Hiring Gifted Faculty, Raising Money, Being a Woman Leader

Leaving the Arts & Sciences deanship, Virginia Sapiro will forego rewarding challenges, but also many seven-day workweeks. Photo by Frank Curran

Virginia Sapiro’s favorite chocolate is bittersweet, a word she says captures her feelings about the impending curtain call on her eight-year deanship at the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

“I’m eager to go on to the next part of my life,” she says. “I have things that I want to do and need to do, but this job is an amazing one. I’ve made a huge difference. My life has become so much richer because of the things I’ve learned, the people I’ve met.”

How large a difference? The numbers tell the tale: one third of the almost 700-person full-time Arts & Sciences faculty were hired on Sapiro’s watch; freshman applications have jumped 38 percent, to almost 28,000 last year; and donations to the college have doubled.

Sapiro’s last day on the job is June 30, when she will take a year’s sabbatical and return to her tenured professorship in political science. (Her research expertise includes political psychology, political behavior and public opinion, elections, gender politics, American political development, and feminist and democratic theory.) Sapiro says she may also teach in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

Nearing the exit door of her deanship, Sapiro is collecting plaudits. She received the International Society for Political Psychology’s Harold Lasswell Award for “distinguished scientific contributions in the field of political psychology.” Past winners include noted scholars James MacGregor Burns and Erik Erikson. Meanwhile, the CAS advisory board has pledged $170,000 for the Virginia Sapiro Academic Enhancement Fund to defray the cost of class trips, recognizing Sapiro’s efforts on behalf of learning outside the classroom. Past CAS excursions studied reptiles and amphibians in Florida, art at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Mass., and how the other half lived at New York City’s Tenement Museum.

BU Today chatted with Sapiro about her accomplishments and her plans.

BU Today: Do you know what you’re going to be doing on sabbatical?

Sapiro: I’m most likely going to do a history of higher education in the United States, with a political scientist’s eye. I’m fascinated by this unique system of higher education. We have publics and privates and elite universities, and comprehensives and Bible schools and community colleges—this host of different institutions that developed at different times in our history. People developed them because they were solving particular problems. People are saying, “Aah, we’re in crisis! Higher education will never be the same as it ever was before because of…” And that may be true, but it’s been true many, many times. To understand the future of higher education, I want to understand these really interesting shocks on the system, that we have the craziest higher education system in the world, and it works the best.

I think it has to do a lot with our federalist system, with how we treat institutions, public and private, with an early frontier development of education. It’s not like most countries, where the central government figured out what the education system that works the best would be, or you have the strong church or religious organization that then develops the system of education. If there’s a real puzzle for me, it’s why is this crazy, lunatic system so successful?

Is there one thing that you are proudest of or that has most changed CAS for the better?

I’m going to be greedy and pick two. The first one, because it will have the longest legacy, is the faculty hiring. More than a third of the tenured/tenure-track faculty were not here when I was hired eight years ago. I’ve hired over 170, not even talking about the huge number of lecturers. If I hired someone last year, in 40 years, that person is likely to be here. So I’ve created the next generations. Not me; the leadership of the University, of the college, the departments have put in place the core people in this University. The faculty are amazing. They’re better than any we’ve ever had.

It is up to the faculty at a research university to hire the faculty, so they do most of the work. But what a dean does is set the process and the standards, and I’ve changed both of those. I personally run workshops with the recruitment committees to help people understand the best ways of doing this, and then my associate deans and I review hiring choices within 24 hours. It’s like the maestro. A dean is no good without a great faculty. It’d be like having a great conductor with no musicians or with bad musicians. But it’s going to be that much better an orchestra, especially a big, complicated orchestra, if you’ve got a conductor who knows how to bring it together and knows how to get the best music out of everybody.

The second accomplishment concerns fundamental changes that I instituted, especially how we work with our entering students in the freshman year, all the support we give them. Changes in advising, the first year experience. I believe we’ve become that much more student-centered. Go down to 100 Bay State Road and look at the Student Academic Life office, which I reorganized, and our advisors and the programs they have there.

My students include every undergraduate on campus, regardless of college, because they all take our courses. I [advocate] for what I think is right in higher education and the support of faculty, regardless of their rank. I think I’m a bigger mouth than most people, but I have a long history of understanding negotiation and so forth. I listen. It’s give and take.

Do you have to have a bigger mouth as a dean by virtue of being a woman? Is academia open to women leaders?

