Culture clash

Did the PC police chase E. Gordon Gee from Brown University?

by Laura Kiritsy

In April 1999, E. Gordon Gee, the president of Brown University, delivered a lecture at Southern Utah University in which he attacked a growing tide of moral relativism. The spread of the Internet was eroding community, he said, turning young people into an uncivilized, narcissistic and cynical lot. "Since we need not interact with human beings to the extent that we once did, perhaps we may no longer be sure of how to act, nor even care about the consequences of our actions," Gee said. "A generation may be concluding that having no particular core values can be a virtue in a virtual world."

Gee told his audience of educators that universities could stem the decline if they stopped being "value-neutral" -- therefore "value-less" -- and instead began to "to incorporate ethics, morality and timeless human values into our teaching." The task at hand, he said, "will be to teach right from wrong," and "to suggest which values are basic and timeless, which have been preserved and what they have taught us."

In the Mormon stronghold of Utah, Gee's lecture no doubt raised more cheers than hackles. A native of the state and a Mormon himself, Gee could think of "no better or more symbolic place" to deliver his discourse than "home." Certainly not at Brown University, his home away from home, and, according to critics, a stronghold of political correctness. Many members of the Brown community, though, are proud of the university's status as one of the most liberal of the Ivies -- it brought the spirit of free inquiry to new heights in 1969 with the "New Curriculum," which abolished course requirements or a core curriculum beyond a student's chosen concentration. And Gee was viewed with suspicion even before he arrived on College Hill in January 1998.

"There really was some skepticism on the part of the faculty when he arrived here, about him personally," says William Beeman, an anthropology professor. "He's a Mormon and that's a horse of a different stripe at a New England university. I wouldn't say that people were prejudiced, but they wondered what that meant."

They soon found out. Gee quickly set a dissonant tone for his 25-month tenure as Brown's 17th president -- the shortest in the university's 236-year history. When the details of his Utah speech trickled back to Providence, speculation that Gee was gunning for a job in Washington began to flourish. Then in February, Gee abruptly announced he was leaving Brown to become chancellor -- the top job -- at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Although Vanderbilt is no academic slouch (it ranks 20th, compared to 14th for Brown, in US News and World Report's annual survey of leading national universities), the announcement sparked anger on College Hill and beyond.

Denying that he was motivated by a $200,000 increase in his compensation package and tenure for his wife, Constance, a professor of public policy, Gee said it was a matter of finding the right institutional "fit." But after trying to position himself as a champion of values, forethought and concern for the larger community, Gee's sudden departure, two years into an expected eight-year tenure, struck some as a rank instance of hypocrisy.

Gee's CEO-style clashed with the intellectualism and individualism that have allowed Brown to remain one of the most selective universities in America. Dubbed the "professional president" by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a tribute to his successful presidencies at West Virginia University, the University of Colorado and Ohio State -- all large public institutions -- Gee was more accustomed to crunching numbers than working closely with faculty and a relatively small body of 8000 students.

The clash of cultures became obvious in one of his first administrative move, the elimination of funding for the university's beloved Charleston String Quartet. Members of the quartet, a nationally recognized group that performed free concerts in libraries across the state and on campus, also taught in Brown's applied music program. Carrying symbolic weight, the cut greatly angered the Brown community, which accused Gee, a sports enthusiast, of not adequately supporting the arts. Gee and his wife were chided on the pages of the Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, for their conspicuous absences at Brown performing arts events.

"What Gee had to endure in terms of public criticism and people coming to him and complaining was totally out of his experience," Beeman says. "He was shocked that he was having to answer questions about this. He could not believe it. He was genuinely nonplused that he would have to stoop to fielding questions about an executive decision," like cutting funding for the quartet.

GEE ALSO RANKLED professors with his intolerance for faculty review, a collective faculty-administration approval process for new academic initiatives, which allowed professors to carefully evaluate changes. In October 1999, he bypassed the process to implement a brain sciences initiative, an innovative collaboration between the neuroscience and cognitive and linguistic sciences departments. Beeman concedes brain sciences is a hot field, and a state-of-the art facility will keep Brown on the forefront. Gee also pushed through the addition of an $80 million life sciences building.

But money talks, and it's undisputed that Gee raised a substantial amount for Brown -- more than $100 million in 1999 -- something his much-loved predecessor, Vartan "Gregarious" Gregorian, managed with less success. Gee's fund-raising ability appears to be what made him the most appealing candidate to the corporation, Brown's 54-member governing body, which voted unanimously to hire him.

