The First Five Years

An interview with President Richard M. Freeland


By Ken Gornstein

Soon after becoming Northeastern’s sixth president in 1996, Richard M. Freeland articulated an ambitious new vision for the institution—achieving excellence as a national research university that is student-centered, practice-oriented, and urban. In the five years since, Freeland’s policies and programs have dramatically improved student quality, retention and graduation rates, fund-raising levels, and the quality of campus facilities.

To mark his anniversary, Freeland—who last month received a three-year contract extension from the Board of Trustees—sat down with us for a review of his presidency thus far and a look at some of the challenges that remain.


In your inauguration speech, you said this about becoming Northeastern’s sixth president: “I’m not only honored by this appointment, I’m exhilarated by it.” Now that you’ve had the benefit of five years of perspective, what are your feelings about the job?

I love the job even more today than I did five years ago.

I love to tell this story: When I saw this position advertised while working down in New York [at City College], I brought the paper home to my wife [Elsa Nuñez, now Lesley University provost]. I said, “You know, this is the best job in higher education. I would love to have this job. Of course, I could never get it, but I would love to have this job.” And she said, “Well, you should go for it.”

Those feelings have never changed. For me, Northeastern is the best possible place to be president.

Without exception, every Northeastern president has served a shorter term than his predecessor. Jack Curry served seven years. How much longer do you plan on doing this?

My goal is to help Northeastern achieve the repositioning that the Board of Trustees charged me to lead. So the first way I think about the duration of my presidency is that I will be ready to step down when Northeastern has accomplished the transition I think it needs to accomplish and is securely established in the top echelon of American universities.

It’s difficult to place a precise period of time on that. All I can say is that I firmly intend to reverse that pattern [of presidential service]. And I think there’s lots of work still to do before we are where I would hope us to be. So I would say I’m in the middle of the repositioning process and, therefore, in the middle of my presidency.

What’s been your greatest source of pride during the first five years?

I’m told through a variety of channels that the Northeastern community—students, faculty, and staff—feel I’m building on the accomplishments of the Jack Curry period, not departing from them. They feel the university is becoming stronger, better, and more recognized consistent with our institutional hopes and dreams.

I also hear that people on the outside sense Northeastern as a place of motion, a place where good things are happening, a place that’s getting better and stronger every year. I think the thing that gives me greatest satisfaction is playing a leadership role here at a time when the internal community, as well as the external community, is observing and feeling a kind of motion.

What’s your biggest disappointment?

The biggest disappointment is that I would always like things to move faster than they do.

I believe so deeply that what Northeastern is, and can be, merits recognition at the very highest levels among American higher education. I’m completely literal when I say it should be our ambition to be the best university in the world for the kind of education we offer, which I characterize as practice-oriented education—an educational experience that integrates classroom and workplace, and liberal and professional studies.

What’s most surprised you about the job?

I’ve been in this business now for over thirty years, and I’ve become deeply conscious of all the centrifugal forces at work in academic communities—all the structural tensions between faculty and administrators, and all the wasted energy that goes into backbiting, and conflict, and turf wars in a complex institution like this. One of my greatest surprises has been how little of that there is at Northeastern.

What have you learned from the students you’ve gotten to know at Northeastern?

The thing I’ve learned most from the students is the power of the Northeastern form of education. I regard Northeastern students as the most mature, and grounded, and sensible students whom I have ever worked with.

I attribute that to their educational experience here, particularly the combination of classroom study and workplace experience, which enables them to grow up in a way that other students don’t.

Has this job had any impact on your personal life?

It has deeply affected my personal life.

I’ve always been someone who’s made a fairly sharp separation between my personal life and my institutional life. I’ve always treasured private time, and I’ve always maintained an individual life, a personal life, an emotional and intellectual life separate from my institutional role.

But I’ve found that in the presidency, those kinds of separations just don’t make any sense. One of the ethics, if you will, of becoming president of a major university is that you implicitly accept the reality that for whatever time you’re in that role, there is going to be a blurring of your personal and professional life. You owe it to the institution to embrace every aspect of the job.

But I’ve also found that I’ve enjoyed that, and my wife has enjoyed that. We love being part of the Northeastern community, with all the social and official functions and duties. It’s added a whole rich dimension to my personal life.

You’ve set the ambitious goal of Northeastern’s becoming one of the top 100 universities in the nation by the end of the decade. Given where we stand now, do you think that’s attainable?

