At Harvard, Religion Course May Be Required

A Harvard University committee charged with revising curriculum proposed that undergraduates be compelled to take a course in religion as part of a new set of course requirements that breaks sharply from the school's peer institutions.

A preliminary report distributed to faculty yesterday recommends scrapping much of the current curriculum in favor of new "general education" requirements spanning the humanities and sciences. The most striking proposals address criticism that Harvard's liberal education fails to adequately prepare students for lives after graduation.

The proposed requirement in religion, dubbed "Reason and Faith," has little parallel in higher education, authors of the report said. It would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. The report, which calls traditional academics "profoundly secular," seeks to place Harvard's students and faculty in the center of contemporary religious debates.

"I think 30 years ago," when the school's curriculum was last overhauled, "people would have said that religion is not something that everyone needs to know," said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and co-chairman of the committee that drafted the report. "But today, few would disagree that religion is supremely important to modern life."

Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences will now consider the report, and significant changes could be made before voting on the proposals. They are the centerpiece of a broader curricular review, launched four years ago, that has suffered from delays, criticism and the upheaval of Harvard's administration. Lawrence H. Summers stepped down as the school's president this year under pressure from faculty, and a former president, Derek C. Bok, is serving in the interim until a successor is found.

Mr. Summers had pushed strongly for a renewed focus on the sciences, but the report issued yesterday doesn't significantly alter the school's requirements in that area. Students would still have to take one course each in life science and physical science.

In all, the report establishes 10 requirements for students to fulfill outside of their majors. They include ethics, culture, U.S. history and foreign societies. The current curriculum requires study in more-specific academic disciplines.

"The role of general education, as we conceive it, is to connect what students learn at Harvard to life beyond Harvard, and to help them understand and appreciate the complexities of the world and their role in it," says the report. It notes that 53% of graduating seniors at Harvard say they expect to enter professional school in business, medicine or law, while just 18% plan to pursue a Ph.D.

Prof. Menand, in an interview, likened the report to the curricular reform instituted in 1945 by James Bryant Conant, then Harvard's president. That reform, known as the "Red Book," also stressed civic values in undergraduate education and led many of Harvard's peers to adopt similar changes.

Academic requirements vary widely across the Ivy League, from Columbia University's strictly defined "great books" curriculum to Brown University's "open curriculum" with few requirements outside of students' majors. An earlier version of Harvard's general-education report, issued in 2004, proposed "distribution requirements" similar to Yale University's system, which is more closely grounded in academic disciplines.

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All in the Family

Parents have just sent their kids off to college, full of hope that the knowledge and enlightenment they acquire will prepare them for the rigors of the modern economy. But a worrying possibility is keeping some of these parents -- especially the conservative ones -- up at night: the prospect that their children will be hopelessly corrupted by the faculty.

In one popular book about campus politics, the author writes, "We all know that left-wing radicals from the 1960s have hung around academia and hired people like themselves. . . . [T]hey spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians -- all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children." If the author is right, then the fears about the minds of our children might seem like a lot more than just right-wing paranoia.

Most studies of the subject have indicated that, indeed, upward of 90% of college professors at many universities hold liberal political views. In some schools and departments, faculties are virtually 100% left-wing. It is one thing to lament this ideological lopsidedness in the academy. But it is quite another to assume that professors actually bend the little minds in their care toward a liberal point of view, or even a radical one. Imagine a student with God-fearing Republican parents exposed to the depredations of an English professor aiming to use his class as a Bolshevik training camp. Will the professor succeed in turning the kid into a Red? The evidence says, probably not: When it comes to politics, people from conservative families follow their parents, not their professors.

The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the University of Michigan's National Election Studies. These survey data uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote Republican than those who don't go to college. Adults 25 and under from Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn't. And young adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if not.

Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age -- but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if they haven't. In fact, while three-quarters of the uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that the college graduates vote this way. And they've not all become skeptical political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.

Obviously, some kids turn left in college -- but this appears to be the exception, not the rule. Does all this mean that our colleges and universities are actually breeding grounds for conservatism? Hardly. What the statistics really show is that higher education by itself doesn't affect political views very much. Rather, in addition to the strong influence of parents, it is higher incomes -- which typically reward a college education in America -- that push people to the right politically. In Republican families, the income effect reinforces parents' influence on their kids. In Democratic families, the two effects work against each other.

To fearful Republican parents, then: Sleep tight. When it comes to politics, your kids are in good hands -- yours.

Mr. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs, is the author of "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism," forthcoming in November from Basic Books.

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Harvard Proposes Religion Course
A Harvard University panel has proposed that undergraduates be compelled to take a course called "Reason and Faith" as part of a new set of requirements that would scrap much of the university's current curriculum in favor of new "general education" requirements spanning the humanities and sciences. The report establishes 10 requirements for students to fulfill outside of their majors. They include ethics, culture, U.S. history and foreign societies. The current curriculum requires study in more specific academic disciplines. The proposed religion course would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences will now consider the report, and changes could be made before voting on the proposals.

