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SMU ONE YEAR AFTER KEN PYE

The man who rode in to clean up SMU talks about sweeping change: more minorities, cleaner athletics, higher standards, and the changing role of a college president.
By Chris Tucker |

A RECENT ISSUE OF THE SMU ALUMNI MAGAZINE SHOWS THE TAR-nished name of the university, engraved on a brass plate, being polished clean by a disembodied hand. Symbolically at least, that hand belongs to A. Kenneth Pye, who recently completed his first year as the ninth president of Southern Methodist University.

Ken Pye is a man on a mission: to bury the bad old days of the athletic scandal, rebuild the university’s confidence, regain the public’s trust, and lead SMU farther down the road to academic success-and, if it can be achieved honestly, athletic success as well. By most accounts he is making steady progress toward those goals.

Pye, fifty-seven, served for eleven years as professor of law and associate dean of the Law Center at Georgetown University. In the mid-Sixties he began a long association with Duke University, where he taught and held the positions of acting president, dean of the law school, and chancellor. His academic specialties are criminal procedure and the problems of legal education and the legal profession.

Refreshingly candid and resolutely confident about SMU’s future, Pye knows that, in the minds of some, his school is not through atoning for the sins of the past. He seems well suited for the needs of a rebuilding university; a realist, not a bubbling cheerleader, he says little that calls to mind the irresistible pun about pie in the sky. The owner of a wry, understated wit, Pye can shed subtlety fast when he wants to: in the midst of a long discourse about the NCAA’s labyrinthine rule book and the difficulties of compliance, Pye stops. “I don’t care if every damn school in the country cheats,” he says. “We’re not going to.”

Pye is already on his way to changing SMU in myriad ways, but larger changes may come when his Task Force on Academic Priorities reports on the strengths and weaknesses of the various SMU departments. Cuts or consolidation could follow. Whatever the results, those who know him say that Ken Pye will find many ways to leave his mark on SMU.

D: You’ve said that since you came into academic life some thirty years ago. the role of the college president has changed enormously, become much more complex. What was that older role, and how has it changed?

Pye: I think that at one time, the college president existed mainly to provide intellectual leadership. Take a Jacques Barzun at Columbia, for instance. And sometimes the president was a figurehead, someone everybody respected, but who was not expected to be a manager-a Dwight Eisenhower at Columbia, or Harold Stassen. That’s changed. It’s been almost a quarter century since Clark Kerr [then president at UC-Berkeley] wrote that the role of a college president was to provide football for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty. That may be the most cynical view.



D: But you’re called on to do much more than provide intellectual leadership.

Pye: Yes. Today, there is the role of the business manager. These are large operations. I got a $2 million surprise yesterday, not a favorable surprise, on some budgetary estimates that were way off the mark. I’m dealing with $130 million a year, and sooner or later it’s got to balance. We’ve got a $300 million endowment. To put it in perspective, in terms of what we buy and sell and hire and pay, this is about (he fiftieth largest firm in the Metroplex. Our assets exceed those of any privately owned bank. And there’s also the public relations function. We have to raise $20 to $30 million a year in private gifts. That requires relations with a number of constituencies-the business community, the alumni community, foundations, private donors.



D: And then you have the faculty. You’ve gotten some mixed responses so far.

Pye: The faculty wants somebody who provides vision and energizes them to achieve that vision-but whose vision is limited to not doing things drastically different from (hat which has always been done, if doing tilings differently means goring their own ox. [laughs) Yet things don’t stand still in the university anymore than they do in the press or in business. You either go forward or you go backwards. Alvin Toffler [Future Shock] was certainly correct: the acceleration of change is one of the things we must live with now, The question is, how do you stay on top in these areas’?



D: Some faculty members seem worried about your overly blunt manner, as they see it. Is it impossible to be liked by all your colleagues?

