REVENGE OF THE RENAISSANCE MAN

IT WAS NOVEMBER LAST YEAR, early Texas winter, which meant 62 degrees and sunny. More than 100 of Southern Methodist University’s top faculty had gathered in the serene forum room of the student center’s lower level. The speaker they anticipated had recently proposed SMU’s most sweeping academic changes in twenty-seven years. For two months, the faculty had argued among themselves , debating the assumptions, costs, and conclusions of the proposals, which were to be voted on by the Board of Trustees. But now they had the Big Guy there, the Agent of Change himself, right in front of them, and they wanted answers. ( At three o’clock, President A. Kenneth Pye ascended the stage. He clasped the podium with his wide, stubby hands, and the crowd quieted as he cleared his throat. He looked slowly back and forth, scanning the large room. ( First Pye smiled, then he chuckled. All those faculty members, many there to defiantly question Pye’s changes, were crowded together in the back and standing in the doorways. The first few rows of the auditorium were empty. ( Pye couldn’t resist a jab. “The seating reminds me of my first year of teaching,” he said, referring to his days at Georgetown’s law school. “There were large columns in the room, and not only did people sit in the back, they sat behind the columns.” ( Everyone laughed. An hour of speeches and debate would follow, but Pye had made his point. He was the schoolmaster, and he had let his precocious yet resistant scholars carry on long enough. It was time to get his class in order so that SMU could become what Pye insists it can be: a firsl-class, financially stable liberal arts university, one that is respected both inside and outside the Dallas area.

Ken Pye looks and acts like a corporate CEO. He conducts himself with a blunt manner, bearing an air of authority. It is difficult to get a word in while Pye is speaking about something he really cares about. He’s known for making direct challenges to employees who question his decisions, sometimes goading them to “stop whining” and come up with innovative solutions of their own.

Ken Pye isn’t the first SMU president to stand on the quadrangle’s field of dreams and hear voices. But he may be the first to hear distinctly what the voices ask: “If you build it, will they pay?” Pye brings a tough hide and a chessmaster’s mind to an arena where he will need both, and he’s already learned that presidents who come promising change may be misunderstood. “My tendency to seek weaknesses and to try to correct them sometimes tends to be confused with pessimism by those who do not know me well” he says.

It is that process of “seeking weaknesses” that threw SMU into the arcane turmoil that has gripped it since Pye’s dreams of restructuring the school were revealed last fall. His initiative set off turf battles and intramural squabbles that are just now beginning to subside. It shed light on the byzantine structure of the seventy-nine-year-old university, which had allowed individual colleges to function as discrete fiefdoms with little regard for the strength of the whole. It rendered painfully apparent the school’s drastic budget deficit- by some estimates as high as $4 million. And it revealed a debilitating apathy that had spread through the faculty like a virus. Now Ken Pye-legal scholar, humanities buff, fan of collegiate athletics-set out to put things right.



SMU LIKES TO CALL ITSELF THE “HARVARD of the South.” But a common joke around campus says that SMU stands for Small, Mediocre University. Often repeated, it isn’t really funny, at least not for students paying $14,000 a year.

In truth, the university has never really been respected on a national level. National ratings (discounted by some at SMU) show that SMU sets the standard for average. SMU is one of a handful of private colleges that don’t release acceptance figures, but one source, The Insider’s Guide To The Colleges, 1989, shows the school accepting 70 percent of its applicants. Some sources put the figure as high as 85 percent. By comparison, elite Ivy League schools such as Harvard accept only around 15 percent. To add to the rub, two other Texas schools-The University of Texas and Rice-are rated among the nation’s best. And Rice, which ranked as the tenth best school in the nation according to a U.S. News & World Report survey, costs $5,000 less a year than SMU.

Why has the school never been able to soar to the heights to which it aspires? Veteran faculty members like Marshall Terry, who has taught English at SMU since 1954, have seen the school search in vain for direction many times before. Terry points to the fact that university professors, by nature diverse and headstrong, have difficulty uniting behind a common vision; hence the difficulties the school has long had in forming curricula that reflect any general agreement about the knowledge that graduates should possess. “Every program was going off in its own direction,” Terry says. “I’ve spent thirty years trying to get an educational philosophy for the whole damn place.”

