President’s Day

Author: Sam Ovenshine

On a relentlessly sunny day in mid-November, Critical Theory and Social Justice professor Thaddeus Russell is sitting in the President’s office, explaining an upcoming panel discussion at which he and a dozen film industry insiders will explore the question, “Are we living in the second ‘Golden Age of Television?'” After President Veitch asks Russell to explain just how the present age of television might be considered ‘golden,’ Russell rattles off a list of contemporary television series that might, in Hollywood parlance, be described as critically acclaimed. After Russell finishes, the President is silent.

Russell perceives Veitch’s silence as skepticism. He concedes a point to his argument. “In the last decade, unfortunately, we have also seen the proliferation of reality T.V.”

Veitch comes alive.

“This is my reality show,” he says, nodding his head towards the rest of his office and the administrative space beyond it.

Russell grins. “We could be making television right now.”

“Call CatAList,” the President deadpans. “Get me a camera in here.”

—

If President Veitch’s day were adapted to the screen, it would not take the form of reality television. That modern medium requires astounding melodrama from its participants, frantic convulsions over tiny mishaps and impassioned reflections on mundane occurrences. In a college president’s life, drama bubbles beneath the surface, far outside the range of the camera. It plays out slowly and languidly at the speed of a glacier and with the same unrelenting force.

Disagreements may be seismic but remain diplomatic—that is the President at work. Veitch defuses a dozen potentially explosive situations daily. He describes his job as making “small nudges in the right direction.” It is the kind of job that doesn’t lend itself to the exploitative eye of the reality T.V. camera, and it is a job so packed with decision-making and delicate dealing that at the day’s end there would be no time for thoughtful reflection in front of a camera. Veitch is tall and thin and a little ungraceful—his movement suggests everything else lagging behind his brain—and at 52, his face is still boyish and his smile sly. He has a soft voice and a calm demeanor that belie his authority and calculation. He is disarmingly genial and capable of showing endless solicitude. Veitch is literate, eloquent, active, thoughtful, aware—an exemplar of everything that is right about the liberal arts education—but he isn’t quite fit for the screen.

When the President listens, he crosses his legs, presses a fist into his cheek and watches the speaker’s lips. On the phone, he whispers “Mm-hmm” every second to signal he’s still on the line. When you talk to him, Veitch does four things: he asks you to explain your problem so that he can understand it, he asks your opinion, he summarizes your problem in perfect terms and then he says what he thinks. If you had President Veitch to explain your life, you might understand it.

If President Veitch’s day were adapted to the screen, it would take the form of a documentary, and it would open with a long tracking shot of me walking from a lifeless fringe of campus to the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Building (AGC) on a relentlessly sunny day in mid-November to shadow the President.

—

Michael Clegg (senior), seated beside me in the upper lobby of AGC, is the first to notice a metallic Toyota Prius pull up at 9:05 a.m. A moment later President Veitch strolls into AGC with a jacket slung over his left arm. He wears a checkered blue shirt with black slacks, a large silver watch and a tie showing the California coast slinking down from San Francisco to Los Angeles. “Gentlemen,” he says and beckons for us to follow him to his office.

Perched directly above the intersection of Occidental’s two major axes—Alumni Avenue and Bird Road—President Veitch’s office is at the center of the Occidental universe. Hundreds of books occupy the space. Few are shelved carefully. Almost all bear signs of use. They fill an entire wall of shelf space and spill over onto tables, the desk, windowsills, the floor. The scene is fitting for a man who delivered a 2009 convocation address on the unsung qualities of reading. “Tell me what you are reading, and I will tell you who you are,” he told his captive audience.

“Do you have time to read now?” I ask.

Not for leisure, he says. “I feel like an amputee. Now I read memos. I don’t read but not for a lack of interest.”

A moment later Clegg comments on the view from Veich’s window. Veitch jokingly calls his workspace “the panopticon”—an all-seeing locus—though in truth the view extends only 180 degrees. It is an addictive spot from which to watch students shuffle to class every hour. “If you look out, you can see them, but they can’t see you,” Clegg says to me.

