Tough Guys Don’t Dance *

So what if it’s barely 7 a.m.? Charlie Reed is in the office and he’s ready to rumble. Got a problem with that? The man at the helm of the nation’s largest university system has already made two pots of coffee for his secretaries and assistants. He’s read the newspaper, scrolled through his e-mail, made a few calls to the East Coast. Now all he has to do is wait--something he’s not very good at--for his staff to file in the door.

He pops out of his chair and grabs a yellow legal pad, the one with 57 items on his “to do” list. Every item, the chancellor says, needs to get done to improve the California State University system, to make it stronger, to prepare it for the future.

Charlie Reed knows it takes a lot to budge a big bureaucracy, but he’s pretty good at pushing and shoving, skills acquired as the teenage quarterback who led his team from a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania to the state finals. Reed packs a few more pounds and a lot less hair these days, but he still has a taste for high-impact sports, albeit on a slightly more rarefied playing field. At age 58, he has agreed to make Cal State suck it up: to add 130,000 students to the current population of nearly 360,000; to do a better job training teachers and help turn around California’s dysfunctional public schools, which fail to prepare even the top third of their graduates for college-level work; and to make the $3-billion university system more accountable for the tax dollars it gets from the state Legislature.

In the process, egos will be bruised and feelings will be hurt. Blood will be spilled. All necessary, Reed believes, to cross the goal line. If he fails, California won’t meet its promise of providing a college education to all who seek one. A high-stakes game indeed.

Reed has wasted no time in barreling forward on these fronts and others, and all that pushing has borne some initial results. In his first 21 months on the job, Charlie Reed has managed to stir up more campus unrest than at any time since the tumultuous 1960s. This time, though, the protests have come from professors. It’s a group he needs to get things done.

Picket lines of PhDs confronted Reed during campus visits earlier this year. Hecklers taunted him at public events. Academic leaders passed proclamations to “rebuke” him for “publicly disparaging the faculty.” A few months later, the faculty on more than a dozen of the 22 campuses voted “no confidence” in his leadership.

The most cutting words came via e-mail. One professor called him a “Nazi”; another compared one of his speeches to “a drunken lout’s” jokes about the female anatomy. A third got personal. He distributed a synopsis of Reed’s dissertation--”Doctoral Graduates in Education of the George Washington University”--to Cal State professors, snickering that the chancellor is “someone who obviously got his degree out of a shoe box.”

Yet at the same time, Reed has managed to bring the faculty members their largest back-to-back raises in nine years, and a whopping 27% increase in the Cal State budget over the last two years. Working the state Capitol like a political pro, he has earned the respect of major players. State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton calls Reed “the best thing to happen to the state university system since it was a bunch of state colleges.”

So which is the real Charlie Reed? A hard-charging administrator who will prove to be the savior of the system, a man of vision who will be remembered for preserving mass access to the people’s university? Or just some reckless politician who tramples on precious academics in his rush to make progress, someone who will look back with no appreciation of what was lost?

And how has he managed, in such a short time, to inspire such high-level praise and piss off so many people?

*

None of the clamor for blood seems to faze Charles Bass Reed, who, after all, learned his rules of engagement from the sons of coal miners and steelworkers on the gridiron in western Pennsylvania. “I can take a hit,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Think the tough guy talk is an act? Don’t take his word for it. Listen to a voice from the sidelines, his seventh-grade sweetheart, who happens to be his wife of 35 years: “He’s used to getting knocked down and coming back,” says Catherine Sayers Reed. “He will always win. He will come back and beat you. You won’t beat him. He won’t give up.”

That’s the way Charlie Reed played football. That’s the way he plays politics, the way he manages bureaucracies. He survived 13 years as chancellor of the Florida State University system, twice as long as any predecessor, deciding to leave for California only because he felt “complacent” and a bigger challenge beckoned.

Reed grew up in a modest household in Waynesburg, Pa., the eldest in a family of five boys and two girls. His father, a Notre Dame graduate and civil engineer, supervised construction jobs. There was plenty of food on the table, but the three-bedroom house was a bit cramped. The boys shared one bedroom, usually two to a bed, sometimes three. (“I never slept alone in a bed until I went to college,” Reed recalls.)

