April 17, 2024
Changing the Game: William Bowen and
the Challenges of American Higher Education
Nancy Malkiel
Emerita Professor of History and Dean of the College, Princeton University
Changing the Game: William Bowen and
the Challenges of American Higher Education
Nancy Malkiel
Emerita Professor of History and Dean of the College, Princeton University
Minutes of the 26th Meeting of the 82nd Year
President John Cotton called the meeting to order at 10:15 AM. Frances Slade led the invocation. One hundred thirty-five persons attended, including six guests: Audrey Egger (David Egger), Peter Ligty (Bob Teweles), Peter Reczek (Julie Elward-Berry), Burt Malkiel (Joan Girgus), Ron Schiller (Joan Girgus), Inez Scribner (Dick Scribner).
Kathryn Trenner read the minutes of the April 10 meeting.
President Cotton congratulated the membership for remembering to park on Springdale Road and invited members to have lunch at Springdale after the meeting. In particular, he recommended the salad offerings.
President Cotton announced that next week's speaker will be internationally celebrated photographer and author Renate Aller, whose talk will be entitled “The Space Between Memory and Expectation.”
Joan Girgus introduced the speaker, Nancy Malkiel, Emerita Professor of History and Dean of the College, Princeton University. Her recently published book and her Old Guard address were both entitled Changing the Game: William G. Bowen and the Challenges of American Higher Education.
Bill Bowen was born into a lower middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Denison University, graduating in 1955. He then became a graduate student in economics at Princeton. Obviously on a fast-track, in 1958 Bowen was appointed to the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor, was tenured in 1961, and made a full professor in 1965. In 1967, he became the first full-time provost of the university. In 1972 he was appointed president, remaining until January 1988, when he left to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an office he held for 18 years.
As Princeton’s provost, Bowen helped to craft a set of strategies to lessen the disruptions at Princeton over race and the Vietnam War. He also pressed to embrace coeducation as critical to Princeton’s future.
As president, Bowen’s top priority was to increase the intellectual muscle of the faculty, through targeted recruiting and setting higher standards for appointments and promotions. A second priority was to make the student body more diverse and inclusive – actively recruiting Black, Latino, and Asian American students; embracing equal access in admissions for women and men; and providing support for students of all religious faiths. Under Bowen, the university established a residential college system and provided support for the legal campaign to require the remaining all-male eating clubs to admit women.
As president of the Mellon Foundation, Bowen instituted programs that had a major impact on higher education. One example was the Mellon-Mays Program, which has prepared hundreds of college students of color for teaching and administrative positions in education. A second was JSTOR, the electronic journal storage project that has transformed access to scholarly journals for faculty and students around the world.
At Mellon, Bowen persuaded college presidents to share an unprecedented trove of student-level data and created a massive database that opened new paths for research about issues important to colleges and universities: affirmative action, intercollegiate athletics, and access and college completion data for low-income and first-generation college students. This data provided the raw material for books that Bowen wrote about these issues and others.
With regard to the problems currently facing universities, such as protecting free speech while resisting hate speech, Bowen could have provided guidance based on his experience in the 1960s and ’70s. While he felt that it was appropriate for individual faculty members to express opposition to the war in Vietnam, Bowen believed strongly that the university itself should not express an institutional view.
However, when the issue bears directly on the university's operations, Bowen believed that the university should take a stand. Two examples, free speech and affirmative action, illustrate the point. Bowen defended free speech as a bedrock principle of the university, with the caveat that hate speech targeted at specific groups or individuals could not be tolerated in a community built on reasoned discourse. Bowen defended affirmative action because he believed that there was talent that Princeton had not tapped; that a more diverse student body would enhance the learning of all students; and that by educating students from minority backgrounds, universities would serve the common good.
As president, Bowen crafted a governance structure to withstand the buffeting that can occur when divisiveness and external turmoil threaten to upend the campus. The key vehicle was the Council of the Princeton University Community, with representation from every university constituency, so that the most explosive issues could be hashed out in the context of a deliberative body where everyone could have a hand in shaping the outcome.
So, in these fraught times, what would Bowen do? In sum: Work hard at establishing relationships with students, faculty, trustees, alumni leaders, and major donors. Reach out; don’t hunker down. Communicate constantly. Keep people on the team. Ask for help when times are tough. Manage processes as carefully as possible. Count votes. Never leave an outcome to chance. Figure out how to accomplish your goal while giving individuals every opportunity to have their say. Keep the president, faculty, and trustees united – all in the interest of enabling the university to get on with its uniquely important work for the benefit of American society.
