Powers Steering As UT president Bill Powers finishes 1,000 days in office, the character and contours of a formative administration are taking shape by Avrel Seale When Bill Powers was named the sole finalist for the job of president of The University of Texas, many saw the logic right away. He was dean of one of UT’s most prestigious schools (law), had been awarded for his teaching, and had been on the national radar recently as chairman of the commission investigating the collapse of Enron. The only question was why anyone so clearly at the top of his game would want to take on such a demanding and often thankless job. “When I learned that Bill had applied for the job, I was surprised,” says Kevin Hegarty, who predates the Powers administration by five years as vice president and chief financial officer. “Why would an attorney, who had been dean of the law school, want to be president?” Hegarty was unsure of how a lawyer would approach the problems of a massive university. Would he be legalistic and perhaps reactionary instead of visionary? “Boy, was I wrong!” he says. “It took a few months to really understand how he thinks, but he’s a philosopher at heart, not an attorney. He stirs our creative juices.” Now approximately 1,000 days into the Powers administration (that milestone was Oct. 27, 2008), the broad contours are coming into focus, and it is possible to see from the trajectory of these nearly three years where he aims for the University to go. At the top of Powers’ traits is a calculated audacity: his goal for this institution is to be the best public research university in America. This seems not to be the blue-sky cheerleading that alumni bodies and faculties expect from their presidents. He means it, and he has a plan for getting the University from here to there, from top-tier to top. “I think there’s a real temptation, which we all have, to settle for B+ — ‘we’re doing OK’ — rather than really focusing and saying, ‘By God, we’re going to be at the very top,’” says Powers, in a slow, halting, and emphatic speaking style. He bites off the end of a cigar, chews it, and continues in a raspy tenor. “I see it in myself as well. It is hard to be at the very top — to get there, to stay there — in any field.” He goes on to explain a great divide within higher education. On one side are those who think universities should be efficient mills optimized for getting more young people into desirable jobs. These people, he says, would rather have another 50,000 seats at B+ places than focus on making somewhere A+. “I don’t think that’s good for the state. That attitude is not good for our university,” Powers says. “That is something that we need to fight on the campus and with the alumni. Being one of the great universities of the world is a critically important thing for the state.” To understand what he means, one must appreciate the different niches that create the mosaic of higher education. “Our goal should be to be the very best research university. That’s not the only niche in higher education. Southwestern University in Georgetown is a different kind of university. Their goal ought to be to be the very best in that niche.” The temptation to settle for B+ is something he saw in the run-up to the capital campaign now underway. “Some people said, ‘Be more cautious. Let’s have a $2 billion campaign; we know we can get there.’ The point of having a campaign is not to set the bar where we know we can get. I’d rather have a $3 billion campaign and raise $2.9 billion, or take an extra three months and get to the $3 billion, than set a $2 billion goal and say we exceeded it. ‘Failing’ by a little bit at the $3 billion level is a lot better for the University than ‘succeeding’ at the $2 billion.” For a positive example, he looks no further than his favorite football team. “This is a particularly outstanding group of young men. And that was part of the pain of watching out in Lubbock. It wasn’t like, ‘Aw shucks, it’s just a football game.’ It hurt. And the reason it hurt is because they had set as their goal that, by God, they were going to be the best at this. It takes tremendous courage for those kids to go out and set high goals.” The Powers Style But all politics is local, and no amount of audacious goal setting will work if a president can’t motivate the people around him. Like that of his predecessor, Larry Faulkner, Powers’ I.Q. is assessed by his staff as off the charts. But his personal style differs significantly. “I was never comfortable calling Dr. Faulkner ‘Larry,’” remembers Hegarty, “not because of anything he said or did, but he just had an aura of formality. I was more comfortable calling him Dr. Faulkner. Bill’s quite the opposite.” Powers’ No. 2, Executive Vice President and Provost Steven Leslie, concurs. “He is very engaging. People like him, a lot.” Charles Roeckle, who was made deputy to the president by Faulkner in 2000 and was kept in place by Powers, says his current boss excels with the public. “He is extremely well-read and well-rounded,” and — importantly — loves football and is not afraid to discuss same. One metric of his popularity is that giving to the President’s Associates — a group that donates money to the president’s discretionary fund — is at an all-time high. This personableness is being employed at the highest level: last legislative session he visited with every state senator and a good many representatives, usually one-on-one. But by all accounts, his lofty office has not gone to Powers’ head, and he will just as soon converse with a groundskeeper or food-service worker as with a donor or lawmaker. “Bill’s a walker,” says Hegarty. Once, he had blocked out a week of time to deal with a lawsuit. When it was settled early, he found himself with extra time and used part of it to stroll through a few of