Leadership:? This is exactly what this country is lacking. There is something to be said about having a president that has a strong military background. Please share Huntsville Times 12/07/2014, Page A13 Leader vs. lackey: UAB’s Ray Watts could learn a lot from BSC’s Charles Krulak. If you hang out late at the Birmingham Southern College library Thursday nights, you would be forgiven if you might for a second think you saw an elf. It has become a tradition now that a diminutive man with a ruddy face and a green pointed cap pushes a cart stacked with cookies, offering them to the students cramming for final exams. Santa’s helper? He used to be the commandant of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The cookie thing he started doing years ago, when visiting Marine duty posts before Christmas. Next May, Charles Krulak, or “The General” as students call him, will retire as president of BSC, a college that, when he came to it four years ago, was on the brink of collapse. The college had suffered the double-whammy of incompetent leadership under the previous president, David Pollick, and the Great Recession reducing its endowment by nearly half. (I should disclose here that I’m an alumnus of BSC, and I have to confess that when the college announced it had hired a retired Marine Corps general to take Pollick’s place, I might have rolled my eyes and figured that was that.) Since then, faculty, students, staff and alumni have come to love “The General,” who has overseen perhaps the most miraculous turnaround in the college’s history. He restructured the school’s debt to cut its payments in half and raised $12.7 million in his first year there. Wall Street rating agencies raised the schools credit to stable. Hiring freezes were lifted, and the initial, brutal fiscal triage turned into recovery. It’s reasonable to say Krulak saved BSC. The key here, though, is how. It’s probably unfair to contrast Krulak’s tenure at BSC to the last few days of Ray Watts’ leadership at UAB, but I’m going to do it anyway. The timing of Krulak announcing his retirement and Watts’ most turbulent day on the job makes it impossible not to measure one. against the other. When UAB students rallied in front of the administration building last Monday,. Watts was invisible, despite their. demands to meet with him. When Krulak moved to BSC, he and his wife lived in the student apartments instead of the president’s mansion. Since Watts took the president’s job at UAB, he’s been largely invisible in Birmingham. Last year, during the city’s 50th anniversary of the civil rights marches here, Krulak led a march from the college to Kelly Ingram Park in memory of Marti Turnipseed, a student expelled for taking part in the movement in 1963. When Watts told UAB football players their program had been cancelled, one player told him bluntly that none of them had ever seen him before. When BSC’s women’s swim team won its conference championship earlier this year, Krulak — still wearing his jacket and tie — dove into the pool with them. Since taking over at UAB, Watts has made a salary of $853,464, the 11thhighest of university presidents in the country. In four years at BSC, Krulak has refused to take a salary. Leaving the football team’s building on Tuesday, Watts had to be protected by police from students who were cussing him and punching his car as he pulled away. . At Munger Auditorium on Tuesday, many students cried when Krulak told them he was retiring, and the guy Tom Clancy once called the “Warrior Prince of the Corps” got so choked up that he had to slip away from the stage before he could finish his remarks. Watts has kept his students at arm’s length. Krulak keeps his students’ numbers in his phone and calls 10 of them every week to see how things are going. Krulak didn’t have to lead BSC through the same mess Watts now faces at UAB. He had to lead his college through worse. This is not a competition, but rather a lesson about how leadership really works — that all that Machiavellian business about it being safer to be feared than to be loved is a bunch of hogwash. It’s a lesson about how humility and compassion engender respect and loyalty, and how contempt and distance bring only disdain. It’s about how one guy tried to lead a school from the 10th floor of its administration building, while another led from the ground. It’s about how one man now looks like a stooge of his absentee masters in Tuscaloosa, while the other stands like a giant. Even if you might mistake him on Thursday nights for an elf.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 13:55:14 +0000