I’ve always emphasized that this phrase “top 100” is only partially meant in a literal way. “Top 100,” narrowly conceived, refers to the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Of 230 national universities [on last year’s list], it says we need to be in the top 100.

The real point underlying this is that Northeastern needs to be recognized as one of the leading universities in the country—a place of high institutional stature, high institutional prestige, and strong academic values.

I am absolutely serious that the basic repositioning process we need to accomplish—for which top-100 status is a symbol—is both necessary and achievable. It’s necessary because as a private, high-cost institution, unless we are perceived as one of the leading institutions in the country, we will not ultimately be able to answer the question “Why should I pay Northeastern tuition, and not go to a public institution?”

I think it’s achievable because, if you look at the characteristics of the leading universities—their admission standards, their graduation rates, the stature of their faculty, and their overall academic reputation—and then you track Northeastern’s progress over the last ten years [in those categories], you see us moving on a trajectory that, if carried forward, gets us into that upper realm.

You’ve said a key to reaching top-100 status is attaining the resources we need to expand and enhance Northeastern’s academic programs. What are your top funding priorities over the next few years?

I don’t believe any of our colleges, or college deans, have the full set of resources they need to function at the competitive level to which they aspire, and to which we need them to aspire. By our calculations, we’re underspending by about $2,000 per year, per student, in comparison with the institutions we seek to compete with.

I also want to invest in our centers of academic excellence in a more selective way. My first priority is to restore our schools of engineering and business to their proper place as leaders in their fields. Both of these schools lost some stature as a result of the difficult financial times. The law school is in something of a similar position, and dollars need to be reinvested there as well.

Then we have to take a look at the schools that have historically never had the level of support that business, law, and engineering have had, and begin bringing them into full parity. Bouvé College of Health Sciences is at the top of that list as a place where Northeastern really has an opportunity to make its mark.

You mentioned practice-oriented education earlier, which is a concept you articulated early in your presidency. Has that been a harder or an easier sell than you had imagined?

Internally, I think the readiness of the institutional community to embrace the idea that what is special about Northeastern is the integration of workplace experience and classroom experience is strikingly high.

With the external community, we’re faced with a much greater challenge, because the world takes a very conventional and traditional view of higher education. That view is conditioned by the belief that the best form of education is what they do in Ivy League schools, and, therefore, the best institutions are the ones that look as much like Ivy League schools as possible.

An institution [such as Northeastern] that gets its hands dirty in the workplace is butting up against those deep biases and prejudices. So one of our biggest challenges in repositioning Northeastern is getting the world to understand that what we do is every bit as academic and intellectual as those traditional institutions.

In 1998, you issued a “Call to Action on Cooperative Education,” with the goal of strengthening co-op as an educational and employment experience. What’s been the progress on that front?

I think there’s been excellent progress. One of the things I’m proudest about is the way, over the last five years, we’ve been able to move co-op in the direction I believe it must move for Northeastern to achieve our hopes.

The single most important point about the Call to Action was that students’ workplace experiences through co-op had to be brought into a much more thoughtful and synergistic relationship with their classroom and academic experiences than had previously been the case—that the emphasis of the co-op experience had to be much more on how it enhanced student learning rather than how much money the student earned in a position.

In order to bring that about, it became necessary to ask the co-op faculty to accept some very radical changes in their working conditions, beginning with moving from a central location in Stearns into offices in the colleges. Their organizational structure was affected, as well, in that they now report to the college deans in addition to the co-op vice president.

I’ve been very pleased that, even though the road has been curvy and the way bumpy at times, the co-op coordinators and the colleges have worked very constructively together to accomplish their objectives and their goals.

The focus of your administration over the first five years has clearly been on improving and enhancing Northeastern’s academic reputation. But during that time, the university has experienced an unprecedented building boom. What are the reasons behind that?

The reasons behind that are twofold. One is that Northeastern recognized ten years ago, when we started down this path of creating a smaller, better Northeastern, and a more academically ambitious Northeastern, that transforming the campus from what many alumni affectionately refer to as “the brickyard”—this parking lot studded with white-brick buildings—into an attractive urban campus was absolutely essential to attracting the kind of students and faculty whom we needed to achieve our academic dreams.

The second reason is that it’s been an essential part of our recruiting strategy to attract a greater percentage of students from beyond Massachusetts. To accomplish that, it’s essential to become more and more a residential campus.

What’s your favorite area of campus?

I guess the part of campus I get the most pleasure from is the Snell Quad—it’s just being in the middle of this beautiful setting, emerging from one of the many pathways that lead to it, and kind of coming into the center of life on campus.