He first caught Catherine Sayers’ eye with his hard-driving work ethic. She was heading to a swimming hole with friends; he was unloading boxes at a fruit market. He stood out in the small town of 5,000. Here was a 13-year-old going places.

“We dated all through high school,” says Catherine, a matter-of-fact woman who suddenly sounds dreamy. “He was a big deal. He played football, played baseball. He was the fastest man in Pennsylvania. He was everything.”

Playing both quarterback and defensive linebacker, Reed led his team past bigger players from bigger towns to the state finals. For himself, he won a four-year scholarship to George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

He played halfback on offense and cornerback on defense in college. He was one of the smallest men on the field at 5’10” and 175 pounds. So he compensated “by being the guy who could dish it out.”

“My mother made me tough,” he explains. No whiners in the Reed household. He tells how he fractured his collarbone in ninth grade. He went home, expecting to be rushed to the hospital. Not so fast, his mother told him. “Sit down and eat your dinner first.”

Reed says he learned most of life’s important lessons from football: teamwork, strategy, fair play, how to win gracefully, how to lose and come back.

He learned about education at George Washington, sticking around after his football scholarship ran out to earn a doctorate in education and secure a job as an associate professor with tenure. Yet his interests leaned more toward policy than academics, so he abandoned the university for a series of jobs that eventually landed him on staff with Florida Gov. Bob Graham, first as education coordinator, then head of legislative affairs and finally chief of staff.

Graham considers Reed one of the most capable people he’s met in 25 years of government and politics. He could always count on Reed to make things happen, he says, to make the big play. “He’s more from the Vince Lombardi school of football than the Bill Walsh school,” says Graham, now a U. S. senator. “If necessary, he will run over you, rather than try to throw the ball around you.”

Before Graham left the governor’s office, Reed was appointed chancellor of the Florida State University system in 1985. He oversaw enormous growth in enrollment and research dollars during the next dozen years. He out-hustled MIT for the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, giving the Florida system a dash of prestige for something besides its football prowess.

He also shook up the faculty during union negotiations by threatening to ask the Legislature to abolish tenure. He never executed the threat. (“You can play real good poker there.”) But the tactic made room for his fallback position, to open a new campus where there was no tenure. Florida Gulf Coast University hires professors on three- or five-year contracts. So far, Reed notes, there’s been no shortage of takers.

Tenure is an academic concept; Reed prefers a business model. One of the leaders of a new breed of corporate chancellors, more CEO than scholar, he talks more about “work force training,” “accountability” and “competitiveness” than he does about the arts and humanities and their advancing a higher understanding of human existence. He likes the way business leaders make decisions, keep close watch on economic trends and move quickly to seize an opportunity or fend off a crisis.

His coziness with the corporate world once landed him in hot water, accused of mixing public and private business because he had a $30,000-a-year gig as a board member of the Florida Progress Corp. while a subsidiary was doing business with a Florida campus. The state’s Ethics Commission subsequently cleared him in a 5-2 vote. Reed says he has cut all ties with corporate boards since moving to California.

He remains active in the Business-Higher Education Forum, a joint venture of university presidents and corporate CEOs. He hosted the group’s semi-annual meeting recently at Cal State Long Beach. “I get my batteries charged up listening to these people,” he says.

Reed follows a simple motto, which sits behind his desk on a bookshelf, framed by a friend: “You work as hard as you can all day and if you make a mistake, you fix it. That’s all you can do.”

He is blunt. He is plain-spoken. He is all business. “I’m not too interested in chitchat,” he says.

Reed tells a story about being seated on an airplane next to a skinny, overbearing blond who spent most of the flight dropping hints about being famous. He chuckles at the memory of her growing agitation. “She was really honked off that I didn’t know who she was.”

Finally, the woman blurted out, “I’m Joan Rivers.”

“Nice to meet you,” Reed said. “What do you do?”

But Reed has a warm, folksy side, too. His aides are encouraged to speak up; they drift in and out of his office overlooking Long Beach Harbor to ask a question, with no sense of formality. As he ambles around, he joshes with his staff, pokes fun at himself, swears like a sailor.

