It’s been said many times that Carleton is a part of everyone who has studied here, but we think that sentiment is also true for the people who have shared their time and talents to lead the college. We asked Carleton’s four living presidents—Robert Edwards, Stephen Lewis Jr., Robert Oden Jr., and current president Steven Poskanzer—to share their unique perspectives on the college’s foundations and trajectory.
Since leaving Northfield, Carleton’s former presidents have stayed busy.
When Robert Edwards left in 1986, he traveled to Pakistan to head the Department of Health, Education, and Housing and to serve as a trustee of Aga Khan University. From there he spent a decade as president of Bowdoin College. He also has worked with the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Now retired, Edwards resides in Maine.
Stephen Lewis Jr. also went abroad after retiring from Carleton, in 2002: he spent four years helping Quett Masire, the second president of Botswana, with his memoirs. He’s served on a smorgasbord of both corporate and nonprofit boards—crossing paths with many Carls along the way. Some highlights include serving as trustee of William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul with Dean Eric Janus ’68; as director of Valmont Industries in Omaha, a company founded by Bob Daugherty ’43; and as chair of Wallin Education Partners, founded by late Carleton board chair Win Wallin. Lewis is also an adviser and counselor to a dozen college presidents.
Robert Oden Jr. serves on several nonprofit boards, including his current appointment as vice chair of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s board of trustees, and advises other organizations on board governance. Like his predecessor Bob Edwards, Oden has worked with Aga Khan University in Pakistan. He’s currently consulting on the launch of two new residential liberal arts universities, one in the university’s home city of Karachi and one in East Africa. In January, Oden and his wife, Teresa, will lead another Carleton Alumni Adventure trip to Egypt.
And, of course, Steven Poskanzer is still at the helm, steering Carleton through the goals set out in its 2012 Strategic Plan, including overseeing an addition to the Weitz Center for Creativity and the upcoming construction of a new science complex. Despite their busy schedules, all four presidents were happy to speak to the Voice about one of their favorite subjects: Carleton.
What makes Carleton unique among liberal arts colleges?
Robett Edwards (1977–1986): The spirit of the place shone through right when I arrived. I found the breadth of willingness to debate and consider and the total engagement with the intellectual world stimulating, and it made the place feel so welcoming. The students and faculty were deeply engaged in the idea of what an education should be—they weren’t withdrawn into departments or disciplinary frames of mind.
Steven Poskanzer (2010–): There are a small number of institutions that are incredibly good in terms of academic quality, where amazing students and great faculty members do the very best teaching and learning and the standards and aspirations are at the absolute pinnacle. Carleton is one of those places, but not the only one. Yet we’re the school in that group that is most comfortable in its own shoes. We’re grounded and stay true to our values, and we’re utterly unpretentious.
Robert Oden Jr. (2002–2010): It doesn’t go well to show off at Carleton. I’ve been at places where people talk about each other’s test scores or how much money their family has. If anybody brags about those things at Carleton, they probably get a dumbstruck response.
Carleton students are extremely genuine and have so much intellectual curiosity. They have this un-self-interested interest in the world—they want to learn just because the world is a fascinating place. I used to be stunned by the conversations I overheard after convocations. Students didn’t say “Where are you going to lunch?” or “What’s happening this weekend?” They talked about politics and world events and the issues raised by the presentation.
Stephen Lewis Jr. (1987–2002): Someone once asked me to describe the typical Carleton student. I said, “The typical Carleton student would be someone who is outraged by the notion that there is a typical Carleton student.” Whenever I told that story to alumni—whether they graduated in the ’30s or the ’90s—everybody laughed, because everybody got it.
Oden: Humor is essential to the life of the mind at Carleton. It doesn’t mean that we don’t take life, ideas, or our friends seriously; it means we know how to put those things in perspective. I remember the first time I went to a Halloween concert. I was dressed in my ordinary clothes and people thought, “Oh my God, that guy doesn’t get it at all!” And then I took off my sport coat and put on a cardigan sweater, and I told everyone that they were special and that I loved the neighborhood.
Speaking of memories, what are some of your favorites?