But a very close second is the emerging West Village complex, where a whole new Northeastern is taking place. One of the things that gives me great joy is seeing that part of campus come to life—to walk over to West Village on a sunny spring day and see kids out there playing softball, playing Frisbee, running around on Centennial Common, and running around in that beautiful new quad around West Village. Five years ago, that area was desolate. Now, it’s full of life and energy.

In your address to the Corporation in May, you candidly said that Northeastern is perceived by some as a low-budget university with modest needs, and that Northeastern pales in comparison with some of its competitors in the number of “megagifts” it receives. How could we improve our fund-raising capabilities?

We have tremendous fund-raising potential at Northeastern. We have a large alumni body—140,000, undoubtedly among the larger alumni bodies in the country. We have, for years, been in the business of graduating business leaders and engineers, many of whom have been quite successful. We are in active contact with a significant number of alumni who are quite wealthy and have the means to make significant gifts to Northeastern.

So all the elements of a significant increase in our fund-raising are there. There are two things we need to do to fully realize the potential.

First, we need to persuade those who have been close to Northeastern for years that Northeastern is a different kind of institution now—that we no longer are the low-budget commuter institution we once were. And if we want to achieve our current goals and aspirations, then we need financial support at a level received by those institutions we seek to compete with.

Second, we need to reach out much more widely and effectively to many of our alumni whom we have not stayed in contact with. We want them to feel proud that Northeastern is their alma mater, and we hope they will be willing to help us and support us.

During the course of deciding the fate of the African-American Institute, your commitment to students of color was called into question by a vocal faction of students and community leaders. Was that personally painful for you?

Of course, it was painful. I’ve spent all my adult life, in one way or another, working to provide greater opportunities for students of color—African-American students, Latino students, Asian students.

I participated in the civil rights movement when I was a student in the sixties. I worked for twenty years in public higher education for an urban institution here in Boston, which was very much concerned with those issues. My first job after graduate school was working with an African-American community, trying to help out with neighborhood renewal. And I’ve tried to place the issue of diversity very high on the institutional agenda here at Northeastern.

So I’ve always seen myself as someone who was a champion for equal opportunity and a champion of causes for people of color in this country, and to be questioned about [my commitment to that] is painful.

On the other hand, I understand what it is to be young. I didn’t necessarily appreciate the contributions of my elders when I was a student. I was quick to criticize people about whom I knew very little when I was twenty years old. So I’m ready to be the target of some of the criticism I doled out when I was that age.

Northeastern is in the process of creating a strategic marketing plan and launching an ambitious branding campaign. What are you hoping to accomplish?

This is an absolutely essential part of the overall strategy for Northeastern. We need to tell our story much more aggressively than we have. As I go around this city, one of the phrases I hear—that I’ve gotten very tired of hearing, quite honestly—is that Northeastern is the best-kept secret, educationally, in Boston.

There’s no reason for us to be the best-kept secret. We need to tell our story. We need to toot our horn. We need to make people aware of who we are, and what we are, and how good we are.

So there are two challenges here. First, we have a local challenge and a regional challenge among people who think they know Northeastern, but whose image of Northeastern is twenty or thirty years out of date in every way—from what we look like physically to what we’re all about academically. We need to transform that thinking.

And in other parts of the country, where Northeastern is not well-known, we need to get on the radar screen. Achieving those two perceptual transformations is important to achieving our long-term institutional goals.

A close friend of Northeastern, Representative Joe Moakley, died earlier this year. Can you say a few words about what he meant to the university?

Joe Moakley was a great supporter of Northeastern, and he was a most unusual political figure. He was a true man of the people, who was, to the day he died, a son of Boston, a son of South Boston, and an authentic representative of that culture.

And so, he recognized that Northeastern, like himself, had its roots in the community and was a place not caught up with social pretensions, but was committed to trying to do a good job for people of modest means, to help such people achieve greater opportunity.

The Egan building would not be here were it not for the help of Joe Moakley. The Behrakis [health sciences] building is getting great assistance through the interventions of Joe Moakley. He played a role in the Snell Library funding. So we were very pleased that, in the year before he died, he accepted our offer to have a scholarship for city workers named in his honor.

You mentioned those federal funds he helped direct Northeastern’s way. Are you worried those avenues are going to be cut off to us with his passing, or for other reasons?

I don’t think you can have even a mild understanding of politics in this country, and be a resident of New England, without being worried about the flow of political power from the Northeast to the West and the South. There’s no question that federal funds flow in patterns that are very much related to seniority in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the chairmanships of key committees.

