Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Welcome to the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
With support from AMS membership, we are pleased to share the journal with the global mathematical community.
PDFLINK |
Philip Hanlon Reflects on His Career in University Administration
Communicated by Notices Associate Editor Richard A. Levine
I interviewed Philip J. (“Phil”) Hanlon in late summer 2024. He was most recently president of Dartmouth College for a decade, and formerly at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor of mathematics before ending up as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. He was a PhD student of Olga Taussky-Todd at Caltech, and his research interests are in combinatorics, discrete probability, bioinformatics, and theoretical computer science. Among other things, he is a Fellow of AAAS and trustee of the University of Denver, and has been a Sloan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the NSA Advisory Board. — Ed.
Being an Administrator
Q: How did you get into administration in the first place? Do you have any advice for junior colleagues?
A: In retrospect, I had actually done some things which unintentionally were preparing me to be a candidate for administration. I think this can be viewed as advice for people who are thinking about an administrative track or a leadership track.
First, tend to your academic success. Make sure you secure tenure, and you’re well on your way to full professor, if not full professor, before you start doing administrative work. Some of the most difficult situations I’ve seen are when an associate professor jumps into being an associate dean or something like that, and then doesn’t have the time to get themselves promoted to full professor. At the same time they don’t have the doors open for future leadership because they’re not a full professor. So, tend to your academic success!
The second thing that I think helped me be a viable candidate for administration was that I was curious about all aspects of the institution and the different kinds of professions. So not only just what was math like, how did mathematicians evaluate their scholarship, what kind of teaching they did, but all across arts and sciences. How do people in sociology evaluate their success in scholarship? How do people in English do it? How do other aspects of the university work? I was on the Graduate School Board. I was on the college Executive Committee. I was on the Athletics Board, and all of these things came about because I had broad interest, but they also made me a viable candidate for administrative work later.
Academic leadership is a very fulfilling and interesting career path if you feel so inclined. If it is of interest, seek ways to learn about different parts of the institution. Ask your department chair or dean to help you find opportunities where you can make an impact outside of your department.
Then it’s not enough just to get these opportunities to contribute across the board, but when you have those opportunities, be completely honest with your opinions. Be forthcoming. Don’t try to figure out what does someone want to hear. Just tell them what you think. Always keep front and center that you’re doing this leadership work to better the institution and not to advance yourself.
The way I actually got into administration was that I was on the search committee for the dean of my college at Michigan and we ended up hiring an outside person to be the dean. She knew me from the search committee and the committee’s work. She asked me whether I wanted to be one of her associate deans. I said, “Well, maybe, but which which one?” Because there are various associate deans. She said “Any one of them that you want—I’m going to clean house.” I knew people pay a lot of attention to money, so I chose the “budget” associate dean, never having done a budget my entire life.
That sounds like a recipe for a train wreck. But in fact, the senior staff who worked on budget in the dean’s office taught me a whole lot about budgeting, as did some of the senior staff in the provost’s office. One of the really important lessons for anyone considering administration is that you should really value the staff around you because they really make everything work.
Q: Did you have any fears before you went into administration?
A: Going in I had some mixture of excitement and trepidation for sure. I was completely untrained and unprepared for it. There sure were tough days and tough weeks. There were times when I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be allowed to continue with my administrative role. But I wouldn’t say that I ever really had fears about being removed, or regrets about having taken up the work. The reason is really important for someone considering an administrative role. It’s very important that you view yourself as serving the institution and not just advancing yourself to have power and a big salary. Once you say, “OK, I’m just doing this to make Dartmouth the best it can possibly be,” then if someone else can do the job better, that’s great, that’s fine. But if you say I’m really doing this for my ego, then if you’re removed it’s a big personal blow. So I’d say to anyone considering administrative work: interrogate your reasons why you want to do it.
Q: How important were having contacts and mentoring in your career?