Lewis: There are so many of them. I had a lot of fun horsing around with students. Once, a group of students calling themselves RAISE—Replace All Institutional Symbols with Elvis—took down the American flag from Willis and sent a ransom note saying, “If you ever want to see Old Glory again, you must perform an impersonation of Elvis at a public event.” So I made it known that I would do this at the next College Council meeting and that I expected them to pay $50 for the damage they’d done. I sang a verse or two of “Hound Dog” and these two guys came in dressed like the Blues Brothers with an attaché case. They opened it up, and inside was Old Glory and $50 in “unmarked coins.”
Another time we decided to prank the students for April Fool’s because April 1 fell on the first Friday of spring term. The Carletonian didn’t publish week one, so I got my senior staff together and we wrote a fake issue of the Carletonian and laid it out just like the real thing—except the e was missing from the name in the masthead. It took many students several days to figure out we had done it. There was a story about how the dean of budget and planning was leaving because he’d been outed as an undercover FBI agent from the ’70s, and another story claiming we were going to invest the endowment in the Target Center in Minneapolis.
Oden: I also had a lot of fun with an April Fool’s prank. I asked the architects who were designing the Weitz Center to make an illustration for a construction sign. I said, “I want you to design a phony building. Make it look like the biggest old bureaucratic building in the former East Germany.” And they succeeded. We called it the William H. Sallmon Administrative Building. The first three levels were parking! We put the sign on the Bald Spot saying it would be built there. For a week I got calls from alumni who were hopping mad, and I’d say, “Gosh, do you know what day that was?”
But as much as I enjoyed being part of the humor on campus, my fondest memory is the symposium we did after Hurricane Katrina. We canceled classes for a day and devoted it to seminars on hydrology, geology, economics, politics, and sociology. The best way we, as a college, could deal with this huge event was intellectually, trying to turn it into a learning experience. When a group of people come together to think about a set of problems, the results are terrific.
Edwards: Some of my happiest Carleton memories are of cross-country skiing in the Arb. I remember one evening the temperature was well below zero as I was skiing past the Hill of Three Oaks, and I thought, “This has got to be the most beautiful place in the world.” I also remember with great fondness teaching my son to ride his bike on campus. My family and I loved the open-sky Midwestern atmosphere of Carleton.
President Poskanzer, what are you looking forward to in the future? What do you think will be the highlight of Carleton’s next 50 years?
Poskanzer: I think the biggest challenge we face—in American higher education and at Carleton—is making sure that the quality of education we provide is not available only to some tiny set of wealthy people who can afford to pay for it. We need to make sure that colleges like Carleton find talented individuals—wherever they are—and make it possible for them to come here and have a life-changing exposure to the liberal arts and to fellow students and faculty members who care about them.
The highlight of the next 50 years for me will be when we’ve found a way not to worry about financial aid or the ability to pay when we are constructing a class, when we can admit any students we want and meet their full need for all four years, and people mention Carleton whenever they talk about the best colleges in the world.
What challenges did each of you face as president?
Oden: I couldn’t get past the challenge of how to be a campus presence while also leading a $300 million fund-raising campaign. Unlike some medieval saints, I can’t bilocate. I just couldn’t be in Northfield and New York at the same moment. But I wanted to do both. For the sake of raising money for financial aid and the Weitz Center, I needed to be among people, talking face-to-face about the campaign, but the whole reason I became a college professor and later a college president was to hang around with students and faculty members. So I tried to handle it strategically. I made sure the New York Times wasn’t delivered to my office. I had to walk over to Sayles-Hill every day to get it. I was never gone on weekends, so I could go to concerts and plays and athletic events on campus.
Lewis: When I first arrived, campus discourse needed some work. There weren’t discussions on contentious issues—there were shouting matches. If there was an open meeting on one of these topics, any sensible faculty member would stay home and read a book. So I started writing notes to respected faculty members when a meeting was coming up, saying, “I don’t know where you stand on this issue, but will you please come and be present?” I knew people wouldn’t say dumb things in front of faculty members they respected. It made a difference. We changed the structure of the governance system to get rid of any assumption of an adversarial relationship between alumni, trustees, administrators, faculty members, students, and so on. I resurrected Larry Gould’s famous catchphrase: “You are a part of Carleton and Carleton is a part of you.”
