new. It's not quite art, it's not quite literature; it's both and more. And that happens all over the place in the curriculum. I just thought that in a small institution where bureaucracy is fairly low level, where there's not a lot of administrative red tape, where you can see these sparks catching, then it's very easy administratively just to encourage it. So that's happened. 14 We strengthened the East Asian studies program, created a Russian studies program, created medieval and Renaissance studies program, a cognitive science program, a neuroscience program, and these are just new opportunities for faculty, new fields for students, and in some ways and at a certain level, it's a clearer fix on "what is," because these disciplines are coming together the way they really are together in the world of reality, whether it's a physical world or a mental world or the aesthetic world. So we just sort of took off in that direction as well. Warren: That's exciting to me. My favorite course I took as an undergraduate was called Parallel Themes in Art and Literature, and I had to go to a different school to do it, but I was so excited by the idea, and I still remember that course. I can remember specific lectures in it, and it really was quite thrilling to bring those two interests together. Elrod: That's exactly right. It is very exciting for students, and most of these programs that have been created or strengthened have good, healthy enrollments and a decent number of majors. The only one that has not done well is cognitive science, and I think that the problem in that field was we never-one of the keys in introducing a program work is that you hire somebody who is fundamentally responsible for the program and who can drive it administratively and from the standpoint of the curriculum as well. We have that in all these other interdisciplinary programs, but we haven't found quite the right person in cognitive science. For two years we had a visiting faculty member here who was in the philosophy department and the psychology department, and he is a philosopher of mind. If he had been able to stay, he probably would have brought the leadership to that program, which it still needs in order to make it the equal of the others, which I think are doing better. Warren: I know your time is precious. I have one last question I'd like to talk about, and it's something you mentioned in your lecture, and I think it's something that's 15 really come to be in the ten years of your deanship. There are a lot of women on this faculty. Elrod: Yes. When I got here, Pam Simpson was a tenured member of the faculty, as was Nancy Margand. They were the only two tenured women. Two tenure-track women came with me in the same year, 1984, in Romance languages. There were a couple of other women, one in art, who was on a part-time basis and temporary, one woman in English who was temporary, and one in the library. As soon as we coeducated, we realized we had to make progress in this area and as fast as we could, so what we agreed to do was to not sacrifice quality, don't hire a woman just because she's a woman, but when the best person is a woman, it's an open-and-shut case. If all other things are equal and it's a male and female, hire the woman. So we now have close to thirty tenure-track women on the faculty, still not as high a percentage by a long shot as we need, but we are tracking well with the institutions that we've compared ourselves with in that first decade, Princeton and Davidson, and we've had about the same percentage growth in terms of women coming to the faculty as those two institutions. We've hired mostly newly minted Ph.D.s, women at the junior level. We've made a couple of senior appointments, and in the years ahead we're going to have to make more senior appointments, for two reasons. You don't want all of the women to retire from the faculty at the same time thirty years from now, assuming most of ~hem will be tenured. So we need to spread it out a little bit. We also need more senior women to provide leadership on the faculty. You can get instant leadership with the right senior appointment, female or male. So I think we'll see a little bit more of that in years ahead. Yes, but we're not coeducating the faculty as rapidly as we're coeducating the student body, but we're making good progress, and it is a high institutional priority, and we'll stick with it for as long as it takes. Warren: It's very nice for me to see faces of my gender and my age around here. 16 Elrod: Well, they're wonderful teachers. You know, we are, I think, at about 45 percent of the Ph.D.s produced annually now are female. Thirty-five thousand Ph.D.s a year, which is a grotesquely high number. The market can't absorb them all, at least the academic market can't. We need really to cut back tremendously. But even if we were to do that, I think we're going to see a continued growth for a while on the female side, and I won't be surprised when we hit 50 percent. So it's not a major challenge anymore to hire women just because they're almost 50 percent in the market, in the applicant pool. That's true when you take them all together. When you go and look at physics or mathematics or even in my own discipline, in philosophy, it's not 50/50 or 45/55 by a long way. In philosophy, I'd guess maybe 15 to 20 percent; in physics it would be less than that. In engineering, less than that. In English, it's probably over 50 percent. In art, probably over 50 percent. So we're going to see parity, male/ female parity on the faculty in certain departments before we'll see it on the faculty as a whole. We already, I think, have it, or right at parity, in Romance languages-six, I believe, males and five females. I think that's right, or if that's not right, it's close to it. And we're making great progress in English as well and in art. So, yes, it's coming along quite well. Warren: I'm going to flip the tape over.