Interview with Steve Hirby
Interviewed by Julia Stringfellow
Location: Lawrence University Archives
October 29, 2007
1. Could you please state your name?
Steve Hirby.
2. What have been your different job titles while at Lawrence?
Well, I came as Dena of Men in 1973, and at the end of 1977, the end of the 1977 academic year, I moved to the Development office and I served for a year as a grant writer. And then beginning in 1978, I was Manager of Planned Giving until 1979 when my title was changed to Associate Director of Development for Planned Giving. In 1981 I became Director of Development and I served in that position through 2000. And beginning in the 2000 year, it was fuzzy, the two positions overlapped. But beginning in 2000, I became Director of Administrative Information Management, working on the Banner software implementation and in January 2005, I became CIO which is the position I hold today and will for two more months.
3. Well, where did you grow up?
I grew up in Piqua, Ohio. Piqua is a town of about 20, 000 people about 25 miles north of Dayton in western, some people call it southwestern Ohio. That's where my dad had grown up and his family before him, so it was a comfortable and small town-ish.
4. And where did you go to college?
I went to the University of Cincinnati. I studied electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. When I was trying to make decisions about where to go, I had very strong technical interests. I had been a hand radio operator when I was in high school, and I thought that something around radios or electricity or electrical engineering would be interesting to me. I also had keen interests in English and history and subjects like that. But engineering, that pull felt stronger to me somehow. And I had the University of Cincinnati engineering program as a cooperative program, so I had the opportunity to alternate school and work. I worked for Hobart Manufacturing which was in Troy, Ohio, about eight miles from my home and worked for them for all five years I was there.
5. Were there any student activities that you participate in while you were in college, like athletics or other organizations?
Not athletics, there was Sigma Nu, a national fraternity that was establishing a chapter at Cincinnati, I think probably beginning in 1961, my second year there. And fraternities were an important aspect of campus life at Cincinnati, and so I pledged that fraternity and eventually served as chapter president. That was probably my main student activity. I played in the band for one year. I'd taken a lot of music when I was in high school, and I played flute and saxophone if I recall correctly in the Cincinnati marching band. But that faded after the first year.
And then there was some kind of tutoring project, my wife reminds me, the last year that I was at Cincinnati, my wife and I, we were engaged, and she was living there, and she keeps reminding me there was a tutoring project that I was part of. And I can't honestly remember whether that was under the auspices of the university or a church we may have been attending.
6. Upon graduating from college, did you go directly on to graduate school?
I did. By the time I was a junior, my third year at Cincinnati, I was feeling that it was not, the subject matter was interesting to me, but it was not something I would be pursuing as a career. I have a vivid memory of one afternoon at Hobart Manufacturing where I was doing my co-op work, and I worked in the electrical lab and there was a guy there named Keith Bader who was probably in his middle 40s at that point. H e was a mechanical engineer, he was a University of Cincinnati alumnus, and he worked, Hobart Manufacturing made dishwashers, commercial dishwashers, and the cycle of the dishwasher was controlled by a timer, an electrical mechanical timer. And there was a defect in the timer. And so Keith's job, pretty close to six months, involved coming into the lab, opening boxes of timers that had been returned from the field because they were defective, and inspecting them to determine what was wrong with them. But mostly it involved a look at the gears and he would write down on a pad of paper what this particular defect was. And I thought to myself, "If this is what engineering is like, I don't think I'm going to find this fulfilling."
And my interests in languages, in history, in culture, in the humanities, and in religion which had been a strong interest of mine since my junior year in high school, began to feel more attractive to me. And so, as I was approaching my senior year, I applied for a Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowship for a trial year at seminary. I didn't win that fellowship, but a seminary, presumably the Rockefeller Brothers Fund had passed on the names of some unsuccessful candidates. The seminary wrote me and said, "We have an opportunity like that, if you would be willing to consider a trial year." So I did. My wife and I, well it was Crozer Theological Seminary which at the time was in Crozer, Pennsylvania, which is in Delaware County outside of Philadelphia. So my wife and I were married in September of 1965 and after a brief honeymoon, drove to Chester and I started studying for the Master of Divinity.
That is quite a transition, going from engineering to theology.
It is quite a transition. One of the things that happened at Cincinnati in the time I was there is they revamped the engineering curriculum pretty dramatically. They opened it up to provide opportunities for a lot more electives. Most of my fellow engineering students were taking more math, more science, and I took German my last year in college and a couple of other things that were more in the humanities because that's really where my interests lay.
