John Sexton Interview (page: 5 / 6) Education & Law	Print Interview

When you took over as NYU President, you made the analogy in a speech, "We have to be a symphony of faculty, not individual soloists." As President of the University, do you find yourself dealing with some of those same dynamics?

John Sexton: Well, the same dynamics do exist at the university level, and it's the same call. And NYU, in a way, is -- well, a man named David Kirp, who is a professor at Berkeley, wrote a case study of NYU and, in the opening paragraph, the last sentence is referring to the time -- the 20 years before I became president -- he wrote, "NYU is the" -- and he italicized "the" -- "success story in contemporary American higher education." And I think that's a fair critique of the university that I inherited. NYU is the -- and he italicized "the" -- success story in contemporary American higher education. So, that's the university I inherited.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Now, the interesting thing about NYU is it carries in it the kind of blood of immigrants. It's very much -- it was founded by Albert Gallatin to be, in his words, "In and of the city." I mean, we embrace New York -- which tends to be a tremendous locational endowment for us, that we have, in a unique way -- I mean, Columbia, you could take Columbia and put it in Iowa and it would be a great university. If you took NYU and put it in Iowa, we would die, because we are symbiotically tied to the city. We're the second largest property owner in the city, I think. And yet we don't have a single gate. We don't have a single blade of grass. You walk out of our buildings, you're on the sidewalk. Except for Washington Square, where many of our buildings are but not most, the building next to an NYU building is likely not to be an NYU building. We're eco-systematic with the city. So this wonderful place has in it the blood of the immigrants. And, of course, the characteristics of that blood is never to be satisfied. I mean, immigrants come yearning for a "better." And the wonderful thing about NYU is it never will proclaim that it's in its golden age. Each generation seeks to be better in the next generation.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

So even in this moment, when I became President -- you know, when David Kirp was declaring us the success story in contemporary higher education, there was a yearning to do something beyond that. Now, there was a cacophonous feature, to pick up on the symphony metaphor, to NYU. So the entrepreneurship challenge for NYU, and for a leader at NYU, is to create more synergy, more connection -- without stifling creativity. So, it's very much the same drill. It's in a different modality completely. The big difference in my life is a movement from retail, where I knew the name of virtually every student -- and certainly of the family members of every faculty and staff person -- to wholesale, where half the community doesn't know my name, and 90 percent of them wouldn't recognize me. And that's a different kind of leadership challenge. But it's the same issue.

Where do we stand now with regard to tenure and academic freedom -- two of the hot-button issues that you have been grappling with in recent years?

John Sexton: Well, both tenure and academic freedom are highly complex issues. What I've begun to do -- and have done -- when you're dealing with this huge community that is NYU, and when you feel a burden to be able to articulate mission and goal, but you don't have the hubris to think that that's something you have the right to do ex cathedra; that you have to listen to the community -- what I've done is put out a series of what I call "reflections." And these are not postcards. These are 40 to 60 pages long each. And I've now done seven of them on different topics about the university. I put them out, and people respond. The whole community gets them, and people respond, obviously with e-mails, but I have town halls, Saturday sessions with faculty. And then regularly I revise them, based on what I've heard, in a way of kind of saying, "Is this it, yet?" "Is this it, yet?" But, it forces a conversation. One of the reflections I did, I did on the role of faculty in what I call "the common enterprise university." And I try to disconnect the notions of tenure and academic freedom in that piece.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Academic freedom, it strikes me, is something that everyone in the university should have, not just the tenured professors. It may well be that tenured professors get a job security that looks like academic freedom. But we wouldn't want a university where only those people enjoyed the benefits of academic freedom. So, to the extent that you make academic freedom depend on tenure, it seems to me, you're being seriously under-inclusive. So, I think that we have to safeguard academic freedom generally and robustly, severed from the notion of tenure.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

On the issue of tenure, I of course believe that in a research university especially, the core faculty -- and therefore the core governance of the university -- reposes in the people who made, with the university, a reciprocal commitment that's lifetime. And there are standards associated with that that are very high and rigorous and, if applied correctly, demand a lot from the professor and, in return for that, the university makes its commitment to support his or her research.

I do think we will be introducing, in the research universities, other modalities of being a member of the community. Some of them are obvious, like part-time people -- adjuncts, they're called. I mean, if you're in New York and you don't take advantage of the ability to bring in someone like you to be part of a media and communications, you know, on a part-time basis; if you have Marty Lipton, the leading corporate lawyer in the world, and you don't bring him in as an adjunct to the Law School, you're really not doing your duty.

But there are other modalities I spell out in this paper.

It's been controversial, because you're talking about teachers without the promise of tenure.

John Sexton: Well, it was initially controversial, because I think people thought what I was saying was a devaluation, or even an attack on tenure. I think as people came to understand what I was saying, it was allowing career choices in different ways. You know, I have a number of people who have left tenured positions to come to NYU into a position where they are master teachers -- which is a five-year appointment, renewable. But, now you say, "Well, why would a person do that?" Well, if the only norm you use in answering that question is, "Why would you give up lifetime job security for a five-year renewable contract?" -- then that's a good question.

On the other hand, if you introduce other norms -- for example, if you're dealing with a person who is strong enough that he or she isn't worried, ever, about not being wanted -- it's just not an issue in their lives -- the lifetime security means nothing. More important to that person might be a connection between the expectations associated with the title and what that person wants to do at this particular moment in his or her life.

So, for example, if I would prefer, in a period of my life, to move away from the life of creativity and research as being a kind of co-equal modality with teaching, and I'd like to throw myself more fully into teaching, and I want to be honored for that, well then doing this master teacher assignment seems more appropriate than to be a tenured professor where, frankly, the expectation is that the modality would be the same.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the problems with tenure is the fact that it protects those people who we ought to be shaming, even though we have tenure. We don't use honor and shame enough.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

So, if you broaden what's important to people, you could see what I've seen, which is that some outstanding people, who could have whatever status they want, opted to choose. In the same way, by the way, that Marty Lipton opts into being an adjunct professor, even though he would qualify for tenure at virtually every law school in the world, if not every law school in the world. Why? Because that's what describes his life preference in terms of mixing teaching with the other things he's doing, namely, practicing law. And one can think this out and see why one would choose one or more of these categories.

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