Next Saturday, College of William and Mary President W. Taylor Reveley III will turn off the lights and walk out of his office in the Brafferton one last time.
Reveley, 75, officially retires June 30 after serving as president since Sept. 6, 2008. His appointment came after several months of serving as interim president after former President Gene Nichol abruptly resigned.
Before his appointment as the university’s 27th president, Reveley had served as dean of William and Mary’s law school for 10 years after having a long tenure as a lawyer.
Succeeding Reveley will be the university’s first woman president, Katherine A. Rowe, who currently serves as provost of Smith College, a private women’s college in Massachusetts. She will begin July 1, and will be sworn in by Gov. Ralph Northam at noon July 2.
Rowe arrives after 10 years of what school officials describe as measured and forward-thinking leadership from Reveley.
Even as an interim, Reveley has said he started thinking about four major goals he hoped to achieve: formulating a new strategic plan for the university, bolstering the university’s financial foundation, reshaping the undergraduate general education curriculum and to communicate better “across the board.”
Much has been done on those fronts. The board passed its first five-year strategic plan since 1994 within the first seven months of his presidency.
A $1 billion fundraising campaign — aptly named “For the Bold” — is underway. The William and Mary Promise guarantees that in-state tuition will stay the same for the four years after a freshman enters the university. New revenue from that has led to investments in faculty salaries, Rector Todd Stottlemyer has said, helping to retain current faculty and attract new members.
A new general education curriculum was adopted in September 2015, which places emphasis on “rigorous thought, research, effective writing and speaking, interdisciplinary connections and global understanding.”
Messaging and branding around William and Mary and its large alumni base have grown stronger in the past decade, as well.
The Daily Press sat down with Reveley a few days before his retirement to discuss his accomplishments, his future plans and what lies ahead for Rowe.
Below is a transcript of that conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
DP: What have the past 14 months been like since you made your retirement announcement?
Reveley: There’s a kind of surreal quality to it, of course, because to my amazement I will have been here for 20 years and when I came I had no idea if this was to last six hours, six days, six months.
But from the moment I walked into the law school, it was good. Twenty years later I’m finally about ready to walk out the door. It is surreal. And it’s also to some extent really bittersweet because it’s been a great run.
There’s so many people and aspects of the annual life at William and Mary that I’ll miss. Plus I’ll miss being a real catalyst, I think, for productive change. You can be that sort of catalyst if you are in fact the leader, because people do pay attention to a leader, which means if you want to get something done, you can rally the troops and start moving forward. And of course you also have to find the money. That’s the dark underbelly of it all.
It’s been just a great 20 years. But I am definitely ready to be sent out to pasture. Absolutely no second thoughts.
This is a quasi-second thought, I suppose. If I were five years younger, wild animals couldn’t’ve gotten me out of here, but at 75 ½ I’m ready to taste retirement, see what it’s like. See if I can learn how to relax.
What are your thoughts on your successor?
I think the schools that really make great progress are ones that line up successful presidencies one after another, and I think that’s going to happen going forward. …
I think it’s quite wonderful after 325 years we do have a woman president. I think the time had come. She is very smart, she has a powerful work ethic, she knows what sort of school we are, in other words, a university rooted in the liberal arts, one (with) great historic significance, one that values enormously teaching as well as scholarship, a school that values undergrads as well as graduate and professional students.
She gets that. And I think she wants very, very much to be a very powerful force for the progress of William and Mary.
She’s going to have a lot to learn. She’s never been state-owned. And while that isn’t a huge factor, it is a difference. There’s a real difference. … Private schools and public institutions do march to the beat of different drummers to some extent.
Decreasingly, as state support declines, the public schools are more and more effectively privatized, but it’s still quite different, and she’s never been in a school as modestly funded as William and Mary due to our really bad 19th century. Harvard, Princeton, Yale did not have bad 19th centuries. Stanford didn’t exist.
We had a bad 19th century, and it took a real toll on our financial strength. That takes some getting used to. You can understand it intellectually, that you’ve got to do more with less, but until you experience it you don’t understand it viscerally.
What would you say is your biggest or best accomplishment in your time at William and Mary?
That’s really hard to say because there have been a number that I think are extremely important. One that is most physically visible is the enormous amount of new construction and total renovation that we’ve done during the last decade. This has been one of the great building eras in William and Mary’s history. It has had a transforming effect on the campus, but I think for the long-term, equally important, has been the real progress we’ve made on alumni engagement across the country, around the world.
The schools that are really going to amount to something in this century are going to be the colleges and universities that have powerful alumni commitment. Ones who stick with alma mater, who help it in innumerable ways, not just giving money. For the long term that’s fundamentally important.
And I think really getting William and Mary going, No. 3, on building a new financial foundation for itself, one that delights in whatever state support we can get but doesn’t count on being supported by the taxpayers, (that) counts on having to do it ourselves. It involves all members of the family in doing that, those of us on campus, as we seek to become seriously more productive and figure out new ways to earn a buck. Students and their families as they pay tuition — and they have to pay a lot of tuition and fees and room and board, unless they had a need, in which case we provide need-based aid. And we’re doing a really good job of that on the in-state front. We’re not yet doing a good job in the out-of-state because we didn’t get the money yet.
And then of course alumni, friends, parents, to really get involved tooth and claw in building the new financial foundation.
Of course, too, there’s been amazing academic progress over the last 10 years, as there always is at William and Mary because the academic program is always evolving. …
In one crucial instance the new general education part of the undergraduate curriculum. After 20 years under the old regime, we crafted a new regime and it really has put us back at the cutting edge of the liberal arts. That needed to happen. …
The Promise was a huge, huge accomplishment. One that was thought to be politically impossible, inconceivable. … I think it became politically possible because we guaranteed the price for four years so a family knows what they’re going to be paying if they’re paying the sticker price. We dramatically increased our need-based financial aid for in-state students, so we began doing the best job in the state for kids who had need.
When you put it all together, it’s a winning plan for the long term. And it greatly expands the potential of William and Mary to really keep moving forward.
Do you think you’re going to have a hard time leaving the work behind?
I think there’s always a sense of some loss in that regard. If you’ve had your hand on the wheel for a long time, it is hard to take your hand off and leave it to somebody else.
On the other hand, once you get to be 75 ½, you’ve had your hand on a lot of wheels you’ve taken your hand off those wheels and you’ve motored on to something different.
Plus, I really am ready to have a different schedule and I really am ready to have more time to enjoy grandchildren and just to be able to get up in the morning and read the newspaper — I still like to hold newspapers in my hands — for as long as I want. And to have another cup of coffee.
Have you given any advice to your successor?
She and I have talked a lot about a lot of things. I’m sure that will continue. And she’s been quite willing to ask what I think about various things. Going forward, the rules of engagement will be if asked, I’ll be delighted to talk. If not asked, I will have nothing to say.
I think inevitably there will be more questions early on than as time goes on. And I’ve been trying to limit my comments to the information about issues as opposed to advice about how to run the show.
Information is really helpful. Advice may or may not be. But she and I have had a really wonderful relationship and I expect that to continue, but I am not going to be inserting myself into the workings of the 28th presidency.
