Perspective: The many faces of Dean Jamieson

K.

Just "K." read the sign on her Annenberg office, the white piece of computer paper with a bold and commanding "K" smacked in its dead center.

But it's Dean Jamieson to you, or maybe Kathleen Hall Jamieson or Kathleen or Kay, depending on how well you know her or how much research you've done for her. But whatever you do, she certainly won't have time to see you.

She's busy -- the type of busy whose calendar is booked weeks, even months, in advance. The type of busy that keeps a spare suit jacket, turtleneck and scarf in her office, just in case someone calls up for an interview and she needs to go on the air immediately.

"An interview -- 20 minutes at the most," Josh Gesell says, in a tone that seems to imply if your unworthy self should be so lucky. "And that'd be more time than she grants most Times reporters."

Gesell is her executive assistant, her walking calendar, her indefatigable answering machine and the keeper of the gate. You can't talk to Jamieson without first going through Gesell. Literally.

She's hardly ever in her office, and even when she's there -- just long enough to gather her stuff so she can dash out again -- his desk sits directly in front of the vast expanse that is her office. But what Gesell neglects to mention is Jamieson's faith in people, her weakness for eager young women.

She's a tiger of a woman, with her short and deep orange mane parted over her right eye, and her jaw set in the grim line of a constant, almost secret, smirk.

She takes steps one at a time, but you might have to bound down them in twos to keep up with her quick, deliberate footsteps. Yet, even as she hurries from her office to the latest grant project, her gait is straight and proud, with her head tilted just slightly.

Above all else, the dean is dignified.

She drinks tea, not straight black coffee as you might expect. She sips Diet Dr. Pepper. And she sips it from a paper cup, not a can. In fact, she brings that paper cup with her everywhere.

She pours in the diet soda, waits for the fizz to subside and then sips. It's this dainty technique that can make 12 ounces last the duration of a three-hour lecture or an entire car ride to Princeton.

Jamieson is also no stranger to hubris -- "Don't you want to know what my biggest accomplishment is?"

She believes it's the money she has raised for the Annenberg School for Communication -- $220 million.

And while that's quite an accomplishment -- when she took over as dean, the school's endowment was zero -- most of her undergraduate students say they value her teaching skills above all else.

Take College junior Gabrielle Arnay.

"She was so incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about what she was teaching," Arnay says. "She certainly is the most impressive professor that I'd had at this University by far."

Then there's grant getting -- the topic Jamieson chooses for a Monday morning graduate seminar. After all, as the largest grant-getter in the school, she thinks she knows the secrets.

First, she wants to know if your idea is compelling, if it will right a social wrong.

"There's millions of starving children," she states, her sly smile emerging. "Why should the grant go to you over feeding the starving children?"

She says that you must include your past funded research in your grant proposal. People forget this, but it's your credibility, she explains.

"Everyone is not equal," she says. "I've funded over $40 million in grants, and you've done zero. Do you think that we're equal? Absolutely not."

She's delivered -- on time, on budget. She's visualized things, and they've happened. She's saved the starving children.

But then there's the tenderness that emerges between the fierceness and determination in fleeting moments.

It's the tenderness present when Jamieson gently places her hands on a graduate student's shoulders as she maneuvers between the chairs. It's the way the dean seems amused when the cries of co-author Paul Waldman's baby interrupt their book signing, and it's the way her pale blue eyes -- an undeniable gift of recessive genetics back in Minnesota -- exude sincerity when she stops her class early to advise female students on the importance of breast self-exams.

It's also the tenderness that prompts the dean to end a grant project early and send the bleary-eyed students home, because she understands that they've been working hard and, unlike her, may need a break.

"Let's wait until 12:00 and then call for the night," she says. "Let's get you home."

Jamieson's break will come soon enough -- Sept. 1, to be exact. That's when her sabbatical starts.

She's stepping down as dean of the Annenberg School after 14 years -- it should have been 12 but she couldn't say no when an ailing Walter Annenberg, the man who had given her anything she'd ever needed, asked her to stay on -- and she can't wait for the free time, if you can call it that.

She's going to Palo Alto, where she plans to sit on a hill, eat Tex Mex and catch up on all the reading that's been piling up between the picture frames that cover her shelves.

Of course, there's also the fellowship that's waiting for her there. And before she climbs that hill, she'll make the daily 9 a.m. call into the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which she will still head from afar. There's also the book she'll be writing, yet another addition to the dozens of others.

But she's excited. After a decade of all-consuming-hardly-have-time-to-breathe work, "hard, demanding work," she needs a change of scenery.

•

"Oh, the biggest obstacle I faced as a woman...," she trails off, her voice still deep with confidence. "Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore."

The topic is all but closed.

Well, there was that first job, the first time she was offered an academic position back in 1969.

She told the man she was having a baby in the fall and might need "a few days off."

