This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: As he begins his third stint as head of the Saint Louis University board of trustees, J. Joe Adorjan wants to make a few points clear.
- The Rev. Lawrence Biondi, who announced Saturday night that he has asked the board to begin the search for his successor, was not forced out as SLU president. He is leaving on his own.
- He didn’t know of Biondi’s intention until the trustees met on campus earlier that day.
- Despite a litany of facts and figures from faculty members showing the university on the decline, SLU is strong and will rebound from the turmoil of the last several months to become even stronger.
- It is more important that a new president be dedicated to SLU’s Jesuit mission than that he — or she — be a Jesuit.
- The university needs to improve its communications, internally and externally, to include everyone’s point of view and avert repeats of the tension that Adorjan thinks could have been avoided in the first place.
- And as much as he wants to avoid rehashing the past in favor of looking toward the future — "That’s all water over the dam as far as I’m concerned" — he wants to make sure SLU avoids repeating its mistakes, plays up its strengths and minimizes its weaknesses.
"What we need to do now is move forward," Adorjan said in a wide-ranging interview Wednesday in his office at Adven Capital Partners in Clayton. "We have to improve our communications and raise our morale. I think we got nicked pretty good. I think we’ll fully recover from all this stuff, and I think we’ll go on and be better. My goal would be to get over it.
"One of our challenges at the university is this idea that we are being secretive and don't share. We have as much shared governance as any university. On every major board and committee we have faculty and students and staff. You can never have perfect communication, but if you focus on something, you can improve the process.”
Long history at SLU
Adorjan, who is 74 — just two days younger than Biondi, he pointed out – has a long history at the university in the city where he grew up. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, he met his wife, also an alum, on campus, and his two daughters also graduated from SLU.
He recalled a time, after he had completed military service and was attending classes with the help of the GI bill and income from outside jobs, that he came up $300 short to pay his tuition. Hehought he would have to drop out until he could raise the money.
Instead, he asked the university for help, and he received a loan for the amount he needed to stay in class.
"Needless to say," Adorjan joked, "I’ve been paying back the university ever since."
A longtime donor who, like some of his fellow trustees, has a building on campus named after him, Adorjan has contributed to the university for nearly three decades. He chaired the board of trustees from 1991-97 and again from 1998-2005 and most recently has served on its executive committee and headed its clinical affairs committee.
Adorjan has held top positions at Emerson and Borg-Warner, so his business experience informs how he thinks a university should be run. But he has few traces of stuffiness about him. He wore a dark T-shirt to the interview, and when he gestured, as he did frequently, tattoos were visible on his arms.
While he acknowledges similarities between the two enterprises, he also notes important differences.
"I see this board as no different as any good corporate board," he said. "Our job is to set policies. Our job is to ensure audits are done and fiduciary responsibilities are met. What our job is not is to run the day-to-day operations.
“Our job is not to meet wth the faculty on an ongoing basis. No corporate trustee can do that. They have their own lives. They are volunteers. It’s administration’s job to do all that. Our job is to make sure this university abides by its guidelines and fiduciary responsibility and organize committees encompassing all aspects of the university."
And, Adorjan added, he wants to make sure that academic experience, not business experience, is a top attribute in whoever takes Biondi’s place.
"One thing you don’t want to have in this job is a business guy," he said. "That’s one way to screw up this university. We need somebody who understands academics. We need somebody who understands health care. We need somebody who has the ability to add to the endowment and grow this university. Most business people don’t understand the faculty and the academic world."
Tough, hard-charging, results-oriented
Finding that person who can fill Biondi’s shoes won’t be easy, Adorjan emphasized, and SLU is determined to take the time it needs to do the job right. He compared Biondi to a former Emerson leader, Chuck Knight.
"Larry is a tough guy," Adorjan said, then wondered whether he should be calling him Father Biondi instead. "He’s dedicated to one things: making Saint Louis University a better university.
"Hard-charging? Yes. Results-oriented? Yes. No one I think ever questioned, even during this last few months, his loyalty to the university or his desire to make it better."
How can SLU find the person to follow such a difficult act? Adorjan said the board will look at best practices elsewhere in academia, at all different kinds of campuses, and because the university’s bylaws have been changed to no longer require that a Jesuit serve as president, a broad field of candidates is open.
"This is going to be a tough job to fill,” he said. “Think about what we need. The challenges are pretty enormous. Has the new president ever been engaged with a hospital? Has the new president ever dealt with the changes in medical care that are going on now? Has the new president been an incredibly big fund raiser, to bring in what pays for all of this stuff? Has that individual had global experience?
"We’re going to take our time. We’re looking at best practices of searches, to see where there have been successful searches and unsuccessful searches. We’re going to look at Jesuit schools and lay schools. The worst thing in the world that can happen to this university, in my estimation, is to select the next president and not have him be successful. We are going to be very selective. We are going to be very careful.”
On the question of whether non-Jesuits will be considered, Adorjan recalled when the bylaws were changed, and why.
"The Jesuit ranks were thinning," he said. "We have to make sure we get the right person, whether that person is a Jesuit or not. I want someone who understands the Jesuit tradition and the mission. Whether that person is a Jesuit or not will not be a make-or-break factor."
