The future of Rochester’s
economy will be increasingly linked to health care and education, says Joel
Seligman, the University of Rochester’s
new president. And his goal — to take the university from being a “good
institution” to being one of the most prominent educational centers in the
country — could impact the region’s economy.
“I really love this city,” says Seligman. “Rochester is a
great place to live. But it is undergoing a difficult transition from an old
economy to a new economy. The companies of the future probably won’t employ as
many people as those of the past, but there will be more of them.”
Statements like these make it clear that Seligman
understands just how important the UR
is to the area. With more than 16,000 people on its payroll, it has surpassed
Kodak to become Rochester’s largest employer. And that makes Seligman one of
the area’s most influential community leaders.
With an undergraduate and graduate enrollment of more than
8,000, the university consists of six schools — the Eastman School of Music,
the School of Medicine
and Dentistry, and the Simon Graduate School of Business the best known. The
university also oversees the Memorial Art Gallery, a laser research lab, and
the University of Rochester Medical Center, which includes Strong Memorial and
Highland Hospitals.
Seligman is a political science graduate of UCLA, earned his
law degree at Harvard, and has taught law at NortheasternUniversity, GeorgeWashingtonUniversity,
and the University of Michigan.
Most recently, he was dean of Washington University’s law school, where he was
credited with dramatically improving the school’s national standing. The author
of more than 20 books, he is considered an expert in the area of securities
law.
Seligman became the UR’s
10th president on July 1, and within days of taking office, he launched the
most ambitious capital-endowment program in the university’s 155-year history.
In a recent interview, Seligman talked about his new position and his vision
for the university. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
City:What charge has your board given you? What
do they want you to do?
Seligman: There
were five dominant themes to focus on: fundraising, communications, senior
leadership selection and retention [deans, for example], our relationship to
the community, and diversity. Translating this, it means that I see a need to
develop new strategic plans for the university.
City: You’ve brought James Thompson in from WashingtonUniversity to lead the fundraising effort. What will the money do?
Seligman: The key
to taking a very good university and making it a great university is strategic
planning. And the purpose of the planning is to focus. Starting with where the
schools are now, how do we make them stronger? With the medical center, in some
instances it will be: how do we attract and retain the best faculty and
researchers? It might be: how do we offer inter-disciplinary programs? It might
mean expanding: what areas of research do we want to go into?
In some instances, it may mean more support for students.
Each school will be different. Capital campaigns don’t begin with asking for
money. Capital campaigns begin with articulating why the alumni should be proud
to support the school. And that’s why strategic planning is so critical.
City: What makes a college or university
excellent? Can you create an excellent university?
Seligman: It’s
not one thing. You first want great faculty in terms of teaching and research,
and I have come to believe there is not a conflict between teaching and
research. Great scholars tend to be great teachers. You want a school that
students want to attend as their first choice. You want a school that is still
small enough where students accurately feel that their voices count.
I take very seriously community service. You want a school
that not only recognizes its academic role, but that it cannot be remote and
separate from the urban area where it is located.
You want a school, when it has medical center, to have a
hospital that is probably focusing on the most important forms of medicine that
can be taught to students. To be very specific, one of the things I found quite
attractive was the regional strategy with respect to the hospitals. It has
become a truly significant set of hospitals, not only to the immediate Rochester
community, but to this broader region. So this gave me confidence that we could
attract the best faculty and students.
So the answer is yes, you can create an excellent
educational center.
City:How much of a university’s reputation is PR,
and how important is it to, in marketing terms, “brand” the university?
Seligman: It’s
very, very different than marketing a product on Madison Avenue for, let’s say,
Procter & Gamble. This is a university where an enormous number of faculty
and alumni are immensely proud of the accomplishments they achieved here. We
want to effectively communicate those accomplishments and what they mean in
terms of our identity.
The term “branding” would not have been my first choice. But
the fact is, we are one university. Whether you’re in the Eastman School of
Music or the SimonSchool
or the MedialCenter,
it doesn’t matter. We don’t want to lose that sense of collective identity,
because it has a special value.
City: Going back a few years, Strong had gained a
solid reputation as a cardiac care center. But more recently, we hear more
about the research work being done. How are you positioning the hospitals?
Seligman: We’re
clearly a very effective hospital network in the city of Rochester.
And it’s terribly important to the community that we continue to be so.
A medical center is a complex entity. It is not purely about
clinical delivery, nor a school, nor a research facility. It is all of the
above and more. And one of the things that the university does exceptionally
well, to our advantage, is the integration of all of these parts.
We’ve learned that when we have strong patient care in our
clinical enterprise, we offer a better education and a better basis for our
research. And I think you will see us continue to grow in this capacity. Again,
this goes back to strategic planning, and then the question becomes one of
being a vital regional health-care
center. Or will we become increasingly more relevant to the national and world
communities?
City: There was a period when the university
seemed to be scaling back on some of its humanities programs and ramping up on
other programs. For example, there seemed to be a growing emphasis on the
schools that serve the new economy, such as the SimonSchool and the School of Nursing.
Seligman: You
know, in a certain way we have tried very hard to offer students a liberal
education, to create more well-rounded individuals, whether they are in the
medical school, the business school, the education school, or the music school.
We have at the undergraduate level what we call “cluster areas,” and the notion
here is that a well-rounded person should not be focused on just one subject,
but will need and should be exposed to a wider range of interrelated subjects
and intellectual areas.
We are unique in what we call our “Take Five Program,” where
we will pay for a person to continue to take classes here for a fifth year, as
long as he or she studies something different than what they studied in the
first four years. It’s a unique commitment to the integrity to our educational
process.
