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The Rice Thresher
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President Malcolm Gillis hasn't taught full-time since 1986, but he can recite his Harvard University teaching evaluations from memory.
"'We signed up for his course because he has a kelly green pickup truck with a shotgun rack in the back,'" Gillis recalled. "I had no such thing, but I thought it was kind of nice that that's the way my persona was viewed."
Gillis, 60, has never been one to waste his time with anything, and he's not shy about discussing his accomplishments, which are impressive. Going to high school in rural Florida, he didn't bother with the sub-par Latin instruction, but he throws a little in as he talks about it, just to let you know he knows some. He taught economics for 25 years, and he's worked as a consultant on natural resources and taxation for groups as disparate as Native American tribes in the United States and the government of Indonesia. In 1986, he became involved in university leadership at Duke University, and he became the president of Rice in 1993. Since then, the endowment has doubled, construction on campus has boomed and the university has launched a $500 million capital campaign. But his story is like something from Horatio Alger. Gillis paid his own way through college, starting with Chipola Junior College and an associate's degree - not a standard beginning for an academic career. From there, he spent two more years at the University of Florida.
After college, he applied for a fellowship to go to graduate school, but he made alternate plans also. "I was already committed to going into the Marine Corps as an officer," he said. "The fellowship offer came two days after the Marine Corps offered me a commission." He said that if the letter hadn't come, "I would have probably been sent to Vietnam in time to be part of the landscape now, pushing up daisies." Instead, he went to the University of Illinois. After receiving his doctorate in economics, Gillis went to Duke as an assistant professor, and then to Harvard University, where he spent 15 years teaching public finance. He still has every unofficial course guide from his years at Harvard, and he's proud to show them. "My courses were always the top-ranked courses in economics, and they had the reputation for being the hardest and most demanding," he said. "So I wasn't buying popularity like people with easy courses. I gave Cs and Ds; nobody else did. I gave the last F at Harvard in economics." The evaluations are nothing to be ashamed of. His public finance course was described as being the department's "best and most rigorous" during the 1982-'83 school year. His exams are described as "murder: question after question after question. You really have to know your stuff; Gillis' exams do not succumb to B.S." They also mention that he led his classes in a semesterly game of touch football against another economics class. He went to Duke in 1984, and in 1986 he became the dean of the graduate school and vice provost. He was promoted to dean of the faculty of arts and sciences from 1992-'93, and was then hired as Rice's president. He clearly loves being the university president, joking that since he lives on campus at the Ralph S. O'Connor House "I'm at work all the time." But he doesn't shy away from a hectic schedule. "A typical day is meetings, telephones, speeches, consultations with my colleagues at other universities, particularly about the challenges and opportunities that we face from Washington," he said. "And my planned day doesn't usually look at all like the day that actually happens because I'm interrupted, things come up, one of my vice-presidents may need a decision, or one of the deans may need to tell me something, so I've got to listen," he said.