But he didn't hire pregnant women. So she told him, "Well, I'm not hirable by any place that doesn't hire pregnant women," and walked out. She had no choice. She took another job. That's what you do. You sacrifice.

And there have been plenty of sacrifices along the way. She knows them like she knows Bill Clinton's come-from-behind victory in the 1992 primaries.

There was having children young and raising them while on tenure track and getting her Ph.D. Yes, the dean, the mother, the professor, the sister, is also a doctor of communication arts.

There was the older son left behind with his aunt back in Maryland because he didn't want to leave all his friends senior year of high school, and her work -- a job she had already delayed for one year -- had suddenly moved to Texas. Then just three years later, there was leaving Texas and the job her husband loved (it's not easy for mechanical engineers to find work, she says) and the terrific, the "just terrific house," to move again -- this time to Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.

"I used to just push through everything," she says, gazing into an earlier time, a time of juggling meetings and lectures and did she remember to pick up her son from school? But juggling is a choice, she says, and she's getting better at saying no.

Now, she stays home when she's sick. She tries to get at least six hours of sleep each night. She only sits on two boards at a time. Her record was eight.

That's not to say there was never a moment when the juggler could juggle no more.

The closest she ever came to being psychologically hit hard was cancer.

"Breast cancer" -- said as a statement of fact, without pause or pity.

About eight years ago, her life stopped. She took herself out of everything that didn't involve her getting better. And go figure, the world went on.

"My sabbatical was cancer," she says.

Despite a negative mammogram, she found the lump during a breast self-exam because as a little girl, she'd been told to do them, and well, she usually does as she's told. Then came the call to the doctor and the chemotherapy and the hair loss.

She shaved her head, though, because she didn't want to wait for her hair to fall out -- "I think you need as much control as possible," she says.

Usually, the dean is the epitome of control. She's in control when, on the way to Princeton, she tells Gesell to pull over at a strip mall. There's a baby store, and she wants to buy Waldman's infant son some presents.

She's an efficient shopper, settling on an "Oh, how soft!" red jumpsuit. But a rainbow caterpillar that rattles and crinkles catches her eye, and she eventually gives up a rubber duck for the young insect.

"Goodbye, ducky," she smiles as she pads up the register, pulling her sweat coat tight and rifling through her purse, like the grandmother she someday hopes to be.

•

Twenty-two minutes.

That's how long it takes Jamieson to arrive at work. But on a Wednesday, as soon as she gets in, there's a conference call waiting, a crisis to be resolved and then she's back on the road -- this time to Princeton.

Riding shotgun, the dean is neither tough nor gentle, just preoccupied. There's the book-signing that night, the live interview at Bloomberg during the day and the survey she has to correct. That's why Gesell is driving -- so she can correct the survey.

She'll be your number one advocate if she thinks you're smart or funny or interesting, and she blindly lobbies on behalf of all women.

Talking to a Princeton colleague about some job openings, she asks if there are any good young women. Just one? Oh, more than one. Three? Well, how many is he going to hire? Her tone implies that she thinks all three would be best.

Now, she's giving the navigator advice, but it might as well be life advice -- engender confidence. That's what she did. That's what got her here.

"If you engender confidence, even when we're going the wrong way, we'll be reassured."

As a high school debater, she learned about conviction and how to argue her way through anything. In fact, she debated her way through Marquette University, right up until she fled from the prospect of law school -- Harvard and the University of Chicago, namely. The best decision of her life, she says, just after marrying her husband. That's a fact.

The dean is about fact. She's about research, history and what she can prove.

When a radio commentator begins, "Racism -- is it only skin deep?" she votes for a new station. Gesell's hand is already on the dial before the last vote is counted.

The ring, clunky and oversized, looks like a piece of costume jewelry.

It has survived two burglaries and years of wear and tear. It hardly ever leaves Jamieson's right middle finger and is gold with a large purple gem.

But the spirit of the ring is also the spirit of the woman. It's the spirit of Jamieson's grandmother, a woman who was all at once funny and profane, tough and resilient. She smoked. She drank. She was chronically optimistic.

And one of the things she believed in was her granddaughter. Whatever Jamieson said she was going to be -- a lady wrestler, a physicist, a lawyer -- was just fine with her, and when she died, she left the ring to the grandchild who loved her harder than the rest. The dean has worn it ever since.

The ring is Jamieson's way of tying herself back to her grandmother. If the world's going poorly one day, she can look into the gem and know that her grandmother is doing OK. Everything's going to be OK.

Now, the car speeds along the Schuylkill. Philadelphia's Liberty Towers glow yellow against the night sky and cast a shadow across the dean's face as she rests in her seat, gazing at her city.

Tomorrow, another day of people and meetings and work will begin anew. But now, with D.C. just two hours south and New York a mere train ride away, everything is OK.

Photos by Ari Friedman.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.