A Hard Act to Follow

Ten years ago, after the committee searching for the 14th president of Northwestern had narrowed the field to a handful of candidates, the finalists were asked to assess the University they wanted to lead. 

“What we got from a couple of the outstanding candidates were some of the sweet statements about what a fine place Northwestern was,” remembers Victor Rosenblum, a professor in the School of Law and member of the committee. “Arnie Weber did not talk about coming here as a gladiator with a sword to do battle; he asked the search committee if we were as aware as we should be of some of the perceived weaknesses of the school.”

Weber was the committee’s choice, and the quality that so impressed them — his willingness to candidly and coolly analyze a situation without sugar coating or buzz phrases — has been the hallmark of his presidency, a time of immensely important growth for the University. 

Weber, at 64, is leaving Northwestern a stronger institution than he found it — stronger academically, stronger financially and, for want of a better word, stronger emotionally. Faculty, alumni and students look back on a man who shook up the school with his incisive mind, his sharp wit and his ability to engage people and challenge them to work at, or beyond, their potential. 

“We thought when we picked him he would be the best,” says board chairman Howard J. Trienens, who was also on the search committee. “He turned out to be better than we thought he could be.”

One of Weber’s first and most significant acts was to carry out the faculty’s recommendation for institutionalized review of every department, making those reviews a significant new component for improvement of academic quality. 

“He put everybody on notice that you are going to be reviewed, and the president would read the review, and when it was over the head of the unit would sit across from the president and go over it,” says Seeskin. “He raised standards. He raised expectations. He made people aim higher than ever before.”

Of course, you cannot raise standards without ruffling some feathers. Weber, smoking Kents and trying to cope with an endless workload of duties and obligations, is known to dispatch in very short order those he views as wasting his time.

“If you don’t have your act together he’ll see through you in a second,” says Seeskin. “He can be real hard on people who are lazy or confused or not working 100 percent. He doesn’t like B-plus performance.” 

Despite the enormous demands on his time, and unlike many other university presidents, Weber did not let the high-level management of a university come between him and the raison d’etre of the school itself: the students. The classic image of a university president — as Weber himself admitted in at least one speech — is someone who is seen by students once at freshman orientation and again, four years later at graduation. Weber did not want to fall into that trap, and made sure that any student who wanted access to the president could get it. 

“I could spend 14 hours a day on the University’s business and never see a student,” says Weber. “So I thought it was very important to have some specific occasions when I would interact regularly with students, particularly undergraduate students.” 

Not only did he establish monthly breakfasts and regular afternoon conversations with students, he also made a point of meeting with the reporters and editors of the Daily Northwestern at least three times a quarter so that the budding young journalists could question him about topics of interest to their readers. He and his wife also have hosted hundreds of student leaders at the president’s house. 

During the Gulf War, Weber made certain that students had avenues to express their often tangled feelings. “We set up discussion groups in the forms, in Norris, we had services in Millar,” says Weber. “For many of these young people, the benchmark for reacting was Vietnam...When President Bush said, ‘Remember the lessons of Munich,’ we wanted to make sure the students knew that Munch wasn’t a German rock band, that it was an important historical event that had conditioned the perceptions and reactions of the generation making decisions.” 

Perhaps this familiarity and communication are what helped Northwestern avoid much of the wrenching political correctness debate defining college life across the country for much of the past decade. 

“I didn’t worry about [political correctness], not in that sense,” says Weber, “but I took steps to articulate principles and values that govern my tenure.” Weber had laid out his position in his inauguration speech: “Our central value is freedom of inquiry and dissent,...” he said. “Those who would deny these freedoms and substitute indignation — or worse — for inquiry attack the legitimacy of the University itself.”

This is not to say his tenure has been free of incident. Just three months into his presidency, student protesters demanded that Northwestern divest itself of stock in companies doing business in South Africa. More than 120 protesters were arrested in anti-apartheid sit-ins in the central administration offices in May 1985, and 32 protesters were arrested in a similar incident the next spring. In perhaps the most acrimonious situation in Weber’s presidency, his office was occupied briefly in 1987 by four students protesting the denial of tenure to Barbara Foley. Foley was a Marxist-leaning assistant professor of English who led a protest that prevented Nicaraguan contra leader Adolfo Calero from speaking at the University on April 13, 1985. The protesters claimed that Calero had no right to speak and “should feel lucky to get out of here alive.”

“They threw synthetic blood on him and ran a miniriot that prevented him from speaking,” says Weber. “Charges were brought, and the administration supported those charges. Professor Foley ended up being censured by the faculty; it spoke very well of the faculty. And then she came up for tenure a couple of months later.” Asserting that Foley had violated the standards of “academic citizenship,” Raymond Mack, then provost, rejected the faculty’s recommendation of tenure, and Weber upheld the decision on appeal.