USC’s Sample Brings Image of a Hard-Driving Man : Education: He pushed SUNY Buffalo into the big leagues. His attention to students, faculty is questioned.

Especially on a slushy winter day, the stark and modernistic campus of the State University of New York seems about as far as you can get in American academia from the rosy-brick quadrangles and bicycle paths at USC.

Many classroom buildings at SUNY Buffalo are connected with second-story walkways so students and teachers can avoid the infamous snowstorms that blow in from Lake Erie. Nowhere can be seen a skateboard or a Frisbee. Nowhere is there a statue commemorating althlete-warriors overlooking sunny lawns.

The differences are not just climate and architecture. SUNY Buffalo is a public institution in a state dominated by liberals while USC is a private school with a conservative ethos. From a suburban location, SUNY Buffalo is the dominant university in an economically depressed region while distinctly urban USC competes for academic respect in vibrant Los Angeles.

Yet now the schools have something in common: Steven B. Sample. SUNY Buffalo’s president since 1982, Sample is to become president of USC on March 31, it was announced last week.

Sample will bring cross-country a reputation as an immensely energetic administrator who pushed SUNY Buffalo into the big league of research grants and honors. He will carry to a much larger city an image of someone who enjoyed being a civic power player for the community’s betterment.

Yet he also leaves some bitterness as a president who, critics charge, favored expensive projects to generate publicity, while not paying enough attention to daily concerns of students and faculty.

“He’s a gunner, really in a positive way. If there are things to be stirred up in the positive sense, Steven Sample will do it,” said William Miller, the dental school professor who is chairman of SUNY Buffalo’s faculty senate. “Even his detractors admit he’s been a very good president. He’s made us aware of what we can be. Not only that, but he’s got us moving in that direction.”

His aides depict Sample, 50, as a hard-driving man who disrupts their personal lives with late-night and weekend telephone calls on university issues. They describe him as a fast tracker, someone who earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana at age 24, had a tenured professorship at Purdue by 29, was second in command at the University of Nebraska at 33, became a SUNY president at 41 and has been head-hunted by several schools other than USC recently. But, even with the pressure, they said working with him has been fun.

Robert J. Wagner, SUNY Buffalo’s vice president for university services, advises USC staff to take vacations before Sample comes West “because once he gets there, it’s going to be nonstop. It’s a high commitment but Steve doesn’t ask you to do something he doesn’t do himself.”

Many people in Buffalo say Sample and USC are a good match, despite the fact that Sample’s entire education and career have been at state schools. They say he has been chafing at the bit for years to run a university without the oversight and politics involved in a state system of many campuses. His feelings reportedly became more acute as New York entered its current budget crunch.

“I suppose that private universities have money problems too. But the chain of command is different,” explained M. Robert Koren, the attorney who is chairman of SUNY Buffalo’s local governing board. And it’s not that Sample doesn’t know how to lobby politicians well, he added. “If we have to sell something, he can sell it without leaving anyone mad,” Koren explained.

In addition, his friends say Sample’s Midwestern roots and corporate demeanor will make him more at home at USC than at a school which in the ‘70s overtly strove to become the “Berkeley of the East” in more ways than one. Sample says he has no political affiliation and that any depiction of SUNY Buffalo as politically radical is wrong.

“In some respects, there is probably more congruence between Steve Sample the person and the students and faculty at USC than here,” said Robert H. Rossberg, Buffalo’s interim dean of arts and letters. “He is essentially a conservative and traditionalist and this campus tends to be left of center. Sometimes the students here shocked him and he did a good job of hiding it.”

For example, the law school faculty and students in 1988 tried to stop the U.S. Marines from recruiting young lawyers on campus because of military rules against homosexuals. Last May, Sample ruled that federal and state laws sanction those military policies and that he could not deny recruiters their freedom of speech and action. In response, law students filed a still pending complaint with the the New York State Division on Human Rights.

His staff says Sample’s handling of the matter was telling. His ruling was a carefully researched, 15-page document issued during spring exams when the school newspaper was closed and protests were difficult to organize. “He is an engineer, not a philosopher,” said one high-ranking dean. He likened Sample’s methodical approach in policy questions to the way the university president earned five patents for electrical inventions, including a control device used in millions of microwave ovens.

To the annoyance of some other SUNY leaders, Sample seems at times to hide the fact that his campus is part of the 64-campus SUNY system. He refers to the school as the University at Buffalo or UB, with no SUNY in the title, partly in recognition that the school was private before 1962. And, Sample repeatedly describes his university as state-assisted, not state-supported, a reference to the fact that nonstate funds for research and programs have tripled during his presidency and now make up about half of the school’s budget.

That boost in research dollars was key to SUNY Buffalo’s gaining membership last year in the Assn. of American Universities, the organization of top research schools, now numbering 58, including USC.

But the emphasis also earned Sample criticism. For example, a recent survey answered by about 40% of tenured professors said that Sample did a fair to poor job in encouraging faculty who don’t bring in outside money. The Sample administration called the survey unscientific and reflective mainly of disgruntled employees.