So as demography moves more robustly to other regions of the country, and as some of the old lions of the Massachusetts political scene, like Joe Moakley, move on, our channels of leverage for federal funding are weakened.

That said, I think Senator [Edward] Kennedy remains a very strong supporter, and has been our friend in the same way that Joe Moakley was. [Senator] John Kerry has been a strong supporter, and Representative [Michael] Capuano is getting to know us. So we’re not without resources. But I think the pattern that Moakley’s passing represents overall is very worrisome.

In fall 2003, Northeastern will move from a quarter-based to a semester-based academic calendar. What do you see as the major advantages of the new system?

I think there are several advantages. The first, and by far the most important, is it allows a deeper, richer educational experience for students in their classroom work. Most of our faculty members, by overwhelming percentages—and most faculty from around the country—believe the quarter system provides too short a period of time for the kind of in-depth exploration of subject that you want students to have.

The thing that has really kept Northeastern from moving in the direction of a semester system has been the sense that the quarter system worked better with co-op. But what has happened in the recent past is that employers and students have moved in the direction of wanting longer and longer co-ops. So the traditional quarter-length co-op is largely a thing of the past.

Beyond that, the semester system offers a better professional environment for our faculty because it aligns their work schedules with the work schedules of their colleagues around the country. That makes a difference in coordinating research projects, attending summer institutes, and the like.
Semesters also make the life of our students better because there’re simply fewer changes, fewer transactions, fewer goings back-and-forth between co-op and classroom. Similarly, it eases the burden on our offices because there are fewer administrative transactions.

All five of the June morning commencement speakers since you’ve been president have come from the political arena: Max Cleland, Mikhail Gorbachev, Julian Bond, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Richardson. Any chance we’ll see an Oprah Winfrey or a Jerry Seinfeld in the future?

I’ve always taken it as a goal in the selection of our commencement speakers and honorary-degree recipients to honor a variety of achievers.

We recognize achievements in business. We recognize achievements in government and politics. We recognize achievements in service, in culture, and, of course, we recognize achievements of an intellectual nature. We also try to make sure that we have representatives of different ethnic groups, and both men and women.

Above all, we try to select speakers and honorary-degree recipients who stand for values we wish to affirm as an institution. Against that standard, the idea of having entertainers as speakers is appealing, in one sense, because it would be a lot of fun to have Jerry Seinfeld. But I’m not sure that I’d want a graduate’s final image of Northeastern to be that of a television comedian, as opposed to someone who’s dedicated his or her life to making the world a better place.

I’ve heard debates between members of the university community about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Which is it?

I’m the president of Northeastern. And as the president of Northeastern, I don’t practice partisan politics.

I have deep social commitments, and I think of those social commitments as progressive. But it is my duty as an educator to make sure that our students are made aware of all legitimate intellectual and social perspectives and philosophies.

There are those who criticize Northeastern for liberal bias, for having too many speakers who represent the liberal perspective. I always cringe a little when I hear that because I think higher education, in general, does have that tendency.

There’s no question that the academic community is more liberal, on average, than the rest of society. And I’m sensitive to that criticism because I think, whatever our personal politics are, our duty as educators is to make students aware of a great range of perspectives.

While some of the lower-profile athletics teams have had success during your five years, the so-called glamour sports—football, men’s hockey, and men’s basketball—have struggled. Is that a concern?

Absolutely, it’s a concern. Every time I speak to our athletes, or our coaches, or our athletic alumni, I say the same thing: In my view, excellence is indivisible. If we want to create a culture of excellence at Northeastern, we need to aspire to excellence in everything and mediocrity in nothing. If we can’t achieve excellence in something, we should get out of the business.

I don’t want our students to see mediocre performances. I want our students to think of themselves as winners, and I want them to see what it takes to win at the high level of competition at which we compete in these sports. So it’s a significant concern of mine that in these sports where we spend a lot of money and where we’re very visible, we’ve had less success than I would have hoped.

That said, I want to make clear that I’m a great fan of our athletic director, Ian McCaw. I think he’s done a wonderful job of professionalizing and strengthening our athletic department. He has had the opportunity in the last couple of years to recruit new coaches for both the [men’s] basketball program and the football program. I’m quite optimistic about both of those [hirings]. I also believe we have excellent leadership for our men’s hockey program.

So if the football team, for example, were to go another few years of 3-8 or 2-9, would you consider folding it?