A: That was everything. It’s just so important. For the reason that we discussed earlier that you’re doing a kind of work you’ve never done before. You haven’t been formally trained to do budgeting, to provide vision, to explain the university to outside audiences. You’re doing it for the first time. And so it’s really important that you listen to, and you learn from those who have worked to walk the path ahead of you, and do so with humility and curiosity. In my case, I had a number of really effective mentors. Mary Sue Coleman, the president of Michigan when I was the provost, went on to be president of the AAU, and she was just an amazing mentor. Paul Courant, who was the provost when I was first hired in the provost’s office. Also several senior staff people. Peggy Norgren and Marilyn Knepp were budget experts, and they were really interested in teaching me, that I would learn from them. Tim Slottow, who was the executive vice president. He was really a great role model for advancing the institution and making that the highest priority.
Q: Some say that mathematicians are at a disadvantage when moving into university admin. For example, they are often not used to working with large teams. Do you have any thoughts on that?
A: Yes, I do. One thing that makes universities so much fun, so rich and vibrant, is that there are different subcommunities on any university campus. One way that these subcommunities are divided is by academic discipline. The experts in different disciplines have been taught different things, so they have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to to leadership. I think you’ve highlighted one of the potential challenges that mathematicians have when they come, or at least pure mathematicians, I should say. Research in pure math is often a very solitary endeavor, so they have less need to develop interpersonal skills or team skills. I would say, though, that experience and training and teaching can help with that. When you’re teaching, you’re interacting with all the students in your class in a way that you need to bring them along.
Also, there’s less tolerance for ambiguity. When you’re trained in pure math, it’s very black and white. You either have proved things or you have not. Many of the issues you face as an academic leader are not of that form. For example, many of them are tensions between two good things, not a bad thing and a good thing. Given limited dollars to invest, do you put resources towards compensation or do you put it towards building academic programs? Or do you put it towards financial aid? They’re all great things, and all worthy of the support.
I think that mathematicians have advantages, though, as well. One is that mathematics at its core is a very creative enterprise. You don’t often make significant advances just by pushing the current state of the art. You have to come up with some brand-new way of thinking about the issue at hand. That’s also true in academic leadership positions. Just to give you an example, when I was doing the budget for the University of Michigan as vice provost, I was doing so in the years where the state slashed our appropriation by 80 million dollars annually in one year. That required some creative ideas about how to deal with that. It didn’t come out of the blue. We knew the state was having big financial trouble, but still, creativity was required.
I think another thing that mathematicians have going for them is a very structured and disciplined way to think about things. And then, of course, mathematicians are generally numerate, which also can be a big help. I have a great memory for numbers, as I think most mathematicians would. So if, you know, some dean tells me they’ve got some level of deficit like 9.6 million dollars, and a year later I’m going to remember 9.6. You know the the difference between one-time expenditures or recurring expenditures, which mathematicians get instantly, but some people struggle with.
Q: How can one keep doing research (assuming one wants to) in an administrative role?
A: Administrative roles truly can be very time-intensive. As with any time-intensive role, you have to set priorities. And you also have to learn how to be efficient. You have to not fret about things, to find the perfect way forward. Sometimes you just have to say, this is a good solution, I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, so we’re going with this. You can carve out time for research or for teaching. I also taught when I was president. As I became provost, and then president, I had too little time to supervise grad students or postdocs, so that part I had to let go of, because I just didn’t think I would do a good job with them. I also had, I think, too little time to generate my own research program. So the research I did as provost and president was really when people brought me problems and said “You know, I’m interested in this problem. It looks a lot like something you have done in the past and might know something about.”
You can still maintain some meaningful research activity. But you shouldn’t go into it thinking you’re going to be going to all the meetings you used to go to, and supporting all the students, and so on.
Q: What is life like after administration? How do you go back?