And so you received a Masters in Theology from…
I received a Master of Divinity in 1968, was trying to determine, one summer while I was there I worked in a poor church consortium, inner city Philadelphia consortium, helped around at a summer camp for inner city youth and during the time I was there I was serving as a student assistant in a church on the main line in Havertown, Pennsylvania. So I was thinking about ministry, about parish ministry, something that I might feel drawn to. So as I was talking to the faculty at Crozer sort of exploring my next steps, several of them said, "You really should think about graduate school." The more I thought about it, the more that felt like something that I would like to do. And I considered Yale and Vanderbilt, and Emory, and the University of Chicago. The application deadline for Chicago was earlier than for the other schools, so I filed that application and put it in the mailbox. Just as I was about to mail those other applications, I went to my mailbox before I dropped those off, and there was an acceptance letter from Chicago saying, "We'd love to have you." And it had been my first choice anyway, so I never mailed the other applications! So we moved, my parents had a little house that had been a schoolhouse in a town about eight miles from where their home was and it was fine in the summer, but not a good year-round residence. So Pat and I moved from Chester to the schoolhouse, that's what we're still calling it now, and spent the summer there. We moved out to Chicago probably August, September of 1968. I was at the University of Chicago Divinity School from 1968-1973, and I got the Master of Arts in Theology in 1970 and then completed my dissertation proposal and started work on my dissertation in between 1970 and 1973. Are you going to ask me another question or should I keep talking about my academic career?
Whatever you want to do!
Our first son Ben was born in 1971 while we were still at Chicago, and Pat had worked while we were in Chester as a public health nurse for Delaware County. And when we moved to Chicago she worked for Wyler Children's Hospital, which is part of the University of Chicago hospital system. And she served as a, she opened and managed for a while at an intensive care unit for children. So when Ben was born, Ben was our first son, because I had largely finished my coursework, she went back to work after about six weeks. And I was his primary caregiver for his first year. But by January 1972, she was pregnant with our second son and anticipating that she had said, "Steve I think it's time you worked for a change." Because we had been married for eight years and she had worked full-time all eight of those years. So I started looking, my dissertation seemed like it was well underway, so I started looking for new teaching positions or something like that. And I had a number of interviews, but by end of the 1973 academic year, I didn't have any offers. Now it's time to ask, "So how did you come to Lawrence?"
7. Yes! So how did you go from being a divinity student to coming to Lawrence and being the Dean of Men?
While that was fate or luck or a wonderful accident. Chuck Lauter was Dean of Students, had come in 1969. And the Dean of Men at that point…, do I need to provide background on how Student Affairs was searching?
That would be great, yes.
In the early 1970s there was a lot of ferment in the way that student affairs was handled at colleges and universities. But the tradition had been in residential colleges that there would be a Dean of Men and a Dean of Women, assuming that the school had both sexes. The role was kind of a combination of student organization support and academic advising. It was in many ways a combination of what now goes on in Nancy Truesdell's staff and what goes on in Student Academic Services. So I worked with students who had, the Dean of Women was Barbara Pillinger and I was Dean of Men, and we started about six months apart and we kind of divided things up so that she worked more on campus activities and I worked more on residential life since that was kind of my specialty. But then for individual students I worked with those who were having academic challenges or personal challenges or those who had, well, maybe they had interests that didn’t' fit very well in the existing curriculum but that would be appropriate at a liberal arts college so it was a matter of trying to develop a proposal to do a student designed major or work with a faculty member. We also gave permission for somebody who had to miss an exam, then I needed to review that, given approval or not, that sort of thing. So…
Very interesting job.
It was a very interesting job. And my predecessor in that job was a guy named Larry Crockett who had taken a leave in the winter of 1973 and went to Wyndham College on some kind of sabbatical. I never met Larry once, I never really had a chance to talk with him about what his motives were. But he went away for a term and when he came back, he had decided that he wanted to work at Wyndham and he didn’t' want to work at Lawrence anymore. As Chuck Lauter explained it to me, he told Larry, "Well, it's okay, you can leave, but you've got to find you successor." And Larry was a minister, an ordained minister, who had studied at Chicago Theological Seminary, which at that point was part of a consortium that included the University of Chicago. So when they started considering sources for candidates, Chicago was one place they looked, and I was available. I don't remember this as clearly, but Pat does. While I was at Chicago, I worked for about fifteen months as a minister of youth at Hyde Park Union Church, which is in Hyde Park. Hyde Park was at that point and continues to be racially mixed. And there were in that congregation, there were Chicago faculty and their families, but there were also people who were not that well educated and whose lives were challenged by the environment in which they lived. We had both. I was building a youth group that included sons and daughters from both kinds of families. I'm sure that was on my resume at the time, one of the things that was interesting about my work there.
So, I came at some point in the spring for an interview, I can't remember exactly when. I had what felt to me like a really good conservation. I hadn't really known what Student Affairs, what the work was, I hadn't really been preparing for it. But I crammed before the interview, I read everything I could find in the Bergenstein Library and I picked up the lingo. In many ways it's not that dissimilar from the kinds of things that a pastor would do or youth ministers do. I had a group of students whose welfare and development and maturation were, I was responsible for that. It felt congenial to me.
And at some point in July, I think we kind of crossed it off the list, that was one more thing that was not going to work out. And Pat was committed to not working any longer, in fact I had taken a job working for, I thought, "Well, all right, maybe it's time to go back to engineering." There was a physician in the clinics at the University of Chicago who was trying to understand inner ear disorders and how they affect balance and he developed this experimental protocol where he would run water of varying temperatures into the ears of his subjects and then he would monitor brain activity based on the temperature of the water and the difference between the ears. He needed somebody to help support this technically and I had said I would do that. About a week later, I got a call from Chuck Lauter saying, "Would you be willing to come?"