Pye: That’s absolutely correct. I was accused of shooting from the hip, with some justice. There are those who feel that we’re best served by not discussing certain things, even if those things happen to be true. I probably ought to do a better job of moderating my public statements. The most difficulty I’ve encountered resulted from what I would call not blunt, but candid answers to students’ questions. Last February I was asked what I thought of undergraduate business education. I told them I thought students were best advised to take studies in the liberal arts and come back to get an MBA. I added that SMU has no intention of getting rid of its business program in the short run, and that I thought we had a very good program compared to most I have seen. Well, that was followed by almost an explosion from some of the business faculty. I was going to crucify their enrollment. In fact, we had more applicants for business than any other discipline this fall, so it didn”t have any effect on applicants. I would not have chosen a public forum, say, in front of the Salesmanship Club, to express my views on this subject. But I’m going to tell the truth to any student on this campus who asks for it. That may come through as bluntness.



D: Then there was your freeze on salary increases for this year. That couldn’t have increased your popularity. Will the freeze be for one year only?

Pye: Oh. yes. Salaries were already low as compared to the state institutions, because of the remarkable support the state of Texas gives them. I can’t promise anyone an increase, but it’s my first priority. We’ve asked a tremendous sacrifice of these people, and certainly those who are most able and most junior must be brought along. I do not plan across-the-board increases, however; the money available will be awarded on merit.



D: Talking about merit, you’ve vowed to bring more minority students to campus. At the same time, the high schools are turning out droves of white, black, and brown students who don’t meet the high standards of top-flight universities. Does SMU get into the remedial business, as so many state schools must?

Pye: We will admit some marginal students. I see no necessary requirement that minority students have the same SATs as white students when we know that the SATs tend to be higher when students come from families with a higher level of verbal aptitude. I also don’t see any basis for turning down kids who were at the top of their class in very weak schools. I may question how well that kid would have done at a strong school, but it may well be that he or she might have been first in the class anywhere. And we have some categories that I regard as special admissions, if for instance there’s been a special association of a family and this university for a very long time. But I’m not admitting anyone here who, in my professional judgment, couldn’t do the work, even if he might have made a very loyal Mustang. It’s not going to happen.



D: This always raises the uncomfortable question of elitism in a democratic society. How does the college strike the balance between admitting these marginal cases and lowering the standards of the institution?

Pye: There isn’t any way we can justify charging higher tuition unless the school is doing something better or different from the public institutions. If we accept the role of remedial education, which in my judgment is a slate obligation, we lower the general intellectual quality and wind up with the best people not coming here. We’re already facing the situation of The University of Texas and A&M awarding wholesale scholarships to people who do well on the National Merit Scholarship Exam. If those colleges want to do that, it’s their choice, but the state does provide these schools massive tax dollars. I don’t think that the private schools can assume a general obligation other than the commitment to deal with the minority problem, which is a national problem in which the privates have to do their share. It’s important to the future of this state and the nation that we educate a minority leadership.



D: Obviously, a lot of people on this campus are holding their breath, waiting for your Task Force on Academic Priorities to return its recommendations for strengthening certain areas, cutting back in others, etc. That’s going to call for some tough decisions.

Pye: Yes. Unless I’m to be surprised, the task force, won’t tell me where to cut back. They’ll speak to me in principles, and only the Oracle at Delphi will be able to translate their principles into something like, “enhance P.E. and get rid of philosophy.” But everyone here knows that while I was at Duke, we got rid of the education department, got rid of the school of nursing, put the forestry department on probation, and got rid of physical education as an academic discipline. That doesn’t generate a lot of confidence among some of the faculty.



D: Picking just one of those, why did you phase out education at Duke?

Pye: We got rid of the elementary school program, the Ph.D., and the Ed.D. The quality of those programs was not as high as the quality of the other Duke Ph.D. programs. And secondly, it did not make sense for people to come to a high-cost private institution for the purpose of entering a profession that was going to pay them without relationship to the quality of education that they received, and without relationship to how good they were compared to others. The profession was just uncompetitive. Until you had teacher competency exams, you just went right smack into the profession. Now you have competency exams, but they basically knock off kids trained in minority institutions.



D: Of course your task force’s findings aren’t in yet, but would you be surprised to see a similar number of cuts at SMU?

Pye: I don’t know. The departments here are much smaller, so it may be tough. There will be questions of emphasis that are reflected by mergers, where you put two departments together and then, over time, move more in one direction. At Duke we phased out some of these departments so that as we entered the Eighties, we had the resources to do other things. And all the time, as we were cutting back, we were running surpluses. The political problem of cutting programs while running a surplus is significant.