What my field of research says is, no matter what kind of a mouth a woman leader has, she will be regarded as having a bigger mouth. So there’s still a degree of sexism. The fact that when one speaks with declarative sentences, is very clear, and all of that, you get points taken off for that.

I think the bigger issue is that being dean of a college of arts and sciences is huge and complex. People get tired of me saying that—they think I’m saying that I’m better than others, and I’m not—but I run a college that’s bigger than the University of Rochester. I have to understand things from the history of art and architecture to the Higgs boson to urban politics to microeconomics. That has an impact on how you analyze and how you think about things, and how intense you are. Before I came here, I was working in a provost’s office. I used to wonder why the dean at the equivalent of CAS at my former institution was always so grumpy. And now I know.

I found the deanship to be often 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. You have to be efficient, and rather than loud, you have to be clear. I have faculty telling me every day that the amount of transparency, the degree to which I care about the place, my concern about fairness, my concern about the welfare of the faculty and the students here is something that they see, and that’s something I’m prouder of than my big mouth.

BU has become a leading research university, with a lot of emphasis on research in the sciences. Is it difficult for a liberal arts college to get its funding, its respect?

A college of arts and sciences stands on three legs: the natural sciences, the social sciences, the arts and humanities. You cannot be a great research university without all of them. You can be a tech school without the humanities and the social sciences.

So a lot of universities put the natural sciences up first, because, yes, there’s more funding for their research. It’s more expensive to do. If I’m doing the best research in the world on literature, I don’t need a $2 million laboratory or a $1.5 million piece of equipment. But that doesn’t mean it’s more important.

Remember, the basic sciences are part of the liberal arts. I’m training chemists and biologists and computer scientists and mathematicians and econometricians. But I maintain that the liberal arts and sciences is more important than it ever was because I believe we are really the first generation of people who know that we don’t know what the future looks like. We don’t know what jobs will look like in 20 years. To train today’s students for today’s, or literally tomorrow’s, jobs is crazy. I want to make sure that they have fundamentals in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, writing, computation, foreign language, all of those basics, because they will be able to be leaders in whatever the economy looks like in 20 years, after I’m gone.

There was recent research that shows that with salaries and employment one year out of college, engineering schools do better. But when they look to see what kind of place does the best 20 years out? It was the liberal arts colleges. Because the liberal arts curriculum requires that your education consists of a major, which is depth in a field, but also that you must understand fundamental things about a breadth of knowledge, of humanities, of sciences, of social sciences. You should be able to count, to write. You have the equipment you need to continue to learn.

What is the biggest challenge facing your successor?

Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.

We are trying to grow a research faculty. That’s expensive to do. We are trying to make sure that we have the best students possible, regardless of their wealth. That’s expensive to do. Go walk around campus. The deferred maintenance is very problematic. The cost of everything we do. We’ve increased philanthropy, but philanthropy goes to very particular things. I’m grateful for it. I’m up at about 90 percent of my goal for the Campaign for Boston University. But the gifts will not clear ice dams from these buildings.

The only thing between us and our plausible aspirations is the funding to be able to fulfill those aspirations.

What can the Arts & Sciences dean do about that?

Graduate enrollments, and master’s and professional programs, are the few areas we could grow our revenue, so we are attempting to do that. This is not a professional school, but we have quite a few areas that are very attractive, certainly lots of the computational areas, economics.

What is your typical day as dean like? Are there days when you can keep banker’s hours, 9 to 5?

Sometimes on Sundays.

I try to get up in a relaxed way, say around 6. Once in a while, I manage to get to FitRec, but otherwise I get washed and dressed and come in. If I don’t go to FitRec, I might be here between 7:30 and 8:30. I spend my day mostly in half-hour or hour-long appointments, in between trying to get things done and having other meetings. There are so many people who want to talk to me that the times I have to do the work where it has to be me, my computer, my thinking is in the evening and on the weekend. So a typical day could be some bunch of appointments during the course of the day. I usually do working lunches here and then maybe catch up in between and going home, doing a little before dinner, and then some more after dinner.

The weekend during tenure and promotion season, I’m up in my New Hampshire house by my wood stove, and I have myself carefully booked each weekend. I know which tenured promotion cases I’m going to do that weekend. Then there’s development travel as well, so then I’m on the road.

What will you do on July 1? Sleep in?

I’m not really good at sleeping in. The whole point about July 1 is I don’t know ’til I get there. That’ll be my first day in ages where I will decide, that day, what I feel like doing.