Still, try as he might, Gee could not ultimately connect with the student body after his initial success in rubbing elbows -- a bowling date at Chip's Bowlerama, dorm sleep-overs and slinging hash in the student dining hall -- wore thin. "He was a very good businessman and that's what we needed," says 20-year-old sophomore Michael Gannon, one of the managing editors of the College Hill Independent, an iconoclastic weekly published by Brown and Rhode Island School of Design students. "He made a great deal of money for us. But he was very big on fraternities. He was very big on athletics. He was very big on a lot of things that the students just aren't big on.

"I feel kind of bad for the guy actually," Gannon says with a laugh. "Everyone kind of knew from the beginning that it wouldn't work out that well." Describing Gee's tendency to "stammer" his way through confrontations with vague answers, Gannon adds, "He just couldn't hack it, I guess."

Gee is slated to remain on sabbatical before assuming his Vanderbilt responsibilities August 1, and he couldn't be reached for comment through his new employer. In an interview with the Vanderbilt Register, a university publication, one week after he announced his departure from Providence, Gee was asked if it was true that he was "too conservative" for Brown.

In what may well have been a veiled stab at the campus climate of Brown, he responded by saying he was a moderate. "The question that I've asked myself at Brown, as well as at Vanderbilt, is whether all ideas are welcomed," he added. "And I do not believe ultimately that universities can be called universities unless ideas are welcomed and debated, even dumb ideas. So I think I stand for the best tradition of higher education. I would never categorize myself as a conservative or a liberal. I think that I am a person who relishes ideas wherever they find themselves."

IN MAY 1999, less than a month after Gee's Utah attack on moral relativism, a Brown initiative for the study of values was announced. According to the proposal by Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of political theory, the initiative was meant, through courses, lectures, research grants and a graduate fellowship, to spark campus-wide discussion on the elements of the well-lived life. A fairly innocuous sounding pitch, and nothing particularly new for the Ivy League -- Princeton's Center for Human Values, for example, celebrated its 10th anniversary this year.

But when the president of your university is a bow-tied, 50-something Mormon who's already under suspicion for trying to subvert the dominant paradigm, the values initiative exacerbated growing distrust and disdain for Gee's style of university management. "I was worried about it," says political science professor Darrell West. "I think the institutions that deal with values the best are families and religious institutions, more so than colleges and universities."

Gannon, the student journalist, says the values initiative caused debate and was problematic, "especially at a campus where the academic approach is that there really are no right answers. To have an entire course system based on values sort of implies that there is a correct answer. I guess what a lot of people were afraid of . . . was that the values that would be espoused would be kind of right-wing, conservative, traditional Christian values."

The irony is that American universities, which are supposed to be bastions of open-minded inquiry and spirited debate, have become increasingly hostile to free speech, unpopular views and individual rights. "This is really a betrayal of the left," says Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil-rights lawyer in Boston (and occasional Phoenix contributor), who in 1998 co-authored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. While the sudden departure of an academic administrator might be attributed to careerist impulses and a better job offer, Silverglate adds, "It wouldn't surprise me at all if Gee was driven away, in one way or another."

In any case, faculty members were uncomfortable with the values initiative. Says Beeman, "I think the faculty had deep suspicions, because the program was just kind of plopped down and announced wholesale. It was funded by the chancellor. Nobody knew exactly who had provided the impetus for its establishment. It seemed to be coming along with a number of other programs that Gee was announcing left and right without a certain amount of oversight."

The outcry escalated when students got wind of Gee's speech at Southern Utah University. "That's when people really went nuts on the values initiative," Gannon says. "They'd been telling us all along that the values initiative doesn't enforce any set of values, and then Gee makes a speech that . . . makes it seem like he has just said very clearly that there is a set of values that he thinks is correct." In the words of a student who wrote to the Brown Daily Herald in September 1999, "Few academic decisions have been the source of so much excitement, confusion and skepticism all at the same time."

The funny thing is, for all his chatter, Gee had absolutely nothing to do with the conception or architecture of the values initiative at Brown. In fact, it was Rosenblum who researched and drafted the proposal after she and Chancellor Steven Robert (Brown '62, who helped to endow the program, along with $150,000 from the Hewlett Foundation of California) found a common interest in values education. Still, Rosenblum has strong words for Gee's ill-timed sermon in Utah. "He would never give a talk like that at Brown," she says, "and I think it was his mistake that he didn't realize" that word of it would reach campus. "And I think that the students' response to the speech was fair and appropriate."