Adds foreign language professor Phillip Solomon: “If changing curriculum is a good thing for a university, then SMU is one of the best universities in the country.”

Into this academic babel, and following hard after the national shame of Booster-Gate, came Ken Pye. When Pye arrived at SMU in August of 1987, he saw that behind that beautiful Georgian facade was a school in disarray. Since SMU’s last major restructuring in 1963, the university’s six colleges had been allowed to go their separate ways, some growing large and wealthy while others became poor relations looking for a handout. Certain schools boasted huge endowments while others were short on revenue. Some departments were enriched by strong professors and bold leadership; others were weak. Pye knew that in order to weld the school into one entity, he would have to play and win the political games, forcing the parochial interests to pull together as one.

Pye’s first step was to commission a four-teen-member faculty task force headed by provost and vice president for academic affairs Dr. Ruth P. Morgan. The body spent almost two years in secret deliberations, culminating last September in the issuing of a 127-page proposal for the university titled “Toward the 21st Century: Excellence and Responsibility.” Task forces in academia, as in politics, tend to return findings congenial to the taskmaster’s world view, and this one was no different. The thrust of the treatise was that SMU must tighten its focus on the humanities by requiring all students to either major or minor in liberal arts. In effect, the plan would reverse the growing emphasis on careerism among SMU students, forcing graduates to do more than pick up the mon-eymaking skills of a profession (business, engineering, etc.). The Triple Concentration Plan (TCP), as it came to be called, clearly reflected Pye’s vision, echoing his pledge to liberally educate students in a university-wide system, not just send them out with the white-collar elite’s version of a union card.

With the task force report, the die was cast. The challenge ahead was to get all of the disparate schools to work together creating interdisciplinary curricula. And that meant coaxing money away from those who have it for the purpose of pooling it university-wide. Basically, Pye wants shared funds not just for operating costs, but to keep deficit-ridden schools like Dedman College (several million in the red last year) financially stable. An infusion of cash in Pye’s pet college would also be needed to fund its expansion; the faculty task force recommended that the history department develop a graduate program.

Not surprisingly, the intramural battle that ensued pitted the university’s largest “have”-the Meadows School of the Arts- against the deficit-ridden “have-not”-Dedman College, home of core liberal arts courses such as history, literature, and the natural sciences. For his ambitious plan to succeed, Pye had to find a way to get at the riches earmarked for the Meadows school. And that meant taking on the art school’s vastly influential dean, Eugene Bonelli.



IT WAS DECEMBER 4, LAST YEAR, THE MID-dle of Texas winter, which meant 72 degrees and sunny. The atrium of Owen Arts Center was packed with more than 100 Dallas socialites, assorted press photographers, and students. They had gathered to hear the announcement of plans for the $10 million Greer Garson Theatre, which would be added to Meadows’ list of soon-to-be-finished renovations, along with the $12 million Jake and Nancy Hamon Arts Library.

The vibrant eighty-one-year-old Garson, still full of her trademark wit and vigor, was seated in front of the receptive group, holding a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses. On each side of her was an empty chair. Two chairs to her left was Meadows’ dean. Eugene Bonelli. Two chairs to her right was President Pye. Both men looked quite happy, their full cheeks flushed. But something was wrong with this picture. Neither Pye nor Bonelli, separated by much more than empty chairs, ever looked at each other. For Ken Pye. it must have been a uniquely schizoid experience. More gifts, more funds, more glory for Meadows, already the center of SMU’s universe.

A turf war was on, and the first salvo had come in the task force proposals, wherein Pye implied that Meadows would have to ante up some of its largesse to help other, less popular schools. “Schools should not accumulate reserves while the university’s debt is increasing,” Pye wrote. He named no names, but none were needed: the Meadows School of the Arts has a $500,000 reserve, largest of any SMU school.

