Transcription of Clayton Rose, president of Bowdoin College for the show Love Maine Radio #309: Clayton Rose + Alaina Marie Harris
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Dr. Clayton Rose is the 15th president of Bowdoin College. After a highly successful career in finance, he earned his PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and later served as a faculty member at Harvard Business School, where he taught and wrote about the responsibilities of leadership, managerial values and ethics, and the role of business in society. Thanks for coming in today.
Dr. Clayton Rose: Thank you for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think the thing I’m most interested in and what I’d like to start with is this interesting pivot shift in your career. You were doing… Actually more than one. You were doing something, you were very good at it and then you said, “Oh, I think I want to do something different now,” and that required really a significant mindset change for you and a lot of work. So tell me about that.
Dr. Clayton Rose: Well, the first thing I would say is I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be able to have done different things. I’ve had some amazing chapters to my career. I’ve had some very cool jobs, and as I tell anyone that’s willing to listen, I now have the coolest job I’ll ever have as president of Bowdoin. It’s really quite a remarkable thing for me. The idea of going through different chapters in life isn’t one that I planned. It wasn’t when I graduated from college, this is my plan.
You can always look back on a career like yours and kind of create a linear narrative, but it’s much more uncertain than that. I came to various decision points, profound decision points, a couple of times and decided to take different paths at each of those points. I very much enjoyed my first career in finance. It was a different kind of business than it is today. At a different time and place in the nature of business in our society, but I worked at a firm where the values were terrific, the people were terrific, the culture was great. We did business in a particular way for our clients and we focused on serving their needs.
Then the firm that I worked at decided to merge, and I was part of that decision process but quickly concluded that the new firm was just not a place that I was comfortable. The business itself was changing, and so I left. I left on good terms, but I decided simply to leave and kind of re-putt myself. I left and I remember walking out of the building on a Thursday night after 21 years, and not having any idea what I was going to do next.
I went to have dinner with my wife and kind of begin a new chapter. I took a year to think about what I was going to do and did some things there in the interim, I began to teach at Columbia and NYU as an adjunct professor. But I had always had in my mind, as a function of a great liberal arts education that I received, the idea of going back and getting a PhD.
It’s something very personal for me. There wasn’t a grand plan associated with it, but it was the idea of having spent many years in my prior chapter thinking about issues kind of a mile wide and an inch deep. I wanted to see if I had the intellectual flexibility to flip that and go a mile deep on an issue that I cared a lot about.
After a year and a lot of advice and ultimately my wife saying to me, “If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it because you’re going to get involved in something else and then you’re going to be too old,” and so forth, I applied to several PhD programs in sociology that were constrained by where we lived. My kids were in high school and so we needed to stay there.
I was fortunate enough to get into a couple and very fortunate that the University of Pennsylvania admitted me in, and I had a really remarkable experience there. I can never say enough great things about the faculty and my fellow students and the institution, and to take a risk on an older guy who was going through this transition was something that was quite special about how they thought about their students and what they were able to provide for me.
I studied issues of race in America. I was very interested in this. I had run the global diversity effort in the firm that I worked at in my first chapter in business. I had some personal interest in the question of why we can’t get over ourselves in 21st century America around issues of race and identity, and decided I wanted to see if I could really understand it by looking at all the literature and studying and in developing some of my own research. That was what I did.
By the time I had finished that program at Penn and I also had been teaching for a number of years at Columbia and NYU and also at Penn, I concluded I really loved being in the academy. I thought I would, but I found that I did. I sought a full-time role as a member of a faculty and was, again, deeply fortunate to be asked to join the faculty at the Harvard Business School, where I taught for eight years before coming to Bowdoin. That was another chapter.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why was sociology so interesting to you?
Dr. Clayton Rose: Interestingly, it wasn’t sociology as a discipline that was the first decision. The first decision for me was what is the issue that I wanted to study, and the issue that I wanted to study was the issue of race, race in America and this kind of simple but profound question of why we can’t get over ourselves. What’s driving the notion that race remains a profound issue and dividing line in our society?
Sociology then becomes, I think, the natural home for that question. That’s what led me to the discipline. I’m someone who had never taken a sociology course in my life before I began my program at Penn. It was just not part of the array of courses that I had taken as an undergraduate or as an MBA student.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why can’t we get over ourselves?
Dr. Clayton Rose: One of the things that I think my colleagues on the faculty and graduate students around the world would agree with me on is that the more you know about something, the more questions it raises and the fewer answers you really have. I don’t have an answer to that question. It remains, as we see in society today, perhaps more than we have in a number of years how profoundly important the issue of race is, the issue of difference, the issue of identity is in our culture, in our society today. But why that creates areas of division and not the notion of celebrating difference, understanding each other, getting the most from the different perspectives that we bring remains an open question for me.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You mentioned your children being in high school when you made this decision, and I would imagine that would have been, let’s use the word interesting for them to have a parent who had been so long in one particular career doing one particular thing, and then deciding I’m going to do this differently now. Did you get feedback from them along the way on this?
