Interview with Agnar Pytte

An extensive interview with Agnar Pytte, who talks about everything from arriving in America at age sixteen to his feelings on leading--and, now, leaving--Case Western Reserve University. The interview was conducted in the president's office in late winter 1999 by Ken Kesegich, editor of CWRU Magazine, and Toni Ferrante Searle (CWR '89; GRS '96, political science), editor of CWRU's weekly faculty/staff newspaper, Campus News.

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His arrival signaled a turning point for the University. Now, as President Agnar Pytte prepares to step down, CWRU Magazine looks at the twelve years he spent stepping up.

As winter waned, CWRU editor Ken Kesegich and Campus News editor Toni Ferrante Searle (CWR '89; GRS '96, political science) talked with Agnar Pytte about the state of the university he has led for a dozen years. President Pytte will retire on June 30.

Ken Kesegich: How does it feel to be leaving?

Agnar Pytte: Mixed feelings. Sad about some things. We [the president and Anah Pytte] will miss this place very much, but we also look forward to a less strenuous life, although some claim I'll be as busy as ever. But it will be different, and we will miss the University. We will miss the people here. We will miss Cleveland. Wonderful people here.

Kesegich: How have the things you learned from your family role models affected the way you have operated in the presidency?

Pytte: I had a wonderful childhood, wonderful parents. They're both dead now. My parents and my entire family in Norway, which is mostly Lutheran, belonged to the Methodist Church, so we had to behave ourselves. No soccer playing on Sunday! My father and mother were people of principle, absolute integrity, and honesty. I suppose I tried to emulate that. But they were also very warm and nice. I also have three brothers and lots of cousins, many of whom now send me e-mail from all over the world.

Kesegich: You started your career as a physicist. Was becoming a college president part of the plan?

Pytte: No, not at all. I got interested in science very early and read about Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and people like that and took science courses in school. When I was fifteen years old, my science teacher said to me, "Agnar, America is becoming the leading country in science. You must go to America." This was in Norway. And I was probably influenced, too, by the fact that my mother was born in the United States, in Connecticut. So at age sixteen I came to Phillips Exeter Academy. They had a wonderful science department, very advanced physics courses. Equally important, I was a member of the soccer and ski teams.

I knew Einstein was at Princeton, so that was where I wanted to go to college. I didn't know he was not at the university. [Editor's note: Albert Einstein was affiliated with Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, but was not teaching at the university.] I met Einstein once, but just to say hello. Princeton at that time was just a wonderful place for an undergraduate to study physics. Then I went to graduate school at Harvard, another great place in those days. While at Harvard, I would go skiing in New Hampshire, where, one day, I met a charming Vassar senior [Anah Currie Loeb]. We got married six months later.

My interest was in finding out how the world works--what everything is made of, how did the universe get started. Just fundamental curiosity. So I became a physics professor at Dartmouth, initially, and was there for a year and a half.

I went, in the spring of 1958, to the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, DC. That was when some theretofore secret research was made public--namely, nuclear fusion for peaceful purposes. I got so excited about that. There was a talk given by Lyman Spitzer from Princeton. And I applied for a job right away and left Dartmouth in 1959 and went to Princeton and a full-time research position.

Here was a chance to solve the energy problem for all time. There is enough heavy hydrogen in the oceans to supply all the energy we use today for about five billion years, which is the expected age of the sun, so it would last us as long as solar power. We thought it was going to be easy, because the hydrogen bomb problem--which is the same problem except the energy is released much faster--was solved in a couple of years. We thought within five years we'd have a power-producing reactor. I worked on that off and on for twenty years.

The dean at Dartmouth invited us back in 1960. We missed the skiing there, and I missed teaching, so we returned. I became a physics professor, which I loved. I loved the teaching and the research. I was equally interested in both.

