Yale Daily News

What I really like about Levin's presidency is that Yale has moved ahead as a modern research university while maintaining the right connections to its past.

Great article! But how much of Yale's greatness is due to Levin, no doubt an exceedingly brilliant, persuasive and diplomatic President, and how much is due the thermonuclear chain reaction of Swensen's endowment?

@#2: before you start collecting on your investments, you gotta have the money to invest to begin with. That Levin has played a huge rule in increased donations is a noticeable omission from what is an otherwise great article.

#2 - Interesting question, but I still have to give credit to Levin. Swensen is only responsible for increasing Yale's wealth. Levin was responsible for directing the application of that wealth. Rich universities result from the first; great universities result from the latter.

Rick Levin, Great President or Greatest President?

Levin should get a lot of credit for a truly huge turnaround at Yale. He arrived at a time when Yale had a massive deferred maintenance load, which had been masking serious financial troubles. He steered the University through some initial belt tightening at the same time as major renovations began all over campus. Yale has vastly improved its accounting and project management systems under his tenure. Yale's relationship with New Haven is no longer a source of mutual frustration. And the Corporation seems satisfied with his approach to Yale's unions. (Levin also was lucky to have Dave Swenson running the endowment....)

In short, Levin is a superb problem solver, and was the right man at the right time. But times have changed.

Now, Yale needs vision, inspiration, and leadership. Yes, Yale is a great research university -- but branding aside is there anything really distinctive about it? (And merely lacking Harvard's absurd institutional ego or Princeton's ethical compromises shouldn't be good enough for Yale). Now that Yale is in its strongest position in decades, we need a president with ambitions greater than just making sure the roof doesn't leak.

Levin is basically still president because a) he feels that he "deserves" to be president during good times having brought Yale out of really bad times, and b) he's too young to retire and hasn't gotten an offer that is tempting (his early sucking up to W never turned into the major government post I think he had been hoping for).

While I admit to being a little churlish for begrudging Levin his victory lap(s) I think Yale deserves more.

Well, Larry Summers still managed to gum things up at Dear Hahvahd, despite El-Erian's returns...

That said, Swensen, too, is a great boon, but he was not the subject of the article.

My opinion of President Levin has moderated over time: while I do not always agree with his social views (or, more importantly, with his facilitation of Yale's massive skewing to the left, but that is common among most academies these days...), I must admit that Yale is a FAR more exciting, energized, and enticing place than ever.

I look forward to Yale FINALLY cementing its place in the sciences and engineering (always quality but long overlooked)--and THAT will have been due to Levin's efforts.

Also, his ability to somehow placate most constituencies has been tremendous; his town-gown efforts ABSOLUTELY amazing; and his building/rebuilding of Yale and New Haven will, one hopes, erase the decades of misery this town has suffered.

Oh, and his increasingly successful business forays, which attract AND RETAIN homeowners, business owners, jobs, and taxpayers is yet another blessing.

So, while I have criticized the man over specific details, he has, on the whole one me over.

The commenter above got it right, I think: Levin has proven a successful bridge from the Old to the New Yale.

Bravo!

Oh, and good article.

Levin may well be one of the great Yale presidents, but he is far from being the greatest, which I think is still a title reserved only for Kingman Brewster. What Brewster had that Levin doesn't (as this article alludes to) is a tremendous vision - a vision that was focused on Yale but also able to see the university in the context of a broader society. No one expects Levin to be as outspoken on the issues of the day as Brewster was, but the way he completely ignores China's human rights violations is still more than a little disheartening.

To be fair to Levin, I think he is a very good president and that the difference between him and Brewster is partly attributable to the different times in which they came to power. Brewster was what Yale needed in the 60s and 70s - an outspoken social crusader with a progressive view of what a university should be. (Yes, he upset alumni with his views on the Vietnam War, but he also upset them with the fact that he started letting in women, blacks, Jews, and other minorities, so his willingness to do that was actually essential to his greatness as Yale's president rather than a drawback from it.) Levin, by contrast, is exactly what the faculty thought he was - a technocrat. And that's what the university has needed the past 15 years, after a period of vacillation and unsteady leadership.

