An Innovating Traditionalist

by Maureen Tuthill

Steve Trachtenberg likes to tell a story about his mother, who once suggested to her husband that “if one of us were to die first, I think I’d like to take a trip around the world.” And she did. When she got to Egypt, she sent Steve a picture of herself riding a camel.

The image of Mrs. Trachtenberg on a camel hints at the atypical influence she had on her son. In his 30-year career as a college president, first at the University of Hartford and later at George Washington University, Trachtenberg has often found himself on nebulous terrain, riding an ancient animal (the university) and embracing a vague, unscripted future where surprising things might happen.

Trachtenberg grew up following the Great Depression—in Brooklyn, New York, where his father made a living sitting at people’s dining room tables selling life insurance, and his neighbors all struggled to survive during the hard times. In the midst of this “entrepreneurial zeitgeist,” as he refers to it, he learned a few things.

“The people I grew up with were small businessmen who had to hustle to make a living,” he says. “I don’t have an orthodox or civil service mentality. Having spent most of my adult life in universities, I’ve been socialized that way. But on the other hand, I am a rebel who tends to be provocative—at least at the institutions where I’ve worked.”

He was also educated by some of the finest teachers in the New York City public school system, where people with master’s degrees, Ph.D.’s and J.D.’s taught because they needed the security of a government paycheck when they had no other employment options. He went on to receive among the most elite and conservative of educations possible: earning a B.A. at Columbia, a J.D. at Yale and a M.P.A. at Harvard.

And while he has great respect for some of the “medieval” overtones that still resonate through the halls of academia, Trachtenberg is perfectly willing to let them go when they no longer make sense.

That said, he admits that the ideas he comes up with tend to be unpopular for about a decade. For instance, he has long felt that the third year of law school provides no content and the fourth year of medical school is “a vacuum.” So, why not eliminate them?

“These are two innovations, both of which I had urged at George Washington, that are now in action at other schools,” Trachtenberg says.

Academics tend to let other people “do” the innovations and see if they work out. Trachtenberg attributes this dynamic to the intransigence of overly conservative faculty who cling to the status quo.

“Professors tend to be risk-averse—that’s why they’re not pirates,” he says. “They’re not opposed to progress. They just don’t want change. I believe in change. Whenever we appoint a committee, it should include college professors, deans, and the president. But I think we should also have science-fiction writers, Silicon Valley visionaries, CEOs, and entrepreneurs and even advertising executives—imagineers who think about what’s not there.”

Innovating in a resistant atmosphere has been a challenge for Trachtenberg, but years ago his father showed him the possibility of selling an elusive idea. “Life insurance is hard to sell because it is so intangible,” he says. “It’s not like selling a vacuum cleaner. It’s a promise.”

For three decades, Trachtenberg has been trying to sell the promise of a better education. But effective change requires balance. The move toward distance learning has brought the idea of the place-based university under scrutiny. While Trachtenberg supports online education, he also believes that the college campus is here to stay because it provides for socialization and certain intangible joys.

“I like the smell of a library, going into the stacks,” he says. “You could spend a whole day in there; it stretches the mind. It’s also a good place to take a date.”

On the other hand, Trachtenberg suggests that we may not need the old-fashioned lecture. Students want to embrace experience—whether on campus, in the immediate environs or via hands-on internships. “From the faculty side, we need Ph.D.’s to expound on theory, but we also need clinicians who have been in the trenches of their fields,” he says.

Trachtenberg believes it’s a question of bringing together the old and the new and having equal amounts of respect for both. So, while he sees himself as “a 20th-century man trying desperately to stay current,” he doesn’t dismiss tradition-steeped practices that have served us well.

After all, as his mother used to tell him: “Stephen, a lot was decided before you were born.”