This earthy, locker-room style plays better in the state Capitol than it does in the tweedy, erudite world of academia. And, no big surprise, Reed is more comfortable engaging in the rough-edged patter of politics than he is discussing an intellectual treatise. He recounts a telephone call from Senate leader Burton, gruffly informing him that he got what he wanted: a whopping 15% boost in Cal State’s budget.

“Hello,” Reed answers.

“Got your [expletive] money,” Burton growls.

“Great. Anything else?” Reed asks.

“No,” Burton says.

Click. The Senate leader has hung up.

Reed loves to tell the story. Rough-housing with one of the biggest characters in Sacramento. Bing, bang, boom. “Isn’t he great?”

The affection is mutual. Burton calls Reed “a helluva guy. He’s one of the few academicians who understand politics. We are very lucky to have him.”

Reed’s casual, almost rumpled way inspires familiarity--at least among those who aren’t intimidated by him. At a recent Cal State Board of Trustees meeting, several trustees--all of whom happen to be his boss--referred to him repeatedly as “Charlie the Chancellor,” which sounded a bit like a takeoff on “Charlie the Tuna.” The name echoed for days among the staff at Cal State’s headquarters.

What does he make of the seemingly disrespectful tone? “I don’t care. That’s not what’s important.”

Catherine Reed believes her husband is incapable of embarrassment. Once she, along with thousands of other witnesses, saw him trip and fall face-first on the stairs leading to the podium for a graduation speech. “Weren’t you embarrassed?” she asked. “No,” he replied. “Don’t you think everyone in the audience has tripped at one time or another?”

Higher education leaders from around the country often seek Reed’s advice, particularly when dealing with thorny political problems.

“It would take the typical university president four or five years to get a grasp as quickly as Charlie has done in a year and a half,” says Stanley O. Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education, higher education’s leading advocacy group with a membership of 1,800 college presidents. “He probably surprised everybody on how fast he could move.”

Indeed, he did. And he seemed to size things up quite neatly, except for one glaring exception--the reaction from the faculty.

*

All it took was one quotation passed on by e-mail. Never mind that it was a misquote. The words attributed to Charlie Reed became the trumpet to arms for Cal State faculty, causing the biggest commotion on campus since the Vietnam War.

“You said, ‘the faculty only works 7-8 months a year, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and only Monday through Thursday.’ ” Cal Poly San Luis Obispo math professor Myron Hood sent the e-mail to Reed, ostensibly to complain that his speech to business leaders in San Luis Obispo seemed to portray “the faculty as a bunch of lazy louts.”

Hood also sent copies to Academic Senate leaders on every campus. The chain reaction was unstoppable; every Cal State professor on every campus from San Diego to Humboldt was bombarded, as was the press.

Reed tried to apologize to academic leaders, but it was lost in the growing clamor of faculty outrage. When a transcript showed Reed’s words to be more ambiguous, that didn’t seem to matter, either. According to the transcript, Reed’s comment came as he was outlining his plan to accommodate the upcoming wave of students by operating Cal State’s campuses year-round: “We’ll never be able to serve them,” Reed said, “if we work about seven or eight months a year. You know, I guess, from about 9 to 2, Monday through Thursday.” Not quite the incendiary line reported by Professor Hood.

Yet the speech also included a snide remark about the faculty, as Reed played to his audience of business leaders: “The faculty says, ‘My God, we can’t work in the summertime. We’ve got to rest.’ I’m thinking how many of your plants are down two or three months of the year.”

Close enough for hand grenades. At least, that’s the way faculty activists treated it.

All this happened during a particularly tense moment in a year of rocky relations with the faculty union. The California Faculty Assn. membership had just voted to reject a long-negotiated contract. Talks were going nowhere. Reed and Cal State trustees a week later stoked faculty anger by imposing the terms of the contract that would increase the power of campus presidents to hand out merit pay raises instead of giving cost-of-living adjustments to everyone.

The union backed away from a strike and settled amicably on a contract, but the fallout continued for months, resulting in the official faculty rebukes for Reed’s “disparaging” words, the votes of no confidence in Reed’s leadership, and the nasty e-mail.