8. When you came up for your interview what were your first impressions of Appleton and of Lawrence?
Well, I think it felt really comfortable. There are lots of buildings here now that weren’t here then, but the feeling of Appleton in 1973 is not that different. There was no mall, there were fewer houses on the outskirts and that sort of thing. But it was friendly, comfortable, an easy place to live, I would say. Chuck, we were sort of talking about the geography of the Fox Valley and he characterized it as, he said, "It's a strip city. If you start in Green Bay and drive along Highway 41 there's pretty much in developed areas at least through Neenah and Menasha, maybe as far as Oshkosh, increasingly towards Fond du Lac." And it was true at the time, it's much more so true now. You could in effect you were in developed areas all the way from Green Bay to Fond du Lac. But if you were perpendicular to that spine, he said, you're out with the cows in five minutes. You have to go a little further, maybe it's ten minutes, you have that rural and lovely natural environment as well as the community itself. I had not hear of Lawrence before I was asked whether I might be willing to be a candidate for this position, but the folks at the University of Chicago had heard of Lawrence and were so positive about the college and both the educational experience and the residential experience that I had positive impressions.
9. When you came as Dean of Men, did you live on campus, did you live in the dorm with the students? I was processing the papers of George Walter and he was Dean of Men here during the 1950s or 1960s and he lived on campus.
He was head resident of Brokaw.
I was wondering if you had lived on campus while you were Dean of Men.
Well, just at the beginning. Mike is our second son, was due in early October, so Pat stayed in Chicago. I took the bus from Chicago to Appleton on Labor Day and was due to start work the following day. There really hadn't been any time to find a place to live, so I stayed for the first several days in the guest room in Plantz Hall. And then there's an apartment in Colman that hadn't been, I think a dietician or cook had lived there, so I stayed there for maybe about a month. And then we found a place to live. But other than that, no, we lived in our own home.
10. What were specifically some of the activities that you worked on while you were Dean of Men, working with the students?
Well, one of the things that I worked on very closely was the residence life advisors, but at the time they were called counselors. And it was an entirely volunteer position. Barbara and I did that together, but I took the lead in putting that program together, training the students and supporting them. We had a structure of head counselors, where there was one in each residence hall, kind of the team leader for that hall. Figuring out who those people might be, reading their resumes and then training them and helping work with them, so I did that. There was a Circle K Club for a time and I advised that group, helped get that group started. There was a group of pastors near the church, kind of a campus ministry group, and I met with them, helped do some planning of activities. I actually taught photography for a while, one of my hobbies more so at the time was photography and there was a point when students needed to learn how to do that. There was nobody on the art department faculty at that time, so I did teach photography for a couple of terms.
11. You taught that in Worcester?
Worcester. And then the Dean of Men was advisor to fraternities, so I worked with the inter-fraternity council and in a couple of cases, with fraternities that were either having challenges or had programs that they wanted to try to bolster.
12. What was the morale of the campus during the 1970s, because I've seen a lot of the materials about the student protests that were going on, the Vietnam War was going on, and I was just curious about what that was like during that time.
I think the worst of that or the most, I think that much of that had subsided by the time I got here. I think the spring of 1970 was when the president's office there was a sit-in, actually that would have bee in the Carnegie Library I think. I think morale was good, there was a lot, the 70s I think in many ways were really an optimistic time. I think there was a lot of experimentation educationally. I remember one faculty member, the Povolny Commission had done its report in '69 and delivered it in '69. And then the Lawrence University Community Council was pretty new, maybe less than five years old by the time I got here, so that was an experiment in governance. And I think that report recommended essentially eliminating distribution requirements so there was a sort of throwing off the limitations of the traditions and an attempt to find a new way. Student designed majors were created by the Povolny Commission, student designed courses were, we were kind of getting used to those sorts of things. There was a lot of education ferment. And Sage Hall became coeducational, I think in 1972, 1973. That can't be right because Sage was closed for renovation in 1972-1973, so it must have been 1973-1974 must have been the first year that it was coeducational.
13. And was it the first dorm on campus that was co-ed?
That's my recollection. So there was that kind of social ferment. The Downer Women's Council became Downer Feminist Council in probably 1973-1974, maybe a little later than that, I don't remember exactly. But that was something that Barbara Pillinger worked at. So it was heavy in many ways, it was a good time to be in higher education.
14. I was going to ask about the report that Chuck Lauter wrote on student affairs and how that changed student affairs. There's not a copy of it in the Archives or I would have read it. But could you briefly talk about that and talk about the impact that it had on student affairs at Lawrence?
That report was significant in my career because it really, I have a copy of that report and I'll get it to you. I believe that the report recommended, during the 1976-1977 academic year, I think the report had been developed maybe in the early part of that year. But it was clear, at least by late winter/early spring of that year, that student affairs was going to be reorganized. And the traditional Dean of Men/Dean of Women, those roles were going to be eliminated and were going to be restructured in a way that matches the kinds, what we see in the typical student affairs office today, where responsibilities were not divided by sex, but were divided functionally, so there would be campus activities focus and there would be a residential life focus. And Barbara Pillinger and I had sort of worked out together with Chuck Lauter's encouragement that she would be doing activities stuff and I would be doing the residential life stuff, not exclusively but that we would. I did for that first summer of 1977, I did housing assignments. It effectively eliminated a housing office which had been staffed by somebody from the business side of the university. I think the other thing that it did was it created this separate student academic services unit and Chuck resigned as, his title went back and forth between Dean of Students and Vice-President for Student Affairs, I can't remember what it was at that point. He resigned in order to become Dean of Student Academic Services and so the role that Marti Hemwall now has he was. He sort of launched that office.
