Thomas Jackson: As president, he is the UR’s man of action

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The University of Rochester-a 150-year-old institution and the area’s third-largest employer-has undergone a metamorphosis in the last half-decade.
On the north side of Elmwood Avenue, the university downsized the student body and pruned and cultivated programs and departments. On the south side, Strong Memorial Hospital added new research facilities, a new emergency room and its own health care system. The Eastman School of Music fine-tuned its programs and polished its national reputation. Meanwhile, the Memorial Art Gallery brought in more visitors than ever through community outreach and creative exhibits.
Ask a UR employee or faculty member who is responsible for the changes and-whether they approve or disapprove-the answer will be President Thomas Jackson.
“One of the great pleasures here was taking on an institution that wanted to make some changes,” says Jackson, 51, in his shirtsleeves, while sitting at a table in his office in Wallis Hall near the Genesee River. “It was looking for some change, some new direction, and it’s been just enormously, enormously satisfying to watch.”
Jackson, a lawyer and law professor, is the university’s ninth president. He and his family came to Rochester in 1994 following his stint at the University of Virginia as Arnold Leon Professor of Law and dean of the UVA law school. Jackson previously served as a law professor at both Harvard and Stanford universities.
Jackson impressed the university’s search committee with his intellect, says Robert Witmer Jr., a partner in the Rochester law firm Nixon, Peabody LLP and a member of the university’s board of trustees.
“He has a powerfully analytical mind, one of the strongest I had ever met,” Witmer says. “And his ability to think strategically, then to plan and implement his ideas, has been proven out again and again.”
One of Jackson’s first strategic moves was the Rochester Renaissance Plan. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the university kept growing. The problem was illustrated in the estimated $6 million shortfall on the $150 million budget for fiscal 1995-96.
“The general notion of higher education is to get larger,” Jackson says. “The idea of most everybody is you grow. Institutions put on a lot of pressures to grow.
“Faculty in the departments say, ‘Oh, if you would only give me two more faculty slots, we would be that much stronger as a program.’ The inevitable dynamics of it end up with a snowball effect-lack of control.”
In 1995, a year after arriving in Rochester, Jackson outlined a five-year plan to reduce the student body by 20 percent, from 4,500 to 3,600 students. While that was going on, there would be cutbacks, including a 10 percent reduction in faculty size, elimination of some departments and the re-engineering of some programs and administrative departments.
Surviving faculty would work together to create a new curriculum with a stronger focus on liberal arts. The plan required more spending in some areas to add to students’ quality of life, including renovating old dormitories and upgrading computer access and networks.
Big change-taking a huge institution, halting its growth and then remaking it-does not come easily. Not everyone approved of the plan, particularly faculty members and students in departments that were downsized or eliminated. The disgruntled made their complaints public, focusing negative attention on the institution as it tried to implement the plan.
“When I came here, I didn’t say I want to make this place smaller,” Jackson says. “But coming here and looking at the struggles this place had financially, it was clear that it had been growing and it hadn’t been working for us.”
One day Jackson suggested going in the other direction and stripping away the growth.
“It became a new thought experiment,” he says.
The plan was successful, Jackson says. In the 2000-01 academic year, there were 3,715 full-time undergraduates on the 85-acre River Campus. Rochester now ranks ninth in the percentage of students who go on to earn doctoral degrees. The top 10 list includes the University of Chicago, and Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities.
The total number of faculty and staff at the university has grown from roughly 10,000 in 1995 to 14,600 in 2000, but the student-to-teacher ratio for undergraduates has dropped from 13-to-1 in 1995 to 10-to-1 in 2000.
“The plan had immediate impact on the quality of the students who enrolled,” Jackson says. “It worked out about as we expected. You don’t always have the luxury of looking back five or six years later and saying, ‘You know, it actually played out about the way I hoped it would.’ ”
Jackson’s approach with the Renaissance Plan was used as a leadership example at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Witmer says. The Medical Center encompasses the School of Medicine and Dentistry, the School of Nursing, the Eastman Dental Center, the University of Rochester Medical Faculty Group, Strong Memorial Hospital and the Children’s Hospital at Strong.
When Jay Stein was hired as Strong CEO in 1995, his goal was to make the Medical Center one of the world’s most important research institutions. As part of a 10-year, $550 million plan, the Medical Center completed the Arthur Kornberg Medical Research facility in September 1999 and has another research building under construction. The two facilities are expected to employ roughly 600 scientists, technicians and support staff.
“Tom served as a model for Jay Stein and the Medical Center administration. Now they have built one research facility and are working on another one,” Witmer says. “Those are really just the physical evidence of the rejuvenation of the UR.”
Jackson’s management style is key to his results, Witmer says. “He gives the people under him free rein and holds them responsible for results.”
Provost Charles Phelps is Jackson’s employee and friend.
“Tom is extremely analytical,” Phelps says. “When someone is going to propose something to him, I tell them to prepare the facts and understand the logic of their proposal. I also advise them to find out what other universities are doing, because Tom is an aggressive benchmarker. He is always asking how we stand up among other universities in the country.”
