8 highlights from President Tilghman’s "last lecture"

President Shirley Tilghman gave a lecture this Monday sharing valuable lessons from her time as president. She touched on all topics, from the eating clubs to hiring staff and administrators to the realities of Career Services. Here are some of the highlights:

1. “What Princeton needs is more students with green hair.” Tilghman said she struggled with realizing that being the University president required taking more care with her public comments than was necessary when she was a tenured faculty member. She said she had to learn to balance her candidness and her instinct for transparency with her new job.

“So I was going from being a pretty anonymous faculty member — I mean anonymous in the sense that I could behave like any other faculty member, I could say what I thought, I had tenure, no one was going to do anything to me … to suddenly realizing that people were hanging onto every word I said.”

“And I’ll give you perhaps the biggest wake-up call that gave me a sense of this, which was something I said in response to a report from The Boston Globe. And this was said, you know, literally within a couple weeks of being selected. I said, as follows, “what Princeton needs is more students with green hair.” And that, I am convinced, is going to be on my tombstone.”

2. Former President Harold Shapiro told Tilghman, “There are going to be days when you think you have single-handedly brought down a 270-year-old institution to crumbling pieces.” She remembered that during the first five months of her presidency two key administrators resigned after “getting really mad” at her. While she did not mention names, one of them could have been former dean of the Wilson School Michael Rothschild.

“[Shapiro’s advice] held me through six days when I was pretty sure I’d really brought the University to its knees. So that kind of advice was just really wonderful advice to get, and I used it a great deal.”

“It was a week in which two very high administrative people in the University got really mad at me and resigned independent of each other in the same week. This happened in my first five months. And I thought, “Oh God, what have I done.” That was a little scary. I did at that moment think, “Oh, I’ve really done something here.” But seven days later, all was well.”

3. Princeton must have a global presence, but creating a satellite campus is not the way to go about it. Tilghman said she believes Princeton is already truly a global university but that it will probably not follow the path of founding overseas satellite campuses like peer institutions such as NYU and Yale have.

“We draw students and faculty now from all over the world. We are global, we are as global as any company. We are global, but what is that going to mean? I don’t think it means we are going to have a campus in Abu Dhabi. I’m not sure that’s the right model to be a global university for Princeton. It may be for other universities, and I make no judgements … in public.” [Laughter.]

4. “I’m not sure I have a management style — but the one rule of thumb I have is if at all possible is hire people smarter than you.” For Tilghman, having to hire a number of people for posts she had little or no knowledge about was especially challenging during her first months at the job. In particular, she said, she had to balance the mentality she had developed as a faculty member over the years of becoming an expert with the need to rely on other people’s expertise.

“So I got into Nassau Hall and suddenly I was being bombarded by individuals who were coming into the office wanting decisions, and decisions about things I absolutely knew nothing about. And so my first instinct was to say, “Well, where’s the data? What am I going to base this decision on? And send me your spreadsheets, and send me your Powerpoints, and send me what I need to read about this because I can’t possibly make a decision until I’m the world’s expert on whatever it is that you want me to make a decision on.” And after about a month of this, where people would kind of look at me and go “What?”, finally it hit that me that I couldn’t function that way anymore.”

“And that was that I had to learn a little about an incredibly broad spectrum of things that happen in this University. You know, everything from how the endowment is invested, to what deconstructionism really is in postmodern literary criticism. I’m not sure I know either one of those things yet, but I’m on the path to at least being able to say the words.”

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5. “I think that one of the big challenges is going to be to deal with the national discourse that is turning sour about the value of higher education.” Tilghman is still a strong believer in a University education as well as in a liberal arts education.

“Now I may be biased, but I think the immense prosperity that this country has enjoyed over the last century has been due to a very significant extent on the quality of its educational institutions. If you had asked me 20 years ago, what are among the most respected institutions in this country, I would have said I think most people would point to the great universities in this country as some of the most respected.”

“I hope that there will be a president standing here in a hundred years defending the liberal arts in the same way that [James] Madison represented the liberal arts and that I am prepared to defend it today.”

6. “It’s easy for all of us to sit here at Princeton and say, well, I can’t imagine for someone to be teaching only online.” Tilghman also discussed the reality of massive open online courses, and cautioned that while online education seems impossible at Princeton, it may soon become a reality for less privileged universities.

"It would be inconceivable at a place like Princeton, but we are privileged and there are lots of little colleges and big state universities that are struggling financially right now and are grasping at these as ways to cut costs. What’s gonna happen to the quality of higher education? That’s what we should be asking ourselves every single day as we think about this issue. Quality, that’s what matters. Not, you know, if you sit through calculus — but did you learn something important from that experience? I think that’s going to be a big issue for the next president."

“One of the reasons that I am very much in favor of our joining Coursera as part of the movement, the one at Stanford — I think it stimulated a lot of faculty to start thinking about how they teach in a way that I don’t think was happening prior to that. I’m not sure the technology that Coursera uses is the right technology.”

7. “I think [what] we just haven’t figured out, is how to really do good student advising.” Tilghman noted that there were some initiatives she had during her presidency that had not given the expected results, naming Career Services, the residential college system and student advising services in particular.

“I think Career Services is still a work in progress. We’ve made some investments in the last couple of years there, but we’re not doing nearly as good a job in helping you, not just get a job, but how to think about what it is you want to do after graduation. So I would say that’s on my conscience, that I haven’t done a better job in fixing that.”

“The other work in progress, I think is the residential college system. I think there’s something that isn’t quite working right yet. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is and whether we’ve made a terrible mistake by not having all six colleges be four-year colleges. I often hear from students in Forbes that, “You know, I might have thought about staying in the residential colleges as a junior or senior but I had no connection to Whitman.” … I think, we’re just not there yet. We’re still inventing our college system, basically.”

8. “I deeply believe that [the eating clubs] have the potential to be one of the best things about Princeton.” While some have interpreted the University’s promotion of four-year residential colleges as an attempt to pull students away from the eating clubs, Tilghman’s vision suggests that she views the eating clubs as an important component of the Princeton experience.

“We did a survey of the student body, oh I don’t know, seven or eight years, five, six, seven, something in that range, and what we discovered is that for most things we ask you about, the answers were a bell curve. Right, there were tails, but the majority of you were someplace in the middle. When we asked about eating clubs, we got a bimodal distribution. Nothing else about Princeton generates a bimodal distribution.”

Finally, the funniest remark:

“I had a delegation from the math department come in very early on and ask if I could turn Fine Hall on its side. [Laughter and applause] Now their rationale made sense. Their claim, and I believe it because I actually believe geography really matters, their claim is that Fine Hall really inhibits interaction, collaboration, and so they had this image that could just take Fine Hall [drowned out by laughter] on its side and all would be well. So in both cases I wasn’t able to [drowned out by laughter].”

For a full transcript of the lecture, click here.