Author: Dean DeChiaro and Richie DeMaria
Oxy Weekly: What attracted you to Occidental?
President Veitch: Well, I love Los Angeles, and I think it’s a crucible for all kinds of social and cultural change in the country and so it’s a very interesting place to live.
Oxy is at the heart of all that. It’s a place that has an opportunity to watch the ramifications of those changes and incorporate some of that into its curriculum and really exploit the resources of the city in a way that a lot of colleges in the Midwest or more rural areas don’t have the same kind of opportunities.
Oxy Weekly: You’re coming from New York City and returning to Los Angeles. What’s that like?
President Veitch: New Yorkers love to be scornful of Los Angeles. They just don’t understand it. They don’t understand it’s every bit as complex as New York. It’s just complex in a different way. It’s not a city that reads, that is, it’s not a city that you can understand from looking at it. It’s a city that you have to choose your spots – it’s easy to be an expert in New York because everything is so great and interesting and easily available, but in Los Angeles it’s miles of tire places and fast food stands and then, boom, there’s something really great.
I think it takes a long time to be here to like it. I hated it at first. It’s not a good city to visit. I think you need to really spend some time here and understand what a dynamic and sprawling place it is and embrace that rather than think of it as a hindrance.
Oxy Weekly: Your background is that of an educator, but now you’re an administrator. How do you view the role?
President Veitch: I think being an administrator is being an educator, and sometimes people think of administration as having a capital “A” as if it were like, ‘you’ve gone over to the dark side, you’ve gone to a world through a black hole,’ but in fact the decisions you make every day as president affect the quality of the education provided by the institution.
You haven’t really given up that role, and in fact, in ways small and large, you can enable people to do very interesting kinds of work. So I’d say that the only thing I miss about being a professor is the opportunity to read and think in long stretches of time, though I also have three children who make that an impossibility.
Oxy Weekly: Do you see yourself teaching?
President Veitch: Yes, I’d like that. I’d like to teach a course anywhere from an introduction to poetry to a class on higher education in the United States.
Oxy Weekly: What kind of poetry?
President Veitch: Sort of a survey course. Just ways to give people the resources to read poems effectively. I think people are daunted by poetry -once one has the skills and resources to read effectively, it opens the possibility to see all kinds of great stuff that before seemed so [difficult].
Oxy Weekly: What sort of new things do you want to bring to campus?
President Veitch: Well, how long you do you have? A lot. Career services to make sure that students have the kinds of skills and resources they need to get jobs. [. . .] There are many schools that you graduate from and you say the name of the school you graduated from and there is an alum at the company you’re applying to, you have a huge leg up – and that’s just networking, that’s just making alumni aware of the importance of looking after their own.
Rethinking the library – making it a place for cutting edge digital resources, bringing all of the academic support services together so that there is a synergy there that’s effective. Certain athletic facilities are beautiful and some of them need to be upgraded. Working on Swan Hall, and the renovation of that. Revisiting whether or not Occidental should have a more carefully imagined core curriculum. Right now it’s more of distribution requirements than a synthetic experience.
Building up programs like OxyEngage, which seem to be amazing opportunities to get people out into the city. Building up residential life, exploring the possibilities of themed housing, and other kinds of experiences that are outside the classroom. I think one of the reasons that one chooses a college over a university is because of the opportunities of residential life and that co-curricular experience. We have great faculty and an extremely good curriculum, but we have great opportunities to enhance the quality of the residential experience beyond the very beautiful dorms we have; I think some programming would be very good.
Oxy Weekly: The whole country’s in a recession, and Oxy’s not doing so well either. How do you plan on getting us back in the game?
President Veitch: In terms of the endowment, that’s just a function of the investments, and in fact Occidental’s endowment is in better shape than most. In terms of fundraising, I think part of it is – well there’s several things. There’s planning that needs to be done. Occidental is a school with enormous potential, but it really hasn’t gotten the planning piece of that potential just right.
One can use this time of economic distress to get one’s house in order, to plan for everything you want to do. That way when the time is right, when the turnaround starts to kick in, you’re ready to go, and you’ve got a proposal on this, a proposal on this, and a proposal on this, et cetera.
Another thing is – there are a lot of people who are prepared to give, even under adverse circumstances, and they need to hear from you and understand what you want to achieve with the college and believe in you. And then there are foundations and other places that are prepared to give if they feel that you have your house in order. So I don’t think it’s impossible in this environment, but it’s more challenging.
Oxy Weekly: You’ve talked a bit about wanting to integrate Oxy into the Los Angeles community more effectively. Do you have any specific ideas?
President Veitch: Yes. Already we’ve begun to talk to the directors of various museums and cultural institutions around us from the Norton Simon to the Gene Autry museum, and I’d like to eventually do the same with LA County and the Japanese American National Museum, et cetera.
I want to see what kinds of possibilities there are. Everything from building courses around major exhibitions to even sharing a faculty member with those institutions [to] student internships [to] allowing students to do research in those institution’s archives. [I want to see about] turning L.A. into an object of study. A few years ago Occidental devoted a year to the study of the L.A. River and all kinds of environmental challenges, from the plants to turning it into a public park, all of that.
So really looking at parts of the city that are undergoing change or transformation – looking at everything from community meetings to the policy issues to the urban planning issues to the environmental and city issues.
