Search and Serendipity

The search for Rice’s seventh president

James Crownover, Rice trustee and chair of the 15-member search committee, said the committee began the eight-month presidential search process by developing a list of 20 criteria for evaluating candidates. These ranged from strength of character and intellect, to embodying the values of Rice, to academic leadership skills. The committee also started with one unofficial prohibition: “No lawyers.” To hear Crownover tell it, there seems to be less irony involved than fate when the leading candidate turned out to be dean of a law school.

“We spent more than 400 man-days on this effort,” Crownover told the crowd that gathered in Duncan Hall on December 19 to welcome David Leebron on his first visit to campus. “Maybe a more impressive statistic is that Jim Pomerantz told me this morning that he received 750 e-mails associated with the effort.”

The committee started by collecting input throughout the Rice community, and those ideas and suggestions were distilled into a white paper titled simply, Rice University (ricesearch.rice.edu/emplibrary/White_Paper_layout_ final.pdf). This document describes the opportunities and challenges at Rice and suggested what those implied for the next president.

After that, the search started in earnest. “We talked with 45 academic leaders in person and maybe another 25 by phone and got their advice on the search, got their perspectives on Rice, and got a number of names,” Crownover said. One of the important insights that the committee gleaned from these discussions was not to eliminate nontraditional candidates out of hand. “We also looked at heads of think tanks, and we looked at academic medical leaders,” Crownover said, then he smiled. “We even looked at deans of top law schools.”

The preliminary list of candidates grew to approximately 300, and from that, the number was reduced first to about 35, then to 12. The committee talked with every one of the 12 on more than one occasion, and they also talked with people who knew them. Finally, the list was distilled to five, with Leebron at the top.

“David is described in many ways by his colleagues,” Crownover said, “but one of the ways that we liked very much was that he is a man who is rooted in the humanities but drawn to science. His leadership record at Columbia Law has been nothing less than extraordinary.” Crownover said that Leebron took a law school that was very good and turned it into one of the top law schools in the country by improving the school’s infrastructure, doing a great job in fundraising, building new buildings, and attracting, motivating, and retaining first-rate faculty. He also extended diversity and improved the quality of the student base. “He turned a very local group of students into one that was very geographically diverse,” Crownover said, “drawing people on a national basis from the South and the West.”

In addition, the committee viewed Leebron as a terrific faculty leader. “Clearly he was viewed as that by his colleagues at Columbia,” Crownover said. “He’s a person of great intellect. He’s a great scholar, and he combines that with a manner, a leadership style, of someone who listens, who consults, who collaborates, who sets extraordinarily high standards, but who inspires people to meet those standards. The reference that struck me most was that of a member of his faculty who said, ‘He is a very powerful leader by virtue of the trust he has earned.’”

Crownover told the audience that many of the academic leaders they had consulted at the beginning of the process warned the committee that finding the right person would depend as much on luck as on hard work, and Crownover said he found that to be true. Late in the process, Gilbert Whitaker, dean of the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, introduced the committee to Jeffrey Lehman, the president of Cornell University. Committee members asked Lehman about the category of law school deans, since he himself had been one. Lehman gave them one name—David Leebron.

“Three days later,” Crownover said, “I happened to be in New York City and called David up. He happened to be available. We spent three hours together and really hit it off.”

The faculty members of the committee quickly numbered among Leebron’s most enthusiastic supporters. “You will not meet anyone smarter than David Leebron,” said Robert Curl, Nobel Prize-winning chemistry professor and search committee member. “I am awestruck at his ability to think on his feet about a subject he knows far less about than we—Rice University.”

Before they could go further, Leebron consulted with his wife, Ping. “As it turns out,” Crownover relates, “Ping grew up in China and made her first trip to the U.S. to attend Princeton. She described this as an adventure. And when David mentioned Houston and Rice to her, she said, well, maybe it’s time for another adventure.”

More good luck followed. “We were fortunate that several of David’s New York friends happened to have exposure to Houston, and they really liked Houston.” And the luck continued through Thanksgiving, when Melissa Kean, the executive director for the search, and then, separately, faculty committee member Robin Forman and his family happened to be in New York. “The Leebrons invited them to spend some time with them,” Crownover said, “So at a critical time in the decision-making process, we had people on the inside, so to speak. It was like the planets just sort of lined up.”

Whether or not the planets lined up, the search committee certainly did, voicing unanimous support for Leebron. The Rice Board of Trustees also were unanimous in approving David Leebron as Rice’s seventh president. In the words of Cornell’s President Jeffrey Lehman, who brought Leebron to the committee’s attention, “David is a brilliant and inspiring academic leader, Rice is a world-class institution—it’s a perfect match.”

—Christopher Dow