"He is not an absent president," said English professor Bob Patten, the speaker of the faculty. "He is very much on campus and will talk to anyone. It's amazing when compared to, say, the president of Princeton. There, you have to get through three layers of bureaucracy before you can lay your eyes on the sacred body." Former Speaker and Electrical and Computational Engineering Professor Bill Wilson agreed. "I found him very open to faculty viewpoints and he was very open to our concerns and questions," Wilson, a Wiess College resident associate, said. "There were times when he was constrained by outside things, by opinions of the board and such, but he was very willing to tell us what the scoop was." He is also universally recognized as a gifted fundraiser, especially in light of last fall's launch of a $500 million capital campaign - two-thirds of which has already been raised. Patten spoke highly of Gillis' role in the campaign. "To be conducting it without a tremor in the worst stock market crash in any undergraduate's lifetime is a tremendous feat," he said. But Gillis has his detractors, some of whom allege he has a bad temper. Many students in the class of 2001 remember a show of anger at their matriculation ceremony, on the first day of Orientation Week in 1997. The ceremony was interrupted by pranks, or "jacks," by upperclassman advisers, as it had been in previous years. But that year, the preferred "jack" was mooning the stage, where Gillis and his wife, as well as many other faculty members and administrators were sitting. Gillis put an end to the interruptions by furiously going to the podium and declaring that he did not find "naked male backsides" funny. Others target his lack of tact. He was criticized during last December's KTRU shutdown for saying in interview with The Rice Thresher that the administration was "not dealing with adults," refering to the student management of the radio station. Gillis said he hopes he's remembered as honest. "Truth-telling is very important in building trust, and in one of these jobs, if you don't have trust, you don't have anything," he said. "You've got to have the trust of the board, you've got to have trust of the faculty, you've got to have trust of the students. "They may not like what you do, but if they think you're lying to them, then they have a right to get up on their hind legs and scream." His leadership style is straightforward. "I delegate, but in the end, I decide," he said. "For each of my vice-presidents, and the provost, I pick people I have confidence in, and I want them to do their jobs, but then when the time comes for a decision on the budget, or on anything material, then it is up to me, and there are no bucks to be passed." He insists that he's not been solely responsible for the changes that have happened to Rice since he arrived, that those changes are a result of cooperation between the Board of Trustees, the faculty - both of which he's quick to praise - and his office. He said Rice's position as a national leading university has improved since 1993. "We do not compare ourselves with institutions that are not leading institutions," he said. "If I'm making comparisons, I'm looking at what Stanford is doing, what Harvard is doing, what Chicago is doing, and what Northwestern is doing, and what Columbia is doing. "We don't ask the chair of the department of chemistry at Spearfish State University, we ask the chair of the department of chemistry at Caltech to come and review our chemistry program for us." Despite his desire to make Rice a world-class research institution - which involves boosting funding and support for research and graduate programs - Gillis has maintained an interest in those receiving undergraduate degrees. "In undergraduate education, there's nobody better than Rice or Princeton," he said. "And we have the edge there." He's been involved in undergraduate curriculum issues for most of his administrative career, from his leading a 1987 curriculum reform at Duke to 1996 examination of the curriculum at Rice. Wilson, who was speaker of the faculty in 1996, said Gillis was an active participant in the discussions. "Clearly, undergraduate education is one of his major concerns," Wilson said. "He's worked with faculty working to improve the curriculum ever since he's gotten here." The reform ultimately failed, but out of those discussions a language requirement was implemented. Gillis, who speaks fluent Spanish and conversational Indonesian, said languages have been instrumental in his career. But, he said he isn't sure that a language requirement, which was repealed by the faculty last month, is the right way to motivate students to learn languages. "At a university like Rice, we've got these seven schools, and it makes it very hard to impose a language requirement across all these schools with different needs," he said. "Most places that have had language requirements, like Duke, only impose it on arts and sciences." Alan Grob, an English professor and a self-professed advocate of Rice's undergraduate focus, praised Gillis' attitude toward undergraduate education. "I've been here for four presidents, and I've always thought he's the only president for whom the fact that something was in the interest of undergraduates has really mattered to him," he said. "We've differed on stuff, but I do think he really grants the fact that the interests of undergraduates should be a paramount consideration of the administration." Also changed since Gillis' arrival is the amount of construction on campus, which he said is to Rice's benefit. "I know students complain a lot about construction, but we were losing faculty when I came because facilities were not very good in science and engineering and humanities and social science," he said. "Faculty, of course, are concerned with monetary value, they have spouses or partners or children to support. "But they're mostly concerned with two other things: number one, the facilities, and two, the quality of the students. "We had humanities faculty in offices inferior to what I had as a graduate student at Illinois," he said. "We had full professors in third-rate offices. You can't do that." Gillis, who is in his eighth year as president, said he would like to stay "as long as the board wants me," but that he believes the ideal tenure for a president is 10 to 12 years. "I haven't felt it yet, but I've seen my colleagues who are far more capable than I go stale," he said. As for the Rice he'd like to see in the future? "Rice students work too hard," he said. "I've seen this ever since I came here, and I'm comparing them to Duke students and Harvard students. "I'd like to see more people involved in exploring different things, like drama and music. I'd like to see students slow down a little bit and smell the flowers."
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