I had no intention of becoming an administrator, but then, in my late thirties, I was asked to chair the physics department. I did that for four years. Then I was asked to be dean for the science departments at Dartmouth and also dean of graduate studies. I did that for three years and was asked to do it for another three, but turned it down and went back to teaching and research.

Kesegich: Why did you take the deanship in the first place?

Pytte: Out of a feeling it would be useful to my colleagues for me to take my turn at it. No intention to make it permanent, because I was committed to my students and my research. So I went back to teaching and research.

A few years later, I was asked to be the provost at Dartmouth. Having seen what I could do as dean, I thought, "Well, this is difficult to turn down, because now I could really do something about the things that need to be done." I still continued with my students for awhile, but it became a full-time job, and so I did that for five years.

Then, along with Anah, I had a major decision to make. This was twelve years ago. I didn't want to continue as provost. The question was, "Do I now want to go back to the physics department full time, or do I want to build on what I have learned as a provost?" I had periodically gotten feelers from search firms as to whether I would be interested in considering presidencies.

I already knew a lot about Case Western Reserve through the Ten Universities Group, in which provosts from ten universities, including Dartmouth, Case Western Reserve, Johns Hopkins, MIT, and other schools, met several times a year to compare notes. That's also where I met Dick Zdanis [CWRU's current provost], who represented Johns Hopkins at many of those meetings.

I looked at two other universities at the same time, including one in California. But I was intrigued by Case Western Reserve, because it looked to me like a very good university with the potential to become even better.

Toni Ferrante Searle: One of the first decisions you made, as president, was to live closer to campus. Previous presidents lived half an hour away. Why did you feel that you should be closer to campus?

Pytte: Well, I wanted, as you said, to be close to the University. It turned out that the trustees also very much wanted the president to live closer. I'm glad that I did, because it's been much easier to have student events there, and easier to entertain the faculty, trustees, and so on. One event that my wife and I enjoy is having the honorary-degree recipients over for dinner the day before commencement. We have the inaugurations of student leaders there, and parents' receptions--at one point, we had four hundred parents there.

Interestingly enough, before my two predecessors, the Case presidents and the Western Reserve presidents each lived in nearby homes that the institutions owned. We really went back to that earlier model.

Searle: Another early decision you made was opening up office hours for students. Why did you do that, and what have the results been?

Pytte: I assumed all presidents did that, and was surprised to find that it was a big novelty here. There is a lot about this University which I would not have known if I hadn't met with students. They tell me things that others don't. I've enjoyed that.

Searle: What sorts of things do they talk about?

Pytte: Everything under the sun. Each student comes for a different reason. Some just come to say hello and chat about their experience here. Some come to invite me to a fraternity or sorority event. Some come to ask for money for some worthy cause on campus. A group of students comes in and sings on Valentine's Day.

Kesegich: What impresses you most about our students?

Pytte: Let me talk about the undergraduates first. They have changed a bit over the years, but they are very bright and motivated. They don't come here expecting a party school, although they do party. I think, on the whole, they are fairly serious about their studies. If you didn't know any other young people except the students here, you wouldn't worry about the future of this country.

Of course, the graduate and professional students are very serious and professionally oriented. I was struck, especially when I first came here, about how pleased the medical students were about this University, which isn't always true. The ones I have met seemed unanimously to be pleased with the education and the approach of the faculty as sort of senior colleagues.

Searle: I've heard through the undergraduate admission office that students today seem to be less focused on professional development and more interested in society.

Pytte: From my perspective, that has been true all along. We have so many students participating in Habitat for Humanity and tutoring in the schools, and the fraternities and sororities are always doing good deeds for organizations around town. They certainly do seem to be interested in the larger community.

Let me just say that our students always were very good students, but they seem to get brighter and brighter every year. I don't know where this is going to end.

Searle: CWRUnet will be a very visible legacy of your tenure. Why did you feel that a high-powered computer network was important to the campus?

Pytte: It's absolutely crucial. As I've been going through files recently, I came across an article I wrote for the Dartmouth student paper in, I think, July of '83. The headline said, "Every student should have a computer." I talked about the need for personal computers and a network, and this was in 1983.