“There were all sorts of flash-bang research grant money. But many of us feel that undergraduate teaching, despite what Sample says, did not take the front seat,” said Harvey Axlerod, president of United University Professions, the faculty and staff union. “I would say he polished his gems and let the rest get dusty.”

Among those gems is the national earthquake research center, which SUNY Buffalo and other New York schools won, with much controversy, over California universities in 1986. Another is the World University Games, an international collegiate sports competition, which Buffalo will host in 1993, much of it played at the school.

Sample also fought hard to upgrade sports and bring a fraternity row to SUNY Buffalo--features so entrenched at USC that they help define the place. After failing in 1984, Sample helped win approval from SUNY trustees two years later to allow athletic scholarships. SUNY Buffalo, as a result, is in the midst of moving its teams from Division III to high-profile Division I. But Sample lost a campaign to use state bonds and campus property to build homes for sororities and fraternities, now scattered off campus.

Both efforts, he said, were geared to improve student life. SUNY Buffalo is universally conceded to be a sterile place of high-rise dormitories and labyrinth classroom buildings seemingly designed to avoid much socializing among its 27,000 students, about the same enrollment as USC.

Given that USC already ranks nationally in the top 25 schools for research spending and has a vibrant student and sports life, what are Sample’s plans for it?

His Buffalo provost, William Greiner, said that USC probably appealed to Sample because it feels it is the academic underdog to cross-town rival UCLA. “In New York, what counted were the privates (schools) like Cornell, Columbia, NYU, Hamilton. UB and SUNY were underdogs nine years ago,” Greiner explained. “We may not be on the same level in all matters as Cornell now but we sure as hell compete. His challenge is to make USC be taken as seriously as UCLA or Berkeley. Give him a few years and he’ll do it.”

Student leaders complain that Sample was too remote, too involved in off-campus activities. But they add he has become more accessible since students tried to storm his office in September in a protest over fees for previously free bus service. “That was the biggest thing on campus in 20 years,” recalled Ian Aronson, editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, the Spectrum. “And it seemed to have surprised him.”

Kelly Sahner, president of the undergraduate association, said she respects Sample very much and hopes he carries to USC the lesson of the fee protest--stay close to student concerns. “Maybe the balmy weather will loosen him up,” Sahner quipped. “I sometimes joke that maybe he thinks if he loosens his tie his head will fall off.”

Sample was back in his Buffalo office Friday after two days of ceremonial meetings in Los Angeles, where his USC appointment was announced Wednesday. Looking rested despite the rush of events, he was wearing his signature dark suit and tie. He joked with a reporter who previously described him as slim, to the great amusement of Sample’s family. The president unbuttoned his jacket and pinched a stomach not noticeable before and proceeded to sip a glass of what he said was very low-calorie water.

Sample said he took comments about his alleged distance from students as favorable to him: “It means they want to see me more.” He stressed it is difficult for any university president to devote as much time as he would like to meetings with students and faculty. Besides, he added: “The essential relationship of a university is between teacher and student, not university president to student politician, not president to faculty, not faculty to faculty.” The recent establishment of honors seminars for undergraduates and a new program to strengthen freshmen curricula at Buffalo were designed to strengthen that link to teachers.

He insisted it is still too early to announce any plans for USC. But he conceded that the USC trustees “very much want USC’s reputation raised nationally and internationally as a center of institutional excellence.” USC trustees want Sample to work also on social and economic problems in the neighborhoods just outside the campus boundaries.

The difficulty of both challenges in Southern California may have been reinforced when UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young and Caltech President Thomas E. Everhart telephoned Friday to offer congratulations.

“I really have a lot of learning to do, I mean a lot, about USC, about Los Angeles, about Southern California,” Sample said shortly afterward. “It is a very complex and exciting urban environment. . . . I hope to learn from Chuck (Young) and Tom (Everhart) about some of the things the research universities can do for Los Angeles and Southern California.”

In Buffalo, Sample was the only nonbusinessman in the so-called Group of 18, a committee of powerful leaders working, with some success, to lift Buffalo from the collapse of its smokestack industries to a future of high technology and free trade with Canada.

“Buffalo suffers from an image problem. So to have a university that claims to be one of the top research universities in the country is a big deal,” said Stanford Lipsey, publisher of the Buffalo News, and himself a member of the Group of 18. According to Lipsey, Sample “knows how to round up a consensus, politically and financially, and knows how to do it with grace.”

On the other hand, English professor George Hochfield said such ties with the establishment did little to aid education. “All the businessmen in town, all the politicians, all the self- nominated big shots all embraced Sample. But what do they know about intellectual life?” asked Hochfield, who has sharply criticized SUNY Buffalo’s move to Division I sports and the centralized nature of the Sample administration. Hochfield alleged that Sample is overly interested in public relations and his own career advancement.

A modern university has a responsibility to help society, countered Sample. And, he says he never took claim for SUNY Buffalo’s improved reputation.

“I think I’ve made it possible for other people to bring about change and work for excellence and make it possible for us to be more competitive as a university. I would describe myself as more of a facilitator of change than a director of change,” said the man who will become USC’s 10th president. “What I really like about this kind of work is to see an idea that is struggling to be born and help make it happen. That’s really satisfying.”