In Nancy Malkiel’s view, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Bill Bowen was the most consequential figure in American higher education.
Respectfully submitted,
Henry Von Kohorn
Kathryn Trenner read the minutes of the April 10 meeting.
President Cotton congratulated the membership for remembering to park on Springdale Road and invited members to have lunch at Springdale after the meeting. In particular, he recommended the salad offerings.
President Cotton announced that next week's speaker will be internationally celebrated photographer and author Renate Aller, whose talk will be entitled “The Space Between Memory and Expectation.”
Joan Girgus introduced the speaker, Nancy Malkiel, Emerita Professor of History and Dean of the College, Princeton University. Her recently published book and her Old Guard address were both entitled Changing the Game: William G. Bowen and the Challenges of American Higher Education.
Bill Bowen was born into a lower middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Denison University, graduating in 1955. He then became a graduate student in economics at Princeton. Obviously on a fast-track, in 1958 Bowen was appointed to the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor, was tenured in 1961, and made a full professor in 1965. In 1967, he became the first full-time provost of the university. In 1972 he was appointed president, remaining until January 1988, when he left to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an office he held for 18 years.
As Princeton’s provost, Bowen helped to craft a set of strategies to lessen the disruptions at Princeton over race and the Vietnam War. He also pressed to embrace coeducation as critical to Princeton’s future.
As president, Bowen’s top priority was to increase the intellectual muscle of the faculty, through targeted recruiting and setting higher standards for appointments and promotions. A second priority was to make the student body more diverse and inclusive – actively recruiting Black, Latino, and Asian American students; embracing equal access in admissions for women and men; and providing support for students of all religious faiths. Under Bowen, the university established a residential college system and provided support for the legal campaign to require the remaining all-male eating clubs to admit women.
As president of the Mellon Foundation, Bowen instituted programs that had a major impact on higher education. One example was the Mellon-Mays Program, which has prepared hundreds of college students of color for teaching and administrative positions in education. A second was JSTOR, the electronic journal storage project that has transformed access to scholarly journals for faculty and students around the world.
At Mellon, Bowen persuaded college presidents to share an unprecedented trove of student-level data and created a massive database that opened new paths for research about issues important to colleges and universities: affirmative action, intercollegiate athletics, and access and college completion data for low-income and first-generation college students. This data provided the raw material for books that Bowen wrote about these issues and others.
With regard to the problems currently facing universities, such as protecting free speech while resisting hate speech, Bowen could have provided guidance based on his experience in the 1960s and ’70s. While he felt that it was appropriate for individual faculty members to express opposition to the war in Vietnam, Bowen believed strongly that the university itself should not express an institutional view.
However, when the issue bears directly on the university's operations, Bowen believed that the university should take a stand. Two examples, free speech and affirmative action, illustrate the point. Bowen defended free speech as a bedrock principle of the university, with the caveat that hate speech targeted at specific groups or individuals could not be tolerated in a community built on reasoned discourse. Bowen defended affirmative action because he believed that there was talent that Princeton had not tapped; that a more diverse student body would enhance the learning of all students; and that by educating students from minority backgrounds, universities would serve the common good.
As president, Bowen crafted a governance structure to withstand the buffeting that can occur when divisiveness and external turmoil threaten to upend the campus. The key vehicle was the Council of the Princeton University Community, with representation from every university constituency, so that the most explosive issues could be hashed out in the context of a deliberative body where everyone could have a hand in shaping the outcome.
So, in these fraught times, what would Bowen do? In sum: Work hard at establishing relationships with students, faculty, trustees, alumni leaders, and major donors. Reach out; don’t hunker down. Communicate constantly. Keep people on the team. Ask for help when times are tough. Manage processes as carefully as possible. Count votes. Never leave an outcome to chance. Figure out how to accomplish your goal while giving individuals every opportunity to have their say. Keep the president, faculty, and trustees united – all in the interest of enabling the university to get on with its uniquely important work for the benefit of American society.
In Nancy Malkiel’s view, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Bill Bowen was the most consequential figure in American higher education.
Respectfully submitted,
Henry Von Kohorn