Dr. Clayton Rose: Yeah, sure. I have two boys, two sons who are both off in life now, and it was interesting. I think the decision that I made was not a decision that was… What’s the best way to describe it? It was somehow at odds with how they saw me as a human being and as their father. I say that because while they were growing up, the business that I was in and the firm that I was at were all that they knew. I didn’t define myself as a human being, as a father, as a person by my job. First and foremost, I defined it around my family and my marriage and my kids, and that has and is and will always be my first priority.
While I love my work, my work itself doesn’t define me as a human being. I think there’s something deeper for ourselves. It’s critically important to me. I spend enormous amounts of time and energy on it, but it isn’t who I am. The pivot that I began from the first chapter into the second chapter is I talked to them about what I was interested in, and they knew my intellectual interests and my kind of naïve desire to be engaged in intellectual ideas throughout my life. This kind of fit very well with how they saw me.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Has it now become interesting for you to be working with an age group that is clearly focused on developing identity? You taught at Harvard Business School, so slightly older students but now you’re with kids, well, young adults, who are 17 to 22 and identity is something that’s very much in development during that time of life. Throwing on your own experience, what is it that you have to offer to this age group?
Dr. Clayton Rose: Well, I think about that question in two parts, how do I think about my role as a teacher, which is the thing I think I love most, and my role as president of a liberal arts college. Those are two distinct kind of roles. With respect to the first, and it does very much bleed into the second, we have just amazing students. The interactions I have with our students, the ability to get to know them, to spend time with them and to teach, and I did teach this last fall is the jet fuel that just keeps me going through all the other aspects of my job, many of which are interesting, some of which are not as interesting. There are some challenging moments and so forth in any job like this.
Working with our students has just been a remarkable joy and privilege. They are amazing in how thoughtful, interesting, engaged, different, and interested in one another. One of the things that I’ve said to almost anyone who will listen is that when we think about what makes a Bowdoin student unique and special, they’re super smart, but there are other places where there are lots of super smart students. They come to Bowdoin to do their best work and to be their best selves, and that starts to differentiate them in some cases from other places a little bit.
But the thing that’s really different about our students is that they come being super smart and to do their best work and to be their best selves, but to engage with one another and to collaborate, not to compete with one another. They do not see their work together at Bowdoin as being a zero-sum game where I only do better if you do worse, but rather where there’s a collective interest in learning and in helping one another. I’ve seen this in lots of different perspectives around the life on campus and in dealing with our alums who share that kind of culture and set of values.
But I saw it play out in just stark detail when I taught this last fall. I taught a first year seminar. I had a group of 16 first year students and from the first day, they were focused on helping each other, challenging, pushing, and so forth, but ultimately helping each other to get better and better. No one saw their ability to do well or to learn as somehow being a competitive exercise with somebody else.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Given that this generation has been occasionally maligned as being the “me” generation, although I would say that many generations are so-called.
Dr. Clayton Rose: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Were you surprised to find how collaborative this group of students was?
Dr. Clayton Rose: No. I think I understood the Bowdoin culture very well when I arrived. I’m now in my third year, and having had an opportunity to teach undergraduates and graduate students for the last 15 years and then having raised two sons, who are now in their early 30s. I have some sense of the generation. I certainly agree with the notion of kind of maligned and misguided view of what this generation is all about. They are quite remarkable.
As we look around at the world and see some of the challenges that are out there and the problems that we have, and there are certainly moments where it can be easy to get down and depressed. I am enormously optimistic about where we’re going and the opportunities we have as a society and as a world because of our students and what I see in them. I hope and believe that that’s been true of kind of every generation as we look to the future, but I can tell you that whatever the caricatures are, young people today they are certainly not representative of our students at Bowdoin, I think more generally of this generation.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: My children are 23, 21, and 16, so they’re squarely in this generation and I have to agree with you. My interactions with them I don’t think are any different than my interactions with their friends. There is something that is hopeful and willing to work hard and persevere. One of the things that has come up in the last year has been the change in our political climate.
What I saw with my middle child who was on campus when this happened was the fear that I had never seen from her before. She called me up, she felt almost as if the world had kind of caved in on her. She was so surprised by the way that the election turned out. Did you get that sense from students on your campus?