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Academic advising is an educational activity that depends on valid explanations of complex student behaviors and institutional conditions to assist college students in making and executing educational and life plans.

·         Gordon and Steele (1995). The effective academic advisor needs knowledge of student development theory, career development theory, learning theory, decision-making theory, multicultural theory, retention theory, personality theory,  moral development theory, adult development theory, sociological theory, and organizational theory.

·         Goodlag (1997). Because advising focuses on helping individuals achieve their own goals and interests, it is also a moral endeavor.

1.      Outlining the scope of academic advising. Five widely beliefs establish the practical boundaries of academic advising

• The purpose of academic advising is student learning and personal development.
• The art or science of teaching is the pedagogy of academic advising.
• The context of academic advising is educationally compelling circumstances calling for the formation and implementation of educational and life plans.
• The focus of academic advising is the whole person.
• The content of academic advising is constructed knowledge about students’ educational and life plans.

2.      Delineating some central concepts of developmental theories used in advising. Relevant theories of academic advising are generally classified into clusters.

·         Identity theories. Erikson (1968): eight stages of development; Chickering (1969): seven vectors of development; Marcia (1980): four identity states; Josselson (1987): unique features of women’s identity development; racial and ethnic identity models; gay, lesbian, and bisexual identity development

·         Theories about making meaning. Piaget (1952): cognitive-developmental theories; Perry (1968): intellectual and ethical development; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986): women’s ways of knowing; King and Kitchener’s (1994): Reflective Judgment Model; Kohlberg (1976): theory of moral reasoning; Gilligan (1981, 1983): ethic of care in making moral judgments.

·         Typology (or Personality patterns of behavior) theories. These theories are not developmental –they do not explain growth and change –but they do add considerable insight about the ways in which personality attributes influence learning. Kolb (1981, 1984): theory of learning; Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (1985); Kersey Temperament Theory (1987).

3.      Discussing practice-oriented generalizations about the use of theories in advising

·         Trait and Factor Theories combine traits of individuals and work requirements to describe the benefits or salience of working under the combined conditions.

·         Developmental Career Theories

·         Decision making theories. Tiedeman (1990): “life career” theory

·         Social learning theories. Career development involves the interaction of four factors.

·         Theories of minority career development. Racial and ethnic identity models; identity development among oppressed groups; five stage model of career development.

·         Other views of career development theories: self knowledge; occupational knowledge and self knowledge; decision making skills; executive processing; contextual influences on career choice.

1.      Students’ needs for advising change with each new plateau of development.

2.      Students’ needs change significantly over time from information dominant forms to consultation dominant forms.

3.      Knowledge and use of developmental theory helps to define advising tasks, identify outcomes of advising, and promote development directly.

4.      The developmental academic advisor must know theory, know others who use it in their educational endeavors, and coordinate these multiple efforts.

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Historical and Philosophical Foundations for Academic Advising 

·         Ideas and events that have shaped advising as it is constructed today.

·         Lessons that can help improve both current methods and interaction between students and advisors.

This review spans the years from the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the 1990. These years are divided into three periods that mark the development of academic advising:

1.      Higher education before academic advising was defined as an activity (founding of Harvard to the emergence of research universities in the late nineteenth century);

• The colonial colleges taught a classical curriculum that emphasized ideas, or the life of the mind.
• The curriculum and the teaching method were standard.
• Three distinct educational philosophies emerged: utility, liberal culture, and research.

2.      Higher education when academic advising was defined but for the most part unexamined (late nineteenth century to the 1970s);

• The elective principle became a defining characteristic of American higher education.
• Growing distance between faculty and undergraduate students.
• By the late 1930s almost all institutions had formalized advising programs.
• Advising was primarily a function of academic affairs.

3.      Academic advising as a defined and examined activity (1970s and continues today).

• By the 1960s society was beginning to shape the tasks that universities and colleges were compelled to perform.
• Continued formalization of academic on most campuses was one response to two forces: student populations that were increasingly numerous and diverse, and faculties that were devoted to research.
• In its 1984 report the National Institute of Education identified advising as one of the weakest components of the undergraduate academic experience.
• In the early 1970s a new concept of academic advising was promoted

-         Crookston (1972). Traditional or prescriptive advising as a relationship built on the authority of the advisor and the limitation of the student. The belief that students and advisors should share responsibility for both the nature of the advising relationship and the quality of the experience.

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Gauging from the scores of readers who responded to my recent column "Any College Will Do," the question of whether a degree from an elite school boosts one's chances for success in business is hotly debated. It's also an extremely emotional topic, because memories of the college application process trigger strong feelings of being either validated or rejected.

