Big Man on Campus: An Interview with Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

This interview is available both as streaming audio and in transcript form. Trachtenberg was president of George Washington University for 19 years. Prior to that he served as president of the University of Hartford for 11 years. His latest book is titled Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education. When asked about his comments in the book that he hoped the GW board would treat his successor more humanely, he replied:

Well, I was being slightly tongue in cheek of course. What I meant was that college presidents, and my successor is no exception in this regard, are being driven to raise more and more funds in order to feed the institution. And this is daunting and I anticipated that with a new president coming in, the university would have ambitions and would want to take the institution to the next level. That's why we bring in new presidents—to help us focus on the future, to help us define where we want to go, and to write the next chapter of the institutional history. And I had just left office—during my tenure, we had gone from $200 million in endowment to about a billion four hundred million dollars in endowment. And, this gives people appetite. And I thought, my goodness, they need to have a certain amount of compassion for this new man coming in not knowing his constituencies, not yet having a vision for the institution. They had to work with him, and understand he was not a magician.