Q: You have indicated you want to boost the university's academic standards. What are some of your ideas?

I want to raise the expectations that faculty members have for each other, that students have for faculty, and that we have for students. With respect to faculty, there's a publication of the Carnegie Foundation, Scholarship Reconsidered, written by Ernest Boyer in 1990. He describes what he calls four types of scholarship: scholarship of discovery, scholarship of integration, scholarship of application, and scholarship of teaching.

What we want to know is, how many of these four types of scholarship are faculty members engaged in? Are they excellent, innovative teachers? Are they successful at taking the research of others and using it to solve problems? Have they ever taken two things that other people have done and combined them into something unique? Do they publish in the best journals and are they among the leading scholars in their disciplines?

We in universities too often look only at two ends of the spectrum. We look at the people who are doing far-out, cutting-edge research, and we look at people in the classroom. We don't give credit for integration and application. By not getting credit for them, people don't do them.

I expect everyone to perform at the highest level in at least one of the areas of scholarship, and in the others, I expect constant improvement. Scholarship is going to be output oriented, not time spent. There's a lot of talk about how we spend 20 percent of our time doing this and 50 percent doing that. Well, I don't really care how much time is spent doing it. What was accomplished by it?

One way to improve the quality of our graduates is to improve the quality of the people we admit. As has been said about M.B.A. programs, if we take in bright people and don't screw them up too badly in two years, they should be bright people when they graduate. I think we need to go out and get better students, and the way we do that is not by waiting until they apply. It's a matter of going out and finding them.

A woman asked me a question on affirmative action at our last faculty session, and I told her that what I want to do is to find out where the best, underrepresented minorities go to high school. We need to go into those high schools and sit down with the best students, as I've been known to do. If we can get smart people--and it is amazing how many times people will come to an institution for the simplest, personalized reasons--we improve the quality. Another way, and I think New Century College is an example of this, is to do something innovative. Stop talking about three-credit courses, three hours a week for 14 weeks. Students and faculty need to concentrate more on learning and less on teaching.

One of our students asked me, why should a student get involved in student activities? I told him, for very self-centered reasons. You learn things in a club, particularly if you're a leader in the club, that we'd have a hell of a time teaching in a class. So, get involved, and use these opportunities to learn something that might not be teachable in the formal sense.

We also need to ask the people who hire our students what they need in an employee and what they're not getting. The communities are the customers. The potential students are customers, but once the students are here, they become "work-in-progress inventory," as one of my friends refers to them.

Q: The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia has mandated consequential post-tenure review for all the state's colleges and universities. What are your views on faculty performance reviews?

I have long supported, even through some very controversial times, post-tenure reviews. I think every faculty member should be evaluated every year, with a one-on-one discussion with a department chairman or institute director. Yearly evaluations should be used for general guidance and for salary. At Cornell, every six years we conduct an in-depth review with outside evaluations of every faculty member. Evaluations are tied to program funding and sabbaticals. I think the post-tenure review plan at Mason is very well done. From what I understand, the process of developing it was also a good one. The faculty were involved, the Faculty Senate was involved, so I think a faculty member who is threatened by the process has some real problems.

Q: Mason's student body is fairly diverse--by race, ethnicity, and sex--but its faculty, staff, and top administration are not very diverse in any of those areas. What are your views on building diversity?

I'm going to ask each academic department and each administrative department to come up with a list of underrepresented minorities they would like to hire. They should include faculty who are at a university they respect, or someone they met at a conference. The creation of the list all of a sudden makes people start to realize there are people we should be trying to attract. The first process is identifying underrepresented minorities who meet our criteria, no matter where they are.

On the administrative side, I expect us to do more national searches. The chances of finding minorities are going to increase. Then what gets measured, gets better. And we will ask people, on a regular basis, how are we doing?

Q: You said that you want to strengthen and promote the three main focus areas of high technology, public policy, and the arts. Do you have a plan for that yet?

I've asked people, how widely have we promoted these areas, and the answer has been not widely enough. I see us acting in two phases: first, let's decide if those three things, plus innovative undergraduate education, are things we want to emphasize. Second, let's get on with promoting them. Let's talk about the Mason Plan everywhere. Let's ask every school, college, and institute--how are you playing a part in this? What are you doing to contribute?

When you ask people what they are doing that supports institutional priorities, you get a list of things. And if you take that list and send it back to everybody, you get another set of things. The second list is of things they hadn't thought about doing until they saw the other items on the list.

A woman in the Communication Department at Cornell sent out a note, at my request, to everyone saying, "Tell me in which courses you have people either write papers or make presentations." She got a modest list back. She gave me the results, and I told her to send out the list with a cover note asking faculty if these were all the courses that required a talk or a paper. All of this new innovative stuff came back--people don't want to be left off a list of things that are considered important to an institution.

In terms of plans, it's really a sense of selling them internally and selling them externally, then identifying specific funding needs. The interesting thing about innovative undergraduate education, technology, fine and performing arts, and public policy is they are not in any way restricted to any school or college. That's the beauty of it.

Q: What is the university's role in the Northern Virginia "Netplex" of high-technology companies and how will you guide Mason in that role?

We have to know what they need from us, and we need to tell them what we need from them. We need them as advisers, to send their employees here for credit and noncredit courses, to speak kindly of us, and to hire our students; we need them to give us money through contracts for specific work, grants, and as gifts to the university; we need them to hire our faculty as consultants.