—

At 9:15 a.m., Veitch has a speaker phone interview with Occidental Magazine writer Andy Faught to discuss a trip President Veitch made to Taiwan with politics professor Tsung Chi last May to promote the establishment of American-style liberal arts colleges in the country.

With a crackle, Faught’s voice comes online. Asked what business drew him to Taiwan, Veitch, a famously vocal exponent of the liberal arts, doesn’t miss the opportunity to plug the curriculum.  Veitch tells Faught that Taiwan sought Occidental’s assistance because the nation is exchanging its vocation-oriented universities for “liberal arts colleges that teach students to think creatively and outside the box and imaginatively.” For the next minute he expounds on the virtues of the liberal arts so lucidly and compellingly I start to plot my future children’s admission to a small liberal arts college.

At the end
of his monologue, Veitch pulls out an anecdote about the last day of his trip to Taiwan. “Next thing I knew,” he says, “I was in the Presidential Palace in Taipei listening to the President of Taiwan address a row of TV cameras in Chinese, and the only things I understood were ‘Occidental’ and ‘Obama.'” Faught laughs.

“By the way,” Faught says to Veitch before hanging up, “do you have any connection to [prolific Western novelist] Louis L’Amour? I just opened one of his books, and I think it was dedicated to your family.”

“Yeah,” Veitch says, “I hung out with him as a kid.”

—

In January 2009, Veitch was selected as Occidental College’s fifteenth president. The Los Angeles Times spoke with Veitch at the time of the appointment. In a phone interview from New York, Veitch told the paper he was “delighted” to be moving back to his native Los Angeles.

Jonathan Alan Veitch was born in Santa Monica in 1959 and grew up in west Los Angeles. His mother, Carol Lee, is stepdaughter of the film actor Alan Ladd. Veitch’s father, John, was president of worldwide film production at Columbia Pictures.

In 1979, Veitch was admitted to Stanford. When he arrived in Palo Alto, he felt challenged by his coursework and an academic institution for the first time. “I went to the Stanford bookstore to buy my textbooks, and I saw that for one of my classes I would be reading a book a week. And I thought, ‘Finally, someone’s taking me seriously’,” he said.

After graduating from Stanford with a major in English and American Literature, Veitch embarked on a romantic tour of dirty jobs across the United States. Like Mark Twain in his autobiographical work “Roughing It,” Veitch worked on a tugboat that cruised up and down the Mississippi. He also labored on a dairy farm in Nebraska and unloaded fish onto docks in Boston. “I would go home exhausted, covered with fish slime. I’d put my clothes in the basement so I wouldn’t have to smell them, then when I got up they would be frozen. You cannot imagine getting into jeans frozen in fish slime and then feeling them thaw out over the course of the day,” he told the Occidental Weekly in 2009.

After his bohemian stint came to an end, Veitch enrolled in a graduate program across the Charles River at Harvard. In 1992, he received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the university in the History of American Civilization.

Through a friend from Stanford, Veitch met Sarah Ann Baxter Kersh, a Brown alumna and Calvin Klein executive, and in December 1992, the pair wed at Columbia University’s chapel. The young couple moved west in 1993 for a position Veitch took as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. While in Madison, Veitch taught undergraduate courses such as Introduction to Poetry and Survey of American Literature.

In 1997, the University of Wisconsin Press published Veitch’s first book, “American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s.” Harvard literature professor Sacvan Bercovitch hailed it as “the best study we have of the achievement and significance of Nathanael West.”

Veitch moved to New York in 1997 to teach as an associate professor at the New School, a progressive university in Greenwich Village three times the size of Occidental. Veitch taught classes related to his specialties of nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, American film and cultural history. His only appearance on RateMyProfessors is from a student who took class of his at the New School in 1999 and remembered the experience well enough to post a comment in 2005. “I had him for Intro to Cultural Studies,” she wrote. “Hands down the best professor I ever had.”