As a parent, Krishna Memani, a bank analyst from Livingston, N.J., writes that his job is to improve "the odds of success" for his kids, and to that end, he supports going to the right college. "It does not guarantee success -- that will always be up to the kid -- but it certainly helps," he says. "I conclude that from looking at the anecdotal evidence in the general population rather than just looking at the backgrounds of CEOs."

The graduate degree that Janice LeCocq, of Century, Fla., earned from Stanford in medical anthropology enabled her to launch her investment-banking career more than 20 years ago, she says. Even though her degree had "no relevance" to finance, she says, employers were impressed.

"I know that when I was a partner a few years later, they wouldn't look at anyone but Stanford and Harvard," she writes. "I argued there would be good prospects at other schools, but they didn't want to bother."

Alexander Wolf, who works in finance in New York, says the Ivy Leagues are still disproportionately represented in the corner office. He points out that last week's column stated there are 10 CEOs from Wisconsin and nine from Harvard in the country's top 500 companies. But you must consider that undergraduate enrollment is 29,000 at Wisconsin and 6,650 at Harvard. That means a Harvard graduate is four times as likely to reach the CEO level as someone from Wisconsin, says Mr. Wolf, who went to Ohio Wesleyan as an undergraduate and Northwestern's Kellogg School for his M.B.A.

Even some educators who have headed small schools concede the Ivies, with their large endowments, have an edge. Dr. William Hamm, president of the Foundation for Independent Higher Education in Washington, D.C., and former president of Waldorf College in Iowa, writes, "If a student asked me whether to enroll at Wisconsin, Waldorf or Harvard, I'd tell him or her they'd be foolish to pass up the opportunity for Harvard."

But Scott Albert, a New Jersey educational consultant, says that after 20 years as an educator, he has "long believed that the college admission process is one of the great lies perpetuated by educators. It dangles a motivational worm in front of young people as a way to get them to work harder, but not necessarily learn more." In the end, he says, "it breeds fear and rejection into a majority of young people while offering a false sense of security to the few who are accepted."

David Curran believes in another key to success altogether. "In my own experience with several Fortune 500 companies," he writes, "I have found the best leaders (versus managers) are individuals who have had to deal with some form of adversity (no money, single parent situations, etc.) and have developed mechanisms to transform those challenges into opportunities -- regardless of what school they attended."

He worked his way through a state university and law school, and now is CEO of software maker Data Communique, a unit of Havas, the French advertising company.

He also argues that it's executive recruiters, more than their clients, who are biased toward Ivy League graduates. "If you can actually make your way through the gauntlet set up by these intermediaries and talk with smart people in senior positions, you can have productive discussions," he says.

Other readers say not having an Ivy League degree means having to work harder to prove your worth. The CEO of a New Jersey marketing company, who went to Rutgers University, writes that his success, like that of others who went to state schools, "was partly born out of the frustration of being cut off from some of the more lucrative jobs, and going through life with a small chip on my shoulder." Not being able to afford an elite school, he adds, "leaves one with something to prove in life."

Jeffrey Atwood, a staff manager for a computer-services and consulting company in New York, despairs that an elite degree may be necessary for all the wrong reasons. "It seems to me there are a lot more criteria that justify successfully reaching the corner office: gender, race and sexual orientation are also key factors," he writes. " 'Any College Will Do' for a white, married male, perhaps, but for anyone else it may be necessary to have absolutely impeccable credentials no matter how good your record; you just can't catch a break."

The pressure to land at elite schools is even worse in developing countries, writes Sarabjit Singh, a manager at GlobalSpec, in Troy, N.Y., and a first-year student in the executive M.B.A. program at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He learned that while staffing a hot line for New Delhi high-school students with exam-related stress. "It was only then that I saw the extent of the problem," he says. "One girl who called in said she had graduated several years ago and still felt that she let her parents down by not getting into a 'good' school."

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Vanderbilt Reins In Lavish Spending By Star Chancellor

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- At Vanderbilt University, the board is trying to rein in star chancellor E. Gordon Gee, without running him off.

Since arriving here in 2000, the 62-year-old Mr. Gee has dramatically boosted the 133-year-old school's academic standing and overseen fund raising of more than $1 billion. Mr. Gee's $1.4 million annual compensation is among the highest for U.S. university leaders.

But supervision of Mr. Gee by the university's 44-member Board of Trust has "probably been a little loosey-goosey," says trustee Edward Malloy, a former president of the University of Notre Dame. Vanderbilt paid more than $6 million, never approved by the full board, to renovate and enlarge Braeburn, the Greek-revival university-owned mansion where Mr. Gee and his wife, Constance, live. The university pays for the Gees' frequent parties and personal chef there. The annual tab exceeds $700,000. Some trustees' concern was aroused when they learned that Mrs. Gee was using marijuana at the mansion. The chancellor told some trustees she was using it for an inner-ear ailment.