In short, we should praise both Levin and Brewster for filling brilliantly the roles Yale needed them to fill at the time they took office. But while excellence in technical proficiency is admirable, excellence in social action at a time when it is badly needed (with all the courage and integrity that demands) is far moreso. That is why Kingman Brewster remains Yale's greatest president.

Levin's guidance of the university reveals a subtle, measured hand in steering Yale from could have become a university which solely relied on its name to a university which more than lives up to the name and tradition. There's nowhere else I would have rather been than Yale.

Hmm... #6 and #8 post good food for thought.

But is *vision* (sometimes translated as ego or arrogance) even *allowed* these days?

Would a president be allowed to say "This is Yale; we are and will be the best." I mean, the Left has effectively eviscerated such naked chauvinism. How would someone with such love of alma mater rise through the ranks without being pummeled, jeered, destroyed?

In today's pluralistic "nothing is better than anything else" milieu, how, exactly, is a university president expected to exercise such vision?

I point again to Larry Summers...

Brewster provides a precedent in his greatness and a warning in his legacy. He left office in '77, at which point Yale began the slow decline detailed in the article. By the early 90s, the destruction was very nearly complete.

Levin, like Brewster, took the helm during a difficult time and steered the school back to greatness. When he leaves, we must be very careful not to become complacent and allow the same to happen again. Instead of simply riding the wave Levin has created, that wave should be continuously augmented.

I do think greatness is often the result of having the right skill set for the right time; Brewster for instance was a corageous, change-friendly leader during a time of world-wide change (he was less well equipped, though, to handle the serious national slump and associated recriminations in the 70s). Bart Giamatti was an incredibly inspirational figure, but he inherited a university that had huge, unacknowledged problems -- problems that took a huge toll on him. Bart had real personal greatness but his skills didn't fully meet the needs of the time. Poor Benno was mostly phoning it in. He did the university a great service by forcing it to recognize that Yale had big problems, but then he proposed the wrong solutions, executed by the wrong people.

Levin had the advantage that Benno had already gotten Yale to admit that there were problems that needed solving. And he really has done a superb job fixing things.

Levin likes to think that the Bass gift thing was his big mistake; in fact, it was a serious development office screw up (they're in charge of making sure that Yale is keeping top donors happy; I'd bet that the lead development folks at the time managed to convince Levin that things were his fault to save their own skins).

Levin's more serious failings include that he has seemed to promote (or at least tolerate) a punitive management culture. (I believe that John Pepper was working to turn this around, but I'm not sure how much good he was able to do during his short tenure). Yale under Levin has been a frequently miserable place to work at all levels.

Sometimes the nastiness was public; the appalling character assassination of sometime Berkeley Divinity dean Bill Franklin (someone very highly placed in the President's or Provost's office leaked damming, and it turns out false, reports about Franklin to the Hartford Courant) was an episode utterly unworthy of Yale.

While Levin has done an admirable job boosting the sciences and social sciences, the humanities have been fairly rudderless. For just one example, Art History has gone from a department of national prominence to obscurity in his tenure.

Anyway, my overall point is that Levin's greatness depends on there being major problems for him to solve. The longer he stays on while things are going well, the less and less great he will look (and the larger opportunity cost Yale will pay for not having a president with the skill set that current circumstances demand).

Hieronymous (#10),

You're right that visionary leadership is hard to come by now, but that doesn't make Yale need it any less. Larry Summers wouldn't be my model at any rate -- he was famously unpleasant long before he was chosen as president (my guess is that the trustees wanted someone who would shake up the entrenched powers at Harvard, but wound up with more than they bargained for) -- and I don't equate "dreadful loudmouth" with "visionary leader." I sometimes wonder if Yale wouldn't do well looking in the post-baby-boom generation to find a new kind of leader (much in the way that Obama has modeled a new, and very compelling, style of political leadership in contrast with his predecessors from both parties).

