Trustees agree to spend $10 million on rebuilding neighborhood
He's skied 100 miles across Germany, hang-glided over the French Alps and sailed the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum. He's hitchhiked across East Africa and huddled with missionaries in the Andes Mountains. And he's run up all 1,575 steps of the Empire State Building.
But now Union College President Roger Hull, a man who enjoys living dangerously, is facing a different kind of challenge: keeping his own board of trustees on board with his plan to rebuild a broken Schenectady neighborhood.
“They're rightly wondering how far out on a limb we're going to climb,'' said Hull, driving to a practice session of tae kwon do, the martial art in which he holds a black belt. “But I feel if you're lucky enough to be in a position of responsibility, you should be willing to take prudent risks.''
The trustees took the gamble, voting last Wednesday to invest $10 million in the renovation of College Park, the neighborhood that abuts the west end of campus. The investment marks one of the largest commitments nationally of academic dollars into neighborhood revitalization. In a news conference Tuesday, Union will show how the plan that was announced in October with 20 houses and $4 million evolved into a project more than double the scope. Prior to Union's vote, the largest commitment of this kind is believed to be the $6 million Trinity College devoted to rebuilding Hartford, Conn.
From Berkeley to Worcester, college presidents are rolling up their sleeves to tackle problems outside their campus walls. The motive is a combination of public service and self-interest. At Union, more than 60 percent of prospective students who turn down the college do so because of Schenectady, the college has found.
But unlike Trinity, Union is starting out on its own — without help from government or the private sector. By borrowing the $10 million to get the project started, Union hopes to loosen purse strings in the community and elsewhere.
“Trinity started with $6 million and leveraged it into $175 million,'' Hull told a group of Schenectady business people last week. “We're putting down quite a bit more and leveraging it into exactly what we have put on the table.''
Few in the community openly criticize the initiative, although Hull is known to have some enemies in the County Legislature who believe he has ignored their economic development ideas. He seems to take an impish delight in publicly lambasting these “naysayers.''
“This community, as good as it is, suffers from an inferiority complex and the belief that one should attack everything and anything that's proposed,'' Hull told the business group.
Hull, 56, has neither a contract nor tenure and seems to exist without a trace of self-doubt.
“He's one of the most creative, innovative and bold presidents in the country,'' said David Warren, president of the National Association of Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C. “I've known him for 20 years, and he's one of the best in the business.''
Born in New York City, the son of German immigrants who fled Nazi Germany, Hull came to higher education late in life. Bored with his career as a Wall Street lawyer, he was invited by an old boss, Republican Gov. Linwood Holton of Virginia, to sit on the board of trustees of William and Mary College. He distinctly remembers his first meeting, just a week after the shooting of four students at Kent State University in 1970.
“I realized that none of the trustees and none of the administrators wanted to be there,'' he said. “It was then I decided I wanted to be a university president.''
The incident reminded him of a letter his grandfather wrote when Hull was a shy boy of 17. Ludwig Stern co-founded the German Democratic Party, one of the first groups to openly oppose Hitler in the early days of his reign, and escaped in 1933 when his daughter discovered the word Jew painted on their house.
“Be a politician, but be an honorable one,'' his grandfather wrote him. “Then and only then do you have the right to be proud.''
The words of his grandfather and the scene after Kent State convinced Hull that the presidency of a university could be a bully pulpit to address social concerns.
The route to his goal was circuitous: Hull was counsel to Gov. Holton and a lawyer for the National Security Council before becoming president of Beloit College in 1981. Beloit, a Rust Belt city in Wisconsin, paralleled Schenectady. It was a place of massive unemployment, run-down streets and faded hopes. Hull joined with local businessmen to create Beloit 2000, an organization credited with restoring the riverfront and returning major corporations to the once-dying city.
Soon after coming to Union in 1990, Hull sparked the restoration of the college's symbolic center, the Nott Memorial. Once an architectural marvel in steel and stained glass, by the '90s the Nott had gone to the birds — literally. Scores of pigeons, flying through the broken windows of the top floor, made it their home.
He brought the college back to fiscal health, balancing the budget every year and raising its endowment from $100 million to $240 million. It is Hull's fiscal conservatism, in part, that allowed him to sell his trustees on the massive investment in College Park.
“He's probably scored more points with the community with that project than any of his predecessors,'' said Neil Golub, Union trustee and president of Price Chopper supermarkets.
With a $1 million bequest from Golub's father combined with Hull's experience in Beloit, the pair created Schenectady 2000 — by all accounts, taking the lead in bringing the city back to life. Their dreams for Schenectady include an eight-screen movie theater, hotel, trade center and a combination bus and train station that will greet the high-speed, commuter friendly trains that will come from New York City.
“They're like the Lone Ranger and Tonto,'' said John Tracy, a local Realtor and economic development booster. The plan got a major boost when Governor George Pataki created the Metroplex Development Authority, which will receive $50 million in bonds to spend in the city and the county.
Hull's local counterparts have taken notice. Last week's meeting of the Hudson-Mohawk Association of Colleges and Universities was a virtual love-in for campus presidents seeking to enhance their communities. Seated around the table were Jeanne Neff of Sage Colleges, who is trying to clean up the University Heights community in Albany, and University at Albany president Karen Hitchcock, who is fostering greater ties with the community as president of the Albany Colonie Regional Chamber of Commerce.
“The great thing is that you are really preaching to the choir,'' said Hitchcock. Hull laughed and paraphrased the famous pitch line of Ronald Reagan, a man he resembles in his optimism and singularity of vision.
“Maybe it's morning on our campuses,'' Hull said.
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