Now change is afoot. Trustees recently created a subcommittee to monitor Mr. Gee's spending. For the first time, the full board will get reports about his expenditures and pay package. A second new board committee is scrutinizing potential conflicts of interest and likely will look at the university's longtime contract with a parking company in which a trustee holds a big stake.

"We should not be issuing blank checks to university leaders," says Judson Randolph, a retired Vanderbilt trustee who still attends board meetings.

Yet no one wants Mr. Gee to leave. Despite the board's actions, chairman Martha Ingram says: "I have never had qualms about whether Gordon should stay on as chancellor."

The delicate dance by Vanderbilt trustees reflects a new era of campus governance and the changing role of college heads. Historically, these campus leaders earned modest salaries and enjoyed long tenures. Now, like Mr. Gee, they make more money and move more often. Their higher compensation invites scrutiny from trustees, faculty and students.

Vanderbilt's $2.2 billion annual budget is bigger than the revenues of all but the largest 800 U.S. public companies. But management oversight on campus often hasn't kept pace with changes in the business world. At Vanderbilt, the full Board of Trust didn't approve the university's annual budget, most big-ticket spending projects or debt financing between 2000 and 2005.

The scrutiny at Vanderbilt comes as the national outcry over executive pay has reached into academia. Recent disclosures about the pay and perquisites of campus leaders have led to resignations and an indictment.

American University last fall forced out President Benjamin Ladner after auditors questioned more than $500,000 in expenditures by him and his wife. The Washington, D.C., university paid for the couple's birthday parties and European vacations in first-class hotels, according to the audit. Investigators found the Ladners once stopped in Rome on a business trip to Dubai so she could have her hair cut by a favorite stylist. Mr. Ladner says the university didn't pay for any European vacations and the Rome stop "had nothing to do with" his wife getting a haircut.

In California, a state audit in May uncovered $334 million in largely unreported pay and perks for University of California staffers during the year ended June 30, 2005. The spending included a $30,000 dog run built for Denice Denton, chancellor of the university's Santa Cruz campus. She committed suicide in June following extensive media coverage and criticism by lawmakers.

In August, a Houston grand jury indicted former Texas Southern University President Priscilla Slade on two charges of criminally misusing university money for her private benefit. The indictment alleges Ms. Slade improperly spent $1.9 million during her nearly seven-year tenure, including more than $260,000 to furnish and landscape her home. Ms. Slade, whom university regents fired in April, has denied wrongdoing and sued them for allegedly breaking her contract. "She believed every expenditure she participated in was for the benefit of TSU and was or would be approved by the board," says Mike DeGeurin, Ms. Slade's lawyer.

In the wake of such disclosures, Congress is considering more scrutiny of management compensation at nonprofits. Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, intends to introduce a bill next year to strengthen a federal prohibition on "excessive" compensation for leaders of universities and other charitable groups. Good governance "can make the difference between universities where presidents live high on the hog and where students come first," says Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Recurring Pattern

Mr. Gee's 25-year career as a university leader follows a recurring pattern: disrupt the status quo, lift the university's image, raise a lot of money, and leave for another job. He has run five universities -- more than any other American, he says. At each stop, Mr. Gee has been well-paid, and well-housed.

A Mormon teetotaler trained as a lawyer and educator, Mr. Gee is known for wearing bowties and horn-rimmed glasses. He first became a university president at West Virginia University in 1981, when he was 37.

In 1985, Mr. Gee left to assume the presidency of the University of Colorado, where he charmed students and lawmakers, who boosted state support by 37% during his tenure. The university also built him a $780,969 house. After he resigned in 1990 to take the helm at Ohio State University, Colorado regents found Mr. Gee had awarded deferred-compensation bonuses to top aides without board authorization. Mr. Gee says he reviewed the bonuses with the board's chairman, who has since died.

At Ohio State, Mr. Gee confronted state budget cuts. He restricted enrollment, merged departments, cut jobs through attrition, and initiated a $1 billion fund-raising campaign. During his seven-year tenure, the university twice paid to renovate its president's home and added a small conservatory to it. The total cost was between $500,000 and $750,000, according to Mr. Gee. When he announced plans to leave for the Ivy League's Brown University, Ohio State students donned bowties and begged him to stay.

Brown spent $3 million renovating the president's home for Mr. Gee, says Donald Reaves, Brown's former finance chief. The total included a $400,000 conservatory that was built in England, then broken down, shipped, reassembled and attached to the president's home on Brown's Providence, R.I., campus.

Mr. Gee believes a home with generous entertaining space is an essential fund-raising tool for a university leader. At Brown, he says, "I stayed out of the budget side" of the renovation.

