The University held an informal discussion on Saturday about the looming search for its next President to alumni and visiting parents on campus for Homecoming/Family Weekend. Attendees were invited to participate and share their views with moderators Kofi Appenteng ’81 P’07, trustee and chair of the Presidential Search Committee, Chair of the Board of Trustees Jim Dresser ’63, and Vice President and Secretary of the University Peter Patton.
Most of the discussion did not focus on specifics regarding the presidential choice. Rather, participants considered the new president’s responsibilities. With the help of a talkative audience, the discussion addressed the University’s public image, its financial situation, and its academic prowess. Questions regarding public image, in particular, proved most interesting to the group, who spent more than half of the hour-long gathering discussing the University’s standing in the media and elsewhere.
“It’s vital that Wesleyan makes sure the image it portrays is accurate,” Appenteng said. “When the New York Times reported a rumor that Wesleyan was sponsoring a ‘Naked Dorm,’ college students everywhere began to think of the University as a very different place than what it actually was. The rumor wasn’t true, of course, but since it was in the Times it may as well have been.”
While the Times may have a much wider readership than other papers, Dresser pointed out that the Hartford Courant’s stories are just as, if not more, important than articles printed in New York when regarding prospective students from Connecticut.
“When the Courant reports something awful that happens at Wesleyan, our number of local applicants drops precipitously,” Dresser said. “We experienced a forty percent decrease in Connecticut applications after the firebombing incident in the early ’90s, a hit that has taken us a decade to recover from.”
Dresser was referring to the firebombing of Bill Chase, then-University president, in 1991, when a student hurled a Molotov cocktail through the window of Chase’s office. The incident was widely covered in both national and international newspapers, most so in the nearby Courant, whose article was partly responsible, Dresser said, for the drastic decrease in applications.
While participants considered questions of image more so than other topics, the discussion also focused on financial concerns. Appenteng, Dresser, and Patton emphasized the University’s need for alumni donations, citing its low endowment.
“We have to convince alumni that we really need their money,” Dresser said. “Alumni from other universities don’t see a need to donate when the endowment is enormous, as in the case of, say, Harvard. We need to spread the word that we need their help in maintaining the level of quality that attracted them to us in the first place.”
Dresser also cited a substantial difference in the amount of money the University spends per year to educate students, as compared to peer institutions. Whereas Wellesley spends $65,000 annually on each student, the University spends approximately $54,000 to do essentially the same thing
“We want to make people aware that we are spending their money as wisely as we can,” Dresser said.
Pat Buchanan ’92, member of the Board of Trustees and a member of the audience, said that the University will also have to make its fundraisers more effective through a similar clarity of vision.
“It’s a fiction to think that a fundraiser can be effective without a lasting message,” Buchanan said.
Finally, participants discussed qualities that have historically defined great University presidents, in hopes of further solidifying trustees and alumni’s opinions about who the next president should be.
“The most successful presidents in history focused on their constituents, not on an unchanging personal vision,” Patton said. “For Wesleyan’s next president, then, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we want someone who, above all, listens.”
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