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A conversation with Neil Kerwin

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BY SALLY ACHARYA AND LINDA McHUGH

On September 1, Neil Kerwin, SPA/BA ’71, became the 14th president of the university that changed his life. He is the first person in AU’s history to know what it means to be at AU as a freshman, professor, dean, provost, interim president—and now president.

He met his wife, Ann, CAS/BA ’71, at AU. He gained a national reputation as a scholar at AU. And the thunder of three standing ovations from students and colleagues who know him well rang through the packed hall when his selection as AU’s president was announced.

But 40 years earlier, Kerwin was a freshman stepping into the unknown. When he arrived in 1967 from his industrial hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut, he knew it was only a few strokes of fortune that brought him to campus.

His interest in studying government in the nation’s capital had been sparked by his father’s involvement in local politics. He’d read about AU, but it was a private university 300 miles from home. A close relative with the family’s lone college degree lived and worked in Washington. His cousins, Don Kerwin and Connie Kerwin, generously offered to let him live in their home while attending AU. Only a National Defense Education Act loan and the flexibility of AU’s dean of students, who let the new freshman live at his relatives’ home, allowed Kerwin’s dream to become a reality. “Without both of those things, I couldn’t have done it,” he says. “I have a special place in my heart for my cousins and for financial aid programs.”

Washington, D.C., was a bigger and more cosmopolitan city than he’d ever experienced, and politics was in the air. He found the classes rigorous and pushed himself to work hard. Though Kerwin recalls that he arrived “with only the vaguest understanding of politics and government,” within a few years he was an undergraduate teaching assistant in Professor Lee Fritschler’s large lecture class in the Ward Circle Building.

“He was very bright, articulate, and innovative, and did a great job working with the students,” recalls Fritschler, who was later president of Dickinson College. “That was at the height of the Vietnam War protests, and it was real turmoil. He should have had combat pay for teaching during that time.”

Kerwin loved it. “That’s where I think I realized that teaching was something I wanted to do,” he says of his experience in Fritschler’s class.

He also showed an early interest in university affairs. Professor Howard McCurdy, School of Public Affairs, recalls that Kerwin was part of “a group of students who took academics very seriously” and urged the university to increase academic and admissions standards. “I think his undergraduate years shaped many of his attitudes toward university administration,” McCurdy says. “He learned things in classes, and he also observed things about the university that I think stuck with him.”

“This is a place that gave me my start in life,” says Kerwin, who earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and joined the faculty in 1975. “It’s an institution that opened doors to me that I didn’t even know existed when I first got here, and gave me the confidence in myself that I could do something special. You can never repay an institution fully for that. I think I can speak very much from the heart about what this place has meant to me.

American magazine spoke with the new president in late July about some of his priorities as he leads the university into the future.

What is American University’s role in higher education?
Like any major university, our place in higher education is defined by how well and how distinctively we carry out the core elements of our academic mission. The creation of knowledge, its transmission through teaching and learning, and its application in service to our varied communities are the most fundamental and important things we do.

In our scholarship, professional contributions, and art, I want us always to be a home to important, exciting, and influential work.

In our teaching and learning for undergraduates, we have the capacity and should strive to combine the best elements of the finest liberal arts college pedagogy and learning environment with the power, resources, and position of a national university located in one of the world’s most important cities.

For our master’s degree students, we should offer programs whose stature not only ensure as graduates they will progress in careers but aspire to and achieve positions of leadership in their fields.

For our doctoral students, we, as faculty, will seek to transform them into the same type of scholars we are and, thus, return the favor that our mentors did us.

Finally, in our service, we must, of course, tend our own community. But we must constantly look outward—just as we have throughout our history—for opportunities to contribute to our city, our nation and our world, and to become a leader on all those stages.

In my opinion, when we hold firm to this mission and push ourselves hard, our role in higher education is that of a leader and example for others to emulate.

What role do you see the university playing in the life of Washington, D.C.?
We are a tremendous resource here locally. The School of Education works with D.C. teachers; the law school clinics benefit residents in the District of Columbia—most of our schools and colleges are either in the middle of, or anticipating, projects in the D.C. metro area.

AU needs to be a much more prominent citizen than we have been in the past. I’ll do my best to ensure that every one of our vice presidents, every one of our deans, actively seeks leadership positions in one or more organizations that identify with the District and the metro area. For my part, I expect to spend concentrated time and effort on the consortium of universities, and frankly, to ensure that the president of AU is a familiar figure with the District government and with the surrounding metro counties.

One great advantage for us is the large concentration of alumni within 50 miles of the university. I think the graduates from the ’80s forward are particularly likely to have resided here. We have a metropolitan area that’s going to grow by an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 jobs annually over the next 15 years. That means perhaps a larger percentage of our graduates will stay here and more of our graduate students will be drawn from here.

We’re also the eighth largest employer in the District of Columbia. If an institution was the eighth largest employer in another city, would they be prominent? Would they be influential? They certainly would. By the end of my time here, we will be too.