A: I’m coming off a year’s leave, which I got for 10 years of being president. My wife and I had a blast. We traveled around, I did a bunch of math and I was reminded of how fun and how fulfilling the life of a faculty member is. This year I’m back on campus. I’m engaged again in teaching, and being involved in discovery. It’s really reconnecting with the reason I became a faculty member in the first place. That is the core work of our institutions. It’s something that I’ve loved doing my entire faculty life and it’s just as much fun right now. I can report that my faculty colleagues, not just in math, but across the institution, have been very welcoming. So that’s been nice. I am delighted to be a foot soldier and have someone tell me what to do now for a while.
Q: Can you tell us about some high-pressure, high-stakes moments in your administrative career?
A: There was something crazy happening all the time, but you’re asking about the really extreme ones. I can think of at least three. One was Covid. I can vividly remember everything about that week [in March 2020]. I can remember sitting with the senior leadership team and saying, okay, we have to put everything online, and we’ve got two weeks to do it right. Amazingly, to my great admiration, the faculty stepped up and did it. The Ivy League presidents met on Monday and decided to cancel the Ivy League basketball tournament. It was right when things were getting bad. We got so much crap for two or three days, and then the NBA canceled its season, and so everybody said “Oh, well, maybe you were right.”
Another that I can remember vividly was the crash before the great recession [2008–2009]. I was at that point the vice provost, doing the budget for the University of Michigan. There was about a week when we didn’t know whether we were going to be able to meet payroll. We didn’t know that we were liquid enough to have the money to pay people, and that was kind of terrifying. Fortunately things worked out, and it was okay. In those moments you’re working nearly around the clock with a group of other leaders to try to figure out what to do. What are we going to do if we can’t meet payroll? In the Covid case, you may remember it wasn’t just that we were having to shut down in-person activities. About 20 million people lost their jobs in almost a month, and the economy seemed like it was just going down the tubes. The value of our endowment dropped precipitously and then rebounded shortly thereafter. Those were scary times.
Another one that certainly sticks in my mind was a really terrible, dreadful incident on campus where three faculty members were discovered to have a history of systematic quid pro quo sexual abuse of students over a period of years. The easy part was suspending them, doing an investigation and then terminating their employment. But the hard part was trying to help the community get through that. That was another really tough one.
Q: What surprised you when moving into administration?
A: One thing was how complicated and challenging it is to run a college or university and not just from the presidency, but for the whole leadership team. From major universities to small colleges—they’re really fascinating, complex places. They have multiple stakeholders with different opinions on almost any topic. It’s a challenge to actually lead such a place. The other thing I learned is how much I enjoyed learning about all them. And then also how much I enjoyed not just doing the core mission of the university, the teaching and research which I’ve always enjoyed, but explaining its values to a nonacademic audience. That’s a large part of the leadership job. You have an external audience, many of them skeptical, and it’s your job to explain to them why this is so important. Why has it led to the success of our nation?
Q: What support did you get from other college presidents?
A: There absolutely are affinity groups like there are for faculty members. You mentioned the Ivy League, the Ivy League presidents get together twice a year at least. Part of that, a small part actually, is discussing and dealing with issues related to the athletic conference. The rest of the time we spent sharing our stories about what’s happening on campus, and seeking advice from each other. It’s a very tight-knit group that I really got a lot out of working with. The issues that hit the president’s desk—we’re not really talking about competing for faculty members or for students directly. We’re really trying to help each other deal with issues on our campuses and seeking each other’s advice. One thing that you’ll notice about the Ivy League is that particularly protests and campus issues tend to migrate from campus to campus in the Ivy League. So once Yale has a student protest about some topic, chances are it’s going to be Brown the next week, and Dartmouth after that, and so on.
I think we really enjoyed helping each other. It can be a very lonely job and so it’s great to be able to have a set of friends that you really trust, and that you want to help.
There are larger consortiums, too. There’s something called COFHE, the consortium on financing in higher education, which is really a data sharing collaborative. But the presidents get together once a year and so that was also a very helpful set of colleagues. It’s a nice combination of research universities and small liberal arts colleges. There aren’t very many groups I know of that combine those in the same way.
