In the four years I've spent holed up on the third floor of Norris, I've made a lot of friends who have worked with President Bienen in some capacity or another. Most like the man; a few have horror stories, which aren't mine to tell. Personally, I have spoken with Bienen only three times, always as a reporter. But with his retirement announcement Monday, and the chorus of plaudits that's followed it, I thought it might be a good time to offer up a slightly different take.
Last year, while I was editing for The Daily's campus desk, we ran an article on black student enrollment at Northwestern. The gist of the piece was that the percentage of black undergraduates attending this school had been falling pretty consistently for 30 years. I interviewed Bienen for the project, and I've always remembered it as a very tense conversation. But listening over the tape of it now, it's remarkable to me how calm and respectful he sounds, even though he was clearly unhappy to be discussing the topic. He was forthright, laying out several very precise reasons for why NU hadn't been able to compete with peer institutions in terms of maintaining black enrollment and discussed some of the steps that the school had recently taken to cope with the problem. But out of the whole meeting, one moment has stuck with me. He mentioned that, over time, the number of students who chose not to identify their ethnicity on their applications had increased, enough to cancel out most of the drop in black students. "I like the fact that kids don't pigeon-hole themselves in these categories," he said.
We decided not to include that bit of reasoning when it came time for press. We were tight for space, and of everything he said, we saw it as his weakest bit of logic. His argument boiled down to the fact that there was a group of students on campus who did not identify with their black heritage enough even to try and claim some sort of affirmative action edge on their college application. Maybe it sounds harsh in print, but we all remember how the admissions game went. The idea that those same students would suddenly join For Members Only when they arrived in Evanston seemed a little ridiculous to both my writer and myself.
Not long after, The Daily received a letter from the school's public relations head attacking my writer and I for not including the bit about racially unidentified students. It also went on at length that our article hadn't emphasized the gains NU had made recruiting other ethnic groups, such as Asians and Hispanics. I later found out that Bienen himself had apparently directed the letter.
The Daily had not arbitrarily decided to provoke a controversy. The idea for the article had come from an FMO leader, and the final piece included several prominent black alums who had long been angry about the issue. But from the letter Bienen commissioned, it seemed that he had only latched onto the minutia while ignoring the big picture. Whether or not his point had been right, the bottom line was that much of the black community, past and present, wanted to see a change. That somehow seemed to escape him. From what I've been told, when the topic of black enrollment came up in a meeting with student leaders, he dismissed the topic by accusing our paper of shoddy journalism.
I am not trying to say Bienen is racially insensitive. In the scheme of things, this story amounts to a fairly small incident, and it won't change the fact that Bienen will be, and should be, remembered as a great NU president. But the man had his faults, including, it seemed to me, a knee-jerk defensiveness that could rear itself in the wrong circumstances. And in some respects, that may be a part of his legacy too.
- Jordan Weissman The Weekly Editor
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