What are some of the ways that AU has changed since 1967, and what do you plan to focus on to further strengthen it over the next few years?
For much of our history, this institution took great pride in accomplishing a great deal with relatively limited resources. But the resources are no longer as limited as they once were. We are not an institution with a multibillion dollar endowment, and we won’t be in my time as president. But we are an institution that has established, thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, an admirable degree of financial stability.

Yet as secure as we are financially, and as successful as we’ve been, we’re no less tuition dependent today than we were 30 years ago. I’d be surprised if we were that much less tuition dependent 25 years from now. While someone may decide to settle a vast endowment on us, in all likelihood we’re going to grow this endowment the way we’ve grown it in the past, perhaps less from contributions from operating budget and, hopefully, more from donations if our alumni outreach is successful.

One thing we have in abundance is intellectual energy. We need to invest in the good ideas that will create the next generation of programs for the next generation of students, and to invest in our faculty. We want to be sure that university work—for faculty and staff—continues to be attractive as a career. Higher education, including AU, is competing for talent with industries that often are paying far better. I want to be sure that American is a place where people feel they can build a great career.

Because of our mission, we have a special obligation to develop full-time tenured and tenure-line faculty. They will be the primary focus in faculty development efforts, but we will not ignore our valued temporary and adjunct faculty. We’re going to make the best decisions we can about teaching quality.

What do you see as the role of alumni?
Many, if not most alumni probably feel that universities approach them only because of the need for money. We welcome anything they can do for us in that regard, but we also have a growing tradition of alumni taking a direct role in other aspects of the life of the institution.

For example, our schools and colleges are not only welcoming, but hungry, for the involvement of their alumni. We need alumni to demonstrate to existing students what life is like after graduation, to provide a bridge for AU students into the worlds that alumni are leading and working in, and to assist in cocurricular instruction programs.

As an alumnus myself, I feel a very special obligation to ensure that alumni feel they have a place at the table. They’re going to have a very large place at the table during my time here, and I’m going to take every opportunity I have to interact with them.

I want my time as president to be known, in part, as a new era in the relationship between AU and its alumni. I think it’s probably fair to say that because of the circumstances of two years ago, and then the search, some alumni may be on the sidelines and waiting to get involved. I hope the decision that the trustees have made will encourage them to do so. We have never had a greater need for their engagement and have never had more opportunities for timely and meaningful involvement.

The cost of higher education has been rising. How can AU ensure that it is accessible to talented students from all backgrounds?
I’m a true believer when it comes to the ability of financial aid to make a difference. I wouldn’t have been here without financial aid. I think the struggle we have, as every good university does, is the mix of need-based versus merit-based aid. We examine that every year.

But given the fact that this institution is largely tuition dependent, and given our dedication to increasing the quality of the undergraduate student body, I think we’ve done admirable work in financial aid. For an institution of our size and complexity to set aside nearly 30 percent of its tuition revenue for financial aid is a very strong statement about making this place available to people from diverse economic backgrounds.

There’s certainly a perception that universities are far more expensive than we should be. If you look at the economics of what the degree produces for individuals over their lifetime, it’s probably the best investment human beings ever make in themselves. But that argument doesn’t mean much if it’s priced out of reach for most of the population. There are legitimate questions about affordability and accessability.

That’s why I’ve always believed in having a healthy number of transfer students. It ensures that people who start their academic careers in one place bring a different perspective and diversity when they join us.

What do you see as the major challenges for the future, both for universities in general and for AU?
Accountability is one of the issues that’s going to confront universities for a very long time. When people are paying as much as they do for higher education, and when they read about things like the national financial aid scandal, it’s inevitable that questions will be asked about accountability and governance. These are legitimate questions, and they’re being raised all over the country.

For AU, I think the challenge of the next 10 years is the reputation gap. And I mean it quite literally. I know what goes on here on a daily basis. I know what the impact of this institution is. We know it takes time to close the gap between performance and reputation, and that’s what I see us doing over the next decade. The performance, the facts, the data, and the people are there. It’s just a matter of getting the rest of the world to realize it.

While we’re doing that, we’ve got to make sure that we’re improving and
growing in the right sense. We have no interest in becoming the size of Ohio State. We have an interest in being one of the universities in a major city that does what it does best. I think we have within our sights the ability to combine all of the values and performance of a small liberal arts college with the power of a true national university.

We see at the undergraduate level that in their first couple of years, students benefit from that liberal arts experience—the care, the individual treatment, the ability to interact with faculty on a human scale. But students are here because this city means something to them as well, and in those last few years here, there’s a gradual transformation and increasing importance of experiential learning—whether it’s an internship, study abroad, a co-op, or part-time work—but always, always within the context of a rigorous and seriously managed academic program.

There are only a few cities in the world where someone can do that across our broad spectrum of disciplines with both depth and breadth. Washington is one of them.