And a guy named Harry Kisker, who was director of the Career Center at that point, was appointed Vice-President for Student Affairs. Chuck was on vacation when this all happened; Harry came to Barbara and me and said, "I'm willing to have you be candidates for these positions, but I don’t' think you should assume that you're going to be those. I'm going to conduct a national search and look for the best person for each of those jobs." That was devastating, it was very hard and we knew this. Well it must have been about July 1, not before that. There was a lot of stress anyway because of the organizational transition. And when Chuck got back from vacation, Chuck loved to sail, and I think that particular summer he spent a lot of time on Lake Michigan and that was before cell phones and e-mails and he was not in touch and when he got back and heard what had happened, he said, "This is not right. We worked this out, we had an understanding. I feel that I gave you my word, I committed the institution and don’t understand why this is happening." Several faculty members, there were senior members of the faculty who became concerned on our behalf and went to the president and said, "This is not the way we do things at Lawrence," and encouraged Tom Smith to find a better resolution to things, to the issue. And he did, and he appointed Barbara. Barbara had a Master's degree from Smith College in Physical Education, and he appointed her to a position in the Phy Ed department. He appointed me to a position in development as a grant writer, which is how I ended up in Development.
15. Let's talk about your work in development now. I was going to ask you, I've always been very curious about the capital campaigns that have gone on, about the work associated with that, and what some of your responsibilities were for the Lawrence Ahead and then the Lawrence 150, and how the decisions came about to have these capital campaigns and what the accomplishments were of them?
Well, the man who was, I think Dick Boya may have launched Lawrence's formal fundraising agenda and programs. Prior to Dick, the fundraising was part of the Alumni Relations program but it did not have its own office, it was done kind of as an afterthought. I'm not sure it was as an afterthought, it was not prominent on the institution's agenda. We did some research about this as we were trying to bolster alumni participation rates, and I think in 1969 or 1970 we might have had alumni donor participation rates in the 15-18% range. And it was explained to me that it was traditional at Lawrence because the members of the board were prominent and wealthy in the Fox Valley, and so as fiscal years drew to a close there would be this preliminary financial assessment, and if there was a gap between what the college had spent and what its income had been, then the guys, it was almost entirely guys but not completely, around the table, they would pony up and they would close the gap. So the idea of fundraising efforts, of established fundraising function, it didn't seem necessary.
But one of the presidents changed that, and it might have been Curtis Tarr or it might have been Thomas Smith. And Dick launched the planned giving program, and he launched the formal fundraising office. There was a fellow named Davol Meader who had worked in fundraising at Brown who really brought current fundraising techniques to Lawrence. And he had with the trustees engaged in something called the Lawrence Leadership Fund which ended in 1976 if I recall correctly, I don't remember the total that it raised, but it was modest. What did it do? Well, the library, this is the Appleton library, well the old part, the Seeley G. Mudd part was built out of that campaign. I can't remember what else. And I think there was an understanding within the administration and on the Board of Trustees that campaigns, unlike the old way where people who had the money and investment in the college sat around the table and wrote checks, but there was really value for the institution in having major gift campaigns at fairly regular intervals. "Lawrence Ahead"…do you have dates?
I think the " Lawrence Ahead" was in 1982.
That sounds right, so it was 1982 to 1987. They were five year intervals, so 1982 would have been, Davol Meader left in 1979, which is the year Rik Warch became president of Lawrence. The trustees had been working on the idea of a next campaign, and Davol had been working on the next campaign. And Rik had been here two years, he came in 1977 as Vice President for Academic Affairs. He was on the cabinet and was part of the planning. There was just a realization that endowment needed to grow, and that there were some facilities needs. The Rec Center was probably the first one, first building that came along. That was an outgrowth of a realization that physical fitness and physical health were important to today's students, and with the gym that far away, it wasn't conducive. And the realization that many of the colleges nearby had new rec centers. I think we, Davol Meader's replacement was Greg Follen who had been a Dartmouth alumnus and he had been at Beloit College and had worked on fundraising as assistant to the president there, and I think he and Rik hit it off really well. They did the leadership identifying the goals. Am I getting at your question?
Yes, yes, definitely .
I think one of the interesting things that happened during the Lawrence Ahead campaign was the Development's staff discovery of what it was possible to do in alumni giving. Lisa Weiner was the director of annual giving at that point, she was Lawrence class of 1959. She had been teaching actually, but came to Lawrence to kind of get this program started or restarted. We discovered two things, we discovered that sometimes when donors would object to being solicited too many times for contributions to the college, I would say, "All the research indicates that to a point the more times you ask, the more likely you are to receive." So we decided, we stepped up the amount of asking that was done, and it increased not only the dollars, but the participation rates. And then we discovered, I think I attended a conference at Woodsong, colleges were talking about the use of the telephone for fundraising, and I came back from that conference, and Lisa and I, we put our heads together and said, "We should be able to do telephone solicitation as well."