So far as I remember, the idea of a wired campus first came from Carnegie Mellon, but we at Dartmouth, through the work of Ray Neff [now CWRU vice-president for information services], were the first campus to be totally wired, but with a copper-wire network. By the time I came here, the Dartmouth network had been operating for three or four years, and I could see the value of it.

I was somewhat surprised that there was no network here. In retrospect, that was probably an advantage. One of the first things I did was to call my old friend Ray Neff, who was by then the computer guru at Berkeley, and say, "Ray, we need you here." And he came. Having done the work with me on the network at Dartmouth, and then having built a network at Berkeley, he said now he could do it right. He proposed a network of fiber-optic cable, which can transmit much more information per unit-time than other kinds of network cabling. Many people questioned his decision, because the technology was relatively new and untested at that time. CWRU was the first university to have an all-fiber-optic network. I think it's had a tremendous impact on the way the faculty teach and the students learn.

Not all faculty use it in their teaching, but many of them have used it in very inventive ways. Of course, through the Hewlett grants and the Glennan fellowships, some of the faculty have found the time and money to develop very imaginative uses for personal computers on the network. That we now have thousands of electronic journals in the library is also significant, because the students can access them from their rooms.

Searle: The Campaign for Case Western Reserve University was a very visible and successful effort. How do you think the University has changed as a result of the campaign and other fund-raising activities?

Pytte: First of all, the endowment has tripled, partly due to the good stock market, but also very much because of the great generosity of our friends and alumni. Without that endowment, which is now about $1.3 billion, this would be a very different university.

A lot of the money we raised has gone for other purposes, too--for example, about ten buildings. The Celeste Biomedical Research Building and the Kent Hale Smith Engineering and Science Building greatly increased the amount of research space. Credit goes primarily to the faculty, because they are the ones who write the proposals and get the funding. But we could not have had the growth in research that we have had without more space for research, so those two buildings have made a big difference. We also have new facilities in law, management, and social work.

The new Kelvin Smith Library has had a very great impact. For many of the people in the humanities and social sciences, the library is their laboratory. The renovation of several science and engineering buildings, as well as residence halls, has also been significant.

Kesegich: How would you characterize the University's relationship with its alumni?

Pytte: We have a much more active alumni program now than we used to. In the past, this was mostly done school by school. Some schools were fairly active and others not at all. Now we have twenty-two alumni chapters that are University-wide, and I enjoy going to their meetings. I particularly enjoy meeting people from all the different schools, and I think they enjoy meeting each other.

We now have an alumni chapter in Seoul, Korea, and one about to start in Singapore. We had a successful reception in Paris about a year and a half ago, which Anah and I attended. There were about seventy people there.

Searle: When alumni do come back to campus to visit, they see a very different University than they may have seen when they were students. Can you talk about why the Campus Master Plan for physical development was needed?

Pytte: Every university has to have a master plan, which needs to be updated every five years or so. So far as I can tell, we didn't have a master plan, except for a very old one. I thought we badly needed a master plan, and so did the late Frank Borchert [vice-president for budgets and planning]. Allen Ford, who was then chairman [of the Board of Trustees], was enthusiastic. We were fortunate in finding Peter Hopkinson, who has been a great asset to this University in helping us with the master plan and many things since then. He's an advisor to the facilities committee of the board.

Aside from the buildings, another thing that has had a great impact is getting rid of two huge surface parking lots--one behind Severance Hall and another between the One-to-One Fitness Center and the Veale Center garage. Now we have more grass and trees. I don't know how many urban campuses you've been to, but I think this has become one of the most beautiful and most rural looking urban campuses, and that makes a difference.

Searle: The admission program is quite different now than it was when you started, in the number of applicants and the size of the student body, particularly at the undergraduate level. Why has it been a high priority to seek these admission changes?

