Running Toward the Fire

My husband, Donald Hart, earned a PhD in philosophy and throughout my years in administration was that voice that reminded me of the central purpose of higher education—teaching and scholarship. Before we entered the academy, he served in the Navy during the mid-1960s, which was a very difficult time to be a servicemember in our country. When he returned from his six years of service, he brought with him a sense of pride in having done what he was supposed to do but also a feeling of guilt in being involved in a conflict that he had questioned before his years in Vietnam and protested in years following that service.

Some of what he learned from the time in country was invested in those conflicting feelings, but some of what he learned was the consequence of living for months on a “tin can” (destroyer) in the middle of the ocean. As a sailor, he was taught if there was fire on the ship, you did not run from it, as you might on land, you ran toward that fire.

I have learned a lot from Don about a lot of things but perhaps nothing was more important than that concept of running toward, not away, from a fire. That perspective served as my north star for dealing with crises on The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) campus during my years as president.

After 15 years teaching full time, I turned my attention to administration and approached the new responsibilities as another opportunity to teach—my students became not just tuition-paying students but other members of the higher education community as well. My job was to help faculty understand the reality of higher education in the 21st century, to guide (and be guided by) citizen trustees about the special qualities of the industry, to communicate clearly with political leadership about the values and import of quality undergraduate education, and to stand up for the ideals inherent in higher education.

Necessarily, I learned that doing this new kind of teaching was much more of a public act than teaching in the classroom and that the moment of teaching was rarely of my choosing. Furthermore, the teaching very often happened during moments of crisis, requiring communication with multiple audiences in high stakes situations with multiple critics eager to attack whatever message was coming from the president’s office.

As is true for almost every president I know, these crises did not wait for me to become acclimated to my new responsibilities. I simply had to jump into the deep water within months of assuming the title in 1999. A series of crises in those early months were seemingly unrelated but came to be perceived by the public and the students as interrelated. In March 2000, a number of troubling episodes were reported on campus—graffiti with racist and antisemitic overtones, reports of unidentified young men walking across the quad late at night wearing black trench coats reminding everyone of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from the Columbine shootings. In October 2000, the Jewish Student Organization received an email threatening violence to Jews. In spring 2001, an openly gay student reported messages to his email account that included threats to him on the basis of his sexual orientation.

We could never determine the relationship between or among the episodes but clearly a new president was being tested in the public arena, and it mattered how I responded. While I had served as provost for six years, the voice of a president in times of crisis, particularly when students are frightened, is a category difference from the responsibilities and voice of any other leader on the campus. I had to train myself to become attentive both to the facts of each episode and to the patterns shared by all the episodes. I could not appear to be more attentive to one group; whether an African American, a Jew, or a non-heterosexual, students (and their parents) needed to feel that I was concerned about her or his well-being whatever their identity. During these early months, I honed my skills in communicating across stakeholder groups, working closely with the communications team but always remembering it was my voice that the community needed to hear, not that of a professional communications expert. Values had to be at the center of each message, not simply concern about public perception. Furthermore, if at all possible, trustees should hear of crises from me before they read it in the press. I called every single trustee (fortunately, there were only 15 trustees at to alert them to any potential news story).

Just as it seemed we were coming out from under this cloud of threats to our community (and communities), I was on my way to a regularly scheduled association meeting on a beautiful fall day. It was September 11, 2001. The details of that day are indelibly branded in my memory. At the beginning of that day, I tried to get my mind around the impact on our college community by trying to assess just how many of our students, faculty and staff could have felt the personal impact of the attack. I enlisted all academic and student affairs offices and the human resources professionals to help us determine who lived in northern Jersey, who could have had a parent, a child, a relative who had been in the Twin Towers. Of course, the numbers were hugely speculative, but by the end of the day, we calculated that up to 2,000 members of our community could have lost someone (or at that time we hoped for injuries).

September 11, 2001, was a national event and it was felt all over the country, but for those of us in the Northeast, particularly those of us who had so many members of our community for whom the towers were part of their backyards, the experience was deeply personal. Students were desperate to go home, but roads were closed, and travel was being discouraged. No one knew who or why this devastation had occurred, and no one knew who or where was safe. Within hours of learning that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, I sent an email to the senior staff telling them to get out of their offices, to be seen and present in public on campus. The provost and I worked as a team to keep the community informed about institutional actions as well as memorial and support services. This continuous communication, with the voices of the chief academic officer and the president at the core of the messages, stood us in good stead.