Conversely then, how can we help them? We have to look at Northern Virginia and beyond. We need to look at our local area as the "State of Potomac" including Northern Virginia, the District, and suburban Maryland. We need to promote their activities, include them in our discussions of what is important to us; we all need to be promoters of Virginia beyond Northern Virginia; we need to help existing businesses get better, and we need to help bring in new businesses.

We have important roles--as a university and as individuals. We should be able to identify faculty who can help the institutions in the community, find resources for them, give them hooks into George Mason. Everyone needs to see himself or herself as a champion for the area.

We need to bring leaders from business and government to campus to teach and work with students and faculty. There were not enough corporate leaders in the classroom at Cornell when I arrived. I knew I was succeeding when into my office would walk a faculty member with an executive who had spoken in one of our classes, not unlike a proud cat coming home with a mouse in its mouth.

We need to develop a profile on every company we deal with; the number of alumni working there; the number of their employees who are students here; the number of cooperative ventures we have with the company; the number of faculty working with that company. This is one of the ways I intend to use the Northern Virginia Roundtable, the Century Club, and other organizations--to help us take the next leap forward.

Q: What are your views on the distributed university concept that Mason has championed?

The distributed university concept is one of the more exciting things going on at Mason. It is an interesting blend of centralization/decentralization, but we have to constantly evaluate how it is working. It can be a stable, yet unstable relationship. It is good that the campuses each have a unique role for us and for their communities, but we must make sure that the activities are supportive of the larger university.

We need to avoid redundancies; we need to encourage visits from one campus to another, even create temporary offices for use by people on other campuses; we need to connect electronically; we need to hold events on different campuses. The distributed university is great for our programs, our competitive advantage, and our image.

Q: Dr. Johnson advocated restructuring the university--not only administratively, but academically. What are your views on academic restructuring? On organizational restructuring?

Mason has done some very good things on the administrative side--it has used state and private funding well. We now need to look at how we can be more efficient on the faculty side. We should consider collapsing several departments into one; make sure faculty are productive as teachers and researchers; determine if we are using part-time faculty effectively and efficiently; eliminate duplicate programs, and combine others.

There are four things we need to do with respect to any change area. We need to frame the decision, what problem we are trying to solve. We need to say up front who is going to be directly involved in discussing what we want to do. Then we need to decide, up front, who we have to communicate with as we go through the process, and, finally, we need to specify who is going to make the decision.

I think universities get into the biggest trouble when they don't describe the decision-making process up front. Failure to delineate the process leads to statements such as, "We didn't know, we thought we were going to make the decision. You mean we're not going to vote on this?" Or you get others who say, "How come we were involved for so long, but now we're not involved anymore?" We're not honest enough with people.

There are certain decisions that I will make. I don't like it when people don't like me; I really want to be liked. But, I really want to be liked about three years after I make a decision. If I'm liked when I make a decision, that's fine--but three years down, that's when it counts.

Q: Colleges and universities--usually as a savings measure--increasingly rely on part-time instructors and larger class sizes to teach course offerings. How will you address this at Mason?

The issues of part-time vs. full-time faculty and large vs. small classes are ones we need to address. We need to do a critical analysis of part-time teachers--they have to be producing. We have to manage and observe the standards set for them and outline the rights and responsibilities of the part-time instructor. We need to look at how we treat them.

Q: All organizations grapple with salary disparities, and Mason is no different. How will you approach this matter?

Salary disparities most likely exist, and we will base our actions on comparative data. There are different markets, and what appears as a disparity might not be. We can't repeal the basic laws of economics. If demand exceeds supply in one area, those in the high- demand area will be paid more. We will look across campus for people who have some common roles, for example, people providing a similar function or service. If inequities exist, we will correct them.

Q: There has not been a university-wide emphasis on continual training, career development, and nonsalary rewards. What are your views on these issues?

I firmly believe in staff development and recognition. It's important that we invest in our people for our sake and for their sake. I will evaluate people in positions of authority on how they develop their people. We need to open continuing education and executive education classes to staff; we need to cross-train employees by lending staff between offices; we need to improve team-building skills. Staff need to be as committed to personal development as we expect managers to be committed to staff development.

Q: How would you describe your leadership style? How would your colleagues at Cornell describe your leadership style?

I like to empower people, negotiate what they should do--not how they should do it. I'm not a detail person. I throw out a lot of ideas because I want people to be aware of how I'm thinking. With a little ready, fire, aim, we have a better chance of accomplishing something early and then fine-tuning it as we go along. I like to know about problems only when I am presented with alternative solutions. I believe that we strongly criticize ourselves internally so we can get better. My colleagues will tell you that I'm not the source of most good ideas--my processes are the source of good ideas. Most people won't walk by my office or come in without a paper and pencil. I share my opinions, ideas, and hopes with everyone I can in the organization.

Q: What are the different messages you would like everyone to hear?

General: You are George Mason and be proud of it. Be constructive; get out of the we/they mindset, and don't talk about George Mason as if it were an abstraction. Never tell me that something is not your job. If it's not your assigned task, go out of your way to find someone who can meet the specified need. I pick up paper on campus, coffee cups at the end of meetings, and I expect others to operate beyond their assigned tasks and job descriptions.
Faculty: Understand the distinction between learning and teaching. We're in the business of helping people learn.
Staff: You have multiple customers. Staff are at the front door of the institution for all its customers, including faculty and other staff members. Staff should have a strong customer orientation--the person on the phone or walking down the hallway could be THE most important person to Mason in the future.
Students: Get more out of education than a bunch of courses and a degree. You're cheating yourself if all you get is a lot of credits and a piece of paper. Demand more of yourself and others.