Pytte: When I met with the search committee when I was being interviewed, I expressed two or three concerns. One was that I had noticed, again from my Ten Universities Group meetings, that the number of applicants to Case Western Reserve had been going down. In 1987, it was down to 1,700. [Editor's note: For the 1998-99 school year, there were 4,390 applications for the undergraduate programs.]

I saw that as a major concern, because I don't know of any great private university that does not have a strong undergraduate college. Turning that around was a very high priority for me. No matter how prominent and famous the graduate and professional schools are--and I'll probably offend somebody by saying this--the spirit is largely in the undergraduate college.

One of the things that struck me when I came here was that our endowed scholarships were offered so late in the year, by which time many students had made commitments to other universities. Now we have more merit scholarships, and we offer them much earlier. I think that has attracted a lot of super students here. As you know, we also have financial aid based on need. We are one of the few universities that still makes it possible for everyone admitted to attend.

Searle: What other changes help make CWRU more attractive to potential students?

Pytte: For students, there are at least two important aspects to their lives. One is the academic, and the other is life outside the classroom and laboratory. Through the leadership of Glenn Nicholls [vice-president for student affairs] and his associates, our residential life is more rewarding than it used to be. And the plan we are now implementing for improving the physical characteristics of the residence halls is helping, too.

We have a great athletic program for both men and women. Dave Hutter [professor and chair, Department of Physical Education and Athletics] is doing a great job. And we have an exceptionally strong intramural program, which, of course, does not involve only undergraduates but also a large number of graduate and professional students. I forget how many volleyball teams the law school has, but it's a lot.

On the academic side, I certainly have tried--and I know the provost and deans have worked on this as well--to improve the quality of teaching by making it clear that teaching and research are equally important. Many universities just pay lip service to that. We have a large number of teaching awards, and the provost and the deans and I try to make the awarding of those prizes significant.

Searle: Would you like to say how the admission picture may have changed at the graduate or professional level?

Pytte: I think things go in cycles. We had a difficult time at the School of Dentistry, as you know, when the number of applicants went down to 466 for the school year starting in 1990. For the year starting in 1998, it was 2,432 for a class of 70. So they can be very selective.

The medical school, of course, gets a super applicant pool. We give some preference to students from Ohio; if I remember correctly, last year we admitted twelve percent of the applicants from Ohio and two percent of the applicants from outside Ohio. The medical school is very competitive. It's hard to improve on that.

I think at the graduate-school level, it's a bit uneven. Some programs attract large numbers of excellent students. Some of our programs are very small, but on the whole, I'm very pleased with the quality. The nursing school is ranked very high. The Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences is ranked very high. The law school is doing quite well. The Case School of Engineering is an excellent school. The Weatherhead School of Management now has the largest number of professional students, although the full-time, two-year MBA program is not where the largest increase has been. It's been in evening and weekend studies.

Kesegich: Let's talk for a moment about the faculty. What impresses you about them?

Pytte: I am increasingly impressed by the quality of our faculty. I review about a hundred recommendations for promotion in a year, and I can't do that without being impressed. In one department in the humanities, the chair says, of one of the candidates I just reviewed, that in her twenty-five years at three top universities, this is the best candidate she has ever seen. We have somebody coming up for promotion in the physics department who has three "rave" letters of recommendation from Cambridge University in England. Among others, he has a letter from Stephen Hawking.

The medical school is now ranked number eleven in the country in support from the NIH [National Institutes of Health]. The University as a whole ranks twelfth in federal research awards among the great private research universities and ahead of three of the Ivy League schools. As I said earlier, the credit here doesn't go to me or to the deans. It goes to the faculty. They are the ones who write the research proposals and have the imagination and creativity to do the research. Certainly, as I meet my colleagues around the country, it's clear that the reputation of Case Western Reserve University in the area of research is up and growing.

Searle: Early in your tenure, you set forth goals to increase University connections to Cleveland and the region, and internationally. What have you done in that regard?