In late 1999, less than two years after arriving at Brown, Mr. Gee took a call from John Hall, a retired chief executive of Ashland Inc. and longtime Vanderbilt trustee. The two men had been friends since the early 1980s, when Mr. Gee sought a corporate contribution from Mr. Hall for West Virginia's engineering school. Now, Mr. Hall wanted Mr. Gee to consider moving to Vanderbilt.

Mr. Gee said he initially resisted, but eventually succumbed after an intense courtship by Vanderbilt trustees. He said he never felt like he fully belonged at Brown, where he had some run-ins with the faculty. The day Vanderbilt announced his selection in February 2000, the Gees toured Braeburn, situated on a hilltop in a tony Nashville neighborhood. "They said, 'It would be nice to fix it up as nice as the house at Brown,' " Mr. Hall recalls. He says the university promised to renovate the home and install a conservatory, guest quarters and commercial kitchen. "He got what he wanted," Mr. Hall says.

The university's offer letter, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, didn't mention the remodeling project. It promised Mr. Gee a $504,000 annual salary, annual bonus and two supplemental-retirement plans. Only a few of the nine members of the board's search committee knew the details of the offer letter at the time, according to people familiar with the matter.

After arriving at Vanderbilt, Mr. Gee set out to recruit top-flight faculty, break down barriers between academic departments and boost enrollment among racial and ethnic minorities. He created a $100 million fund to support interdisciplinary research. And he attacked a sacred cow of higher education by folding the athletic department into other departments to better integrate athletics with the rest of the university.

Meanwhile, the university began renovating Braeburn, which was built in 1915. The project, which included new plumbing, heating and electrical systems, expanded the mansion by 3,700 square feet, to a total of 19,700. Construction permits estimated the cost at $2.1 million. But the final tab exceeded $6 million, according to a person close to the situation.

Mr. Hall says he knew the building was in poor repair but the extent of the work was a "surprise." Mr. Gee says, "We indicated some of the things that we thought would be important, including creating a space for all the entertaining we were going to do." However, he says he didn't keep tabs on the project's cost because he didn't want to be perceived as trying to shape the project for his personal gain. "I was told it was done right, it was done well and it was done on budget," he recollects. In hindsight, he agrees he should have learned the amount and kept the full board apprised.

Still, Mr. Gee says, "we paid for that house over and over and over again." He notes that the university has raised more than $1.2 billion since he arrived and says, "A lot of that was raised in that house." Some of the money went to build the endowment, which has grown to about $3 billion from $2 billion in 2000.

Mr. Gee estimates that Braeburn is home to several hundred events a year. The events range from five-guest dinners served by a waiter to large fund raisers for Nashville-area nonprofits where Vanderbilt pays the bill. Improving community ties "is a very good use of university resources," Mr. Gee says. "We don't live here to have parties for ourselves."

In some cases, the connections to Vanderbilt are more tenuous. Three years ago, Mr. Gee and his wife hosted a party to celebrate a memoir written by their friend Marshall Chapman, a rock singer, songwriter and Vanderbilt alumna. Ms. Chapman says 300-plus guests dined at tables covered with tie-dyed cloths while she sold about 65 copies of her book. The party cost Vanderbilt more than $15,000, according to the person familiar with the situation.

Michael J. Schoenfeld, a university spokesman, declines to discuss the party's cost. He says the party strengthened Vanderbilt's ties to the music industry and notes that Ms. Chapman had endowed a women's basketball scholarship.

The renovations, the entertaining and Mr. Gee's pay package stirred little dissent on campus for five years. Mr. Gee was viewed as a campus hero and the university became significantly more selective. Vanderbilt admitted 34% of its applicants this year, compared with 55% in 2000.

In the fall of 2005, university employees discovered that Constance Gee, a tenured associate professor of public policy and education, kept marijuana at Braeburn and was using it there, according to people familiar with the matter. A few weeks later, several trustees and a senior university official confronted Mr. Gee in his office, telling the chancellor he shared responsibility for allowing marijuana on university property, the person familiar with the situation recalls.

Trembling, the chancellor replied, "I've been worried to death over this," according to this person. Mr. Gee said his wife smoked marijuana to relieve an inner-ear ailment, this person says. The Gees decline to comment on the incident.

Mrs. Ingram, Vanderbilt's board chairman, formally reprimanded Mrs. Gee for possessing and using the illegal drug. The matter was "handled appropriately and satisfactorily," says Mrs. Ingram, who is chairman of Ingram Industries Inc., a conglomerate with interests in book distribution and shipping.

Causing a Stir

Mrs. Gee has caused stirs on campus with her liberal politics. She lowered the American flag outside Braeburn to half-staff after President Bush won re-election in 2004. Mr. Gee says he quickly ordered the flag raised back up. She and others signed a letter of protest to the chancellor when Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush's national security adviser, was invited to address graduating students in 2004. Mr. Schoenfeld says Mrs. Gee posted the letter on the couple's refrigerator door at Braeburn.