Raising his hands to two levels, one slightly higher than the other, Adorjan added:
"If I had a Jesuit here and a lay person up here, it goes to the lay person. The worst thing we could do was pick a person because he was a Jesuit and not the best person.”
Shared governance and respect
Looking back on the standoff between the administration and faculty and student groups – both of which passed votes of no confidence in Biondi and asked the board to oust him from his presidency — Adorjan acknowledged that some aspects of the turmoil could have been handled differently.
Using what he called “20-20 hindsight," he said that a six-point plan issued after the trustees met in December — a blueprint calling for more cooperation and communication between the Faculty Senate and the trustees — "wasn’t the best idea I’ve had in the last 10 years."
He added:
"I was the guy who came up with the six points. In retrospect, it helped some. When we met with the Faculty Senate, I thought we were making really good progress. I was the doofus who suggested the six points. If there is blame to be had here because we didn’t do everything we said, it sits right here."
One of the points that ended up causing considerable strife was the commissioning of a campuswide survey to gauge the feelings of faculty, staff and students of how the administration was performing. It was put together too hastily, Adorjan acknowledged, and should have involved focus groups to sharpen the questions.
"If we had done the climate survey in a more orderly way and not run to judgment on that," he said, "we would have had focus groups and gotten to communication issues. If I had a brain, I probably would have delayed that survey. I know the faculty would have been upset about that, but it was not as comprehensive as it could have been."
He said a threat of legal action against the head of the SLU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who announced that the group would do its own survey focusing more sharply on Biondi, was made on the recommendation of the university’s counsel. He said he did not see a need for a separate set of questions.
"It may have been heavy-handed," Adorjan said, "but I thought it was very heavy-handed to run a parallel survey."
He said he did not understand why other faculty members did not want to go along with the survey devised in part by the senate.
"For some reason," Adorjan said, "they decided they didn’t want to play in what the Faculty Senate endorsed. I think that offended board members. We spent a lot of money and a lot of effort working with that task force getting that done, and to have someone say they want to run a parallel survey, that’s a biased way to do it. No survey I’ve ever run would do it that way."
And when it comes to being offended, Adorjan said he did not appreciate the attitude of people who organized what they called an "alternative gala" Saturday night outside the $1,000-a-plate celebration of Biondi at Chaifetz Arena on campus. The alternative event charged $1 a person.
"I find it terribly offensive to have a gala for Father Biondi in which our donors and people like myself gave $1.4 million for scholarships and have someone stage an alternative gala and call us hoi polloi. There is such a thing as being civil. There is such a thing as avoiding personal attacks."
Challenges ahead
Keeping such people in a giving mood will be a big priority in the months ahead, Adorjan said.
"The biggest challenge will be for donors," he said. "These are people who give big money to the university. I think they are offended. How would you like to donate $25,000 of your hard-earned money and have someone refer to you as hoi polloi."
He emphasized that when people give money to an institution like SLU, they aren’t giving to a university as much as they are giving to a person who leads that institution.
"I would hope our donors, our major benefactors, don’t withdraw,” he said. "I’m not going to stop supporting Saint Louis University because of what has happened here.
"If you’re committed and understand the role Saint Louis University plays in this community, and how important it is to the community, and you are a civic-minded individual, your first reaction is distress, disappointment and a little sadness. I feel that, too. But the issue is that the institution is bigger than this, and we need to work to make this a better institution."
Asked whether Biondi could play a role similar to that of the Rev. Paul Reinert, another longtime SLU president who stepped aside in 1974 to become chancellor – a post that is primarily dedicated to bringing in donations — Adorjan said that kind of decision is up to Biondi.
"We all need to think about what role he should play," he said, "but it’s his call. Pure and simple, it’s his call."
Biondi angered members of the Faculty Senate when he declined to appear as scheduled at their meeting on April 30. He explained that since he was going to come along with Thomas Brouster, and Brouster had announced his decision to step down as chairman of the board, it made more sense to wait until a new board chairman was named before talking to the senate.
In response, the senate scheduled a special meeting for May 14. Adorjan said Wednesday that he will be out of town that day but he is working to set up an alternative time when he and Biondi can meet the senate. Jane Turner, new head of the senate, told the Beacon a meeting is being arranged for May 21.
For himself, Adorjan said he isn’t used to being in the limelight and has worked most of his career to avoid it. But as with SLU’s communication policy in general, he said he saw a need for a change and he is willing to make the effort, such as sitting down for an interview — an invitation repeatedly declined by Brouster.
"I don’t like high profile,” he said. “I’ve always tried to avoid meeting the press. I don’t think that’s important. But I’m really seeing a change, because I think it’s important that we send our message."
He said he did not think the recent turmoil on campus will have a lasting effect on recruitment of either students or faculty. He likes to take a longer, wider view.
"There are people who are saying that we’ve lost sight of our mission," Adorjan said. “I reject that. This institution still does so many things for people.
"No one talks about the really important things this university does, what we do for our students. They are the most important. They are the products of this university. Somehow that has gotten lost in this torrent of stuff."