Eugene Bonelli, who declined requests for an interview, is a master fundraiser. His strength, and that of the programs over which he presides, have made Meadows the school’s cash cow. And it’s not just that reserve that Pye is after. He wants more of Meadows’ large endowment ($57.8 million out of SMU’s total endowment of $346 million) freed up as well. But this creates a tricky situation. Meadows alumni, like most bequeathing alums, usually stipulate that their gifts be used for the arts school only. To get around that, administrators levied a “tax” on Meadows’ tuition revenue back in 1986-87. In 1988, Pye upped the tax from 20 to 25 percent. And still he wants more. He has called for even more taxes and an end to Meadows’ fiscal autonomy-Pye would centralize both budgeting procedures and the money flow.

To put it mildly, Bonelli didn’t see much negotiating room in that proposal. And he began a subtle counterattack. Bonelli knew he couldn’t marshal support from the general faculty if the issue were mere money. So he cast the fight as a battle over principles and academic treedom, portraying the TCP as inhibiting to those who were accustomed to more freedom in choosing their courses.

Professors throughout Meadows spoke up at meetings. They wrote letters to the editor and to Pye about how “restrictive” the TCP would be for students, even though the proposal specificaJly exempted performing arts students (who comprise two-thirds of Meadows students) from the Triple Concentration Plan. Screams echoed through the arts school’s departments: “It’s a turning back of the clock instead of moving forward into the 21st century,” said John Gartley, head of the communications department. “I haven’t encountered one Meadows student who is for this proposal,’” added Jody Ezer-nack, a sophomore theater student. “The plan is too restrictive and reduces [students’] electives tremendously,” echoed Greg Warden, art history chairman.

Pye heard these complaints and more, including attacks on the alleged “cloak and dagger” methods employed by the task force (which had two out of fourteen voting members from Meadows), the leadership of Provost Morgan, and the excessive length of the deliberations. “Some of those [teachers] who stood up at those meetings had so little understanding of what they were talking about, it was sad,” Pye says.

But Pye’s persistence didn’t end the battle. Meadows faculty began to push for more time to discuss the proposals, urging the SMU Board of Trustees to push the vote back. Board Chairman Ray L. Hunt, who had handpicked Pye as president in the wake of BoosterGate. promptly squashed that idea. “The time-honored way to not get something done is to drag it out,” Hunt said. “I think three months of deliberation is plenty.”

With delaying tactics out, Bonelli’s school resorted to democracy. The Meadows faculty insisted on a general -faculty vote on the TCP, saying that the faculty had a right to speak its mind on such an important policy decision. Hunt made it clear that the plan did not require the professoriate’s seal of approval, and Pye declared himself opposed to the referendum. He had come to SMU to lead, not count noses, but he could do little to stop the vote. The ballots were distributed, giving faculty members one week to return their votes. Less than one-fourth of them did so, fewer than had taken part in a recent survey on smoking. Most of those who bothered to vote backed Pye and the TCP; seventy-eight for, fifty opposed. It’s anybody’s guess how Pye would have reacted to defeat, but he lit no Roman candles in victory. “I don’t think you can rest on obtaining a consensus and have any potential at an institution such as SMU,” he says. “To move forward, some level of leadership is required, and leadership means something more than simply accepting the lowest common denominator.”



KEN PYE WAS BORN IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1931, between world wars. A year later he and his parents moved to Norfolk, Virginia, out of the world’s urban center and into a pastoral land of pines and hills. In nearby Richmond was the family farm, where a boy could spend his whole day lying in the prickly grass of a hillside, lost in boredom.

After attending school in Charleston, South Carolina, and then college at the University of Buffalo, Pye began to think about what he would do with his life. Pye knew that his stepfather, a retired naval architect, was worried that he would die before his wife did, leaving no one to care for her.

“I came home when I was a junior in college,” Pye recalls, “and he asked me what I wanted to do after graduation. I said I thought I’d like to study history. His response was, ’Young man, you’ll first get yourself a professional degree so you can take care of your mother. Then if you want to study history, you can study history.””

Pye says that because of his stepfather’s tutelage and a library full of 19th-century novels, his appreciation of the classics was honed. “I read more of the classics in those two summers than I ever did in college. He’d say, ’Why don’t you read Vanity Fair, and we’ll talk about that period.’” Or he would ask Pye to read two of Charles Dickens’s works, then say, “Suppose you were a Marxist; how would you look at those same conditions?”