Se we built our first phone-a-thon solicitation effort during that period probably in 1982. We identified a new component of the fundraising program called the Lawrence Fund that would focus on continuing operating support for the college. Until then, one of the principal issues in fundraising that was done, and it increased the endowment for colleges is that the most important donors are the ones that support the existing programs but the most attractive fundraising targets are often things that do funds for new stuff. And we were trying to find a way of giving some prominence in a name and a focus to the fundraising. And the motto, if you've only got one gift to give to Lawrence in a year, make it for the annual fund, make it for the Lawrence fund. That's what we need for the foundation. So all that stuff was developed during the Lawrence Ahead campaign.
And then the other thing that happened in that campaign was our discovery that you could use the telephone to solicit fairly substantial gifts. We had been fundraising for the Art Center, and had been making reasonable headway. And Greg Volk was at the time Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations, and he had been instrumental in our getting a grant, a challenge grant from the Cresky Foundation to complete the Art Center. And we were close, we had a number of major gift people who were capable of making major gifts. And many of them had come through. But we still had a gap of about three quarters of a million, maybe closer to $800,000, and we mounted a summer phone-a-thon effort asking people to consider gifts at targeted levels. This was the first time we'd ever done that, the kind of etiquette of fundraising at Lawrence was always you'd ask people for support but you wouldn’t dare to suggest how much that support might amount to.
We developed, it was during that period also that we did our first experiments with electronic screening, where if you submit, an outfit named Marts and Lundy had developed an algarhythm that they thought was predictive of donor capability and inclination to give. And we did a screening of our alumni and based on that, the results from that we suggested some target amounts. We spent the summer with paid callers in the basement of Landis-Peabody calling people on our list to try to raise money not for the annual fund, but for the Art Center. By the end of the summer, we had raised almost $800, 000 on the phone. We had coordinated phone and mail campaign, but it was the phone contacts that did it. We met the Cresky challenge and successfully funded the Art Center.
16. Was the Worcester Art Center torn down before the funds were raised on the faith that there would be enough funds for the Wriston Art Center? I'm just curious about this.
I think that's right. It seems to me that because we were so far along in fundraising, and the trustees have lately adopted a rule that you don’t put a shovel into the ground until all the funds have been committed. But that was not true in the Lawrence Ahead campaign. For example, the Buchanan Kiewit Center was built substantially with borrowed funds, and the renovation of Shattuck were done substantially with borrowed funds. But the Wriston Art Center, I'm a little sidetracked here, but the Wriston Art Center, we raised every dollar that was needed in order to open that building. And I think we were well enough along in the fundraising that we started construction of, demolition of Worcester and construction of Wriston even though we didn't yet have all the funds because we thought with the Cresky grant and successful completion of that would be enough. And we did.
Wonderful, beautiful building.
Isn't it wonderful? I have to tell you about one of the women that I worked with, a Lawrence alumni, I'm not going to disclose her name because you're going to publish this. She was a resident of Appleton, and she and I were close. I mean we talked frequently and she was a friend as well as somebody who was in my portfolio of people to work with, and one day the Art Center had been built at that point, and she had contributed to it but she had never really, I don't know that it was complete but it was well along, and one Sunday after church some friends had taken her for a drive, and the drive included the campus so that she could see the progress on the construction of the Art Center. And Monday morning she called me up and she said, "Steve, this is ---. Whoever authorized that color should be talked to." I said, "Well, I think that was Rik." She said, "It's a big red sore on the face of the campus." It was controversial, it continues to be controversial, but I love it. I think it is such a wonderful building.
The architecture and the natural light that comes into it is just wonderful.
If you think about it, it's s a creative solution to a challenging problem, location, size, those kinds of things.
17. Well you were working on this before the Internet and all that. I was wondering if you did a lot of traveling for this campaign, a lot of going and visiting potential donors, or if a lot of that was done in the Appleton area or if you traveled throughout the country to meet with potential donors?
Well my focus was what we call planned giving, I worked mainly with older, mostly alumni. There were several people that I worked with that were in Los Angeles, I was there several times on Lawrence's behalf. There were people in the southwest, Sun City and Green Valley, Arizona, I was there several times on Lawrence's behalf. I was in Dallas, in fact I had a conversation last weekend with a trustee who had just become a trustee emerita, and she reminded me that it was my visit to her home that kind of began her association with Lawrence, her closer connection with Lawrence.
And then there were a number of people within the state of Wisconsin whom I saw regularly so I drove to those places, Minneapolis not so much. And I think initially we had organized our assignments within the Development office based on whom, was this person likely to be considering a planned gift and divided it up based on specialty and then over time we tried to go more regional. I think in my case the regional didn't fit very well because I had relationships with people who lived where they lived, and if it didn't fit in the region, that didn’t seem as important as having the right person in conversation with them.
18. Well, moving on to the Lawrence 150 campaign which was started in 1994 I believe and went thorough 1999?
1992 to 1997, it probably went public in 1994, but we started it, it was pretty much in ten years.