the departments and just say thank you to some of the administrative staff. Roeckle observes that both Faulkner and Powers are brilliant men with amazing memories. Like Faulkner, Powers possesses a detailed grasp of the budget, is big on strategic outlooks, and believes in action plans. But their differences are noteworthy too: Faulkner was an introvert; Powers, an extravert. Faulkner listened more during meetings; Powers speaks more. While Faulkner was at home in the digital world, working extensively by e-mail and “addicted to his Blackberry,” Powers relies on his own memory or those around him to remind him of when to be where. “Powers is very visual, very aural; he wants to see your body language,” says Hegarty. Another aspect of the job that invariably comes up is the long hours. “He takes a personal role in engaging deans, vice presidents, and other leaders,” says Leslie. “Everybody knows that he’s going to work tirelessly for his 80 hours a week to do whatever it takes for the University.” Roeckle attests that both the volume and the level of the volume of matters that come before the president are things for which no one can truly be prepared. “The President’s Office is the lightning rod for anything and everything UT,” says Roeckle. Whether it’s a ticked-off alumnus or the governor’s office or beyond, people don’t feel like they’ve spoken to the University until they’ve spoken to the President’s Office. Turning conventional wisdom upside down, Powers says that familiarity makes the heart grow fonder: “When you spend close to 15 hours a day on it, it just reminds you what a fabulous institution it is. You’re never off, and frankly, occasionally you just want to get away and do a crossword puzzle or lie on the beach, but it’s nice being associated with this university. All over the world you meet people that want to talk to you about this university.” With the last of his five children still at home and a wife, real estate attorney Kim Heilbrun, who is active in her own right, striking the “work-life” balance is even more challenging. But perhaps ironically, he sees Kim more than he might otherwise because of all the UT functions they attend together. Adding to the workload is a genuine love of University activities. A big fan of both men’s and women’s athletics, “He and Kim will go to a game and stay till the end, win or lose, and then go to the locker room to talk to the students. They love the University, and everything about it,” says Leslie. “Everything that Bill does is centered around the students,” he says, an assertion supported by Powers’ membership in the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, his emphasis on the undergraduate experience, and his love of athletics. “It’s all about the students.” “He’s hard to keep up with,” Leslie admits. “He has an energy and a capacity for working long hours that wears me out sometimes.” Building the Team While Larry Faulkner did some major restructuring to the administration (splitting finance and campus operations, integrating academic and administrative technology, and elevating IT to a vice presidential level), Powers has brought yet more changes. He has flattened the organizational chart somewhat, bringing athletics and governmental relations directly under himself, at once ensuring more personal control over these high-profile, high-impact areas while relieving some of the load from a thinly stretched vice president for administrative and legal affairs. But wanting more control doesn’t mean he’s a micromanager, says Hegarty. “If you’re delivering on the mark, he’ll let you operate however you want.” He also allows staff members to work outside their portfolios. For instance, Hegarty was allowed to investigate creating electronic textbooks. In three years, Powers has had to replace roughly half of UT’s deans. In so doing he promoted from within: Randy Diehl at Liberal Arts, Doug Dempster at Fine Arts, M. Lynn Crismon at Pharmacy, Judy Ashcroft at Continuing Education; and hired from without: Thomas Gilligan at Business (from USC) and Gregory Fenves at Engineering (from Powers’ alma mater, UC-Berkeley). In addition, he formed two colleges and appointed their inaugural deans: the Jackson School of Geosciences, headed by Chip Groat (previously director of the U.S. Geological Survey), and the School of Undergraduate Studies, led by philosophy faculty veteran and erstwhile Plan II director Paul Woodruff. There have been fewer replacements necessary at the vice presidential level. He lifted the office of diversity and community engagement up in the organization chart and in so doing promoted its head, Gregory Vincent, from vice provost to vice president. He also brought on Brian Roberts as vice president of information technology. But the most significant hire was that of then-dean of pharmacy Steven Leslie, whom he brought in just shy of a year after taking office to fill the position of executive vice president and provost. “Powers is team oriented, and he picked his team very well, especially with Leslie,” says Hegarty. “At first there was trepidation that, because both the president and the provost hailed from relatively small, professional schools, they wouldn’t get the University. That turned out to be wrong.” While he calls Leslie “a nice guy and an eternal optimist,” Hegarty says he also knows how to say no. “Just the right pick.” While Leslie indeed had spent the previous eight years as dean of a small, professional school, his interest in neuroscience and resulting interdisciplinary research had given him broad familiarity with campus beyond the borders of Pharmacy. And because he had co-chaired an earlier provost search committee, he had a significant understanding of the provost’s duties before ever taking office. One would expect that a CEO and his hand-picked