Gee, Again

Yesterday I decided to get a bit nostalgic about my time at Vanderbilt and went to a talk by E. Gordon Gee (pronounced with a hard g like "go," not a soft g like "giraffe") at Teachers College. Gee was chancellor at Vandy during my four years there and now he's the president of Ohio State. Turns out Gee is an alum of TC, having earned his Ed.M here many moons ago. I always liked him at Vandy, even though many of my friends wrote him off as a phony. No question, he's got the air of a politician about him. But I've read interviews with him and heard him on the radio and like what he has to say about higher education. And it's hard not to like him the second you see him. He has a high, cheerful voice and a face that can only be described as elfin. He's always cracking jokes, and bow ties are the only kind he will wear. At Vandy, we had an annual bow tie tying competition in his honor, and he used to hand out bow tie-shaped cookies each Valentine's Day to all the students with a heart frosted in the center where the knot should be. Honestly, what's not to like?

The room was packed, although mostly with older audience members. During his 35 minutes, he had a lot to say about what the role of the American university system should be but hasn't been recently. In his opinion, it's broken. He said universities should not be run like businesses, and that they need more partnerships with the community and other institutions within the community. He's in favor of abolishing departments and changing the role of tenure. He said community colleges are the most important educational institutions in the country.

He delivered all of these controversial statements with a lighthearted tone and a steady stream of jokes, but from what I know, Gee's track record is pretty serious. He's not afraid to put his money where his mouth is. He's gotten a lot of heat for this kind of thinking from the press, and cheerfully brought up lots of it during his talk. For example, one of his biggest quests upon arriving at OSU was to take an axe to all the bureaucracy that he felt was unwieldy, inefficient, and expensive, and a lot of people weren't happy about the changes he made within days of beginning his new post. He said that leadership requires three things: a thick skin, a sense of humor, and nerves like sewer pipes.

I learned another reason to be a fan of his: He chaired the committee that decided to add a writing section to the SAT test. This was a sorely needed addition in my opinion, as one can learn a lot more about the way a student thinks from reading something they've written than from looking at patterns of bubbles they fill in. And its addition has ensured that ambitious kids and their often more ambitious parents don't relegate writing to the back burner in favor of vocabulary flashcards.

I had class immediately after the talk, but on my way out I shook his hand and told him I was a Vandy alum. He beamed at me and asked what year I graduated and what I was doing these days, then said it was great to see me again. I'm sure it probably wasn't. But the last time I shook his hand, it was on stage at the Vanderbilt graduation when he handed me my diploma with his signature on it, and it was awfully nice to relive that again.