Whatever you think of University President Henry Bienen the man — whom you probably don’t know and probably don’t care about — he’s arguably Northwestern’s biggest booster since he started the job in January 1995. (Hell, he went to court for us against the City of Evanston.) That’s not to say that Bienen has much to do with what Northwestern stands for. The underlying irony behind everything Bienen has done for the school is that, at times, it seems like he could be doing it for anybody. A squash-playing, foreign-policy egghead with an Ivy League pedigree, Bienen has almost nothing to do with a laidback research university smack-dab in the Midwest, more reputed for its engineering school than for its political connections. Other than during his annual address to freshmen, Bienen is rarely seen, rarely heard.
But his expert tactical maneuvering can be felt just about everywhere on campus: the outpouring of money that has brought endless construction; the remarkable rise in applications and SAT scores; and the resulting prestige that, for the first time, landed Northwestern as one of the top 10 American universities in a 1997 issue of U.S. News and World Report. We also appreciate his sentiment (alluding to Thomas Jefferson) that institutions must be “refreshed regularly with new leadership,” as he said when announcing that he would step down next year, even if we suspect that it’s a bit of a cop-out. Oh well. Northwestern may not be Bienen’s real home, but we won’t forget him easily. Here are a few fond, and not-so-fond, ways to remember our future ex-president.
1. As a moneymaker
For any university board of trustees, the indelible mark of a president is his ability to raise lots of money. Medill alumni with a bad case of John Lavine Sour Grapes may put their wire transfers on hold for the moment, but Bienen has still made plenty of cash in almost all places where it counts. Launched not long after Bienen’s arrival in 1995, Campaign Northwestern raised more than $1.5 billion in five years, largely thanks to Bienen’s ability to put on large-scale, hyped-up events. And he hasn’t put that Rolodex of rich friends to waste, either: No doubt through some good old-fashioned sweet-talking, he netted about $10 million from the deep pockets of the Pancoe family alone.
2. As a builder
If you want to be a prestigious research university in 2008, you better be building: Harvard, Yale and Columbia are doing it by the acre, and they’re all getting in on the molecular-biology action. Thanks to Bienen’s endless cash flow, Northwestern opened the doors of its Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly in September 2002 — and it’s not stopping there. After kick-starting an effort to expand and renovate buildings, including Crowe and Annie May Swift, the university announced earlier this year its plans to construct a new home for the School of Music.
Of course, the holy grail of Bienen’s expansion efforts has been opening outposts of Medill and the School of Communication in Qatar, putting Northwestern alongside the likes of Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon. To anyone who cries “sellout,” we say you’re a xenophobe: Building connections with an oil-rich Middle East country isn’t just a sweet deal. It’s an investment in the future.
3. As a failed proponent of diversity
The stain of Bienen’s legacy will be his exceedingly complicated relationship with, well, minorities. This is true in just about every sense of his job: academics, recruitment and financial aid. It’s not that he doesn’t like them; he’d just rather not talk about them. In March, former Weekly editor Jordan Weissman revealed that Bienen was tense and “clearly unhappy to be discussing the topic” during an interview about Northwestern’s failing black enrollment (which has nearly halved since 1976). Later, he tried to explain the drop in black students by claiming, in full lawyer mode, that more applicants chose not to identify their ethnic background, and then chewed out The Daily Northwestern for not including the reasoning in its final article.
It wouldn’t be the first time he tried to get himself out of a sticky situation: The Asian American Studies program that recently hired the popular Nitasha Sharma only came about after a 1995 hunger strike, in which students demanded the creation of the department.
4. As a squash-playing, namby-pamby prepster
You can take the prepster out of Princeton, but there’s no getting the Ivy League out of Henry Bienen. Though he will have served as the president of a Midwestern university for 15 years, Bienen, who got his bachelor’s at Cornell in 1960, still wears his East Coast bias on his sleeve. He once told the Northwestern Chronicle he tries to play squash and tennis at least once a week, but finding time isn’t easy, you know, what with all those Wildcat games he doesn’t always attend. And he’s been known to act nostalgically about his 30-year stint as a professor at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs: carrying out research projects in Nepal and Egypt, swapping late-night gossip with Cornel West and all those other things they do in Princeton. We can’t say we really blame him, though. Sometimes we wish we had a position on the New York Council on Foreign Relations, just so we could board a jet and get away from the icy wind and drunk Cubs fans every once in a while.
So when Bienen packs away his rackets and balls in November next year (his effective exit date), the stakes will be both high and low. Whoever replaces him (Oprah? Donna Shalala, the Hobbit-ish president of University of Miami? Barack Obama?) should be a more charismatic fellow — maybe wear purple, and most definitely not play squash. But the real question is whether they can do as much for Northwestern as Bienen did for us. Bienen’s legacy is improving how we look to the outside world, so much so that we’ve actually started to resemble that stupid “Ivy of the Midwest” moniker we give ourselves. Maybe after he leaves we can even forget about comparing ourselves to the Ivies and just start acting like one. But first we’ll need to find a professor as cool as Cornel West.