lieutenant would have a good working relationship, but the chemistry between Powers and Leslie seems especially good. They have a one-on-one meeting every week and work together every day that both of them can be found in the office. “We’re both just on the go constantly,” says Leslie, “but we find time to get together every week no matter what.” Only occasionally will the two get together for a round of golf, but they do spend every home game together in the President’s Suite at Royal-Memorial. In addition to key hires, a structural change has proven crucial to Powers’ sense of accomplishment: the formation of the drily named but high-impact Policy Planning Advisory Committee. (Powers himself momentarily has trouble calling to mind the words PPAC stands for.) Including leaders from all major campus constituencies — faculty, deans, department chairs, administrators, students, and staff — it functions as a sort of presidential cabinet. The Big Ideas Powers is the first to observe that in many ways, his entire administration flows out of the Commission of 125, a citizen group that met over the course of several years (and still meets annually) to draft a road map for the University’s next 25 years. Powers refers to it, with his signature emphasis, as a “momentous event on the campus.” Virtually all of his major initiatives have their roots in the commission’s 2006 report, especially the Big Three: Undergraduate Studies, greater support for the humanities, and increased ethnic diversity. Although he was dean of the law school, Powers also was deeply involved as the faculty liaison to the Commission of 125 committee that called for reforming UT’s curriculum to give students a greater shared experience, the so-called “core curriculum.” “The core idea of our reform efforts,” he said in his State of the University address in September 2008, “has been not to try to do everything at once. Instead, we created a structure and a process that will enrich our undergraduate experience over time.” The main structure is the School of Undergraduate Studies, which was established last year. And the initial step was the formation of First-Year Signature Courses. This fall, 2,800 freshmen enrolled in these courses, with another 1,000 set for this spring. This means that half of freshmen will experience these courses this year. Most of them are small classes taught by senior professors. To accommodate this effort, six new seminar rooms were built out on the second floor of the Main Building, adjacent to the Life Science Library. It signaled the return of academic life to the Main Building after a long absence, during which students mainly associated the structure with paying their bills and fines. “He was going to transform the undergraduate curriculum. Two years later, he’s got that in place, and done it in ways that really have created excitement on campus, a lot of which has to do with [Dean] Paul Woodruff,” says Leslie. “The benefit of that will be seen years out. And we’re getting it done in ways that are sustainable, rather than just looking good in the short run. We’ve got resources flowing through the Undergraduate chool to the other colleges and schools. “I don’t want to seem immodest,” says Powers, “but I don’t think people appreciate what a monumental achievement curriculum reform has been. The faculty took it seriously, and we’re getting that done.” Elsewhere in the undergraduate experience, Powers’ first 1,000 days have seen the opening of the StrategicAdvisingCenter to help students plan for life and not merely for their next semester’s classes. Powers also has spurred the creation of more research opportunities for undergraduates. The Freshman Research Initiative in the College of Natural Science has given more than 500 freshmen the chance to do actual lab work. The second initiative out of the Commission of 125 was to empower deans and department heads to aggressively recruit star faculty. Specifically, Powers set his sights on history and English, and has begun to see his first victories in each. In history, Chair Alan Tully has recruited six new faculty members, one of whom is Jacqueline Jones, a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the Bancroft Prize in American History, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Likewise, English chair Liz Cullingford has recruited a number of faculty, not least the celebrated poet Dean Young, who holds the new William S. Livingston Endowed Chair. “I believe in Norm Augustine’s book Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” says Powers. “We face a serious issue in the United States if we don’t tend to science and technology,” he says, adding that that is what UTeach, the University’s science and math teacher-preparation program, is all about. “But it is also critical both for our country, state, and for our being a great public university, that we attend to the humanities, social sciences, and the professions.” Powers cites a number of factors that conspire against the humanities today. First, there simply is more focus in the public debate about math and science. Then, as public universities become less supported by the state, more of their outside funding comes from the sciences and engineering, such as National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and corporate donors. “It used to be that if all your money was coming from the state, we’d sit and think, what’s the right balance of education? But more money is coming from outside, and NSF has more money than National Endowment for the Arts.” In his push for better ethnic representation on campus, Powers has logged a lot of miles recruiting students from high schools that historically have not sent many students to UT. During the Q&A portion of his presentations, he says he might hear: “I want to be