In 2004, Veitch was promoted to Dean of Eugene Lang College, the liberal arts branch of the New School. While at Lang, Veitch instituted tenure for professors, doubled the size of the college, hired 43 full-time faculty members, established new study abroad connections for students and increased the school’s fundraising yield twentyfold. Veitch stepped down in 2008, citing a growing gap between his academic interests and his daily workload. “I write memos all day,” he lamented to the New School Free Press, the student newspaper he had helped to found. He told the newspaper he needed a sabbatical to rest and write.

And yet, less than a year later, Veitch stood at the base of the Greek Bowl in a comically baggy red and black robe to be inaugurated as Occidental’s fourth president in five years to a job he knew was hardly a sabbatical. “Let me say at the outset that I am somewhat daunted by the task before me,” he told the expectant crowd. “It is clear that I have undertaken a mighty responsibility.”

His inauguration address outlined a twelve-point agenda for the college, and at its conclusion Veitch inserted a personal note. “This is an agenda that requires a great deal of hard work and dedication. It is also an agenda which requires a great degree of longevity,” he said. “So let me assure you: I plan to be here for a long time.”

As the crowd cheered the pledge, Veitch took one step back from the podium and brought his arms to his side with his palms facing out, as if to present himself for inspection. Behind him, members of the Board of Trustees clapped emphatically, their faces tied up in smiles. Veitch waited for the applause to wane, and then he smiled too.

Upon his appointment, President Veitch told the Los Angeles Times he hoped to be at Occidenta
l at least 10 years.

“Has the timetable changed?” I ask late him in the day.

Another administrator in the room is the first to answer. “We hope not.” 

—

At 9:40 a.m., Special Events Directory Kimberly Uribe enters the office. “Fast Food Nation” author and journalist Eric Schlosser is receiving an honorary degree in the evening, and Uribe reminds Veitch that is he expected to speak at the ceremony.

“There will be a script for you on stage,” she says.

“If I never had to speak in front of an audience again,” Veitch tells me later, “I’d be exuberant. “Fourteen hours a day behind my desk, and I could run a marathon. One cocktail party, and I’m ruined.” It’s the same for nearly all academics, he adds. “Most of your professors are introverts and their job forces them to be extroverted. I’m an introvert.”

“You’re an exceptional speaker,” I say. “Have you had to cultivate some kind of extroversion?”

“The fear,” he says, his voice mock-quivering, his face as expressive as I’ve seen it. “The fear.”

Everyone in the room—all the extroverted administrators—laugh along.

—

When I transferred to Occidental in 2009, I was so shy that I completed O-Team having said hardly a word. On the last day of orientation, when we visited the President’s office after entering our names into the college’s registry, Veitch asked each of us to name our guilty pleasure television show.

At 11:15 a.m., Veitch bolts from his office to the Cushman Board Room in AGC, where the college’s Investment Committee is already meeting for a teleconference with professional managers of the college’s endowment. When he arrives, Veitch announces himself, sits at the head of the table and puts on a pair of reading glasses to view a thick packet with information about fluctuations in the endowment. 

After a few minutes he sets his glasses on the table and shifts his body to gaze out a window at an intermittent stream of students walking from Johnson towards Haines. The meeting carries on.

Ten minutes later Veitch comes back. In a single motion, he reorients himself, directs his gaze at the phone and fires an incisive question about the managers’ decision to drop a particular firm due to their performance.

“Yeah, actually,” the voice marvels, “that question asks us about one of the toughest things we do as a committee. That question goes to the heart of why we’re having this discussion.” The voice hems and haws to try to answer Veitch’s question. “Hopefully that was coherent,” the response ends.

“Thank you,” Veitch replies and turns away again.

When the meeting wraps up at 12:05 p.m., Veitch salutes the professionals. “Thank you. I trust and I know that we are in good hands,” he says.

I want to tell him the same, but I don’t.

—

Veitch lives on campus in the Wallis Annenberg House with his wife and three children. Of the sightings and rumors of sightings of the family, one of the most common is Veitch using the Alumni Gym. Veitch said he works out in the gym on weekends and plays tennis with Occidental staff on weekday mornings. He takes his younger daughter to the Taylor Pool and his son to other athletic facilities. Veitch and his son eat at the Marketplace afterwards. He and his daughters  visit the Cooler for late-night ice cream.