Dr. Clayton Rose: Sure. I think that for a couple of observations I guess, one is that for many of our students and other students in this generation, the results of the election were in a sense the first major failure that they had experienced. These are students that are used to doing incredibly well and used to working hard and persevering and pushing through, and ultimately realizing the objectives that they had in mind. I think the vast majority of students certainly went home from dinner on election night believing that the outcome would be different.
That’s true whether you happen to be a student who voted one way or another way, I think the whole group of them. For those students who were supporters of Hillary Clinton, it wasn’t a really momentous moment for a number of them. I happened to have been teaching my class the Wednesday morning after, I had an 8:30 class, so it was the first class of the day on the morning after and my students came in. Many of them had been up all night, and they were I think deeply confused about what had just occurred.
We put the syllabus aside for a while and had a conversation about what had happened and how could this happen, why did it happen, and so forth. In some ways, and we can spend some time, Lisa, talking about this, it relates a little bit to the bubbles that we all exist in, in talking only to those folks that reinforce our own views and so you get the sense that that’s the world when the world is a much bigger place than that.
One of the interesting things that happened in this conversation in class is that I have a young man, a student who is from the Midwest, and people were going around and kind of trying to isolate a little bit about what happened and why and what they’d missed. He said, “Let me tell you that I voted for Secretary Clinton, but I’m from rural Wisconsin. My friends didn’t vote for her, and my parent’s friends didn’t vote for her, and they didn’t vote for her,” and he went through the reasons about rural versus urban and the sense of dislocation.
Many of the things that we’ve now been able I think over the last few months to kind of understand better and tease out as to what the reasons are that the election turned out the way it did. It was really a remarkable thing to watch a number of the students in class for the first time hearing from a peer about a rationale.
They may not agree with it. They may have different ways of articulating why those reasons may exist, but they heard a very cogent peer-driven rationale for why the outcome was the outcome. That led to another discussion about how we think differently about things and this bubble that we may exist in and so forth. It was really I thought profound moment that began us down another path to think about what has happened here.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I would agree with you that we’ve come to now understand that perhaps each of us was existing within some sort of cultural socioeconomic bubble per se, maybe an educational bubble, and then was surprised and then surprised even as a country. Now that we know that that existed and that we were somewhat unable to connect with people outside of our bubble, how do we connect with people outside of our bubble? How do we create conversations so that we understand where people are coming from without trying to shut them down because they aren’t agreeing with our point of view?
Dr. Clayton Rose: It’s a great question, and I think in a central part of the mission of a great educational institution like Bowdoin. I’ve been actually talking about this issue since I arrived on campus two years ago. I talked about it in my inaugural address that one of our deep responsibilities and opportunities is to engage with ideas that make us uncomfortable and at times will offend us, to be able to understand how good people and frankly not good people think about the world, understand the world, and maybe driving decisions and policies in the world.
The only way I believe that we can have effect on the world in a meaningful way is to understand how others think about the world, why their arguments may carry weight and where they may not hold water, and to be able to confront those arguments and those issues and those points of view from a position of confidence, strength, data analysis, reason, rather than fear, engagement with those issues and those arguments.
One of the things that we’ve been working on at Bowdoin for the last couple of years is how we do this better, how we develop the skill and the sensibility among our students to engage in discourse and debate about the hardest, most challenging issues of our time and knowing that you come to college in part to engage with ideas and issues that are going to make you uncomfortable and they may even offend you, but are going to push you deeply outside of your comfort zone. That has at least two deep values.
The first is the one that I just discussed, which is that it creates the skills and the ability in an individual to be able to have effect in the world, to make a difference once you get out there, because you have thought about the pushback on your issue, the pushback on how you’re advocating for something. You understand the data. You know where it’s real, you know where it’s not, and you’re able to analyze it in a thoughtful way, and you’ve thought about those arguments.
The other is that it gives you respect and a thoughtful approach to both ideas that are different than your own, and God forbid for a moment from time to time, we ought to be able to change our minds if we hear an argument that’s compelling. And to have respect for individuals with whom you can disagree, but who are at their core good human beings, who care about the world in the same way that you do. There are a handful of bad human beings out there in any category of life. Those aren’t really the people that we should be caring about. We’re in a place now where we won’t have an honest thoughtful conversation with good people in areas where we disagree.
In the Baccalaureate Address that I gave in May to our graduating seniors and their families, I talked about one of my closest friends, a guy that I’ve known since the first day of college who and I’ve just returned from a week of fishing with him. I fish with him every year, he and his wife and Julianne and I. He and I are very different in a number of ways. He’s a Midwesterner, a Republican. He’s a staunch supporter of the NRA. None of those things describe me, but he is one of my dearest friends.