a medical technician. Do you have a medical technician program?” “Well, that’s not quite the point of a university education,” he says. Naturally, students pick their majors based on what they want their career to be. “Very few people want to be historians or philosophers, like they would engineers or biochemists,” he says. “But history and philosophy can be great foundations for many careers, in which the student might go on to law school or get an MBA.” Having that humanistic background can serve one in a variety of businesses and public interest fields. It’s not favoring one side of the campus over another, he says, but simply helping to bring balance to the University when so many external currents are working for one side. Where the Game Is Played Key to accomplishing any of this administration’s big ideas, says Powers, are structure and budget. “One thing I always ask is, if X is what we want to do, you show me in our budget and in our structure how we’re going to get there.” Powers quotes a state legislator he heard speak the previous day. “He said, ‘Give me your checkbook and let me go through it for the last year, and I’ll tell you what you cherish and value.’ That’s where the game is played. Where do we put our resources? There are all sorts of clichés: talking the talk and walking the walk. The budget and our structures are where we walk the walk.” Powers recalls a conversation early in his administration that surprised him. “Someone said, ‘You know we have a priority for Latin America.’ I said, ‘Where does that show up in the budget?’ And they’d say, ‘No, people just know that’s a priority.’ I don’t think stuff gets done like that. That’s why we have a School of Undergraduate Studies. That’s why we have a Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.” Powers says institutions often set a priority and then wait until the end of the budget process to see if there is any money left over to apply to that priority. “There never is,” he says. “Incidentally,” he adds, “I don’t think you can have 130 priorities — I think you can have four or five.” At a sprawling institution like UT, this is not so much an exercise sunsetting certain programs. If anything, there are too many good projects and eager people to implement things that would be good for the University. Rather, “You’ve got to say, ‘We’re going to budget money for those priorities at the outset, and that comes out of a common pot.’” Not as a formal process but simply as a way of thinking about priorities and budgeting, Powers proposed in his 2007 State of the University speech that if UT had the discipline to set aside 1 percent of its budget for high-impact priorities, that would mean roughly $20 million a year. PPAC, Powers’ “cabinet,” has been key in figuring out where that precious 1 percent should be applied. “We want our scholarships for undergraduates. Money into graduate stipends,” he says, in addition to the aforementioned surge in the humanities. Being Powers’ No. 2 has confirmed for Leslie what he already knew instinctively: “We have far more ideas and potential programs than we have resources to create.” That central reality means his job is one of working with the deans to set priorities. “I think when we go into budget meetings now, people are thinking very differently,” says Leslie, “not just, ‘Would this be a good project?’ but ‘Putting money into this is not putting money into what we said were our priorities.’” The Road Ahead This month marks the start of Powers’ second go-round with the Texas Legislature. And while some past presidents practically have been driven from the state by the process, Powers is philosophical. “I like working with the Legislature,” he says. “Almost uniformly, legislators are doing what they think is right for their district and for the state. Democracy is a very cumbersome and messy way of doing business, but I enjoy being part of that process. “But I do think they undervalue the power of this institution for the state. We are not investing.” Part of his pitch to the Legislature is an appeal to look into the future. “What will people think in 2025? We’ve got to invest in education.” Powers borrows a line from state senator and former Austin mayor Kirk Watson, who says that the current generation is the first to enter the workforce without excess capacity in infrastructure, and not just roads and bridges, but infrastructure of every kind, including higher education. “Frankly, we’re mining our resources. It’s a sustainability resource issue,” says Powers. Along with A&M president  Elsa Murano, Powers will encourage the Legislature to appropriate more funding for the Competitive Knowledge Fund, which rewards successful research, and would help UT renovate, expand, restore, and build facilities on campus. Outside the perennial issue of how much the state will support its largest and most prestigious research university, the common theme in Powers’ legislative wish list is giving the University more control over its own destiny. This starts with greater control over whom to admit. The first thing out of his mouth when asked what he wants from the upcoming session is, “We’ve got to solve this Top 10 Percent issue.” More than 80 percent of UT’s freshman are now admitted automatically by law because they ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class. This percentage has grown dramatically in the last few years, and trend lines suggest that within two to three more years, all freshmen would be admitted under that single criterion, leaving the administration no latitude in whom to admit. In the last session, Powers proposed capping the fraction of freshmen automatically admitted under Top 10 Percent at 50 percent. The bill had made it all the way through both chambers’ conference committees but failed in the final hours