VALLEY BUSINESS : Harvard-Westlake CEO Ties Family Investment to Desire for Quality : Cost: Tuition at the school is $14,400; the headmaster says annual giving and voluntary capital support allow salaries that attract the kind of staff customers expect.

As headmaster of Harvard-Westlake School, Thomas Hudnut oversees what might easily be likened to a successful corporation.

With an annual budget of $25 million, the school enrolls about 1,550 students in grades seven through 12 on its two campuses--the high school in Studio City and the middle school in West Los Angeles.

The school, which charges an annual tuition of $14,400, is known for state-of-the-art science labs, art and dance studios, winning athletic teams, and a rich academic curriculum.

It is also known, less favorably, as the school where convicted killer Joe Hunt prepped in the late 1970s with a group of young men who went on to form the notorious Billionaire Boys Club.

Harvard, founded as a boys’ school in 1900, and the previously all-girl Westlake, established in 1904, merged in 1989. Hudnut, 52, who once sang professionally with the Washington Opera and elsewhere, came to Harvard in 1987 and shepherded the merger.

Magna cum laude at Princeton, Hudnut also has a master’s degree in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. As he prepared for the start of a new academic year, Hudnut talked about the business side of a successful private school.

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Question: What makes Harvard-Westlake special?

Answer: We’re able to offer the academic program of a small private academy, with small classes and favorable student-teacher ratio, and at the same time the extracurricular and athletic programs of a big school. We can present a smorgasbord of opportunities.

On the academic side, for example, we teach 31 of the 32 [subjects tested by the Advanced Placement Bureau of the College Board]. In extracurricular activities, we are able to play against schools that other independent schools are too small to face. As a result, our athletes get experience they couldn’t get in another independent school and academic experience they couldn’t get in a public school. It works.

Q: Are you bothered by preconceived notions of Harvard-Westlake?

A: Sure. Not just about this school per se, but about independent schools [in general]. There is not an independent school head in the country who wouldn’t complain about adjectives like “exclusive” and “elitist” finding their way into every newspaper article written about our schools.

As American public schools have come more to reflect the neighborhoods they serve, they have become, in many instances, more monochromatic. And as independent schools have recognized their responsibilities to the broader community, they have become more inclusive.

People often look at a school like ours and assume that everything is peaches and cream, that the money just flows in, but it’s not that simple. The money flows in, when it does, because we do a good job, not just because people have no place else to put their disposable income.

Q: How is being headmaster similar to being a corporate CEO?

A: I have a very corporate relationship with the Board of Trustees, who function more as a corporate board of directors than is typical in schools. In a school with two campuses, 1,550 students, 250 employees, a budget of over $25 million, hard assets of several hundred million dollars and the eyes of the community on it . . . it is a very corporate role I play.

Q: What are your responsibilities as CEO?

A: The Board of Trustees has the ultimate policymaking responsibility in the school, although nearly all of that is quit-claimed to me. The board also is responsible for the financial well-being of the school. As CEO, school employees are hired and contracted by me and answerable to me. That is a critical portion of my job. I include others in [hiring decisions], but I don’t delegate, because nothing is more important than who you have as teachers and students.

Similarly, I cast a benevolent eye on the admissions process because it’s critically important that we get a favorable mix of students to go with those good teachers. There are budgetary responsibilities as well. Although our chief financial officer is primarily in charge of that, the buck ultimately stops here.

The school raises over $2.5 million a year in annual giving, and in recent years we’ve been hovering around $10 million a year in additional voluntary capital support. That’s what builds the buildings, funds the scholarships and funds the margin of excellence that allows us to be what we are.

I am also the voice of the school to the outside world, the person who represents the school--the corporation per se--in the community.

Q: How did the merger with the Westlake School come about?

A: It was an interesting time. Harvard, in the late ‘80s, did not want to be the best boys school around--it wanted to be the best school around. We were thinking of going coeducational on our own on the Studio City campus.

[When Westlake learned of Harvard’s plans], fear of fragmentation of the applicant pool led the Westlake board in the summer of 1989 to approach the Harvard board about this merger. The majority of both boards thought it made sense, as did I.

Q: What are your greatest challenges?

A: The greatest tension is between what we feel we can responsibly charge our customers and that which in our heart of hearts we’d like to pay our employees. We want the school to be affordable to middle-income families. That’s very important. [Yet] we have to pay a decent wage to our faculty. Nobody went into teaching to be rich, but nobody who is a teacher went into it to go poor either. We have a responsibility to do as well as we can by the men and women to whom our customers trust their children every day.

The result is we have a median salary of just under $50,000, which doesn’t say too much given the size of the faculty and the fact that some of them are young. Our span of salaries for full-time teachers runs from the low 30s to the mid-80s.

[Also] the aspirations of the parents who are lucky enough to send their children to a school like this sometimes conflict with the reality of a given child’s ability. A school with children of high-achieving parents has to be mindful of the fact that those parents are used to being right in their professional lives and therefore tend to think that they’re right in their lives as parents who are consumers of education.

I think we are at pains sometimes to help people understand that when it comes to educating their children, most of the time we really know best. We have very few problems because I think our track record is known enough and strong enough for people to send their children to this school with the kind of faith that such a relationship requires.

Q: Although Harvard-Westlake is a vastly different environment than you find in L.A.’s public schools, is there any advice you could offer to those running the Los Angeles Unified School District?

A: One of the reasons that I am able to be as effective as I am is that I can hire and fire all the employees. This gives me a tremendous opportunity that the public school principal simply doesn’t have. Similarly, our faculty has the major say in curriculum in the school. Virtually all the teachers are teaching in areas in which they hold degrees . . . which almost automatically assures a higher level of mastery than of people in many public schools who are working with provisional credentials because they are teaching outside their areas.

Another advantage that we have here is the absence of many of the normal discipline and attendance problems that beset public schools. Our students are almost by definition motivated. They fully intend to go to college.

Q: Do you have plans to expand?

A: No. I feel strongly that we are at our optimum size. Our middle school is around 700 [students], the upper school is around 850. Those work perfectly. They give us enrollments and class sections that are ideal for academic instruction and socialization.

Q: What is your vision for the future?

A: We have purchased two [land] parcels adjacent to our middle school campus and need to figure out how to exploit them in ways that are advantageous to the school and in harmony with the neighborhood. We have several opportunities on the upper school campus to improve our athletic facilities. I have a very keen interest in creating a wilderness campus where students can go for a portion of their high school education and be in a completely different setting where they would have the advantages of a school environment in the great outdoors, but with their Harvard-Westlake faculty. [The school is looking into sites in Colorado, Arizona and Northern California.]

We have ongoing responsibilities to the community to continue to make our education available to as broad a spectrum of Los Angeles as possible. Currently about 15% of our students receive about 12% of our operating budget in terms of financial aid. I think [we can] improve our financial aid packages, and I look forward to raising money for that.

Q: What do you like best about your job?

A: The endless variety. My days are filled with different opportunities, experiences, challenges. Some days I have to be a tight-fisted businessman, some days I have to be a pastor, teacher, psychologist, leader, mentor, cheerleader, community spokesman. It’s endlessly enriching. I get to be a fund-raiser, a public speaker, a writer, a thinker, a community activist. I love all the different roles.

Q: Anything you hate?

A: There isn’t anything I hate. I get impatient sometimes when the modern world presses in on me, when government requirements or regulations impinge on our ability to do what we’d like to do as quickly as we’d like. I’m enormously privileged in the faculty at this school and the students who go to this school. It’s a daily treat to see them in this place.