I meant what I said. I don’t believe we ought to stay in any business where we’re only achieving mediocre results over extended periods of time. In athletics, in particular, there has to be a serious question about competing at the Division I level and spending the amounts of money we’re spending unless we can achieve some real success.

If our goal is simply to give some of our students the opportunity to play intercollegiate football, which is a perfectly legitimate institutional goal, I’m not sure we’d be doing it at the Division IA level, with all the costs associated with that.

I want our students to have a good experience. I want as many of our students to participate in intercollegiate athletics as possible. But if we can’t win at the level at which we’re competing, then I think we need to seriously re-examine the whole program.

How important do you think athletics is to recruitment, retention, and giving?

This is a great conundrum. I have to say—because I’m enough of a scholar in the field to know—that most of the empirical evidence, to the extent that systematic evidence can be put together, suggests that strong athletic programs have very little positive impact over the long haul in areas like fund-raising and recruitment.

On the other hand, I don’t know a single college president who really believes all that research. I think most of us think that, given the significance of athletics in this country and the emotional energy that gets generated around major athletic events, it’s a significant factor in both admissions and giving.

So there’s no question that one of my motives in wanting to achieve a greater level of athletic performance at Northeastern is that it will be good for admissions and good for alumni giving.

But that’s just another way of saying it’s good for overall institutional morale. Northeastern should aspire to be a winner. It should feel like a winner. And having winning sports teams is part of it.

You’re assuredly the most well-traveled president in Northeastern history. What’s the greatest benefit of that kind of travel?

First of all, I love travel. There was a period in my life, when I was younger and had more time, that I traveled to every part of the world, and I thought of travel as a terribly important part of my education. I continue to see it that way.

My presidential travel has been much more institutionally instrumental than personally instrumental. My travel today focuses on reaching out to Northeastern constituencies beyond the region and trying to bring those alumni whom we’ve neglected into the family.

But at a deeper level, I believe the experiences of other countries and other cultures are incredibly important to anyone’s education.

I want every young person at Northeastern to have the opportunity to travel. I believe in study abroad. I believe in bringing international students here. I think the kinds of issues we saw so tragically unfold on September 11 are less likely the more we reach out across traditional cultural boundaries.

How often do you sit down and compare notes with other university presidents?

Remarkably little. This is something presidents talk about a lot. We’re all so busy, and we all have so many demands on our time, there are relatively few opportunities to really sit down for formal meetings.

However, through organizations like the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, I do have the chance to meet with colleagues at private institutions. And I maintain a certain degree of social contact with others.

If you had one piece of advice for an incoming president, based on what you’ve experienced your first five years, what would it be?

Don’t bring to the presidency any canned ideas about what’s good for an academic institution or what an academic institution should be. But rather, try to understand the potential of that institution in its authentic context against its unique history. And then try to think through what the current and future conditions call upon that institution to become, to maximize its social contributions.

The ultimate task of any college president is to formulate a vision of that institution’s future and to formulate directions to get to that future. And it has to be done with a deep understanding of that institution’s unique potential, history, traditions, and strengths.

What do you do to relax?

My wife and I try to reserve Friday nights to ourselves whenever we can. We have dinner together, share a bottle of wine, and maybe watch a video of an old movie. That’s probably the greatest and most relaxing time of my week.

Have you given any thought to what you want to do when you leave the presidency?

One of the things I look forward to is the opportunity to be a full-time teacher, which I’ve not done for many, many years. And I have a book I want to write that’s been germinating in my mind for the last three or four years.

What’s the book?

The book is a study of the pursuit of meaning and value in life across three generations of Americans: my father’s generation, which is the Depression generation; my own generation; and the generation of our children. [It would seek to] understand how our ethics and values shape what we do with our lives, and how that has changed over time, as the historical experiences of the country have changed.

Last question: What do you want your legacy to be?

I want my legacy to be the twenty-first-century version of Northeastern.
I inherited an institution with a nearly hundred-year history of [being] a locally oriented, service-oriented, commuter, low-cost institution that made it possible for large numbers of youngsters from Boston to get an education. It was an institution that, by the time I arrived on the scene, had recognized it had been overrun by historical circumstances and a new version was needed.

And the great good fortune fell to the president, and he not only recognized the changing context, but he repositioned the institution—poised it in a way that it was now ready to try to find what that new version would be.

And that is a much more academically ambitious version of itself, which remains committed to our core values: practice-oriented education, and providing opportunities for people of modest backgrounds.