Seriously, H, you're doing chauvinists everywhere a disservice by equating "naked chauvinism" (a Yale president saying Yale provides superior education) with Larry Summmers' naked male chauvinism (a Harvard president saying women are biologically inferior vis-a-vis scientific study).

I would also argue that the angry anti-elitism of the mainstream Right is much more of a social obstacle to an open sense of superiority than the sense of cultural relativism on the fringe Left (see: Sarah Palin's "small-town" thumping, or the desperate distancing of the president from his Yale/Harvard education, for example). But then, I don't think vision is synonymous with ego or arrogance anyway. There will be plenty of arrogant Yalies whether or not Yale's president dictates a revolutionary vision; the relationship is hardly causal.

Bosch, you wrote that Larry SUmmers said "women are biologically inferior vis-a-vis scientific study."

Please do not go there. I KNOW that you know that he did NOT say that. Seriously. Please.

Romantic nostalgia for Kingman Brewster (president 1963 to 1977) is amusing. I attended Yale under Kingman Brewster, who largely left the University a shambles. Union and worker trouble was a constant, grating condition under Brewster, including a 10-week strike in 1974, a 6-week strike in 1971 and a 5-day strike in 1968. And although the especially destructive 14-week strike in 1977 was technically on the watch of his immediate successor, Acting President Hanna Holborn Gray (1977-1978), that strike, too, was the product of Brewster's administration.

Nor were the University's finances well tended during the Brewster tenure. President Brewster placed management of the Yale Endowment in new hands, which exposed it to what is widely regarded as excessive risk with little to show for return. The results can to some extent be seen from reviewing the portion of a chart of the Yale Endowment's through time corresponding to the Brewster years (it's not a pretty picture):
http://www.yale.edu/investments/Yale_Endowment_07.pdf

Much is also made of President Brewster's supposedly deft management of the widespread student unrest of the late 1960's. Less is said of how Brewster's handling of those crises alienated many Yale alums, resulting in less financial support for the University from its most important resource. Such nostalgic comparisons generally favor Brewster over his Harvard counterpart, ignoring the rather obvious fact that Harvard emerged from those times of trouble with better all-around alumni/student/university relationships ... and in far better financial condition. Dining hall food deteriorated in quality. Yale's campus became quite a bit more physically run down under Brewster. The bulk of the deteriorations cannot be blamed on New Haven, an all-too-common Yale punching bag.

Certainly Kingman Brewster had his charms. He could be a personally charming and diplomatic man, although he alienated a lot of people (and did not make an especially large mark as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James). Brewster had some vision, but of a curiously local variety. He presided over the coeducation of Yale, which was a good and necessary thing. But it was not well managed or marketed. One can get some idea of how amateurish and inadequate the effort in this area really was by considering the fact that Yale has already engaged in much more planning and thought over the two new residential colleges than was spent on its coeducation! Building on the work of others, Brewster removed vestiges of the almost inconceivable stupidity of academic antisemitism, but somehow without fully lifting a broad perception of Yale as recalcitrant in this area, a perception only recently abolished by Levin. Brewster engineered the admission of more African Americans, which was long overdue. But again without nearly enough effort and planning to ensure that these students felt welcome and at home, resulting in self segregation and a good deal of needless alienation.

One could go on for a long time listing the pluses and very considerable minuses of President Kingman Brewster. Is Rick Levin the greatest president? I don't pretend to know. But being a great president of a great university requires more than charm, intelligence, good intentions and limited vision. If anyone were to ask me (and of course nobody has), I might sum it up this way Rick Levin:

I knew Kingman Brewster. I experienced Yale for six years under President Brewster. You're no Kingman Brewster, Rick Levin. And in my opinion, that's a very good thing.

charybdis:

"he's too young to retire and hasn't gotten an offer that is tempting (his early sucking up to W never turned into the major government post I think he had been hoping for)."

- Not even close. You have no idea what you're talking about.

"Levin likes to think that the Bass gift thing was his big mistake; in fact, it was a serious development office screw up (they're in charge of making sure that Yale is keeping top donors happy; I'd bet that the lead development folks at the time managed to convince Levin that things were his fault to save their own skins)."

- Even more laughably inaccurate.