The Month of May-Hem

The writer is a current president.

April and May are often presented by presidents and provosts as the best time of the year on campus, because of the celebrations and the culminating event of commencements. I love commencement and all of the other celebrations, too.

But this is both the best and worst of times. The current political climate and the events of the past 12-plus months make everything more stressful, but this time of year is always a mixed bag. Because while we are celebrating at our underresourced, inequitably funded university, we are also praying that we meet the current fiscal year budget targets and creating budgets for the next fiscal year. The latter process involves testifying in front of both houses of our State Legislature, a process that can evoke embarrassment but not additional funds, and working with all of the divisions and departments of the university to figure out what we can stop doing, where we can find revenue-generating opportunities, or ways to combine unfilled positions. It reminds me of being a poor grad student looking for coins in the sofa cushion to ensure that I could pay the bridge tolls to visit my parents (that sure dates me!).

Amid this, we are negotiating with our major collective bargaining units, who feel entitled to salary increments that exceed inflation and guarantee every employee the living wage defined by MIT. There is little consideration for the value of their generous benefits and total compensation and no answer to the conundrum of how the university can provide all employees with a salary increase in excess of inflation on an annual basis when our state appropriation hasn’t kept pace for more than a decade and our access mission prevents us from merely passing the cost on to our students, who are already struggling to pay tuition. 

We want to compensate our employees fairly, but their arguments don’t generate resources. When we suggest organizational changes that could create efficiencies and generate resources to invest in salaries, they balk and accuse us of evil intentions (this rarely garners support from the business community, who don’t understand our built-in inefficiency and limited ability to manage our workforce as the result of bargaining agreements and civil service regulations). 

Faculty and staff around our state are perpetually threatening to strike or are on strike, while they remind us that administrators are unnecessary because office support specialists really run the university. They also remind us that they are critical to recruiting and retaining students at the same time they leaflet family tours on admitted student days.

And, the worst part of the worst of times is knowing all the things that we could do to support our students if we had the resources: services that would improve their academic success, mental health and well-being, and career prospects; investments in transformational experiential learning opportunities; the ability to recruit and retain excellent faculty (and I have not even mentioned our leaky roofs and $500 million in deferred maintenance, because it is too depressing and I am desensitized).

So, yes. It is the best of times to celebrate, applaud, and elevate the excellence and resilience of our university community—and the worst feeling in the world to try and figure out how this is sustainable year over year.

The writer is a current president.

“It’s hard, but it doesn’t suck.” Reading that line helped refocus my attention on the joy of service. I am nearing the end of my third year, and I can say the job doesn’t suck and it is hard. It doesn’t suck because ours is a vocation with a deep well of joy upon which to draw. Nonetheless, the hard comes in many forms.

For me, the hard is trivial made catastrophic. As I navigate an intensely complex set of competing threats to higher education, I cannot help but feel frustration when faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni (well, every constituency) want to go to the barricades over the most trivial issues. Sometimes it feels like people would rather rearrange deck chairs than address the gaping hole in the ship, perhaps because we might need to acknowledge that we helped steer the ship into an iceberg?

The hard comes in the middle of the night when I worry about the balancing act: We are changing fast in response to intense revenue pressure. Is it fast enough? Will something else come out of left field and derail our progress? What if it doesn’t work? Morning comes, though, and brings with it fresh energy and resolve. Resolve comes from knowing without a doubt that the work matters. It matters now, 150 years after my institution was founded. Even more, the work today matters as we shore up the foundations for another 150 years.

For me, joy comes from purpose. It comes from knowing others before me did hard things to ensure our life-changing education would continue. I read the institution’s history and hope every president has the benefit of a written history. Otherwise, you risk thinking it was easy for everyone who came before you. It was not.

Joy comes from place—from providing an excellent education to students who would not have access otherwise in a location where we have no peers. Joy comes from knowing our broader community values our institution as central to its history and its future.

Joy comes from watching my colleagues come together to overhaul the curriculum with astonishing commitment, full debate, and real speed. It comes from watching my board coalesce around its responsibility to an institution that, though different from the one they attended, holds at its core a commitment to academic excellence and nurturing joy in its students. Joy comes from being in community.

Joy is the constant current that keeps me moving forward despite the wild swings of the moment.