Then there’s the AAU, really research-intensive universities. And that’s a larger group, say 65 or 70. I personally found that less useful just because with that many institutions the issues got kind of watered down. But it still was a set of colleagues, and a way to seek advice on issues that arose.
The Future of Universities
Q: What are the important trends in higher education? In your view what should people be looking out for in the next five years?
A: That’s a great question. One is the obvious one. We couldn’t go through this interview without saying AI at some point. But the big thing about machine learning/artificial intelligence is that machines are now not just doing physical tasks, as they did during the Industrial Revolution. They’re starting to do cognitive tasks as well. The question is, how far will they go? What are the uniquely human skills that they won’t be able to do? I think that’s going to play out probably over the next 5 to 10 years.
I’m an optimist. I believe that what we do at universities is important and fun. And so I have to think there are still going to be things that humans can do that machines can’t do. To the extent I understand it, much of AI is based on finding current instances of reasoning and language, and replicating those. That would seem to suggest that human creativity, where somehow signals in our brain go crossways, and we come up with new ideas, still has a place of value, no matter how good the machine learning gets. That’s what I hope.
If you want to know the issue that I consistently heard the most about all through my tenure as president, it’s cost structure and affordability. We will soon, in the next couple of years probably, hit the point at which Columbia or Chicago will exceed $100,000 a year sticker price, and that’ll just ignite even further people’s dissatisfaction with the price of higher education. Many of the top places have immense amounts of financial aid, but it’s still very hard to explain to people how it could possibly cost $100,000. I think getting some sort of resolution on what’s an acceptable cost and getting some better handle on the cost structure is one of the big challenges facing higher education.
It’s hard, because if you think about what really drives up the cost is the whole bundle of activities. It’s not just the professor in the classroom that’s costing the money. It’s housing students, giving them medical care, feeding them, all of the wonderful cocurricular and extracurricular activities that contribute to their learning: athletics, the arts, and so on.
Let me leave you with one more. You could say that free speech on campuses is a big issue right now. But the one that I think is obviously a really important challenge is demographics. Look at where will the population of 18 to 22 year olds be in the future. It’s not very many decades out that there’s going to be just explosive growth in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Latin America, and pretty hefty declines in Western Europe, US, East Asia. That’s where the demand for higher education is going to be. It’s going to be in those regions. So the question is: how do we develop a global system of higher education which can deliver a product that is appropriate for those audiences at a cost that they can sustain? What’s that going to look like? You can’t just bring them all to US campuses. How are we going to deliver the product to the people who need it in the future?
Q: I’m just wondering whether a stripped down university, with fewer frills, would have any kind of appeal for some people.
A: I know some business people who are exploring that idea of unbundling very seriously.
Q: What do you think about the decline of traditional tenured positions relative to lecturer-type positions in higher education institutions?
A: When I have done events for alumni and external audiences, one of the questions I often get is, what’s the future of tenure? Does tenure make any sense anymore? My answer is always that tenure is disappearing, not by policy, but rather because more and more of the faculty who are doing the research and teaching are in the nontenure track lines. It’s pretty clear why that’s the case—volatility. Volatility of demand for different instructional resources. Volatility of research support, so that you can’t necessarily count on continued grant funding. When that volatility hits, the leadership of the institution understandably wants to be able to respond. Having people in tenured positions really introduces a rigidity that makes it hard to respond to those. I don’t imagine the volatility going away. So I think yes, it probably is going to be more and more true in the future that growth in faculty will be in the non-tenured types of appointments. So either lecturers, research faculty, clinical faculty.
Q: Do you think that there’s going to be more unionization, a more adversarial kind of attitude there?
A: That’s absolutely the case for the positions that are defined as temporary. There will be more grad student unionization, more unionization of lecturers. Athletes are starting to unionize. And this growth in unionization is understandable. It’s really dreadful when someone’s dragged through a series of one-year contracts forever and ever and ever. That’s just not good for anyone.