The marijuana incident troubled some trustees, who were bothered that Mr. Gee never told the full board about it, according to people familiar with the matter. To these trustees, the incident demonstrated that Mr. Gee needed to be more accountable to the board.

Aware of the trustees' concerns, Vanderbilt General Counsel David Williams reviewed Mr. Gee's spending, looking for personal expenses. Mr. Williams questioned the absence of clear records documenting time the chef spent preparing meals for the Gees rather than for university events. Mr. Gee later agreed to cover about one-third of the chef's roughly $50,000 salary -- more than before. "When they [university officials] tell me what needs to be done, I always write the check," Mr. Gee says. "But sometimes, I get heartburn" from the requests.

Restive trustees then asked Mrs. Ingram for a broader look at Vanderbilt's governance system, pointing to the federal Sarbanes-Oxley law on governance of publicly traded companies and the scandal at American University, according to Mrs. Ingram. She formed a committee to determine if the university was following "best practices," she says. The committee, led by retired investment banker Joe Roby, found the full board never approved the budget and other financial items between 2000 and 2005.

The committee report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, recommended that trustees take a more active role in university affairs, including strategic planning, capital spending and management compensation. It also suggested a special panel to monitor Mr. Gee's budget and outlays for entertainment, travel, food, staff and upkeep of Braeburn. The panel would report annually to the full board.

The recommendations sparked a spirited board debate. Mrs. Ingram says she initially opposed an April board vote to adopt the report and create the expense panel. Later she retreated, and the board unanimously endorsed the tougher oversight measures.

"We have a chancellor who is performing well," says a trustee. The new checks, this trustee says, are aimed at making Mr. Gee "more effective."

Other trustees worry that the board could become a micromanager. "You don't want to cut off your nose to spite your face," says Mr. Hall, who won a spot on the new expense panel after lobbying on his behalf by Ms. Ingram and Mr. Gee.

The trustees' effort to improve oversight has also renewed questions about one of their own -- Monroe J. Carell Jr., a key Gee supporter on the executive committee and head of the university's $1.75 billion capital campaign. He and his family have given Vanderbilt more than $40 million.

Mr. Carell is founder and executive chairman of Central Parking Corp., the world's largest operator of parking facilities. He and his family own about 48% of the shares, according to Jeffrey Heavrin, chief financial officer. Central Parking manages Vanderbilt's parking lots and related services under a 1974 contract. It currently earns between $100,000 and $120,000 annually in management fees there, according to Mark Manner, a lawyer for Mr. Carell.

Vanderbilt never put those parking services out to competitive bid, says Mr. Schoenfeld, the university spokesman. That created a fuss in 2002, when Steve Franks, a former associate athletic director, questioned Central Parking's rates for handling parking at football games.

After the athletic department switched to a different provider, Mr. Carell complained to athletic director Todd Turner, Mr. Franks says. "We were instructed to back our way out of the contract we had signed and return to Central Parking," he says.

Mr. Manner confirms Mr. Carell called Mr. Turner to discuss the contract. But the trustee "applied no pressure to him," Mr. Manner says. Mr. Schoenfeld says the athletic department retained Central Parking's contract, which had more than a year to run, because it had not followed proper termination procedures.

A consultant later hired by the university to review the Central Parking relationship concluded the parking-management fees were within market rates but advised Vanderbilt to seek proposals from competitors. Mr. Carell didn't participate in the board discussions and declines to comment, Mr. Schoenfeld says.

Vanderbilt requested bids for parking services in July. Central Parking was a bidder. Vanderbilt will announce the winner soon.

Early this year, board members began talks with Mr. Gee about a new employment agreement. The chancellor says he sought to update his offer letter "in light of the changing nature of corporate governance."

One issue on the table was Mr. Gee's seats on five corporate boards. Fewer than 2% of U.S. corporate directors hold more than four seats, according to proxy-advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services. As trustees considered inserting a limit into the new agreement, Mr. Gee recalls, "I said I would move back to three boards" over the next year.

The agreement, signed in August, restricts Mr. Gee to three public-company directorships. It also says the chancellor must get prior approval for budgets in five categories including house maintenance and entertainment, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Gee isn't entirely happy with the new limits. He says he missed few of his 77 board and committee meetings last year at Dollar General Corp., Massey Energy Co., Gaylord Entertainment Co., Limited Brands Inc. and Hasbro Inc. When he travels to these meetings, he says he also conducts Vanderbilt business, such as conferring with alumni, parents, prospective students and faculty. "Sitting on a corporate board is a hobby for me," he remarks, pointing out that he doesn't smoke, drink or play golf. Mr. Gee made nearly $400,000 in cash and stock awards from his directorships last year.