19. And then what were some of the buildings that came out of doing that campaign, endowed professorships, what were some of the major accomplishments of the Lawrence 150?
Well it was $62 million, do you have literature from that campaign?
Yes, I do.
Good, well it was for Briggs Hall, the renovation of Youngchild Hall, Science Hall, I think substantial work on the chapel, although that wasn't identified in the campaign objective, but we did have a donor who was very interested in the chapel who very generously helped to fund it. So there was that. And there were a number of endowed professorships that resulted from that. One of the things that, one of Lawrence's consistent fundraising successes, depends on how you put this, from the perspective of the college it's a fundraising success. From the perspective of the people who make the contributions they think about it differently, they don’t think about contributing to Lawrence's success, they think about making it possible for students to attend Lawrence and to learn and grow as a result of that Lawrence experience. One of those areas is scholarship support.
And we do an annual scholarship luncheon as you may know, where we try to bring together the recipients of many of our named scholarships and either the donors, or if the donors are deceased, their associates of family members to connect with the students who are benefiting. And that was an outgrowth of a conversation I had at a training session when I first became Manager of Planned Giving in 1978. I went to a conference to learn about this area which was new to me at the time and was talking with some fellows who had been at the National College of Education in Evanston, and they told me about their scholarship luncheon. And I came back with that, and said to Greg Fallen and Davol Meader, "We can do this. We have scads of endowed scholarships. Why can't we do this?" So we did. We've done it annually, well, since 1980. This was the 27 th that we just had, so since 1980. And scholarships resonate with Lawrence alumni. And people have been very, very generous, and I think it's really a hallmark of the college's fundraising program. So, Lawrence Ahead and Lawrence 150 both benefited quite a bit from gifts pouring down for scholarships. Do you have final reports from those campaigns?
I think I do, yes.
I think there is a summary, I want to say that maybe half of what we raised for endowment was directed toward scholarships. Bjorklunden, I think the construction of the new lodge at Bjorklunden may have been part of Lawrence 150.
20. I was going to ask how the makeup of the Development department changed from when you started there in the late 1970s through 2000. Obviously the department has grown significantly, but I was wondering if there were any differences in those years .
Size has an impact on an organization. If you have a few people, then either some things don’t get done or people end up wearing multiple hats. I think one thing that happened organizationally was the separation of annual giving from corporate and foundation relations. I can remember in those early years, we thought of annual giving as including corporate giving, as well as individuals, principally alumni, and the realization that we really couldn't do both. One person couldn't do both. So establishing the annual giving office, as I mentioned Lisa Weiner, she pretty much started that. Carolyn Bauer had been doing both corporate giving and alumni giving, and she started focusing on corporate giving and bolstering that. I think a clearer definition for the annual fund and building a staff there for corporate and foundation work, I think the emergence of planned giving as a specialty within the office was another change that occurred.
I was able to become Manager of Planned Giving in 1978 because an alum named Rufus Schriver, had been working that position half-time, retired for the second time and vacated it. But prior to that, Dick Boya had been interested in Planned Giving, it was a partial thing. It was part of a position, and it was full-time work for me initially. When I became Director of Development I continued to do some planned giving work but it sort of faded in importance and then we brought in others to focus on it. So the emergence of that as a specialty within the office was one of the organizational changes. Technology transformed what we did dramatically. I think the growth in professional staff in Development was not accompanied by proportionate growth in support staff, partly because of what technology allowed us to do.
21. In looking at the transition from going from Development to the Director of Administrative Information Management, did I get that right?
You got that right. Isn't that the longest title?
22. It is. Were you able to put all of that onto a business card?
Yes. Well that was kind of interesting. Bill Hochkish, do you want to hear that story? How much time have you got?
However much time you want to use to tell it.
Bill Hochkish was vice-president for Business Affairs. Probably in 1995, somewhere in that range, middle 1990s, and Lawrence had been struggling with administrative information systems for some time and there were some areas where we were in fairly good shape, Admissions was one, Development was one, and that was where my engineering came back into my career because one of the things I worked on as Director of Development was developing information systems that fit our programmatic needs. That hadn't been true in Financial Services, and they were using software that we had purchased that was based on a business model that was probably twenty years old at that point. And he had been a banker, and he knew what kind of information systems support he had as a banker. And he was determined that Lawrence ought to have good information systems and support for its finance site, otherwise how would we be able to manage? He engaged Schumaker Romenesko who were our auditors at the time, he engaged them to do some consulting, to look for a suitable financial management application for the college to use.
As a consequence of that I served on the Selection Committee for that software, and we were approached by a company called Buziol that was developing a new software suite that was intended for colleges and universities. Their business model involved selling a product that was made by Oracle in order to generate enough cash flow so they could do the development of the rest of the suite. So the idea was there would be this Oracle Government Financials it was called, that they would sell us that and install it. Meanwhile they would work with us to understand our needs and build software. Buziol, they sold us Oracle Government Financials, and we agreed to be part of this project to develop a comprehensive solution, but Buziol failed and we had Oracle Government Financials and no software. There was nothing to show for it. We had paid money to support this development, but there was nothing to show for it. Well, Bill was able to, through a negotiation process, I think we're still bound by the confidentiality of some of those agreements. Btu the gist of it is we were able to, we weren't able to get all of our money back, but we were able to get substantially enough back. So we were regrouping and looking for something else.