Veitch said he likes to escape the insulation of AGC but can’t always get away. “You have to make up your mind to go to the Quad or to Gresham [Dining Room on the Branca Patio]. I went bowling with students last night. I’m thinking of teaching a course in the fall. But I can’t be everywhere.”

One place you won’t find him is online. Veitch doesn’t use an iPad at work. He has a cell phone, but I don’t see it. He doesn’t boot up his office computer. He has an Occidental email address but uses it sparingly. “Warmly, Jonathan,” he signs his emails.

—

Early in the afternoon Veitch meets with Brett Schraeder, Assistant Vice President for Strategic Initiatives. “I work on things that Jonathan thinks are important,” Schraeder casually described the job.

The meeting’s official business is website mock-ups from White Whale, the Oakland-based web firm commissioned to redesign oxy.
edu, but the conversation is discursive and freewheeling. Eventually it oscillates to a document that Schrader says is finalized and will eventually need Veitch’s signature.

“Let’s go sign it right now,” Veitch says, with a hint of impetuousness. He is on his feet before the end of the sentence. The sun is low and hangs in the window between Fowler and Johnson, and Veitch casts a long shadow across the room as he strides towards Stolz’s workspace. A moment later he is standing in the doorway to his office, calling out to her. “Can I get the….”

Clegg and I smile at the scene. Schraeder stays in his chair, perfectly composed, with no trace of bemusement. Another day with Jonathan.

—

Veitch mentions one aspect of his job—fundraising—only once in the day, to tell me about the unexpected phone calls he sometimes gets from potential donors who want to reconnect with the college. “It’s the dramatic part of the job,” he says. “You never know if the call is going to be the one that changes your life.” He pauses before the punchline. “We get a lot of false leads.”

—

At 3:05 p.m., Veitch is back in the Cushman Board Room to discuss collaboration between Occidental and the Art Center College of Design, a prestigious art school tucked away in the hills behind the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The Art Center’s representatives are dressed in slim bespoke suits and pastel pocket squares that make President Veitch look slovenly by comparison. After a round of handshakes, Veitch asks Art Center President Lorne Buchman what his institution wants from Occidental.

As Buchman begins to enumerate potential joint ventures, I watch Veitch’s face tighten—he is stranded with a pen but no paper. In front of him is “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation” (“This book is everything I know about design,” he says later). He turns it over a few times, then opens the back cover. His pen flutters on the page.

After a minute Stolz comes knocking on the door, looking for Veitch. The President excuses himself. His youngest daughter, he is informed, has been left at school.

“Sarah’s in New York for the weekend, and Jonathan’s playing mommy and daddy this week,” Senior Vice President Dennis Collins says to the room.

Veitch returns. He cites Foucault’s “Archaeology of Knowledge” and the British sociologist Anthony Giddens to make a point about the disconnect between groups of faculty in different academic departments. As the Art Center representatives murmur in agreement, Stolz appears again and President Veitch departs.

A few minutes later he comes back.

“My daughter has been found,” he announces.

Veitch sets two handmade ceramic turkey candle holders on the table: gifts from his recovered daughter, who made them in her second-grade class.

“Here’s her portfolio,” Veitch says, sliding the turkeys towards Buchman. “What do you say, Lorne? Can she get in?”

—

Last fall President Veitch visited the Occidental Weekly to chat over lunch. Veitch had half an hour allotted for the meal, but he didn’t eat; instead, he answered questions and entertained with stories for 45 minutes. After he left, one person mused, “I think the President still wants to be in college.”

“What do you miss about your undergraduate years?” I ask Veitch.

“Everything,” he says. “That’s when you do your best work, and the world opens up to you, and you decide what you’re going to do with your life. The world is yours. The better question is, what don’t I miss?”

—

At 5:15 p.m., the phone on Veitch’s desk rings for the first time. President Veitch dashes towards it from across the room and picks up the receiver—his first physical contact with technology.

“Jonathan,” he answers. “How are you?” A pause. “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm….” 

This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.