Steve Brauntuch: Gen. Stanley misfires on all cylinders

After only one year, the Clifford Stanley experiment at Penn has come to a close.

Stanley arrived with a great deal of fanfare last October, coming aboard as University President Judith Rodin's handpicked successor for John Fry as executive vice president. And last Friday, Stanley officially departed for "personal reasons," leaving an office that will remain empty for the next president and plenty of question marks about an extremely short tenure.

Staff members were surprised. Higher education search firms were confused. West Philadelphia leaders say they never even got the chance to meet with him. The circumstances surrounding Stanley's departure are mysterious at best and disconcerting at worst.

Will he be missed? Probably not, to be honest. Rodin can clearly handle the extra responsibility, and Penn has a very strong group of vice presidents -- Fry holdovers, by the way -- in place that can handle themselves just fine.

But in one year, the position of executive vice president has gone from integral to unnecessary. It can't be a reflection of the position itself, which was successfully inhabited for seven years prior to Stanley's arrival. Sadly, it must be a reflection of the work that Stanley did -- or, for that matter, didn't do -- in just one year.

I say sadly because General Stanley is a smart, respectful, generous and kind man who was well liked by everyone at this University. It really is a shame that his tenure did not work out.

Everyone has wonderful things to say about Stanley's work and his reasons for leaving. No one, however, is willing to admit that a one-year term as executive vice president is strange, and giving only 10 days notice for his resignation is even stranger. There are two self-evident truths that can be gleaned through the no-comments and feigned smiles:

1) Stanley was the wrong fit at Penn right from the start. He had 30 years of military experience under his belt, mostly on the educational side, but almost zero experience in business. This school, both in the academic and business spheres, is highly complex. It's one of the top schools in the country, and it's located squarely in one of the largest urban markets in the country. Penn isn't a place for higher ed rookies, and Stanley certainly fell into that category.

Stanley may be a great leader, but no matter how hard administrators tried to get him slowly acclimated, he was thrown right into the fire. Within the past year, this campus has had several significant retail openings and closings, major construction projects in progress and the purchase of several blocks of land to the east. Not much time to learn on the job.

But that's fine -- it was a mistake, and now the University can move on. Stanley can exit gracefully when Rodin steps down, and the next president can bring in an entirely new team of leaders.

Except in this case, "graceful" isn't a word that many would use to describe Stanley's abrupt departure. He bolted. And while some may be denying it, there's a larger issue here.

2) This looks bad. Really, really bad. It's unfair to speculate on what made Stanley decide he'd had enough of this school, but no matter what the reasons are, a flurry of spin control can't hide the fact that nobody saw this coming. He gave 10 days notice, which is unheard of in this business, and he did it right in the middle of the semester without publicly moving to a different school or even a different field.

It may make sense to administrators who know Stanley and understood this situation. But to Penn outsiders (presidential candidates, perhaps?), it looks awfully bizarre to have the top business officer of this university skip town after less than a year on the job. It's not what Rodin would have wanted in her final year, and it may raise some questions about the administrative culture that led Stanley to call it quits.

Now, the presidential search committee is in a bind. Do they pick a true academic and business novice, who will be blindly stepping into the role of president and CEO? Or do they break with tradition and go with a president from the business world and risk a faculty uprising? Having an executive vice president allowed Penn to keep business structurally separate from academics, at least on paper. That structure is out the window now, and the fallout will likely color the search for a new president.

In the meantime, though, it will be business as usual at Penn. Truthfully, there won't be a difference in how this school operates as long as Rodin is in charge.

But she and other administrators had better hope that people don't read between the lines on the issue of Clifford Stanley's abrupt departure. There's a whole lot more to this story than what appears in the press releases.

Steve Brauntuch is a senior Communications major from Tenafly, N.J. and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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