Pytte: A university today cannot be an ivory tower. The work that we do should be relevant to the larger community, both locally, nationally, and internationally. Essentially every school of the University is involved internationally. In the law school, we have the Center for International Law; the medical school is very active in Africa and Southeast Asia and other places; the nursing school has been involved in many places abroad. Both the Case School of Engineering and the School of Medicine are involved in Thailand.

We have both visiting and permanent faculty from other countries, as well as students. There is an international intellectual community, and we are part of that.

I also think it is very important that we be seen as an asset to the city of Cleveland. Many of our graduates work in Cleveland and provide professional services here, whether we're talking about doctors, lawyers, or dentists. Schools like medicine, nursing, dentistry, and social work are all very much involved in the community. The [Milton A. Kramer] Law Clinic is another example.

We want to be relevant to the outside world, and I think it's appropriate to have faculty that range all the way from the most theoretical to the most applied. Although we are sometimes criticized for not doing enough here, many start-up companies have come out of the University, and this creates jobs. We get quite a bit of licensing income as well. But we should do more. The recent appointment of the vice-president for research and technology transfer [Editor's note: See Home Pages] will speed that up.

Kesegich: I'm sure that our readers would like to hear your opinion on whether costs in higher education are topping out.

Pytte: It's clear that the population at large, certainly parents but also people in Congress and in the government generally, have become very concerned about the rapidly increasing cost of higher education. We try to be as efficient as possible to keep tuition from going up too rapidly. But it is a burden on our parents and students. We tried to keep annual increases as close to the rate of inflation as we could.

As a consequence of the national interest in higher-education costs, several of the leading universities have announced greatly improved financial-aid programs. We actually have that on the agenda for our coming Monday morning meeting [of senior administrators]--whether we are doing enough.

Kesegich: CWRU has had a balanced budget for over a quarter of a century, with tuition low compared to peer institutions. What do you do internally to make that happen?

Pytte: Well, every time one of our vice-presidents comes in here and says, "I need a bigger staff," I usually say no. Nonetheless, one of the biggest increases in cost has been the result of growth in administrative staff. Some of that is the result of the increased research effort, some because of the government's requirement for additional reports.

I do say no to a lot of requests. So far it doesn't seem to have hurt. The work gets done. We try not to be mean, but we certainly try to be lean.

Kesegich: What is your opinion of college rankings?

Pytte: They certainly are influential, because a lot of prospective students and parents read them. I don't necessarily agree with the way they total up their scores. Some of the ratings hurt us, relatively speaking. We're talking now about the university-wide ranking, which is actually based on undergraduate performance. I think we belong in the top twenty-five. I think we'll move up a bit next fall, because we have such an outstanding freshman class, but reputations change very slowly.

We've met with the editors at US News & World Report and tried to point out how they could do things better, but they don't necessarily listen. We're not ranked badly. We are the only university in Ohio ranked in the top fifty--last year we ranked thirty-fourth. I think we moved up from the previous year by three places. We rank higher in some of the graduate programs like nursing and social work and medicine.

Searle: What do you hope the educational experience here is like?

Pytte: Education is not just to get a job. Life is more interesting to me because of having had the privilege of the kind of education that I had. I also think education has to talk about morality and values, integrity and honesty. I hope our faculty, both through their own examples and in their teachings, mention that from time to time.

I think our cultural heritage, by which I don't mean just the ancient Greeks but a much broader heritage than that, is important to all of us. Some in science say that the century that is passing is the century of physics and that the next century will be the century of biology. Maybe so. Certainly there will be enormous advances in our understanding of medical science and biology, and our cosmologists will continue to study the early universe.

Our universities are among the oldest continuing institutions worldwide. Among the ten oldest institutions, only the Catholic Church is older, and the reason for that is, I think, that universities serve an essential function.

Kesegich: Are there ways in which computer technology isn't good for higher education?