“You are making a lot of good people sick--with your ugly words and pathetic bravado,” wrote William Nericcio, an English professor at San Diego State University. “If the business model is so exciting for you, it is time for a quick career change--you can boss teenagers around at K-Mart, for all I care, though, silently, I will pray for them.

“Quit. Now. Please. I promise not to call you names or make fun of you anymore if you do all of us this one small favor.”

If such anger seems an overreaction, consider the role of the professor at an institution that has struggled with feelings of inferiority almost since its inception.

Founded in 1961, the California State University system brought together a group of mostly teacher colleges and opened them to other “polytechnic” subject areas such as engineering, business, nursing, etc. But the master plan that gave birth to Cal State also set it up as a second-tier university, to avoid competition with the top-tier University of California. The result was a “prestige structure” in status-conscious academia; one former Cal State chancellor calls it “the single greatest poison in California higher education.”

So as the UC faculty revels in Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and other advantages of a major research university, Cal State’s faculty pursues its less glamorous role of instructing undergraduates at a teaching university. UC cherry-picks the top 12.5% of California high school graduates; Cal State is accessible to a much broader group: the top 33%. It also takes in twice as many community college transfer students as freshmen every year, catering to “nontraditional” students: the average age is 26; 83% are commuters; 33% work more than 30 hours a week, and 25% care for dependents.

Although Cal State offers master’s degrees, it grants no professional degrees or PhDs, a domain reserved for UC. It does teach more than twice as many students as UC.

Cal State professors, for the most part, embrace the university’s mission. They take pride in their role in social mobility, teaching the sons and daughters of immigrants, students from the inner-city and poor rural areas, helping the working- and middle-class students boot-strap their way into successful careers. They argue persuasively that these students often get a better education from professors who teach their own classes, grade their own papers, counsel their own students--tasks often fobbed off to graduate students at research universities.

Yet Cal State faculty members also must keep up with their own scholarly research. So, many of them cannot help comparing their situation to their UC counterparts’, envying the freedom of UC professors who make more money and have a lighter teaching load.

“It’s a chip-on-the-shoulder thing, which starts in the beginning,” says Mary Wolfinbarger, a Cal State Long Beach business professor. “They didn’t get the job they initially wanted. They didn’t get the resources they wanted. The students weren’t as good as they hoped. You are teaching more classes, you are getting less research time and fewer research dollars.”

Add to this the lingering insult that they got passed over for annual raises three times during the recession of the early 1990s yet were asked to increase their teaching loads because the cash-strapped university laid off part-time instructors.

And now, just as the economic outlook brightens, along comes a new chancellor who publicly describes Cal State as the “workhorse” and UC as the “show horse.” Reed says he meant it as a compliment about Cal State’s hard work.

He says he didn’t fully realize how his comment would jab an old wound. Many professors interpreted his “workhorse” distinction to mean “plow horse,” as in old nag straining against the yoke. How would Reed know? Florida has just one university system, which includes research and teaching campuses--and none of the institutional touchiness about being second-tier.

Nor does Florida have Academic Senates and faculty unions as powerful as the ones in California. Here, state law has enshrined the concept of “shared governance,” reflecting a tradition that college administrators will consult with the faculty before proceeding with major changes.

So mostly the faculty has told Reed to slow down, suspicious that his plans to improve K-12 public schools would push Cal State backward, toward its narrow roots as a collection of Normal Schools devoted to producing schoolteachers. Reed further antagonizes much of the faculty by talking up the application of business practices to increase financial accountability, all anathema to many professors, who see this as a direct attack on academic freedom.

Purists explain that tenured professors are in a unique position in our society: Their independence allows them to speak the truth as they see it, without fear of reprisal or concern about the corporate bottom line. So parents can expect that faculty members are not feeding their children a corporate position. And journalists, who often turn to professors for independent assessments, can presume that they are not motivated by financial self-interest.

It also means that a professor can stand on a soapbox in the quad and denounce the chancellor, or send him a nasty e-mail, without fear of retaliation. Such an intellectual free-for-all would never be tolerated in a corporation. University administrators might not put up with it either, if they had the leverage of withholding merit raises for perceived troublemakers. And so professors like Cal State Northridge mathematician Al Sethuraman say that Reed, “as he continues with his mission to convert the university into another corporation . . . . will destroy its soul.”