Q: I recently read a book by the president of Johns Hopkins (Ronald J. Daniels): What Universities Owe Democracy. In your view, how do universities contribute to higher aspirations for society?
A: How do I evaluate the success of a college or university? It’s by that institution’s impact on the world. I’m not an ivory tower guy who thinks what happens on campus is all that matters. I think it’s how we impact the world. Of course we do it in multiple ways. Certainly one is educating our students and preparing them for lives of leadership and impact. Part of that is to teach them how to be engaged citizens, and teach them that that’s an important thing to do. Number one, when I think of democracy, we should be preparing our graduates to recognize the importance of democracy and try to protect it in every way they can.
Going beyond democracy and into the many other ways that universities help, certainly through their research and scholarship and discovery, there’s a great example here at Dartmouth. A professor in the medical school, back in 2015 when I was just in my third year, was doing work on coronaviruses and spike proteins—just curiosity-based. One of the issues with viruses was that the spike proteins, the things that actually sit on the end and identify target cells, were very unstable structurally. So they would go flopping around. It was really hard to create some sort of vaccine because they wouldn’t sit still enough to train the body’s defense mechanisms. He discovered back in 2015, long before vaccines were being considered, that if you replace three of the amino acids you would create something that was almost the same shape and was very stable. That was one of the key ingredients of the Covid vaccines. So curiosity based research completely saved millions and millions of lives. I think that universities and colleges are places, unlike corporations and corporate labs, that will sustain curiosity based research. Sometimes that becomes extraordinarily important.
Q: Some people will say: sure, universities do great stuff. You’re always telling us about the medical research, but why should we fund English literature or pure mathematics?
A: Over the years I’ve heard that question a number of times. To answer it, I go back to something that really makes university campuses special, which is our commitment to the enlightenment values. The idea that the way you evaluate truth or the way you validate truth is as follows. You start with a completely open mind to the question. You gather all available evidence, not just the evidence you want to hear. You apply logic and reason to the evidence. You draw conclusions. You share your evidence and your reasoning with others, and let them critique it. That’s the process by which you validate the truth of something. I think that is the most important takeaway that our graduates leave with. It doesn’t matter what subject area, whatever their interests are, they should be able to learn that lesson. So if they want to major in English Lit, if that’s what really turns them on, they can still learn those enlightenment values in English literature.
There is also the argument that in some subject areas like pure math, there are discoveries that seem to have no application but decades later become super-important. You never know quite what they’re going to be. But to me it’s really the educational process, which can occur in any field. We want to make sure that all of our graduates carry that lesson with them when they leave our institutions.
There is an increasing body of literature which is suggesting that the way that the current generation prefers to validate truth is by how many times something is repeated, how many times it’s liked, how many times it’s retweeted. I was present when a student was speaking to our dean of student affairs, and the student repeated some preposterous rumor they’d heard. The dean said “Well, that couldn’t possibly be true. How could you even think that?” And the student said, “Well, yeah, it seems really illogical, but it’s been retweeted 250 times already today.” So there is a body of work which says that the enlightenment values are actually under threat. This isn’t a new idea. It has long been said that even a lie, if repeated enough times, becomes the truth. But we now have social media and ways to repeat things over and over that we didn’t have in the past. If that change takes place, if the current generation thinks that’s how you validate truth, it’s a huge threat to higher education, because what we do is we represent the experts and the enlightenment values.
Philip J. Hanlon is the Trustees Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. His email address is Philip.J.Hanlon@Dartmouth.edu.
Mark C. Wilson is the editor-in-chief of the Notices. His email address is notices-ed@amsjournals.org.
Article DOI: 10.1090/noti3121
Credits
Photo of Philip J. Hanlon is courtesy of Philip J. Hanlon.
Photo of Mark C. Wilson is courtesy of Mark C. Wilson.