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RESEARCH PAPER ‘SKELETON’

The ‘skeleton’ will entail six parts:

1.      A hypothesis or a set of hypothesis; research question –define scope

From PFF syllabus:

a.       Analyze and evaluate advising issues that face academic institutions, faculty members, professional staff, and students

b.      What do professional and faculty advisors bring to students that the other can’t?

c.       What is the difference between being an advisor and being a mentor?

·         Variable definition

d.      What are the differences between undergraduate and graduate advising?

·         By disciplines? Institutions? Departments?

e.       What do students really need?

·         Who goes to the advisor?

·         Who receives help/advisement? Why do some people receive advisement while others do not? For those who receive advisement who do they receive it from? Did they have to actively seek out assistance or did someone approach them? Did they find the advisement to be useful? Why or why not? What long-term effect do they perceive the advising had on their academic or career decisions? (Christina)

·         Part time students: Electronic advising - by what means do these students continue communications with their graduate/dissertation advisers. Are the relationships largely technical (email, phone, blogs/wikis). And does technology impede or induce progress in the various stages of the graduate lifecycle (Brian)

f.        What policies are best for students?

g.       How have the parents of Millennial Students changed the equation?

h.       How can faculty members prepare to be useful advisors?

·         Skill set necessary for advisors

·         Certification needed?

·         Who is giving advice?

·         Is there academic advising in graduate school? Or is it career preparation?

From class discussions:

i.         How advisors are perceived?

·         Experiences

·         Is there a difference in perspective between students and advisors?

j.        Best practices

2.      A list of reasons supporting your contention that the hypothesis or hypotheses is/are significant and worthy of study;

3.      An identification of the approach (es) within which your study falls and a justification for such an identification;

4.      A list of the five most relevant articles or books and a brief paragraph describing the relevance of each to the hypothesis/hypotheses you are testing; literature review

a.       Research standard; ratings about advising within institutions?

5.      A brief description of the methodology you will employ to test the hypothesis/hypotheses, i.e. the tools and techniques you will use to gather the data you need and perform the test, and a justification for they use of that methodology; and

a.       Interview, survey, blog

b.      Unit of analysis: master or PhD? Students? Alumni?

c.       Sample?

d.      Variable definition: an agreed upon definition of what we mean by advising (Christina)

e.       Indicators: ratio faculty members/students; How do you measure good advice?

6.      A preliminary list of the evidence you develop to support/refute the hypothesis/hypotheses you set out to test.

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'Any College Will Do'

Nation's Top Chief Executives Find Path to the Corner Office
Usually Starts at State University
 

September 18, 2006; Page B1. The Wall Street Journal. Marketplace. Vol. CCXLVIII No. 66

The college diplomas of the nation's top executives tell an intriguing story: Getting to the corner office has more to do with leadership talent and a drive for success than it does with having an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university.

Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges.

Wal-Mart Stores CEO H. Lee Scott, for example, went to Pittsburg State University in Kansas, Intel CEO Paul Otellini to University of San Francisco and Costco Wholesale CEO James Sinegal to San Diego City College.

This information should help allay the anxieties of many parents and their college-bound children who believe admission to a top-ranked school with a powerful alumni network is a prerequisite to success in the upper echelons of business management. Today's crop of chief executives are, of course, at least a generation older than current college students, but they are in the position to hire and say they don't favor job candidates with certain degrees.

"I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business," says Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

What counts most, CEOs say, is a person's capacity to seize opportunities. As students, they recall immersing themselves in their interests, becoming campus leaders and forging strong relationships with teachers. And at state and lesser-known schools, where many were the first in their families to attend college, they sought challenges and mixed with students from diverse backgrounds -- an experience that helped them later in their corporate climbs.

Bill Green, CEO of Accenture, never planned to go to college. The son of a plumber, he took a construction job when he graduated from high school in western Massachusetts because he didn't think he had the ability to pursue more education. He changed his mind when he visited friends at Dean College, a two-year community school near Boston.

"Walking around campus, listening to my friends talk, I realized they were being exposed to a big world -- and I had a chance to take another shot at learning," he says.

At Dean, he got help from faculty members who devoted themselves to their students, not "doing research and writing books like professors at four-year schools," he says. Rather than post student-meeting times on their office doors, they posted their class schedules. "All the other time, they were available to any student who needed help," says Mr. Green, who worked part-time to pay for part of his tuition.

Inspired by an economics professor who made the subject "fun and relevant," Mr. Green went on to Babson College to earn his bachelor's and M.B.A. degrees. But he credits Dean with teaching him to think analytically, to gain confidence in his abilities and to learn to work with people.

"You can go to a top-end school and end up dramatically underperforming, or you can go to a place that cares and blow away what everyone thinks," says Mr. Green, who still stays in touch with his economics professor, Charlie Kramer. A trustee at Dean, he feels angry when he encounters "parents who are afraid or ashamed to say their son or daughter is attending a community college," he says.