Shirley Svorny, a labor economist at Cal State Northridge, senses that Reed alarms the faculty on a more personal level. “Imagine having total job security and no one tells you what to do. Then all of a sudden, someone who doesn’t have any manners says he’s going to change all of that. They feel totally threatened.”

During much of the unrest, Reed tried to keep his head down, driving forward toward his goal line. “Change is scary, I know that,” he says. Finally, when the turmoil blocked his momentum, he summoned Myron Hood, his antagonist from San Luis Obispo, to Cal State headquarters for a face-to-face showdown. Direct confrontation. No tiptoeing around the Ivory Tower for the big guy. “It wasn’t the most congenial meeting,” Hood says. “I was somewhat intimidated by him. He wasn’t happy. I have tenure, so I didn’t think he could fire me.”

Hood presented Reed with a book, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” by the horse trainer whose gentle technique inspired the movie “The Horse Whisperer.” The message was delivered: Listen more and lighten up on the whip. “How do you get a mule to move?” Hood asks. “Do you push it from behind? Or pull it from the front? Mules are stubborn animals. They are hard to move if you don’t treat them right.”

*

None of the name-calling, no-confidence votes or official rebukes have undermined the chancellor in the eyes of his bosses: the 24-member Board of Trustees that hired him. “In a sense,” says board Chairman William Hauck, “he’s kicking butt, and we want him to.”

But Reed sensed he needed to improve relations with the faculty if he was going to make any progress on his game plan. “I underestimated how angry they were,” Reed says. “I didn’t understand how they didn’t trust anybody in the administration.”

So he sat down personally at the bargaining table--usually considered a no-no by negotiating experts--to hammer out a contract with the union. Then he sold the compromise to the trustees. He has been more careful with his words, relying more on a speech writer to script his remarks.

Faculty rancor, in turn, has receded. Reed hopes that with the security of the three-year labor contract, tensions won’t flare anew this year.

Some faculty members suggest that Reed’s predecessor, the super-smooth Barry Munitz, now president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, might have made it through the year without such acrimony. The notion is swatted down instantly by Munitz: “He got pounded exactly the way I and [former Executive Vice Chancellor] Molly [Corbett Broad] would have been pounded when we pushed ahead on those same issues.”

Although they are kindred souls on the issues, their personalities couldn’t be more distinct: Munitz, the fancy-talking finesse player vs. plain-spoken Reed, described as “three yards up the middle in a cloud of dust.”

If things have calmed down, it’s not because Reed has given up. Like any good college halfback, Reed knows he needs the help of the front line if he is to gain any yardage. So for all his tough talk, he realizes the faculty must help with the 57 items on his “to do” list. He needs the faculty’s cooperation to prepare the nation’s largest university system for the future.

With 130,000 more students headed his way by 2010, Reed knows he doesn’t have the time or money to build five new campuses the size of Cal State Northridge. So he needs the faculty to teach more classes at night, on weekends and over the Internet. He wants to keep campuses open year-round. That means coaxing some professors to give up their cherished summer breaks. Former UC President Clark Kerr wishes him luck, given Kerr’s failed effort in the ‘60s to take UCLA and Berkeley year-round. “You always have faculty upset about things, but usually different things,” he says. “This gets everybody upset about the same thing, at the same time.”

Reed’s pledge to help improve California’s public schools is not a selfless act. “If they get better, we get better,” he says. Nearly all Cal State students are public school graduates and half the freshman class shows up needing remedial math and English. Reed has focused on improving teacher education, given that Cal State trains 60% of California’s schoolteachers.

It’s also a shrewd political move outside the university. Fixing the public schools is Gov. Gray Davis’ top priority and this is an area where Cal State can shine brighter than UC. Internally, it’s more problematic. Reed wants all faculty to share in the task of training more and better teachers. But math, English and science professors are often disdainful of their colleagues in the schools of education; teacher training is the lowest rung of the academic status ladder.