In early October, federal officials began receiving letters laced with anthrax. On October 18, one of the post offices nearest to the TCNJ campus was closed because of anthrax contamination. Soon a number of other local New Jersey post offices reported contamination. These facts reinforced that the story was not a national story, but also a local crisis. Provost Steve Briggs and I learned that the important message to the community was similar to the one in response to the hate-filled attacks earlier that year—that the senior administration was aware and attentive to the most recent events, that the members of the community (particularly the students) were at the center of our concerns. And as in the earlier episode, the trustees were kept informed, with the goal that they would never read something in the press about TCNJ before they heard from me or the assistant to the board of trustees.

Almost one year to the date of the attacks on the Twin Towers, which happened to be Yom Kippur, a race-baiting, antisemitic, homophobic, sexist appeared on our campus to preach his view of the world to our students. As a public institution, TCNJ has always been dedicated to the concept of the power of free speech on college campuses, resisting the temptation to silence even the most outrageous messengers. Reverend White tested those values, and the community was up in arms that he was allowed to speak in the center of our campus in the middle of the day. Students loudly protested, keyed his car and afterwards faculty joined students in complaining to me about my allowing his presence on campus. At first, I tried to have individual conversations with each person who contacted me. As the messages escalated in number and passion, I decided I needed to make a public statement. I reached out to the student newspaper, The Signal, to see if they would be open to an op-ed. I wrote:

Perhaps there is wide consensus on this individual, but what about Rush Limbaugh, Al Sharpton, Winnie Mandela, Jerry Falwell, Louis Farrakhan, Ariel Sharon, or Yasser Arafat? What guidelines should we use in these cases? I am also confident that The College would have substantial legal obstacles in developing such guidelines…We must encourage all community members to speak for themselves, to be able to hear an unacceptable viewpoint and respond…Speaking out fervently and passionately, citing contrary opinions, trying to engage the speaker in debate—all constitute such acceptable response. So does silence and absence…Whereas such speech, silence, and absence constitute acceptable response, violence, and vandalism do not…

The op-ed was not met with unanimous support, but the community came to understand my deep commitment to free speech, to the value of open and vigorous debate on thorny issues, and the board supported me throughout.

There are rarely times in the tenure of a president when life is calm, when there are no crises to confront, but there is one year during my presidency that stands out in my memory as one of particular upheaval. Early in the spring 2006 semester, the new governor made two announcements that would throw our life on campus into turmoil. In his budget address, Jon Corzine announced that his financial plan for the next year included a 32 percent cut to state funding for public higher education. Almost simultaneously, he proposed an executive order that would change the public reporting requirements for members of the boards of trustees that would most assuredly have decimated these voluntary boards. In early March, I was actively working with colleagues in the higher education community, with board members, with advocates to minimize these possibilities. Then on March 25, a freshman student went missing. My entire focus turned to the campus, to the missing student and his family, and to the impact of that student’s absence on the rest of the TCNJ community.

Within a couple of days, blood matching the blood of the parents of the missing student was found in the dumpster outside the student’s residence hall and within six weeks his body was found in the landfill where our garbage was dumped. During the intervening weeks, the sounds of helicopters permeated our quiet; intrusive reporters accosted students at their residence halls; and gadflies from across the country spun stories of crazy conspiracies. In the face of the news, numerous public relations companies contacted me offering help in our managing the crisis. Partially in the face of the budget threat but also knowing the talent of the person who was our senior communications person, I decided that Matt Golden and I would be the voice of the campus, rather than expending precious college financial resources in crafting a response.

Throughout the spring semester, we sent out almost daily messages. Being truthful, open where we could and constantly reminding everyone that the focus was on supporting the student community, not giving into the speculation—those were the consistent themes throughout the spring. The board was tremendously concerned about The College and frankly about me, but some of that concern came to play out in troubling ways. Some board members began to reach into managerial responsibilities (particularly with regard to planning the budget for FY 2007). I was then and am still now convinced that the trustees’ impulse was all driven by genuine concern and real commitment to TCNJ. But trustees were forgoing their fiduciary and oversight responsibilities and were beginning to try to engage in administrative responsibilities.

During this very stressful time, I had to work to reengage the trustees at the appropriate level. I had to assure them of the importance of their insights and input but also remind them that they had to let me and the administrative team do the work that provided the proposals to the board for consideration—that it was not their job to create the proposals. In the end we were successful in navigating that re-learning of good habits. Part of that success was the fact that the board saw me as a strong advocate for the modification of the governor’s executive order which would have either led to their resignations from the board or to their engagement in highly onerous reporting requirements. They knew that I valued their work.