Some 10% of CEOs currently heading the top 500 companies received undergraduate degrees from Ivy League colleges, according to a survey by executive recruiter Spencer Stuart. But more received their undergraduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin than from Harvard, the most represented Ivy school.

Harvard's nine current CEOs include United Technologies' George David and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Among Wisconsin's 10 current CEOs are Pitney Bowes's Michael Critelli, Kimberly-Clark's Thomas Falk and Halliburton's David Lesar. Carol Bartz, chairman and former CEO of Autodesk, majored in computer science at Wisconsin and used a scholarship she'd won for women gifted in math to help pay her tuition.

Some non-Ivy League schools have long been training grounds for particular industries. The University of Texas-Austin, the alma mater of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, has churned out numerous oil executives. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is known for its computer-science graduates. But some of today's most successful CEOs got their start on small, isolated campuses.

A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's CEO, chose Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., because he wanted a solid liberal-arts education and to be assured a spot on the intercollegiate basketball team. A history major who graduated in 1969, he was elected president of his sophomore class, became a fraternity officer and spent his junior year studying in France.

"I learned to think, to communicate, to lead, to get things done," he says, adding that those qualities are what he seeks in job candidates at his company. "Any college will do."

Berkshire Hathaway's Mr. Buffett didn't even want to go to college. He enrolled at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as an undergraduate at his father's behest. He stayed just two years, then returned home to Omaha and graduated from Nebraska within a year.

At his father's urging again, Mr. Buffett applied to Harvard Business School, which rejected him as too young, he says. By then, he was devouring the books of investors David Dodd and Benjamin Graham, who advocated investing in companies that had "intrinsic business value" -- a view that became Mr. Buffett's guiding investment principal.

When he learned the two men were teaching at Columbia University's business school, he wrote to them to ask if he could attend their lectures. He earned a Master's degree in economics at Columbia in 1951. "But I didn't go there for a degree, I went for those two teachers, who were already my heroes,'' he says.

One reason more Ivy League alumni aren't CEOs may be that many have traditionally chosen careers in investment banks and at big law firms, where they could earn big sums quickly and wouldn't have to start in entry-level management jobs.

"A lot of people who earn degrees from tier-one universities and business schools aren't willing to start at the bottom of a huge company" and spend years scaling layers of management and hoping to reach the top, says Richard Tedlow, a business historian at Harvard Business School.

The exception are some founders of high-tech companies who never completed college. They found their classroom studies less compelling than their own ideas. Bill Gates quit Harvard to start Microsoft, Michael Dell quit the University of Texas-Austin to start Dell Computer and Steve Jobs quit Reed College in Portland, Ore., to work at Atari and then found Apple Computer. None ever returned to college to complete a formal degree.

What do they think about this decision today -- and would they advise young people to copy them? In a graduation speech at Stanford last year, Mr. Jobs said college, like any life decision, is up to each individual. "You have to trust your gut," he said.

His decision to quit Reed after one semester was "pretty scary" but ultimately "one of the best decisions I ever made," because instead of taking required courses that didn't interest him he spent the next 18 months auditing classes that did.

A calligraphy course he audited strongly influenced his design of the Macintosh computer ten years later. "If I'd never dropped in on that single course, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.

Quitting college also eased his guilt about spending his adoptive working-class parents' savings "when I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure that out," he said. But dropping out "wasn't romantic," he warned. "I didn't have a dorm room so I slept on the floor of friends' rooms and returned Coke bottles...to buy food."

Thomas Neff, chairman of recruitment firm Spencer Stuart U.S., warns: "It's the exceptionally inventive person who can do this. If you have a big, big new idea, you can get venture financing -and if you wait to graduate someone else may capitalize on your idea first," he says.

But for everyone else who wants a professional or management job at a big company, a college degree is a necessity -- including for jobs at Apple, Microsoft and Dell. And increasingly, employers also expect graduate degrees for management-track candidates. Close to two-thirds of top CEOs have either an M.B.A., law, or other advanced degree, according to Spencer Stuart's survey -- and some executives who didn't go to Ivy League colleges got Ivy credentials as graduate students. P&G's Mr. Lafley has a Harvard M.B.A.

Robert Iger, CEO at Walt Disney Co., decided in high school that he wanted to work in television and attended Ithaca College in upstate New York because he felt its strong communications program would nurture his career dreams. "I was in a place that supported creativity and individuality with a focus on what I was most interested in," says Mr. Iger, who took liberal-arts and hands-on broadcast courses. After college, he got a job working for ABC-TV, now a unit of Disney.

Anyway, by the time someone has been working for a few years, or held one or two jobs, their employment record counts more than their educational background, recruiters say. And companies seeking to fill CEO and other senior jobs rarely consider candidates' degrees. "It's what you've accomplished that matters," says Mr. Neff, "not what you were doing at 21."

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