Ex-OSU president Gee visits Columbus
The job of university president has changed quite a bit in the four decades since E. Gordon Gee first become one.
“The role is really upside down,” Gee, 75, said in Columbus on Wednesday. “It’s changed rather dramatically.”
The two-time former Ohio State University president served up his present-day takes on higher education to a crowd that greeted him with warm applause at the Columbus Metropolitan Club.
A bow-tied Gee, whose contract as president of West Virginia University was just extended, discussed issues that universities face, includ- ing threats to free speech on campus, his disdain for college rankings and university strategic plans and the diminishing public support for higher education insti- tutions.
Gee, joined by Ohio State political scientist Herb Asher, also addressed scandals on college campuses, including sexual abuse cases, academic fraud and the recent “Varsity Blues” admissions scandal, acknowledging that he was president of Ohio State during some of the decadeslong sexual abuse by deceased uni- versity physician Richard Strauss.
“What is there about institutions of higher education that allows these things to happen, and to go on so long, uncovered and unreported?” Asher asked Gee.
“I certainly have some responsibility for that, in terms of Ohio State, because of Dr. Strauss, who was there on my watch,” Gee said. “(I was) unaware of it. I was interviewed about it, unaware of it.
“But that is no excuse,” he added. “We always have to be concerned about the victims. I think that we don’t spend enough time in universities thinking about, how do we really discipline ourselves.”
Gee said that university presidents need to start asking more questions when a problem is brought to their attention.
“That is the lesson that I have learned from all of this,” he said.
“We have a culture of complacency very often, and we are not really focused on doing the right thing. We’re focused on doing the right thing for the individual that is in charge of something, rather than the other way around.”
Gee’s first stint as Ohio State president was from 1990 to 1997. After terms at Brown and Vanderbilt universities, he came back to lead OSU in 2007.
He would go on to retire from Ohio State in July 2013 after drawing criticism for comments he made during an Ohio State Athletics Coun- cil meeting in late 2012, following the Ohio State football controversy that led to the resignation of then-coach Jim Tressel in 2011. Gee’s jokes at that time targeted Catholics at the University of Notre Dame and other rival schools.
But Gee said Wednesday that a university president has to have a thick skin, “nerves like sewer pipes,” and a sense of humor.
“The minute you’re afraid to get up and say anything that is semi-humorous, that you’re going to offend some- one — that, I think, is an American tragedy,” he said.
Gee remains proud of his work at Ohio State — specifically, moving from open admissions to selective admissions, and, in his second term, focusing on undergraduates with campus renovations and requiring first- and second-year students to live on campus, he said.
Establishing the nonprofit redevelopment corporation Campus Partners also remains an accomplishment that Gee is proud of, he said, recalling his first drive to campus from the president’s residence in Bexley.
“I thought I was in Fallujah. It was hand-to-hand combat to even get into the campus,” he said to laughter.
“The truth of the matter is, we had to change that,” Gee said. “... That was, I think, one of the most important things that we did because we changed the culture of the city with Campus Partners, in many ways.”