Reed also insists on making the Cal State system more accountable for its tax dollars. The idea is that if lawmakers and taxpayers are pleased with the results of sending money to Cal State, they’ll send more. So Reed wants the faculty to help him reduce the time it takes a student to complete a degree (it now takes 5.7 years on average) and to help him demonstrate how much each student learns. He wants all faculty, including part-timers, to be evaluated every year; he would tie these evaluations to pay raises. Most faculty are suspicious, if not outright hostile, to such accountability measures.

Reed is acclimatizing to the consultation demanded in California academia. But he hates the way the various commissions and task forces “get you tied up in your underwear--I think by design--so nothing ever gets done.” It grates on what little patience he has. “My philosophy is I’d rather make a mistake and fix it, than never get anything done.”

So culture clashes with the faculty are likely to resurface. The man listed in Florida Trend Magazine as one of Florida’s 10 toughest bosses is not about to change his style. “He’s right in your face and that’s with everybody,” says Hal Charnofsky, a sports sociologist at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “That’s what athletes do.”

It’s almost as if the chancellor and the faculty speak different languages. Reed’s brutal honesty doesn’t always sit well with professors, many of whom bicker and snipe but generally shrink from a vein-bulging row. Charnofsky marvels at colleagues who make “crude allusions” that “this guy’s a jock”--a label Reed would pin proudly on his chest.

All Reed can hope for is that the faculty will lose its suspicions, take him at his word, judge him by his actions. He promised to close the salary gap between Cal State faculty members and their peers nationwide within four years. With back-to-back raises, the gap has dwindled from about 13% to 6%. The faculty, he says, has “an extraordinarily heavy teaching load.” He’s trying to figure out what to do about it.

Reed portrays himself as an uncomplicated leader: He plays it straight, tells people what he’s going to do and then does it. Susan Meisenhelder, president of the California Faculty Assn., confirms that “when he tells me he will do something, he will do it.” That’s not always a good thing--such as when he made good on his threat to impose the terms of the contract rejected by the union.

But it’s not just the faculty he’s been tough on. Two campus presidents have stepped down since Reed took office. Blenda Wilson left Cal State Northridge after Reed pointedly informed her that she needed to cut back on outside commitments to corporate and charitable boards and to focus on managing the campus. Reed, who doesn’t like surprises, was displeased by the allegations--never proved--that campus workers had moved Wilson’s husband’s office furniture and were paid with federal earthquake recovery funds.

Robert Detweiler resigned from Cal State Dominguez Hills upon Reed’s recommendation shortly before the release of a critical state audit. After reading a draft of the audit, Reed said he telephoned Detweiler with a message: “I said, Bob, you can be in charge of your future, or I can be in charge of your future, or the public can be in charge of it. I recommend that you be in charge of your own future. Otherwise, this is not going to be pretty.” A few days later Detweiler was in Reed’s office with his resignation.

Student government leaders were surprised at their first meeting with the new chancellor. “We were expecting, ‘Hi, how are you doing?”’ says Stephanie Rahlfs, chairwoman of the California State Student Assn. Instead, “he rapped his hand on the table and said, ‘What’s your agenda?’ ”

After the initial shock, Rahlfs began assembling written agendas. “When we meet with the Academic Senate, we sit around and talk and do general BS-ing,” Rahlfs says. “And with the chancellor, it’s all business. If he’s ready to move on, he’ll say, ‘Next subject.’ If he doesn’t like what we’re asking for, he’ll say so. If he’s going to do something, you don’t second guess him. . . . it will be done. It’s kind of refreshing.”

What does it take to run the largest university system in the nation?

“It’s easier to move a graveyard than a college or a university,” says Ikenberry of the American Council on Education. “If you take the largest, most complex university system in the United States and turn it over to a weak leader, it can go down the tubes in a hurry. Charlie Reed is not for every place. He’s exactly what is needed in California.”

And what’s in this for Charlie Reed? When he left Florida, he was 21/2 years from full retirement. Instead of finishing out a distinguished career, he decided to test his legs one more time on the toughest gridiron in higher education.

“I want to leave you with some words by the great coach Vince Lombardi,” Reed said, concluding a recent speech: “Any man’s finest hour is when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle--victorious.”