Pye’s stepfather had one more stipulation: that he finish school as quickly as possible. So after graduating summa cum laude from Buffalo, Pye weighed his educational options. He had no desire to be a minister, and, because he is blind in one eye, following his stepfather to the military was impossible. “So I ended up going to law school by default,” he says. And law school meant off to Washington, D.C., and Georgetown University.

Even after taking advanced degrees, Pye never felt he had learned as much as he would have liked. “Part of the price of racing through school was an inadequate education. And I suppose that one of the reasons why I am so insistent that people get that education is the appreciation of what I missed.”

Pye taught law at Georgetown, traveled abroad, and worked in D.C. for the better part of a decade. During the Kennedy-Johnson transition, Pye chaired a D.C. project designed to help those who couldn’t afford bail. In 1965, he married his wife Judith. “My first year I was only home three nights in a row on two occasions, and I said, ’To hell with this.’ So we went to India for a year to work for the Ford Foundation. There were eight other Europeans in the city, and we ran around in a house for fifteen with five servants. It was bizarre.’”

After returning, Pye began his long affair with Duke University. He had been promised that he would teach and write, not become part of administration, but the promise wasn’t kept. “I was there twenty years in which I was twice dean of the law school, twice chancellor of the university, and once director of international studies. In my spare time, I was chairman of the athletic council,” Pye recalls with a grin.

Pye’s time at Duke was a time of great strides for the school. Try to find unkind words from anyone at Duke about Pye and you’re in for a big phone bill. “How is Ken doing?” asks one administrator. “We sure miss him here. You guys got one helluva president there,” opines another.

But the vestiges of Pye’s tenure there are evident in the Duke mementoes in Pye’s peach-colored office: a plaque that reads, “the A. Kenneth Pye Hot Air Pipe”-a gift in honor of a Pye threat to a subordinate to “fix a leaky pipe or have his head on a plaque”-and an ax from the Duke Health Center, which had suffered through Pye’s budget cuts. Other departments were jettisoned as well: education, nursing, physical education as an academic discipline.

It was Pye’s corporate style and toughness that won him the support of the search committee charged with the task of replacing former president L. Donald Shields in the wake of the school’s ’86-87 athletic scandal. When people were asked to name Pye’s weaknesses, chairman Hunt recalls, they kept saying “that he doesn’t suffer fools and incompetents well.” That was exactly, Hunt says, what SMU needed.

But, according to Hunt, it was Pye’s honesty and willingness to listen that has proven most valuable during this period of turmoil and transition at SMU. That openness served him well in the aftermath of the bomb he decided to drop on the engineering school.



WHEN JACK HARKEY FIRST HEARD ABOUT the phase-out, he couldn’t believe it. Harkey, who had just gone into semi-retirement, has been at SMU for more than forty years as a student, teacher, and administrator. He was one of thirteen civil and mechanical engineering teachers listening to President Pye that Monday evening, August 28, as Pye gave them a sneak preview of his plan to eliminate the Civil and Mechanical Engineering (CME) department. CME chairman Bijan Mohraz knew about the proposal ahead of lime, but had been told to keep quiet. “The atmosphere in the room, to say the least, was shock and disappointment,” Mohraz recalls. “They couldn’t understand why the elimination was needed.”

Pye was blunt in his reply: “To save money,” he told them. The School of Engineering and Applied Science brings in the least money, yet costs the most. Pye said the department was too far in the red to ever see black. On top of that, Pye said he had sought the counsel (and the financial support) of several influential Dallas businessmen, including former mayor of Dallas and Texas Instruments founder J. Erik Jonsson, who asked Pye “if he had the guts to close the school of engineering.” Gossips recalled that Jonsson had, after all, founded the engineering school at The University of Texas at Dallas. Fanning the flames was a rumor that “a powerful Dallasite” had promised the school $50 million to kill SMU’s engineering school, a rumor Pye vehemently denies.