I also received a great gift during one of my early years. The alumni office had conducted a survey and asked alumni to choose from a list the top three most important characteristics of Carleton. A majority of them—across all decades—chose the same three things: the character of the place, the quality of the faculty and instruction, and the commitment to the liberal arts. So I structured every talk I gave around those three things. Having that survey to guide me to the common ground was just dumb luck. It was really rewarding to get everybody pulling in the same direction—not destroying anyone’s individuality in any way, but just reminding them that we’re all in this together.
Edwards: I was amazed—and gratified—by how involved the entire faculty was in the curriculum. It was well designed, and it expected a great deal from students. There were senior projects, writing projects, all kinds of things in both sciences and humanities that asked students to demonstrate that they controlled the body of learning that was their major. I’d never seen any place do it as well as Carleton.
My one concern was that the professional engagement of the faculty was so intense that it could become a sense of doggedness. Over time, if one isn’t careful, professionalism can become a little destroying, suppressing imagination and becoming routine. So I found some money to release faculty members for a term—beyond their regular sabbatical—to work on a project. It could be research, art, music—the only requirement was that they would make a contribution to the college by producing a “visible product.” One of the first recipients was [music professor] David Porter, who used the money to master the Goldberg Variations and then gave a campus concert when he returned.
Undergraduate teaching is more than a job and more than a duty. It’s got to result from faculty members who have a kind of aeration of the mind that keeps the joy in what they’re doing alive.
Carleton is perhaps best known for its excellent teaching faculty. What’s the secret to our success?
Poskanzer: It starts with a unity of purpose. We do one thing here: undergraduate education. And we do it in a way that’s small in scale, personalized, and intensive. That’s the core base we’re working from, but it goes beyond that. At Carleton, no matter how distinguished faculty members are as researchers or gifted as artists, they will cite students as the most fulfilling part of their professional existence.
Everybody comes here wanting to teach undergraduates, but when you get such a strong reaction from students who really want to learn, it makes you want to do even better. And when students see that faculty members care about them and want to teach or use their research to help their teaching, it makes students want to learn even better. So there’s a reinforcing cycle of respect and care that makes the teaching so effective here.
Lewis: There’s a clear symbiotic relationship between faculty members and students at Carleton. They feed off each other’s enthusiasm. I oversaw a reaccreditation process in 1998 and the accreditation team told us that when they asked faculty members why they stayed at Carleton, almost all of them said, “Because of Carleton students, of course!”
Oden: I was surprised by how selflessly faculty members wanted to help one another make their teaching better. The president shares Laird Hall with the English department, so I’d sometimes overhear professors talking. One would say, “I’ve got a problem in this course,” and another would give advice. That doesn’t happen at a lot of places. Sure, you want to be a good teacher, but you’re not going to admit your struggles or share your best secrets! There’s a willingness here to be vulnerable and to abandon self in the interest of everybody being a better teacher.
Edwards: I can’t imagine a faculty more deeply engaged in its mission than Carleton’s. In all the reading I do these days, in the popular press and beyond, there’s a certain sense that the educational mission has become joyless. It’s burdened by students’ apprehensions about loans that have to be paid off, and this generation has been exposed to some bad rhetoric about how the world is going to be extraordinarily difficult, so the best they can hope for is to engage in hedonism. I don’t think that’s necessary. The fact is, college is just the beginning of a joyful mission. One can always go on learning. And it seems to me that Carleton faculty members have kept that joy present at Carleton.
What advice would you offer future Carleton presidents?
Lewis: Stick to the core and don’t mess with the recipe. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the colleges that are really strong stick to their heading, and the ones that get in trouble have wandered off course and are doing things that aren’t related to their core. When you have a good culture, you can’t take it for granted. You have to continue to nurture it. I see Steve [Poskanzer] doing that now.
Poskanzer: The benchmark I try to use when I make any decision is to ask myself what is right for the long-term health and success of this institution. I am the beneficiary of my predecessors’ willingness to do that. Fundamentally, the students are the central reason we’re here, so when in doubt, I ask myself what’s best not just for the students of today, but also for students 20, 50, or 100 years from now.
Edwards: My advice is for the students: Learn to love what you’re doing in your education, because you’re going to live for a hell of a long time, and you’d better have something in your head to amuse you when you are old! Even in my 80s, I am absolutely fascinated by the world, and the liberal arts education I received pushes me to read to the limits of my understanding in new areas. I wish the same lifelong joy for Carleton’s students.