D: Let’s talk about your involvement in athletics in the coming year. How do you see your relationship with Doug Single, your athletic director, and the new Athletic Council? You’ve obviously got a high regard for Single. Will you have to reach over his shoulder?

Pye: When I have to reach over his shoulder, I’ll fire him, and Doug knows it. But I want to be informed about everything, and I give him my judgment as to crucial appointments. And there are a few other policies I’ll make. This week we’ve been talking about the policy on drug testing I drafted for Duke athletes, because that federal judge in California just overturned the NCAA policy.



D: How does the NCAA’s policy differ from Duke’s?

Pye: The NCAA policy allows random testing or testing for everyone as a condition of their grant in aid. At Duke we tested only with some reasonable basis for suspicion. Of course the court is right. There is no basis in the world for assuming that athletes are using drugs to a greater degree than the student body in general. Indeed, if I’m out there running the 440, I’m going to be more careful to be sure that I haven’t had crack or something the night before than I would if I was in a play or something.



D: So you’re changing the drug testing policy?

Pye: After the court decision, Doug asked if 1 wanted to put in my policy from Duke, but my call is that right now, we have to be cleaner than Caesar’s wife. We’ll take the tougher NCAA policy until they decide to change it. Single and I will talk about matters like that. I deal with him as if he were a vice-president of the university.



D: Figures show that about 40 to 50 percent of SMU football players don’t complete their degrees within five years. What does that say to you about the way that the university and society view the student athlete?

Pye: It’s ridiculous. The attrition rate for student athletes should not be significantly different from the overall rate. They are not to recruit people who cannot do acceptable work. And while these athletes are here, we will not subject them to a regimen that prevents them from doing so. At Duke, we often graduated as many as 90 percent in football and 100 percent in basketball. I don’t understand this, although 50 percent is not in any way an irresponsible average in this part of the country.



D: You mean, not out of line with other Southwest Conference schools?

Pye: Yes. But again, that doesn’t make any difference to me. We’re making changes in two ways. First, all admissions are now done by the director of admissions. All the coach does is nominate. On any marginal case, the director gets the advice of the faculty committee before he admits. And at the end of each semester, the faculty members of the athletic council review the records of every student who is presently on a grant in aid, looking at the admission stats, the GPA, and where the student is in terms of performing toward a degree. And if he or she is not successfully progressing toward a degree, we want to know why. The athletic council will monitor the eligibility of the athlete.



D: Couldn’t the selection of Forrest Gregg as head coach be viewed in two ways? He’s a local hero and a man who speaks proudly of his own SMU degree. But cynics might say that choosing a coach from the pros is saying, hey, we’re headed back to the big time, back to winning above everything.

Pye: We are headed back to the big time, within the rules that I laid out. I want to give us the best crack at that. I know a great number of college coaches, and I have only met two who could have been head coach at Cincinnati, Green Bay, and Cleveland, but turned it down to coach in college. Coach Gregg will have some trouble with some of the details as he makes the adjustment, but he’s got a first-class staff with him. We’ll make the best attempt possible to have big-time football according to the rules. They do that with varying levels of success at Notre Dame, Duke, Rice, Southern California, Boston College. Not many private schools have been able to do it, and the odds are stacked against you. But we’re in a metroplex of some four million people, and Dallas is a very attractive place to go to school.



D: Once the program is reborn, you’re probably looking at several losing seasons. How do you expect the backers, the people who really follow football, to react?

Pye: Well, I hope they appreciate that you don’t build major football programs in one or two years, and the reason it’s going to take so long is the behavior of some people in the past. We’re starting from minus one because of them. Forrest thinks we can do it quicker than that, but it’s going to take time. But believe me, it takes a shorter time to build a great program in football than it does in high energy physics.



D: You’ve said that you can imagine SMU without football…

Pye: I can imagine SMU without anything other than the Perkins School of Theology.



D: Okay. Taking it more positively, what does football add to the university besides something to do on weekends?

