 V. Lane Rawlins muses about his seven years as president of Washington
State University. "I would like my legacy to be that we focused on
quality," he says. Photo by Robert Hubner.
His first thought was that it was too late. It was 1999, and V.
Lane Rawlins caught word that Washington State University was
looking for a new president. The 62-year-old was in his ninth year
as president of the University of Memphis, and he and his wife,
Mary Jo, were looking forward to retirement after a long career in
higher education.
But then he had a second thought: “I felt good, I felt
energetic. I figured that there were some things that I could do
that could make a difference in five years.” So he pursued the job,
committing to work at WSU for at least five years. He would stay on
for seven.
“It felt like coming home,” says Rawlins, who in 1968 started
his career teaching economics at WSU. Coming home meant that he
could reconnect with his friends in Pullman, where he lived until
1986, and that he could be closer to family who lived in the
Tri-Cities.
“We wanted to find someone who had some affection for the
University and some connection to the Northwest,” says Peter
Goldmark, former president of the Board of Regents and chair of the
search committee that found Rawlins. The group, which had surveyed
faculty and staff about what qualities they wanted in the next
president, was also looking for someone who had already been head
or second-in-command at a major research institution.
“We really had to recruit him,” says Goldmark, explaining that
Rawlins never expected, or even dreamed, he would come back to WSU.
“I think it really capped his career in a way that he had not
foreseen.”
At the time Rawlins was hired, WSU had a reputation as a party
school, had branch campuses around the state but no real plan to
organize them, and was struggling with enrollment and research
development issues.
Rawlins knew he could attack the party label right away. “I’ve
worked in the South. I know what a party school is,” he says. “We
were not like that. It was just that we hadn’t worked hard enough
on the academic image.”
So, with the help of a new “World Class. Face to Face.” slogan,
Rawlins and his administration started working on image and
enrollment. “We had slipped,” he says.
As the ninth president of WSU, Rawlins took the time to study
the successes and failures of his predecessors. He started with
Enoch Bryan, the first president to stay a substantial amount of
time and the one who pushed for the school to be a comprehensive
university. Then came Ernest O. Holland, who fulfilled Bryan’s
vision. “The programs were put in place, the faculty were hired,
and the buildings were built,” says Rawlins. “We became a beloved
land-grant institution.”
Next came Wilson Compton, who shook things up. “He wanted to
compete with the Eastern universities,” says Rawlins. He was good
at pushing the school, but stepped on some toes in the process. In
the end he was fired. C. Clement French, “a careful man, a man of
high principle,” was a steady leader, but not equipped to handle
the social and student unrest that came in the 1960s. That’s why
Glenn Terrell was such a good choice, says Rawlins. “He was not
here to change our direction, but to reach out to the students. He
wanted this to be a haven. His nature was to be inclusive and reach
out.”
Sam Smith took over in 1985. He had a big vision for the school,
branching it across the state with the Distance Degree Program and
campuses in the Tri-Cities, Vancouver, and Spokane. “It was a
strong idea,” says Rawlins. “But when you take a big bite like
that, not all of it is chewable.”
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