The author, currently president of Hampshire College, previously taught classics and comparative literature at Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale University, and served as executive dean of letters and science at Berkeley. A version of this essay first appeared in Inside Higher Ed (insidehighered.com), January 25, 2007.
I can’t say that I was surprised that some of the inquiries and interviews that followed my appointment in 2005 as the fifth president of Hampshire College, in Massachusetts, had to do with the fact that I arrived at the president’s house not with a wife, and certainly not alone, but with my partner of 27 years. Of our nation’s several thousand college and university presidents and chancellors, an exceedingly small number are known to be gay or lesbian. The word was that I might just be the first gay male president of a residential college, and certainly, along with friend and mentor Charles R. Middleton, president of Roosevelt University in Chicago since 2002, among the first few who have not been closeted.
Throughout my career in academic administration, I have been keenly aware of this particular (if rarely mentioned) “glass ceiling,” but I’ve tended to regard being gay as ultimately tangential to my roles as professor, dean, and now college president. Of course, I knew that not every college or university searching for a new leader would look at it that way. I was fortunate enough in my last post to be able to take the position that I was not interested in any institution that wouldn’t apply in practice its policy of non-discrimination language based on sexual orientation when hiring someone for its top position. I’m proud that Hampshire was entirely welcoming of my partner and me from the first interview with the search committee through discussions with trustees and our on-campus visit.
And yet, perhaps my being gay is not as tangential as I once thought. Among those who interviewed me during my first few months was Kirk Snyder, a lecturer for the Center for Management Communication at U.S.C., who was completing a book on gay leaders at the time. Snyder began his project several years ago with a survey that found that employees of gay managers were substantially more satisfied with their jobs than the average employees, and he went on from there. The resulting book, The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders … and What Every Manager Needs to Know, was published late in 2006, and I ended up as one of the featured “executives.” The passage from The G Quotient that left the biggest impression on me concerns a work situation that does not support inclusion and equality. The words belong to an active-duty U.S. soldier who exchanged e-mails with Snyder about his workplace: the battlefield. “Primarily,” Snyder writes, “he talked about how it felt to be expected to put his life on the line every day for an employer that didn’t value him enough as a human being to let him be who he is in the world.” In the soldier’s own words, speaking of the people he works with: “[T]he respect they show me … isn’t real because they won’t let me be real.”
And maybe it’s less tangential than I thought to my being the best president of Hampshire I possibly can be, where “it” is now not so much that I happen to be gay as that I have always been open and honest about this fact, even in a world that is still sometimes hostile. It seems to me that openness and honesty, especially when they entail risk, are values that we should look for in the presidents and chancellors of institutions of higher education, and perhaps in all leaders.
Over the past eighteen months I’ve been surprised by the number of times that I’ve drawn on my own experiences and perspectives as a gay man and spoken with the license of one who has never hidden this major fact of his life. For example, in the convocation remarks I addressed to new and returning students in September, I spoke about what I called “habits of mind,” some bad, some better. Given the realities of my own life, there was special meaning to my also placing in the first category “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which I critiqued less as a current governmental policy than as an epistemology of willed ignorance and active deception. In the context of a college convocation, a president would naturally contrast the willingness to accept half-truths and the encouragement of deception, on the one hand, and the cherished goals of education and intellectual ideals, on the other. I believe that students on our campuses really do look to their teachers and presidents to be individuals of integrity and courage, willing to speak their minds honestly and openly even when it involves taking controversial or unpopular stances.
One does have to pick one’s battles carefully, and not every silence betokens character deficiency. There is or should be a legitimate sphere of privacy around the lives of one’s own family members, and for obvious reasons presidents and other college officials must be circumspect when asked about personnel cases, grievances, or disciplinary actions at their home institution. There remain plenty of topics that can be discussed, and should be, by a college or university president. The long list might begin with issues directly impacting higher education but would include—and these are but a few examples—the environment and energy policy; corporate and governmental ethics and responsibility; the criminal justice system and our rates of incarceration and execution compared to those of nations we usually consider our peers; unequal access to opportunities of all sorts, at home and abroad; and democracy itself.
I even have the sense that a broader spectrum of society, certainly broader than the blogosphere or much of talk radio might lead us to believe, is ready to applaud college and university presidents for championing principled positions, well argued and well articulated. Again, there are plenty of individuals, and not just off-campus, who approach certain issues with their minds made up, but this simply presents us an opportunity to broaden the argument, to model rationality, and to raise the general level of discourse.
