Keeping Brown in Black

By Ellie McGrath

Strategy for the '80s: tight management, academic excellence

One Sunday morning last month, as the exuberant but messy Spring Weekend celebration was drawing to a close, an unusual clean-up crew went into action on the campus green of Brown University. Its members were not maintenance workers but volunteers from the student body--led by a tweedy man with a professional air: Howard Swearer, 50, Brown's 15th president. If, at that moment, Swearer was not the only U.S. college president stooping to such a mundane task, he may have been one of the enviable few whose cooperative posture was producing positive results.

After years during which Brown was in trouble financially and in limbo academically, the 218-year-old institution in Providence now attracts the kinds of students who used to prefer Harvard, the kind of alumni giving once mainly associated with places like Yale, and the kind of national attention that could make it a case study in how a private university can survive amid the mounting economic odds of the'80s.

Brown has come a long way since 1972, when it was starting to eat away at its $117 million endowment to meet rapidly growing operating expenses. By 1974 its endowment had dropped by $43 million. Parts of its faculty were known to be demoralized. Its academic reputation--despite its free-form "new curriculum," which emphasized student initiative and de-emphasized required courses--was in the basement of the Ivy League. And its administration was blamed for loose and unfocused programs and management.

Facing these problems, the university in 1976 hired Swearer, a political scientist by educational background and a seasoned administrator with six years behind him as the budget-balancing president of Carleton College in Minnesota. Swearer put together a team that brought Brown back into the black. Today, endowment stands at a healthy $144 million, the faculty is first rate, and student recruiting programs seem to have yielded rich dividends. This year the admissions committee was exultant over the quality of the 12,000 applicants for Brown's 1,360 freshman openings. The yield rate, the number of accepted students who choose to attend Brown, is among the highest in the country at 56%. Furthermore, 92% of Brown students applying to medical school are accepted; 96% to law school. The students, like the stars of the 485-member faculty, seem to have been attracted, in part, by the positive atmosphere of a school on the rise. Says Princeton Vice President Anthony Maruca: "President Swearer is a dynamic, able leader. There is a spirit and enthusiasm for what he's doing and has done."

Swearer is both modest and cautious about Brown's success so far: "You have to give credit to a large number of people." But his chief financial aide, Senior Vice President Richard Ramsden, believes that management programs have helped steer Brown out of trouble. "We wanted Brown to be known as one of the best-managed institutions of higher education in the U.S." Broad faculty, and even student, support was enlisted for these programs. When Swearer in 1978 embarked upon a $158 million capital fund drive, instead of asking the faculty where it could cut back, he asked where it would add if it had more money. The result: highly motivated faculty members started defining their priorities and raising funds. Historian Joan Scott landed nearly $500,000 in grants for Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Just last summer, Swearer repositioned Brown's investment portfolio, moving away from tradition-bound companies to smaller firms that offered higher yields. He also put money into high-risk but potentially high-return investments like venture capital pools and energy companies.

Brown now has computer programs for everything from energy usage to servings of ravioli. The campus is completely wired with a computerized communications system; by fall the heat in a dozen of Brown's 125 main buildings will be controlled room-by-room, minute-by-minute and degree-by-degree. Expected savings: at least $350,000 a year. Brown's computerized meal-planning system predicts student choices and the number of desired portions and matches these with the best food prices. The savings: more than $100,000 in the past couple of years. Up-to-date information on alumni is also in computer files. Says Ramsden: "It is probably the most sophisticated alumni development records system in the U.S. today." It seems to be really cooking. To date, the capital-fund drive has already raised $134 million.

More will doubtless be attracted by an unusual spring gift catalogue that, in the style of Neiman-Marcus, offers such one-of-a-kind items as an endowed faculty chair (at a cost of $1 million). For a mere $10 million--with a 10% discount for cash--the Brown booster can even have the building housing the geology and chemistry departments named after him (no takers yet).

Nonetheless, with tuition, room and board hitting $ 11,500 next year--and possible reductions in federal student aid--Brown is going to have trouble maintaining the diversity of its 5,200 student body. Says Swearer: "Higher education has taken its fair share of cuts, and to single it out for even more drastic cuts would not be either good national policy or fair." Meanwhile, Brown's students are doing everything they can: the senior class has pledged a total of $126,000 for its class gift. It is the largest gift by far ever pledged by a Brown senior class, and nearly a third of the money is earmarked for student loans. --By Ellie McGrath. Reported by Ruth Mehrtens Galvin/ Providence

With reporting by Ruth Mehrtens Galvin

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