Pye: A number of things, the major one being a sense of collegiality. Football binds people together. And it’s not just the student body or the alumni or the city. It’s also the people who work on campus. Football is something they can see and feel a part of. The professor in business may not see much of the professor in Perkins, and the staff person working in a dorm doesn’t have anything to do with the staff working in the dining hall. Football gives them all a sense of identification with the school. Second, athletics helps you maintain contact with alumni during the time between their graduation and the time they’re able to make significant gifts to the university. Thirty years, by and large. When an alumnus is in his fifties and his company is bought out, bringing a significant amount of wealth, you want him to remember there are tax advantages in providing some money to a charity.



D: And football helps bind those people to the university.

Pye: Yes. And try as you will, operating a lecture series on theology or law or astrophysics just doesn’t do that. There’s also a third factor about football, something peculiar to this region of the country. Football is so much a part of high school life in this region that not to have college football would be a significant deterrent for many young people. It’s the syndrome reflected in the line, “Sweet Jesus, drop-kick me through the goalposts of life,” and in the size of those high school football stadiums. It’s the overemphasis that Mr. Perot tried to deal with. I haven’t been here long enough to know about wrong and right, but I do know that more than 40 percent of our undergraduates come from Texas. To them, football has significance, particularly to the male students, and they are about 48 percent of our student body. I want to maintain that ratio at around fifty-fifty.



D: Let’s go back to faculty matters for a moment. What are your thoughts on the old problem of publish or perish? What’s the proper balance of teaching and research?

Pye: At SMU, we’ve got to insist that our faculty members publish in order to get tenure. As a teaching institution, this is really a first-class school, much closer to the top than on the research side. But having said that, I see no basis for giving tenure or promoting to full professor anyone who is not an effective teacher, regardless of their research.



D: Some academic research seems like pretty arcane stuff. What do students get out of it?

Pye: There’s a constant rekindling of genius produced by research. It maintains the teacher’s interest in the subject matter, and that fervor reflects itself in the classroom. That’s why we have to find ways to support our academic colleagues in the research they’re engaged in. It may be that I don’t understand it, or if I understand it, I may have severe doubts that it’s going to be the equivalent of the atom bomb or Gator-ade. But it may be for them. So I’ve got to try to find a way to replace scientific equipment in chemistry and physics, so they can do that kind of research. Or find some money to somehow meet the insatiable demands on the computer.



D: Speaking of money, you’ve got to be encouraged by the contributions this semester, up 20 percent over last year.

Pye: I’m encouraged by the total amount, which is remarkable, but I’m particularly encouraged by the contributions of the board of trustees, because of what they did in permitting us to pay off all the costs associated with the athletic scandal. And that came in December, after they’d already made their normal gifts to the university in sustentation. We’re also extremely proud of Mr. Perot’s gift [a million dollars] for three reasons: he had never before given to SMU, it was an unrestricted gift, and he said that his gift reflected his confidence in our long-range potential.



D: How unusual is it to receive an unrestricted gift of that size?

Pye: Unrestricted gifts to this university are very rare, except for those that come in as sustentation, in relatively small amounts. Such gifts permit us to move our money around to support endeavors in different schools. Most of our donors want to decide how their money will be spent; that’s much more prevalent here than it is in the East. The result is that you have less flexibility in meeting new needs.



D: What’s caused the imbalance between the restricted and unrestricted money?

Pye: We have individual donors who feel a primary dedication to the individual schools or disciplines of the university. The Meadows School of the Arts has received the remarkable dedication and support of the Meadows Foundation, and Perkins has been supported through the years by the Perkins and Prothro families. We’ve had graduates of the Cox Business School who have seen themselves as graduates of Cox, for instance, and not graduates of SMU. And not infrequently, students think of themselves as Kappa Sigs or whatever, which further fragments the situation.



D: At Georgetown and Duke you were quite involved with legal aid for the poor and disadvantaged. Do you think such experiences are valuable for students entering the legal field?