I am firmly convinced that you cannot have a truly great
university without equally great humanities, without great arts and social sciences,
without great engineering. I am absolutely convinced of it. There may be some
movement, some growth in the university over time. But I don’t want to try to
build up one segment of the university at the expense of another.
I came in and said something that may have startled some
people here, but I absolutely meant it: I don’t intend to cut academic programs
in aggregate here. Does that mean that a department that currently consists of
11 people will always consist of 11 people for ever and ever? No. The schools
may decide they want some growth here and less there, but it does mean that I
am not going to the schools and
insist upon cuts. I will not do that.
City: You’re the new guy, and we know so little
about you. What do you want people in Rochester to know about you at the most parochial
level?
Seligman: Well,
first I want them to know I love Rochester.
It’s a wonderful place. I mean that. Everyone has been so enthusiastic and
receptive. But at one level, what I want more than anything else is to help
build a university which is inclusive. A place where people regardless of race,
gender, religious affiliation, political philosophies are comfortable and can
come together to have serious discussions on the type of academic issues that
lead to a robust academic community.
It is terribly important to me that the university itself
not have a political point of view, that it be an institution that provides a
forum where all serious points of view are welcome. I am, like Tom Jackson
[Seligman’s predecessor], a novelty at the University
of Rochester. We’re the only two
former law professors on the faculty. And I think it’s the case that when the
law operates best, it takes seriously opposing ideas, tries to consider the
evidence, tries to hear facts before reaching conclusions.
City: Rochester has always thought of itself as a
white-collar town. Now it finds itself dealing with large layoffs. I don’t
think 25 years ago anyone would have guessed the UR would become the area’s largest employer.
That creates an extra set of responsibilities for you. What do you want the
area’s politicians to know about your plans?
Seligman: I had
looked at the employment picture before coming here, and I could see the trend
lines. The reality is, over time probably two of the most important areas of
economic activity will be college and university education and health-care
delivery. I am not speaking about just the university and the medical center,
though we may increase some. But this is a thriving community for higher
education.
My sense from meeting with Dr. Al Simone at RIT and from
meeting with presidents at the other fine colleges is that there is a really
strong sense of optimism on the educational side. With respect to the medical
center: this is a thriving institution, and as the regional strategy further
takes hold we will see more and more patients coming here for what we hope will
be really outstanding care.
What I would like to see is the fortification of two types
of relationships that the University
of Rochester has to the city and
the community more broadly. First, in terms of economic generation, I think we
can do a better job in inspiring and helping start-up businesses. I just
finished meeting with our scientists, and I was struck by the amount of energy
and degree of interest we have here. There is so much they would like to do, so
many things they would like to develop.
Next, we have a social role, whether it is as a major
employer or as an educational center. I can’t give you the precise number of programs
that the university is involved with in partnership with the city, but I think
it is well over 300. It ranges from dental care, to the WilsonMagnet school, to community and
preventive health, to urban fellows — just on and on. Many of our students
feel this is an important part of their education, and many of our faculty feel
this is an important part of their research. That’s going to be strengthened
over time.
City: As you looked at Rochester, what in your estimation are the biggest
problems facing the city?
Seligman: I think
in a broad historical sense that the city is gravitating from a period when it
was dominated by manufacturing such as Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb to a
period when a new economy is emerging. Some of it will be quite entrepreneurial,
like Paychex. My sense is that they will be quite scientific and
knowledge-sensitive industries. A few may be spin-offs of the university.
If you look at the city, one can see that the downtown area
has gone through a 20 to 30-year decline and an eroding tax base. There are
problems with the city school district. And as a lawyer, I understand the
concerns with lead-based paint and how it is impacting our children. But at the
core of it, if you had to put your finger on it, it’s the economic base. It
just isn’t as robust as it was a few decades ago. That’s perhaps the biggest
problem, and we must find ways to reignite the economic engine for this region.
At another level, it’s to provide the infrastructure so that
more people will want to come here and stay here or, as the economic picture
begins to pick up, that people don’t want to relocate. I think the single most
concerning thing I have learned about Rochester
is the high number of young people who, once they have graduated, leave. We
want to create a city that is so vibrant that they call it home, and they want
to live here. And that the job opportunities are here, so they can make that
choice.
City: Do you see the university expanding? Will
you be adding a school? Might we see a law school sometime in the future?
Seligman: Let me
come back to that in the future. We have just begun the planning process, and
the challenge to the deans is: everything’s on the table. But I want to give
you a serious answer at a later time.
I am aware that the University
of Rochester’s MedicalCenter is, among Tier 1 research
centers, relatively small. Does that mean that we automatically expand? No, not
necessarily. But it does mean we need to understand why the others are larger.
And from there, what do we think is feasible?
City: If you were meeting President Bush this
afternoon, what would you want to talk to him about?
Seligman: I
suppose more than anything else, I would want to talk about the urgent need to
fortify social programs, and about my great concern that the terrible
calamities of Hurricane Katrina and the enormous burdens we are carrying
because of the war in Iraq won’t lead to a further reduction in social
programs, which I think are vital. And I say that not just because they are
supporting people who are suffering, but because these programs are vital to
our long-term economic health.
City: What other world figure would you like to
meet?
Seligman: Living
or dead?
City: Dealer’s choice.
Seligman (pointing
to a bust of Abraham Lincoln): Not just because of what the man faced. He was a
principled man. And he was concerned for the well-being of all people.
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.