IT WAS PRECISELY the tumult surrounding the values initiative that made teaching its inaugural academic course, "The Good Life," so attractive to Nancy Armstrong, a professor of comparative literature, media and culture and women's studies. "Our now ex-president sort of co-opted it for a while and made it look like values in the neo-conservative sense," Armstrong says. "And we had a lot of people on the faculty deeply suspicious of this. Which resolved me, absolutely, not to quit -- to prove that there isn't any topic that we can't talk about at this school. I'm not going to be scared away by my colleagues' fear that we might be doing something conservative, which I think is just as bad as the other impulse."

Rosenblum says the initiative wasn't a response to the "general wave of jeremiads that say, `We have no values and have to revive them.' She envisioned a discussion in which the values of the diverse Brown community were embraced, rather than undermined, and in which students would look beyond moral relativism to come to their own conclusions. "I think it's very important that Brown students be confronted with other ideas," she says. "We are quite a homogeneous little community and a very comfortable community."

Meanwhile, Gee's announcement in February that he was quitting shocked and infuriated not just the Brown community, but others in higher education. Gregorian, now president of the Carnegie Corporation, told the New York Times, "There is an etiquette among educational institutions, that you do not go after a person who has been in an institution for two years only. And if you're the president of an institution for two years, you do not leave, either. I am stunned, utterly disappointed and dismayed."

Meanwhile, the dust quickly settled and the Brown campus heaved a collective sigh of relief. Less than 48 hours after Gee's announcement, Sheila Blumstein, a professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, was appointed the institution's interim president, a move that, for now, has satisfied just about everyone.

But although the perceived threat of Gee propagating his traditional values on campus was gone, the values initiative had, in the minds of some, visited a new plague on College Hill. In March, Brown's liberal orthodoxy was challenged when Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, spoke at the Conference on Participatory Democracy, the first lecture series sponsored by the university's values initiative.

Reed, who had helped swell the membership of a grassroots organization to 2 million people, was Rosenblum's first choice to speak on the value of participatory citizenship in politics. At the same time, some faculty and students were offended by Reed's right-wing agenda, and disruptive students shouted him down before being escorted from the lecture hall -- an instance that epitomizes the strictures on free speech at college campuses. In fact, conservatives like Reed were in the minority at the conference. The next day, US Senator Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, spoke undisturbed on "Liberalism and the Moral Life."

Although prevailing US political values moved to the right after the '60s, "The Ronald Reagan era produced no [conservative] backlash on the campus," says Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based nonprofit foundation that Silverglate helped to establish. "If any, the most persecuted groups on college campuses today are believing Christians and conservatives. Never, ever, would you find a speaker on the opposite end of the spectrum from Ralph Reed shouted down on college campuses. It really speaks very ill of Brown and those students."

The values initiative finally shook off some of its bad vibes through the "The Good Life," a course which attracted about 80 freshman. Campus skeptics saw that the course was not churning out Stepford Students, ready to pull out their piercings and drop their protest signs to run off and join the Junior League. "I think the class, in itself, was not in any way attempting to force any certain viewpoints on us, or trying to convert us as far as our values," says Kendra Torigoe, an 18-year-old student from the San Francisco area.

Team taught by Rosenblum, Armstrong, and two other profs, the course offered an exploration of values from ancient Greece through contemporary times, incorporating such thinkers as Aristotle, Malthus and Thoreau. "All of the things that people were worried about have fallen through and it's just an ordinary, moderately successful course," Armstrong says. "These kinds of initiatives are going on at Brown all the time -- it just really isn't that unusual. It's just some weird adverse publicity that made it so."

Next semester, "The Good Life" will be offered to freshman and sophomores, as will another course that came out of the values initiative, "Justice and Responsibility," along with numerous lectures and other programs. Rosenblum, though, says she'll discontinue her involvement in the initiative if students ultimately choose not to take part. Which means that the ballyhooed values effort could go the way of E. Gordon Gee -- here today and gone two years later.

Brown, meanwhile, is continuing the search for its 18th president and hopes to fill the post by January 2001. Although university trustees will have the final say, Brown is being careful this time around to involve those who were most disillusioned by their former leader, namely students and faculty. One thing seems certain: Brown's next president will bear little institutional resemblance to E. Gordon Gee.