The Politics of Presidential Appointment. Sheldon Hackney

Democratic Party to the center of the political spectrum. In broad terms, his politics were my own. Lucy and I had contributed the maximum allowed by the law and our budget as soon as there was a Clinton Campaign organization in existence. A year later, in the fall of 1992, I joined a group of university presidents in the unusual act of endorsing Clinton for the presidency. Looking back, I am sorry I did that, not because of any judgments about Clinton’s performance but because it is not a good idea for university presidents to endorse political candidates. It is fine to speak out on public issues having to do with education, and I have done that throughout my career, but engaging in partisan politics risks politicizing the university in an unhealthy way.

      Nevertheless, when I was poking through the woods of the Farm Neck golf course with Vernon Jordan just before Labor Day in 1992 looking for our errant tee shots, I was already a firm supporter of Bill Clinton. At the urging of our playing companion, Don Brown, with whom I had been talking about my future, I explained my “what next?” problem to Vernon. During a previous round of golf at Farm Neck, he had told me that under no circumstances would he take a position in a Clinton administration, but I nevertheless told him that working in Washington in a Clinton administration was something that might interest me.

      As usual, Vernon gave me very good advice. While acknowledging that there might be a chance for me to do something interesting in Washington, he told me to think carefully about two things. Did I want to make the financial sacrifice a tour in government would entail, and did I want to live under the heightened scrutiny that public service at my level would certainly bring? Washington was getting to be a mean place, Vernon said, implying that he was not sure that I could survive in that atmosphere. He was right to worry. Nevertheless, he said he imagined that he and Warren Christopher would be involved in the talent search, if Clinton were elected, and that he would be glad to look after my interests.

      I told the Trustee Executive Committee at its September meeting that I intended to leave by June 30, 1994, and that I thought I should announce this publicly at some time between January and June 1993. The tail end of any college presidency is always tricky. On the one hand, it is desirable to provide enough public lead time for a careful search for the next president and then for a smooth transition. On the other hand, it would be good to minimize the resulting “lame duck” period of inevitably slowing rates of progress. I hoped we could get it right. The departure of the executive vice president was a blow, of course, but my chief-of-staff, John Gould, had moved over to serve as acting executive vice president while the search for a permanent EVP proceeded. John was doing extremely well in a challenging situation. I had also kept Mike Aiken, the provost, fully informed of my thinking, so I could expect him and perhaps Rick Nahm, the vice president for planning and development, to be open to job possibilities elsewhere. I worried about the appearance of my administration “unraveling.” On the other hand, there were several deans who could serve as interim provost or even interim president, and the development staff was deep in talent.

      The fall was packed with problems both routine and unusual; I was also teaching my undergraduate seminar on the history of the 1960s. While juggling the crammed agenda with as much of the outer appearance of inner serenity as I could muster, Lucy and I went to Korea and Japan to make connections with alumni/ae and to cultivate fund-raising possibilities. I got through the meetings of the full Board of Trustees in late October with no damage, and Lucy and I were elated when Bill Clinton won the election on November 5. I was particularly pleased that I had invited Hillary Clinton well before the election to be Penn’s Commencement speaker in May 1993 whether or not her husband won the election. Lucy and I went to Washington for the CDF gala in November soon after the election. The President-elect and Hillary attended. Hillary spoke after dinner and was impressive. Lucy and I exchanged pleasantries with the Clintons at the reception, and it was interesting to discover how thrilled we both were with that simple and inconsequential event. Even though we have lived lives that have brought us into frequent contact with the rich, famous, and powerful, so that we are no longer excited by the prospect of meeting a celebrity, the aura of the American presidency affected us, just as it does most Americans.

      Some time between the election and Thanksgiving, I worked up my courage and called Vernon Jordan. He and Warren Christopher were indeed deeply involved in managing the transition. At Vernon’s suggestion, but without any expectations or any particular position in mind, I sent him my curriculum vitae, the first of several that disappeared aimlessly into the great maw of Washington. More purposefully, I wanted to get a delegation of college presidents in to see the President-elect to emphasize the importance to higher education of the student-aid programs and the research budgets administered by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and various cabinet departments. Indirect cost recovery on research contracts was an especially hot topic then, and I hoped we could explain its mysteries to the President-elect in a more sympathetic light than was being shed by Representative John Dingell or the daily press.

      Realizing that every other organized sector with things at stake in Washington would be pressing for a similar audience, I was prepared to be shunted aside to see Johnetta Cole, the president of Spelman College who had just been named to head the transition “cluster” that included higher education. I knew Johnetta only slightly, but favorably, from our service together on the Board of the American Council on Education, the “umbrella” organization for all post-secondary education. She would be a friendly face and sympathetic voice.

      Vernon told me that he would see what he could do about getting an audience of some kind for me, but he warned that my delegation could not look just like me. He meant that it could not consist entirely of white males representing elite research universities. This hint from a friend alerted me to the importance of the “politics of perception,” the ruling ethos of the public world with which I was about to collide, and it made me think again of the disjunction between the way I think of myself and the thing that I sometimes symbolize to others.

      With that warning tucked into my subconscious, I continued to chip away at the year’s agenda for Penn, and to mull over my “what next?” problem. I had for some time been aware of a troubling proposition that applied to me. Sometimes, you cannot be the person you want to be by doing the things you want to do. In my case, there has been a contradiction between the pleasure I get from contemplative pursuits—puttering in my study, reading, thinking, writing, preparing to teach—and the satisfaction I derive from being at the center of action, preferably leading an organization toward a worthy goal. I love the process of thinking and writing, the ways in which a teacher/scholar spends his time; I don’t enjoy the ways in which a college president spends most of his time, even though I love being at the center of decision making.

      In addition to this unresolved conflict in my psyche, certain other personal disabilities emerged from my late-life vocational crisis. I was raised in modest circumstances in a Methodist family in Birmingham, Alabama. The virtues that I most admire were absorbed from that strict upbringing: humility, self-sacrifice, courage, determination, self-discipline, integrity, and service to others. I certainly do not claim that I always exemplify those virtues, but they are the ones by which I measure myself.

      Somehow I also managed to infer from the conscious training that I got in Southern manners that they were not just empty forms, not simply gestures that marked one as belonging to a particular stratum of society, though they were that as well: giving rise to the term, “polite society.” They were all based on the belief that selfishness is bad. Each of us must realize that we are not the only individuals in the world, so we have to work out ways of sharing the world with others. There are many ways of doing that, of course, but in the South of my childhood, Christianity was the unspoken paradigm: men were to defer to women, the young were to defer to the old, the able were to defer to the infirm, and the strong were to defer to the weak. Since we are all God’s children in equal measure, it was not polite to do anything that would call attention to an inequality. Hip post-modernists would hasten to point out that these rituals of manners “enacted” or “performed,” and thus reinforced, the prevailing patriarchal order. If this is true, it is true in an upsidedown kind of way, in a way that can only be understood in terms of the Christian paradox: Jesus as both Lord and servant. This is the opposite of the way segregation “performed” the caste subordination of blacks that was required by the dominant white Southern society. The more important function of