Both newspapers were enthusiastic about the tough decisions Pye had made (the Dallas Times Herald’s editorial even copied entire lines from the SMU press release), but little support for the cut could be found on campus. The narrow halls and cramped offices of Engineering Lab I were suddenly filled with galvanized teachers and students.

A group headed by Jack Harkey was formed to study the numbers and enrollment trends. Alumni called to ask what they could do to help. Letters were written to Pye, in the hope he would keep his promise to look at the matter with “an open mind.” One senior CME major took his complaints to the student newspaper after security prevented him from displaying a banner at an SMU football game. The banner read, “Don’t Give CME the Death Penalty.” Fear swept through other departments in the school of science that CME was just “the first domino” “We believe,” CME professor Peter Raad said, “that the end of CME also means the end of engineering.” Pye himself was cautious when asked if other engineering departments would survive. “I don’t know,” he told the student newspaper. “I think so. I do not think it would be possible at most places in the country. [But] this area of North Texas is the thrust of engineering activities.”

Of course, the SMU engineering faculty couldn’t have agreed more. And even professors at UTD wondered why SMU would cut the one engineering program UTD doesn’t have. Support from outside and inside SMU began to pour in: more than 100 alumni and current students signed a save-CME petition addressed to Pye.

After research by the engineering committees and overwhelming endorsement of the CME program by the Faculty Senate, Pye settled for a compromise. He proposed cutting only civil engineering, which was graduating about ten students a year at a cost of $19,000 to $25,000 per student. “When the president saw all the data,” Mohraz said, “he knew what had to be done. He said all along he would go into this with an open mind, and he did.” Pye chastises himself for not hitting on the plan. “If I’d been clever,” he says, “I would have done it myself.”



“SOMETIMES I HAVE SYMPATHY FOR GOR-bachev,” Pye says. His own efforts at vast reorganization, Pye-roistroika, have led SMU through a time almost as precarious as the “student athlete” scandal that brought him to Dallas. And enormous hurdles lie ahead, the largest among them being the task of finding the money to fund the changes he has proposed. The Board of Trustees has given Pye autonomy, but that’s a sword that cuts both ways. According to Hunt, Pye is the CEO, solely responsible for his institution’s progress. Gone are the days when the board would panic and move in at the first setback. Pye was promised room to maneuver, and he knows he must now deliver.

By all accounts, he’s off to a good start. He’s spent much of this semester traveling the country, preaching the gospel of the new SMU. NCNB has just given $1 million to Dedman College for the Richard B. Johnson Center for Economic Studies, and Pye hopes there are more large donations to follow. He sees Dallas’s financial backing as key, and he hopes to tap substantial support from sources that “inexplicably” have not donated in the past.

Pye has also raised annual tuition fees by 9.5 percent. How long parents will go along with the increase remains to be seen; according to a new American Council on Education report, the trend among top universities in 1990 is to scale back tuition increases. Pye says bluntly that he needs the money, and he adds that SMU is still cheaper than most great schools.

Feeling largely ignored by Pye, the Faculty Senate is considering forming a committee to study the way SMU’s administration (i.e., Ken Pye) makes decisions. But Pye has complete confidence in his plans, and as long as Hunt and the Board of Trustees continue to back him, he will have his way. For now, Ray Hunt is content with the man he wooed from Duke: “I think Ken Pye has done a terrific job. A big reason for that is that there’s not a political bone in his body. He’s driven only by wanting to do what is right,” Hunt says.

Pye thinks SMU’will achieve greatness, but won’t say for sure if he’ll enter the Promised Land with his sometimes reluctant flock. “I couldn’t say how long I would be here. I would not want to stay so long that I keep out someone with great energy and vision who is ready to lead SMU.”

But Pye is too busy to think of that now. Plus, he says, he really doesn’t want to leave Dallas. Although he grew up on the East Coast, he says he is still amazed at the spirit and energy in Dallas, saying it serves to inspire him quite often. As long as the Renaissance Man keeps winning, and future challenges remain, Pye doesn’t see any reason to leave his adopted city. Except perhaps one.

“Oh, I do miss those pine trees,” he says, nodding slowly. “They were gorgeous.”