of the session, when a number of representatives from rural areas who had previously supported the cap switched their vote to no. “He’s a pretty up guy,” says Hegarty of Powers. “I’ve only seen him down one time, and that was the day after the last legislative session ended. He had lost the Top 10 Percent issue. He took a day of mourning. Then, he was back.” Also file under “Controlling Its Own Destiny” the ability to set tuition. Two sessions ago, the University scored a major victory when the Legislature agreed to give the Board of Regents authority to set UT’s tuition. But nothing is permanent, and it seems that the UT president is destined to have to re-justify to every incoming legislative class the wisdom of that 2005 decision. Politics is part of any president’s job, and while Faulkner, and Berdahl before him, understood that, it seemed to wear on them. Powers — and perhaps this is where the attorney in him surfaces — seems to, if not enjoy, then become more animated by the strategy of politics. Be that as it may, political struggles are always a drag on energy. “You expect to have political fights with external forces. What you don’t expect is internal struggle,” said one staff member. Powers’ team would not, of course, cite examples of internal drama, but one clash was obvious even to casual observers: In 2006, with the newfound freedom of the Board of Regents to set tuition and faced with state support that had been declining against the cost of running the University for some 15 years, Powers assembled a task force to study the cost of attending UT and recommend its level of tuition. The task force included all major constituents and went through four months of meetings and public hearings before forming a consensus. With buy-in even from students, on Nov. 14, 2007, the administration went public with the task force’s recommendation that tuition should increase $318 per semester in 2008-09 and $303 in 2009-10. With it was published a detailed report justifying the recommendation. But before the report was scheduled to come up for approval, the Board of Regents called a special meeting for Dec. 6, 2007, at which the board announced that while it “applauded” the process that the individual universities had gone through to come up with their recommendations, it nevertheless was imposing an identical tuition structure for every UT System university. In doing so, the board capped the tuition increase at less than half of what the UT Austin task force was recommending (4.95 percent, or $150 per semester, whichever is greater, for each of the academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10). For its part, the board seems to be in the unenviable position of walking a tight-rope: trying to meet the crying needs of its constituent universities while at the same time not provoking the Legislature by moving too far too fast, lest the board once again lose all control. It takes chutzpah to set a goal of being the best public university in the United States, especially in light of its current resource streams. But, says Leslie, “We have an esprit de corps across this campus that you can feel. The arts and humanities are being taken care of,” he says, and new interdisciplinary initiatives will pay off big for future generations of students. Leslie says that, as a spokesman for UT, Powers brings an unselfish message to the state of Texas — that the University wants to continue supporting the state in the way it has. (By some accounts, the state’s return on investment for appropriations to UT Austin is 20:1 — not too shabby, especially when compared to current markets.) But that support has to be reciprocated. “In the first 1,000 days,” says Powers, “I think we’ve made tremendous progress. It might not  show much from the outside yet,” he says, but getting the lifeblood of funding to high-impact programs — “that is an absolutely critical thing for me to do.” Says Leslie, “He is a uniquely talented administrator. He’s not afraid to stand up and take a hard stand for the University.” Bricks and Mortar Raising money for, planning, designing, and constructing buildings is an enterprise that generally takes longer than any single president stays in office. So virtually no president could take credit for the building regime that coincides with his time in office. But rarely has the spate of projects to be managed been as vast as it is now. It’s not uncommon to spot eight cranes on campus at any given time. The new buildings on campus today, while thoroughly modern in their function, represent a return to the Spanish mission architecture that gives the core of the campus its character. This is partially the legacy of Robert Berdahl, who as president during the mid-’90s commissioned a new campus master plan, and partially the legacy of Larry Faulkner, who adhered to that plan and during whose tenure many of the buildings now being completed were begun. In Powers’ first 1,000 days . . . • Garrison Hall, home of the history department, underwent extensive renovation. • The Biomedical Engineering Building was completed. • The AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, the University’s new high-tech hotel and meeting facility, opened for business in August. • The second of the Blanton Museum of Art’s two buildings, the Edgar A. Smith Building, was finished. • Bass Concert Hall got a major facelift and a nearly complete update. • The Student Activity Center on the East Mall should be completed in the fall of 2010. Two upper floors will be added to house the Department of Anthropology in anticipation of a new liberal arts building. • The Experimental Science Building was razed — a decision with some controversy — and a new state-of-the-art science building is going up in its place. • The north end of the football stadium shot up.