Jackson says he manages serendipitously.
“I’m a quite good delegator. The most important thing I do at this job is pick good people and then let those people have a lot of responsibility,” he says. “I tend to be soft rather than dictatorial. It’s not that I don’t have my opinions, but I like to hear people talk about things. If I don’t like how things are going, then I’ll put my own weight on it.”
Jackson never imagined he would become a college president, although in his early college years he did consider a teaching career.
Jackson graduated from Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., in 1972, and then earned his law degree from Yale University, in New Haven, Conn., in 1975. He then worked as a clerk for U.S. District Judge Marvin Frankel and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, when Rehnquist served as a Supreme Court justice.
Jackson’s specialties are bankruptcy and commercial law. He has served as special master for the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving all 50 states over the disposition of unclaimed dividends by brokerage houses.
“When I was a senior in college, I applied to law school, business school, Ph.D. programs in history and political science. I was sort of eclectically not really sure what I was going to do,” he says. “The Ph.D. market looked pretty bleak. There wasn’t much of a market for college teachers then, and that was not a cliff I was willing to jump off. So I picked law school, not knowing what being a lawyer meant.”
A Yale mentor, contracts professor Ellen Peters, pushed him toward a teaching career.
“I ended up working for her as a teaching assistant, and that put the bug back in my ear,” he says.
While serving as a clerk in New York City, fate presented Jackson with a teaching opportunity and he jumped at it.
“Another clerk and I sat with our desks facing each other. She got a phone call one day from the Stanford appointments committee because they were scanning to find women interested in academic careers. When she said she wasn’t interested, they asked if she knew anyone who was and she handed the phone to me. That’s how I made contact with Stanford,” Jackson says.
Faculty members traditionally view college administrators as necessary evils.
“Like most academics, I was glad somebody else wanted to administrate, because I sure didn’t,” Jackson says of his teaching years.
Stanford officials eventually offered him a deanship-and he declined.
“Then UVA called and asked the same question. It was a school I knew fairly well and liked a lot. I was 37 years old then,” he says. “I thought, ‘Look, if you don’t like it, you can always go back to teaching.’ And I’ve said that every step along the way in my administrative career.
“I never anticipated being a president, and no, I don’t know what comes next,” he says.
Although he may be unsure of his personal future, Jackson does have a sense of what comes next for the UR.
“We need to consolidate what’s already in place. The second medical research building is under construction, and we have to get the hiring for that in place. We still have to deal with some issues like freshman housing,” he says.
The university is implementing a plan to put all freshmen together in certain residences, which requires reorganization of all housing.
The university now must decide which strategic areas to invest in.
“An academic institution simply can’t stand still,” Jackson says. “While I’ve spent most of my administrative life cutting, it would be fun to sort of build.”
Preliminary brainstorming sessions have pinpointed biomedical engineering, optics and photonics as potential growth areas for UR, he says.
Being the president of an organization with as many distinct components as UR is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week undertaking, Jackson says.
Students bring issues that must be addressed. In 1999, students were concerned about on-campus racism. A year later, the issue was apparel manufacturing. Those concerns require an educated response from the administration.
“You have to be paying time and attention to what’s happening,” Jackson says. “What’s in health affairs, what’s happening with the Eastman School downtown, with the performing arts center and other projects. It’s just a range of things to consider that, in some respects, just filter through. You have to stay involved in all of that and it controls your agenda.”
Jackson is an avid amateur photographer. The walls of his office showcase framed prints of his work.
“It’s my way of expressing my artistic side,” he says. “I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t do creative things with my hands, but I can take pictures.”
Jackson has a chemical darkroom where he processes his color work. He also uses digital photography.
“It’s a real avid hobby of mine and, outside of work and family, it’s my one sort of escape from my job.”
Jackson lives in a university-owned house on Mt. Hope Avenue with his wife, Bonnie Gelb Jackson, and two sons, Richard, 16, and Steven, 13. Outside of photography and an occasional game of golf, Jackson considers himself “a relentless homebody.”
“If I play golf on the weekend, I’ll never see my kids,” he says.
Jackson and Phelps have become close friends since Jackson came to Rochester. Recent plans to try hot air ballooning in Letchworth Park fell through, but they are planning to reschedule the trip.
The two frequently get together for an evening to cook a pasta-and-salad meal, then watch a video.
“Tom’s a good cook,” Phelps says.
As Rochester’s third-largest employer, the university is an important component of the region.
“We’re obviously a vitally important part of Rochester, both by our size and because of the research money that comes in, and, with that, the ability to spin off new companies,” Jackson says. “We are a real synergistic part of Rochester’s future. The future isn’t going to rely so much with Kodak and Xerox as much as it’s been, but with smaller companies and new areas.
“The best things we can do are to continue to provide great education, continue to bring students in from outside of Rochester, bring in faculty from around the world, bring people here because this is a terrific institution and because we think Rochester is a pretty terrific community.”

4/27/01 (C) Rochester Business Journal