Pytte: There was the worry expressed back in the '80s that this would keep people from having personal contact. However, people in our physics department reported that after they started communication on the network, they actually had more people stopping by the office than before. They had established a rapport with their students on the "net," and even some of the shyer students then felt free to come and visit. And a lot of people work on the Web in groups, so I don't think this idea that you're sitting all alone with a computer is going to be the problem. The School of Engineering is trying to introduce group work in the freshman year. [Dean] Jim Wagner is promoting that.

Some of these ideas are passed on as ancient wisdom and may not be necessarily true. One of the things that bothered me when I first came here was that students would say that there is no social life here. How you can have 3,000 undergraduates of both sexes together and not have a social life, I find hard to understand. But then I noticed that when the freshmen came in, they had a wonderful time until the seniors told them there's no social life here.

Searle: How would you define your presidential style and legacy?

Pytte: I'll let others do that. I've tried to develop consensus among faculty and my senior colleagues about what our goals should be, and then with the trustees as well. There are times when I have to make decisions that are not popular, but most of the time I try to develop consensus.

I think I have a good relationship with the faculty. I certainly have a high regard for the work they do, and I hope they understand that. My office has always been open to students and faculty.

Searle: What one or two things would you count as your proudest accomplishments?

Pytte: I'm not sure I can answer that by singling out one thing. If the students are happier about their experience here, if the alumni are prouder of their university, then I'll be very pleased.

Searle: What have been your biggest challenges?

Pytte: Well, as you may remember, I've had some difficult times with issues relating to hospital affiliations for the medical school. We have, I think, improved our relationship with the Cleveland Clinic, and we developed a new relationship with the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. I wish we could have a better relationship with all the hospitals, but with the competition and the way the health-care system is moving, it is becoming more difficult for the hospitals and doctors to support medical education. We still have a great medical school, though.

These are minor, minor complaints. My overall experience has been so positive. It has been a joyful experience. It really has. For my wife, too. We are both very happy that we came here.

Searle: How has Mrs. Pytte been active on the campus and in the community?

Pytte: First of all, she does all the hostessing at home. Usually when we have an event at home at six o'clock, I show up at five minutes to six and she's arranged everything, and that takes a lot of planning.

When we first came here, she tutored children with learning disabilities in one of the inner-city schools. She's on the board of trustees of the Cleveland Institute of Art, and she is an artist. She's been involved with the Cleveland School of the Arts and other University Circle institutions, as well as going with me on trips to visit alumni. She's been an active partner and, like spouses at other universities, she doesn't get much credit for it.

Kesegich: When did you start thinking about retirement, and why?

Pytte: When Allen Holmes [the late chairman of the University's Board of Trustees] interviewed me for this job, he asked me how long I would stay. I remember that I said, "Well, maybe six years." Then he said, "No, it's got to be ten years." But it's been twelve years. For several years, I was wondering when it would be the appropriate time to leave. You don't want to overstay your welcome. Whatever ideas I came in with, I have pretty much contributed, so it's time for somebody with new ideas.

Searle: What is it time for you to do now?

Pytte: I'm getting all kinds of advice from retired friends. One said, "You'll be as busy as ever; you just won't get paid for it." I will continue to serve on two corporate boards and two nonprofit boards. One is the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, which has been a wonderful experience, because I get to give away money instead of asking for it. I've just been asked to join the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the group that accredits all the residency programs in medical education. They have a national council with two so-called lay members, and I've been asked to be one of them.

We're moving back to our home in New England, and I assume I'll be involved in local things there. I may do some part-time lecturing, but no full-time job. One good thing about moving away is that I won't be looking over the shoulder of my successor, and I'm sure he will appreciate that. [Editor's note: For a look at CWRU's next president, David Auston, click here.]

Kesegich: Do you have any words of advice for your successor?

Pytte: Have fun and enjoy. I don't have any advice, but I have a message: It's a wonderful job, it's a great job, so enjoy it.