It was out of that experience that we realized we needed an integrated software solution, and not have one for Admission, another one for Development, a third for the Registrar, a fourth for Financial Services, and who knows what else, and have those free-standing, not communicating with each other, no integrated perspective on an individual alumnus or a student. It was just silly. We hadn't been able to get to that point of view, Bill was very committed to it, and he asked me if I would chair a Search Committee for something else, something from a reliable vendor, not somebody selling vaporware. So I did that starting in July of 1998, and I was still Director of Development. One of the factors to be thought about here was how, I think all I was asked to do at that point was figure out how, with the help of a committee, what was the right product. And we considered People Soft and SCT Banner, and Data Tells Software Solutions. People Soft dropped out early because they were just, they didn’t' have everything that we needed yet, they were still building, and they were expensive. And the University had already made a commitment to Oracle database as its database platform, and Data Tell would not run on Oracle. That's how we got to Banner. But at that point, how were we going to get this software implemented?
Bill asked me if I would be willing to leave the Development office and lead that software project. I had been, a lot of the time that I was spending as Director of Development I had been devoting a lot of it to moonlighting. It wasn't moonlighting, it was me working nights and weekends to write software to make the Development office run more smoothly. So he asked me if I would do that, and he talked to Greg Volk who was my boss at the time, and I'm not quite sure what all the negotiations were behind the scenes, but it felt like the right thing for me to do. Meanwhile, Bill already had a Director of Computer Services, and he was trying to find a way, that's why the title is as long as it is, he was trying to find a way to describe this job that didn't leave the impression that it was encroaching on territory that properly belonged to the Director of Computer Services. That's why the title is as long as it is. So that's where the title came from. What your question? That wasn't an answer to your question. You had a different question.
23. I was asking, I think, just about your responsibilities in that position and any challenges in implementing Banner and having it to be a university-wide system to use.
Well, one of the skills that I needed to acquire during that implementation project was project management skills. I had strong technical skills, but we ended up about two years into the project with deadlines missed and with doubt about whether we were going to be able to complete important parts of the project on time. And we asked SET to come in and do a review after two years into the project and they said, "You need project management." I went away to project management school and we brought in a consultant who worked alongside me for about nine months trying to turn a kind of loosely organized project, one that was characterized heavily by the offices that said, "Well, we'll do this when we get time." And projects don’t succeed if they only get as much time as is left over from other things; they need a focus and institutions need to make a commitment, and institutional leadership meds to make a commitment.
That was the other thing, we didn't have that commitment to the extent that we should have, partly because it was all brand new to us, we had never done a software implementation like this before, we never had a staff to do it. So my job was to work with the various teams that had operational responsibility for this, to do communication among the teams, to serve on a project steering committee, it was to keep Bill Hochkish apprised of issues, there were things that needed his attention that I wasn't going to be able to address, try to get him to take action to address issues.
I started by leading the implementation of the Development software because, the agreement was I could only stop being Director of Development if there was new software in the Development office, so that's what we worked on first. And then the group implemented housing and student accounts, and I worked closely with those teams. And then we did Admissions, I worked closely with Admissions. Everywhere but Admissions, there was a basic buy-in to the idea that integrated software would be good for the university. I think Steve Syverson in particular and to some extent Phillip Schultz kept saying, "Well, Admissions is separable from the rest of the university, we deal with 20, 000 to 25, 000 inquires annually and only 350 of those become students. Why do we need those other 24, 0000 in change? Why do we need those in the database? Why does that need to happen?" Besides, they were using a system they had written together over a fifteen year period; it fit their operation like a glove. And in truth, Banner did not fit their operation like a glove.
It was hard for us to deliver a functionality that would be useful to them and support them. In fact, we got through that, but it was in many ways the most challenging part of the project. It was finding a path forward that supported Admissions and what it needed, gave it the capabilities it needed but it still kept them in the Banner boat so to speak. That was good, I learned a lot in that period. I'm really glad I had the opportunity.
24. And then came the transition of going into Chief Information Officer, and I was wondering if you could talk some about the job duties with that and maybe some of the different task forces that you served on in that position?
There were two technology planning task forces that I served on while I was still Director of Development. The first was under Rick Harrison, he launched a long-range planning process when he was Dean and there was a technology working group that I chaired that tried to identify sort of current and future needs for Lawrence. And I think you probably have that report; several of the things that came out of the need to raise the visibility and faculty investment in use of technology and teaching. There was a committee on instructional technology that was formed. Sometimes in the academy it's hard to say that any one factor triggered something, but at least our report recommending there would be such a committee, there was a precursor to the actual formation of that committee, whether it was a cause like that I don't know, but at least it was there. The move toward an integrated administrative information system was a recommendation of that committee, and there were a few other things. Bolstered staffing in computer services, that was another outcome.
And then prior to that there had been a study group on technology. This was during Jim Evans's term as Director of Computer Services, and I think there the focus was on at what level of investment are we supporting technology on our campus. The feeling was we were understaffed and under-funded. The encouragement of the university to extend its campus network into all campus buildings, that was another recommendation of that task force.