We go and we spend time talking about the world and issues that we disagree about and so forth, and we do it in an agreeable way and try to understand each other and figure out where the essence of our differences lies. I encouraged our students as they are leaving Bowdoin, and I talked about this, to go find their version of, my friend’s name is Mike, to go find their version of Mike in life. Whether they may already have, and in fact I had a graduating senior grab me just after the commencement ceremony the next day and said, “I just want you to know that I already found my Mike here.” It was really cool for me at least that some of the students kind of just resonated with him in a way. So long-winded answer but that’s….
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you think that a liberal arts education can be helpful in developing these skills that you’re talking about? I think that there’s a lot that’s been thrown about with return on investment in education and the cost of education, which continues to climb. So then some people would question, why are we educating students on broad-based topics? Why are we not just putting them through whatever set of skills they need to get a job on the other side.
Dr. Clayton Rose: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Is there value in liberal arts given what you’ve just described?
Dr. Clayton Rose: Yes, profound value. Let me describe that in kind of two broad ways. One is some categories of value, and then I want to tell a bit of a story. There are at least three profoundly important reasons why a liberal arts education adds deep value. The first is and maybe for me it’s the most important, but I think they’re all equally important, is that it allows us as human beings to live richer, fuller, deeper lives, to understand the world that we’re in.
To understand our place in it, and to be able to engage in lifelong learning about all kinds of issues, whether they’re humanistic, social science, scientific, policy, economics, so forth, and to be able to get a sense for why we are here and the ability that we have to give back to something that’s bigger than ourselves. That’s the first point. There’s something just deeply profound as human beings to this kind of education.
The second is that it develops the skills and the ability to engage thoughtfully in civic life, and in the broadest sense, political life in our country. At a time where our political system seems deeply broken, we need as many young people who are educated in a thoughtful way and have an ability to engage with one another and to engage these issues to help us get better and to pull us out of this mess. This goes back to some of the things that we were just talking about. The engagement in civic life is the second.
The third is that the skills of a liberal arts education of critical thinking, of analysis, of how to use data, of the ability to communicate well and the ability to learn quickly are all skills that help our students and help liberal arts graduates enjoy great professional success. So this notion that somehow liberal arts education is divorced from career success is just a myth. There is some power to the myth out there, and it’s something that I have a responsibility and other college presidents have a responsibility to deal with in a stronger way. But the data are crystal clear.
You get a great liberal arts education and you’re going to have a great career, and you can major on art history and go into finance. You can major in biology and go to Google. You can major in economics and become a doctor. You can spend your time during your college years pursuing your intellectual passions and the data are crystal clear, you can go off and have any kind of career you want. Deep satisfaction in life and as a human civic engagement and career success are three profound values that come from liberal arts education.
Let me just put a little human face on that. We have a thing at Bowdoin called the Bowdoin Breakfast. You probably know it well, but we’ll have somebody back, an alum back to talk to both students and folks in the community a couple of times a year. These things usually get 400, 500 people coming. Some of it is about the Bowdoin food, but mostly it’s about the speaker.
In the spring we had a couple, graduates from the early ‘90s. She was an English major, he was an anthropology major. They went off. They left Bowdoin and graduated and went off in the early ‘90s to go work for a little firm in Silicon Valley called Facebook. They were early there and worked there for a while and went off and did a few other things, as people do. She is now at Pinterest and he is now at Airbnb.
I was talking to them before they gave their talk and I said, “How do you think about the role of the humanities and the social sciences in Silicon Valley today?” They said the demand for folks that have a training in sensibility of humanists and social scientists has never been greater, because the issue of Silicon Valley and the tech community is zero about coding. It is pivoted now from being less about engineering, and much more about dealing with the human problems that technology has created. All you have to do is read the paper every day to think about what Facebook is facing and Google is facing. Those are the human problems that are created by the technology, and that’s where a profound liberal arts education comes in.
We have a huge number of graduates now that are out in Silicon Valley and in other kinds of places like that in the new economy that are having a really powerful impact on the world who have had nothing to do with the engineering side of things. We have some that are coders and engineers and engagement network and that is wonderful work, but it takes all kinds.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I recently interviewed Joan Benoit Samuelson, who is obviously a Bowdoin graduate and also winner of the first women’s Olympic marathon, and also Jean Hoffman who was the founder of Putney who just sold her business a few years ago for quite a lot of money. She was an Asian Studies major at Bowdoin. Obviously I went to Bowdoin and I have….
I think that you’re right. I think that what you’re describing this need for helping create interface, this understanding of how to communicate with other people, maybe it’s not solely the property of a liberal arts education, but there certainly is a great benefit to offering that to students. It’s been really a pleasure to have this conversation with you. I appreciate your taking time out of your very busy schedule. I’ve been speaking with Dr. Clayton Rose, who is the 15th president of Bowdoin College.
Dr. Clayton Rose: Thank you, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Thank you.