As I approached my final year as president, 2018, part of me fantasized that I would be able to glide toward retirement. No such luck! The year before my retirement, a group of students began a campaign protesting the name on a building. Paul Loser had been the Trenton superintendent of schools from 1932 to 1955. His son, Tom Loser, had been a generous donor to The College and my predecessor agreed to name a building that housed the admissions office and the School of Nursing in honor of his father. In the fall of 2016, a group of students in a history class uncovered archival research that revealed some questionable actions by Superintendent Loser. He had been taken to court by families who accused him of unlawfully assigning Black students to predominantly Black schools, not necessarily the schools nearest their homes; a community-based task force (Trenton Committee on Unity) accused him of failing to hire Black teachers and principals. In the case brought by the families, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided against Loser and the Trenton School District. In the report from the Trenton Committee on Unity, the statistics were stark: from 1942 to 1947, not one Black teacher was hired in a regular (not substitute) status in the school district and only one of the twenty-seven principals in the district was Black.

Ironically, none of this history was unknown either to the Trenton community or in fact to the TCNJ community (as previous students in a history class taught by the same professor had done similar research). But in 2016 the story captured the attention of a group of students—not just members of the history class that conducted the research who found unacceptable the celebration of a person they deemed racist. The protesting students began posting derogatory flyers across campus; then they occupied the conference room in my office suite.

Soon the group incorporated ancillary issues into their advocacy, including the argument against the closing of a School of Education (SOE) clinic for mental health counseling. To the protestors, these actions were all of a piece, indicating The College’s lack of concern about its students, its neighboring community, and the commitment to racial disparities. In the face of the protests, I took several actions. First, I established a commission that had broad representation from the faculty, student, and alumni groups as well as a former trustee that would report to me with advice regarding my possible recommendation to the board of trustees for the change of the name of an asset. Second, I reconfigured the decision-making process for the decision about closing the SOE clinic, allowing more student voices to weigh in on what had previously been solely a financial decision, closely held within administrative offices. Finally, I opened myself up to public engagement with advocates both for and against the name change and the clinic closing. Some of this engagement included the very difficult personal conversation with the daughter-in-law of Paul Loser (by the time of the episode Tom Loser had died). It also included some very tense interactions with students who were deeply committed to a goal which they saw as unyielding. I had to agree to some of their requests (I never accepted their description of requests as demands) and to reject others.

I ended up making some very difficult decisions (with regard to the clinic) and recommendations (with regard to the name change). In both cases, I kept the board of trustees informed throughout. I deeply regretted two aspects of these results: first, having essentially to overturn a decision of the provost; second, having to deliver hurtful and damaging research and decisions to a college supporter whom I admired tremendously. These decisions were guided by my sense of the mission and principles of The College and the best interest of the students, faculty, and staff.

While each of these crises had its own context and facts, they shared some things in common.

• These were issues that involved a large segment of the community.
• The feelings were strong and passionate and there was no consensus on what was the problem—nor what should be the solution.
• The issues had ramifications both on and off the campus.

In managing these crises, I learned the following:

• Communication is the key to managing crisis.
• The president’s voice must be heard.
• That voice should be one of concern and kindness but also humility in the face of the crisis.
• The decision-making process could not be seen as rigid or resistant to contradictory and even angry input.
• My team had to recognize which stakeholder groups were primary audiences. When there is a concern about safety, students have to be seen as a primary audience.
• Trustees should be kept informed throughout the crisis and before any public statement.
• Communication must be simple and honest and when information cannot be shared, that should be stated with the rationale for why it cannot be shared.

Since retirement in 2018, I have spent a great deal of my energy thinking and writing about the centrality of strong presidential leadership in maintaining the health of the higher education enterprise. On July 11, 2023, I urged my colleagues to speak out about the place of higher education in a healthy democracy and the necessity of presidential voice on issues of social and political concern (“The Time is Now,” Inside Higher Education). In January 2025, I published my second memoir, Portrait of a Presidency: Patterns in My Life as President of The College of New Jersey (Koehler Books). In both, I acknowledge that navigating crises has become a more fraught but even more essential part of the job of a president. In leading their institutions, presidents must keep the mission and purpose of the individual institution and of higher education at the center and learn from their own mistakes.

R. Barbara Gitenstein is president emerita of The College of New Jersey and is a senior fellow and senior consultant with AGB.