I think that’s a wonderful window into how democracy works or doesn’t work, how urban planning works or doesn’t work, private property, and public good. Identifying organizations that we want to work with, building partnerships that can be in place for a long time, and then building coursework around those commitments. So if students are out working on issues of homelessness, they have a course that introduces them to the history of poverty in the United States, public policy, public housing.
They have the opportunity to come back and say, after what they’ve seen in the field, ‘You know, I read this, but what I’m seeing is this.’ And how can those two things be reconciled?
Oxy Weekly: Among the older students at least, there’s a cynicism with regards to the college’s president. In the past few years we’ve had more than one, so they don’t have a lot of faith in the office. What can you say to students to reassure the
m, or about how long do you intend to stay?
President Veitch: First of all, I think there are a couple of things to be said about the last couple of years. Oxy has remained a robust, interesting, exciting, and compelling place regardless of who’s in office. One of the reasons it’s such a special place is that there are very good people here. There are very good faculty, staff, vice presidents, and directors of various programs. That doesn’t change, regardless of who the president is, and I think the experience has had consistency regardless of the turnover.
The second thing is, I think the turnover gets overplayed- yes there have been a number of presidents, but there’s really only one who left, and then there was the interim and then there was a president who didn’t stay very long. I spent some time when I was thinking about this job, reading the history of Occidental, and one of the things that I saw very clearly was that the presidents who have had the biggest impact on the college were the ones who stayed the longest – Coons, Gilman, Bird.
You heard the list of things I want to do, you can’t do that in a couple of years and shuffle on to something else, that’s a ten-year commitment, at least. It takes a long time to lay the groundwork and find a consensus in the community, and write the fundraising proposals and go out and get the money to design the programs or buildings that need to be built, get them built, and hire the faculty, etcetera. That’s not going to happen overnight.
Oxy Weekly: What were you like as an undergrad?
President Veitch: When I got to college, the idea that you could define yourself in any way you wanted to, and that there were multiple constituencies for whatever it was that you were interested in, was liberating to me. People took you seriously as a student. I went to the bookstore and the reading lists on my syllabi awed me; these were all the books I wanted to read. I felt like a kid in a candy store. All of a sudden all this was open to me. Then I became just absolutely immersed in my studies.
I loved it. For the first time I wasn’t being forced to do stuff I didn’t want to do. I was driven by curiosity and interest and I found that very compelling, and although Stanford was a big school, I became very good friends with three or four professors. I really wanted to think like them. That was what changed my mind about graduate school. I felt like I was earthbound and they were not. I remember telling one professor when I had decided to go to graduate school, I said, ‘You know, I’m going to become a professor.’ I thought he’d be very impressed that I had chosen a career like his. He looked at me sort of disdainfully, and he said, ‘To be a scholar is not very much, there are a lot of those; but to be an intellectual is a real achievement.’
And at the time I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. I came to realize that what he meant was: an intellectual is someone for whom ideas matter and for whom the life of the mind is enough. Someone for whom education and ideas have an ethical component and a value in the world. You don’t have to be a professor for that to be true. If that was what an education at Occidental can do for you, that’s what I would hope it would do.
Oxy Weekly: You’re a reading enthusiast. Tell us about that.
President Veitch: I was thunderstruck when I met with friends years after college and discovered that they’d gotten rid of all of their books. It was stunning to me. It was like getting rid of your family. I can’t imagine going through life without your books. They’re a resource to you. Sometimes people will say to me – and I know this isn’t very PC – they say, ‘Well I’m a little troubled by this,’ and my response is, ‘You should read Dostoyevsky.’
Literature is an interlocutor that can offer this kind of help to you, a much more profound help than a culture of therapy. But I know that I’m not supposed to say that.
Oxy Weekly: Are you reading anything at the moment?
President Veitch: No, I read Manguel’s “History of Reading”. . . What I wanted do was reread the books for a class that I had taken my freshman year and talk about that and I got halfway through the list and then packing and everything else intervened. I read two books that I hadn’t read in 25 years. One was Thoreau’s “Walden Pond” and the other was “Moby Dick,” and those were the two books that set me on my way.
Before I was in college I had a job at a parking lot at the beach in Santa Monica. I shared this job, with another person and he always wanted the sunny days on the weekends when everybody came down. He could double park their cars and get tips from everyone, and he didn’t understand why I wanted the foggy days, but I was perfectly happy working that parking lot in the month of June when it’s very foggy at the beach because somebody was paying me to read. I couldn’t believe it, there were four cars all day and here I was sitting in the middle of the parking lot on a beach chair reading “Walden Pond” and I thought if somebody’s going to pay me to read then this is a good job.
I half believe I became a professor because I sat in a parking lot on the beach and someone paid me to read. I thought, if someone pays me to read as a professor, that’s a good deal.
Oxy Weekly: What’s your craziest Los Angeles story?
President Veitch: Do you know Pink’s Hot Dog Stand? I lived right around the corner from Pink’s Hot Dog Stand. I used to eat there all the time. I thought it would be funny one day to take down a picture of one of the celebrities on the wall. I took down Kevin Costner’s picture, took it home, put my picture in it, took it back the next day, hung it back on the wall. I signed it, with the proper cliché, the whole thing.
It was on the wall for four years. I used to go there and eat underneath the picture and people would look at me, look at the picture, and start whispering and try to figure out who I was. Eventually they [realized], but look at how grimy those pictures are. I don’t think they pay much attention.
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