Pye: Yes, I do. I started in 1961 when I set up a legal internship program at Georgetown. These were students working on their LL.M. degrees at night and representing in-digents accused of crime during the day. In 1964 I chaired the District of Columbia Bail Project, which was designed to set up a social science method by which you could predict with reasonable certainty which defendants were at risk of running away and which were not. We then urged that the courts release those who were good risks on their own recognizance, rather than requiring a professional bondsman. Most of these people could not make the hundred dollars required for a thousand dollar bond.



D: Were you usually right in your predictions?

Pye: About 85 percent of the time. The only problems came when some guy would sleep in and someone would have to go get him. Some of them were so damn dumb they couldn’t remember when to come to court. But they weren’t going anywhere. Most people who commit crime do it within six blocks of home and then go back and go to bed. They don’t know anywhere else to go.



D: As one who still teaches law courses, are you disturbed by the popular belief that we get the best justice money can buy? Do you agree with that notion?

Pye: At the highest possible level, yes. If you have unlimited resources, then the quality of counsel and particularly the quality of investigative resources can make a great difference. In 1956 I had $100,000 to investigate a case. I knew everything there was to know about every juror, every witness, everything. When you’re prepared like that, you never say anything that could inadvertently offend anyone. If not, you go in there blind and you have no idea. Once you get below that top level, however, I don’t think money is that significant, and when you get to the lowest level, it’s the opposite. The public defender and the court-assigned counsel are more likely to provide able representation than is the average lawyer you hire. The PD will lack experience but will more than compensate with youthful fervor. His total commitment to his client transmits charisma to a jury. And there’s almost always a mother on that jury, and she doesn’t want to see that young person lose.



D: You’ve got another task force looking into the relationship of SMU and the Methodist Church. Doesn’t this happen whenever a new president comes in? Are you aware of any pressing problems?

Pye: To my knowledge, this hasn’t been done like this before. What should be our relationship, when we’re owned and controlled by the South Central Jurisdiction? We have a theology school, of course, and historically our relationship with the church has been deep and committed. But we are also an academy, a free marketplace of ideas. You can’t be a university, whether you’re Catholic or Methodist or secular, if you’re not open to the free discussion of ideas in an effort to ascertain truth. And in that effort, you have to entertain ideas that are contrary to accepted dogma, whether that dogma be the free enterprise system or democracy or Christianity. That’s particularly true in a university where three-quarters of the students are not members of the Methodist Church.



D: But there has been no interference from the church…

Pye: No, but it needs to be clearly stated why there shouldn’t be. We need to think out, better than we have done, that relationship.



D: You’ve been in academic life through a couple of very stormy decades. Were the Sixties good for the university, or is the legacy of that time a bad one?

Pye: Some good came out of the Sixties, in the sense that some good comes out of most traumas. Certainly, the greater level of student participation in the governing of institutions is a plus. It’s akin to the general movement toward consumerism; it’s nonsensical to ignore the consumers of your product. On the other hand, the curricular reforms that came out of that era were a mixed bag. I personally think they went much too far in encouraging the “smorgasbord” rather than a directed course of study. At eighteen, students are expected to have these superhuman powers of a renaissance person and know what they need to prepare themselves for life.



D: You’ve said that you wouldn’t mind ending your academic life back in teaching. Does that mean you won’t retire as president of SMU?

Pye: When you take one of these positions, you have to realize that your longevity is limited if you’re doing the job right. Each decision that you make tends to disappoint some people. And after you disappoint enough of these people individually, they, quote, “lose confidence in your leadership,” end quote. That means they have a single-issue objection to you, and when the combination of single-issue complaints reaches a critical mass, it precludes you from developing the constituency you need to operate.



D: So like a baseball manager, you were hired to be fired.

Pye: Yes. And look at the turnover in these jobs. If you want longevity, you give speeches saying we’re the greatest in the world. We’re on the verge of being Cambridge or Oxford, and I see no major changes necessary except to increase faculty salaries and faculty support.



D: In the fall of 1986, Governor Bill Clements told D: “We are on a plateau just before the final step of achievement at SMU.” Would you agree with his assessment and his geography?

Pye: SMU is a fine university that has asignificant way to go before we achieve whatI would regard as the ideal: a private university in the Southwest that can compare withany in any other section of the country.That’s going to require money, direction, anda sense of optimism and confidence tempered by reality.

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