So in some ways, during the period when I was Dean of Men, I had this toe, ankle, leg in the technology water. I chaired, I was the founding chairman of the worldwide web steering committee which probably dates to 1995 or maybe a little bit before that with our…technology has been a strong side light almost since 1981 probably. And as Chief Information Officer, what has that been about? Partly that was trying to find a way of organizing for technology at Lawrence that didn’t involve a lot of fragmentation. When I became CIO, we brought under one umbrella what we'd been doing in administrative computing, that was Jody Fraleigh and me, that little two-person administrative management unit, and instructional technology, and although not right away, within a year, the web. Each of those had been separate, they had been reported up in different ways, the members of the staff worked independently of each other, if there was a project that brought them together, fine, but if there wasn't, there wasn't, there wasn’t a coordinated focused direction involved in all of those groups. So we were able to…one of the things that the creation of that CIO position did was to make that possible.
And one of the things that I'd been working on most consistently over the three years that I have been CIO has been to in various ways, get it knit into the fabric of the IT organization that our job, our principal job, is service. And that our existence is justified to the extent that we allow everybody else in the university to do their jobs better. Supporting faculty first, students second, administrators third, to make sure that they have the technological resources that they need in order to accomplish their mission. That means our mission is always contributory to theirs, never the other way around. I think we've made good progress in that regard, it's something my staff has really responded to and it took a while.
I think there was a justifiable sense in a number of areas that well, we already give good service. I know that was true, has been true for a long time. On the other hand, the perceptions are important and the quality of that service was not always well-perceived. We've tried to pull the formally disparate components into a whole. Wireless expansion started before I became CIO, we worked hard at that. Adding technology in classrooms, pulling the web into ITS so that there's identified technical support for the web and a full-time position was something we were able to do. And just having coordination-collaboration leadership vision, those are the kinds of things that CIOs do. I know of CIOs who get mired in day-to-day operational stuff, and because my career has never taken me through informational technology until the last three years of it, I never developed any particular skills. I mean, I can write a decent computer program, I can write a database query but I can't configure a router or a switch. For the most part, I'm not very good at desktop support, but I've been a consumer of information technology since it almost became important on the Lawrence campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so I know what technology can do on behalf of the university's mission, and I've tried to keep my focus on that and let somebody else make sure stuff runs.
25. Well, I was wondering if you could talk about some of the activities, the travels that you've done while you've been at Lawrence, activities outside of work or places that you've traveled, favorite places to go.
I think probably our favorite place to go, we have a son who lives in northern California, north of San Francisco. It is lovely. He is in San Helena, which is in Napa County, and he makes wine. We started going to northern California before he moved there, but it is a favorite place that we go, at least annually. Our oldest son is married to a woman who is a professor of French, and the two of them lived in Paris for a while. I was in France twice that year, we enjoy France, and we'll go again. I spent a couple of weeks in Scotland in the summer of 2006, which was a very beautiful place and congenial people, that was a lot of fun. We certainly enjoy traveling, a lot of the traveling we do is back and forth to see our kids.
26. Well, I just have one last question. I was going to ask in the time that you've been at Lawrence, how have things changed and how have things remained the same? I know that's a very vague kind of question, but what things come to mind when you think of that?
It's easiest maybe in many ways to talk first about what is the same. That I would say is what I would characterize as a community of learning. One of the things that impressed me about Lawrence when I came here was how the same approach to teaching and learning that I experienced at the University of Chicago is also here, that was a graduate program I was in, a PhD program. And yet the kind of rapport between students and faculty, the commitment to really digging in and learning, the commitment of learning by analysis, the commitment of trying to work from original sources, that sort of rigor and high standards combined with a sort of mutual respect between students and faculty was something that was apparent as soon as I started here. That hasn't changed, at least it hasn't diminished, it may be stronger, but it's definitely a hallmark of a Lawrence education, part of a culture of this community.
Changes, well, Lawrence is bigger than it was, although just marginally, I think the fall of 1974 we were somewhere in the vicinity of 1, 360 students which is not too far from today's 1,400. I think the social life of the Lawrence community has changed a little bit than when I started in the middle 1970s. There was more socializing among faculty and staff, partly to the extent that faculty and staff are in families and those tend to be two career families now and not one, people are busier, we hear that they're busier. Their personal time is prized to the exclusion of more time with colleagues I think. But that is a change, it felt different, somehow. There was a sense in which the boundaries around the job were really permeable, you were part of a community .The borders around work were not quite so defined as they seem to be today.
I think Lawrence is better off financially than it was, and not just in raw dollar terms. It's obvious in raw dollar terms, but I think in terms of what today's dollars make possible. I think we're better off, and that's good. There was a period, it must have been 1977, 1978, 1979, some where in that range, where the long-range planning report talked about no new positions, and there were questions about whether there should be a wage freeze. That never had to happen, but it was sort of projected as a way to get through a tough financial patch. Certainly the facilities we have have changed. I think I would identify those as the major changes that I'm aware of.
27. Well, is there anything else you want to discuss or that you can think of to add?
I don't think so. I think we've covered a lot of territory.
I'll go ahead and turn the recorder off then.
