Daniel H. Weiss

Lafayette’s New 16th President—”The Whole Package”

by Robert J. Bliwise ’76*

No one at Johns Hopkins University pokes holes in the image of Dan Weiss’ doughnut consistency. When he brings in morning snacks for his dean’s-office colleagues, forget about the strawberry-frosted, cinnamon-cake, or apple-and-spice varieties. It’s all about upholding the primacy of glazed doughnuts.

If he won’t think outside the glazed-doughnut box, Daniel H. Weiss is wide-ranging in his thinking, and his accomplishments, in every other sense. Weiss, named in December as Lafayette’s 16th president, has fans all across Hopkins—and beyond. William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and formerly president of Princeton University, calls him “one of those rare people who have, as it were, the whole package. He’s a very, very talented academic, an outstanding art historian with a worldwide reputation, and a fine teacher. Beyond that, he had business experience and a background in management consulting before he became an art historian; that gave him, early on, experience working with genuinely complex problems. Then, of course, he’s had major administrative experience at Johns Hopkins. And his interpersonal skills are outstanding. He listens well and he tells you what he thinks, and without a trace of arrogance.”

Weiss has been James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins since 2002. His responsibilities include oversight of academic departments, graduate and undergraduate academic programs, scholarly and scientific research, budget and financial operations, strategic planning, development and alumni affairs, student life, and admissions. “One of the particular things about Hopkins is the high degree of decentralization,” says Paula Burger, who reports to Weiss as dean of undergraduate life. “The deans really run mini-colleges; they have the responsibilities that the president would have at a college. They have a great deal of independence in establishing their school’s priorities and identifying the resources to achieve them.”

In Burger’s view,

“What I found very exciting and appealing about Lafayette is a sense of community, a commitment that everyone has to creating a learning environment that is productive and rewarding and comprehensive.” —Dan Weiss

Dan and Sandra Weiss with sons Teddy and Joel, and family pet Callie.

Weiss’ core values, as well as his responsibilities as dean, make him ideally suited for a college presidency. “At his heart, in terms of his university service as a teacher and scholar, he has always been passionate about undergraduates in the classroom,” she says. Hopkins is the nation’s first research university, and it has long stressed teaching and graduate education. Weiss, though, “has been persuasive in holding up the vision that our advances in undergraduate education don’t have to be at the expense of graduate education,” says Burger. “He’s gotten the faculty on board with that. And that’s no mean accomplishment.”

Adds the Hopkins provost, Steven Knapp, who once held Weiss’ job as dean of arts and sciences, “This was not a place that paid a lot of attention to the integrated experience of the student inside and outside the classroom. That has been a really strong emphasis of Dan’s. He has become the principal point of accountability for student life on the campus.” Knapp says Hopkins’ administration “did a very unusual thing” when Weiss’ predecessor left: “We appointed Dan to the position without doing a national search. We were confident that we had in him the right person for the deanship, and the faculty agreed with us. That’s a pretty extraordinary tribute to him.”

As dean, Weiss put in place an advisory council of high-powered alumni to help in formulating, and gathering support for, the school’s strategic plan. Its chair was Tony Coles, now a Hopkins trustee and senior vice president, commercial operations, for Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Coles speaks admiringly of Weiss’ ability to reach out broadly, incorporate the ideas of many individuals, and then build consensus. Weiss’ savvy understanding of management, he says, makes him an effective leader, focused on accomplishing results and capable of getting the most from those he’s working with. Weiss is equally sensitive to the values of the academy, he says, and “models himself after some of the great educators of our time.” (Weiss mentions as role models A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was Yale’s celebrated president, and Princeton’s Bowen.) “I think Dan has every capability to have a huge impact on this century’s education,” Coles says.

Part of Weiss’ impact at Hopkins came on the issue of diversity, where he’s spearheaded more assertive efforts in student and faculty recruiting, along with a push to endow professorships and open centers in ethnic and regional studies. “It’s not done by incremental change,” he says. “You have to simply take it on all at once.” He points out that Hopkins, which had lagged in its diversity efforts, last year was cited by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education as a leader in campus diversity. A faculty-member colleague notes that as international students were feeling besieged by new visa restrictions, Weiss wrote them to assure them that the university community valued their

presence.

The faculty has been another priority for Weiss. Together with the engineering school, he worked to revamp the policy for granting tenure, so that faculty members there, as at most campuses, could earn tenure at the associate-professor rank. Under the old policy, tenure could be an 11-year quest—a fact that had hurt faculty recruiting. The outcome of that complex but collegial effort shows that Weiss is “very good at articulating a vision,” Knapp, the provost, says. “That’s one of those important things that a president does—to be able to say in very clear terms where it is that he’s trying to lead the institution. I’ve seen his effectiveness in being able to get support from above and below. He’s very thoughtful on the issues of higher education. So he can provide the kind of philosophical and moral leadership that you want from a president.”

Weiss’ dedication to higher education began at George Washington University. As a sophomore, he found himself attracted to a woman planning to enroll in an art-history course, and he duly followed her lead. Art history (along with psychology) would become his major. His professor, a medievalist, impressed him as “dynamic, articulate, and energetic.” Weiss speaks passionately about the transformative influence of teachers; he dedicates one of his books, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis, to all of his teachers, and he’s still in touch with his second-grade teacher.

The day after he graduated in 1979, he started working at the Kennedy Center in Washington, managing the gift shops. To prepare for graduate work, he took courses in French, German, and Greek. After two years he went to Johns Hopkins for a master’s degree in art history.

Sandra Jarva Weiss Dan and Sandra with (L-R) Teddy and Joel. It was a shared cultural interest—or a shared employer—that brought Dan Weiss and Sandra Jarva together. As George Washington University undergraduates, Weiss was working in a Kennedy Center shop, and his future wife was a Kennedy Center theater usher.Jarva Weiss majored in economics and continued into law school at George Washington. Starting out as a corporate attorney, she did legal work for a hospital, became interested in health care, and then worked as a hospital general counsel. She later entered private practice with a specialty in health care. She is now a partner in the Baltimore office of Piper Rudnick Gray Cary LLP. “I work on 10 or 12 different things a day,” she says. “It’s a juggling act.” She’ll be continuing that juggling act with the move to College Hill. The firm, through a recent merger, is one of the 10 largest law firms in the United States, with 20 offices. Those offices include Philadelphia, and Jarva Weiss plans to work there part-time. She says she’s also looking forward to taking part in campus events, and to finding community involvements as well. Dan and Sandra Jarva Weiss are the parents of two sons—Teddy, eight, and Joel, six. She says that both boys are excited by the adventure of the impending move; they’re already enamored of the Crayola Factory at Two Rivers Landing in Easton. “Every visit we’ve made to Lafayette has been more terrific than the last,” Jarva Weiss says. “This is a friendly environment. You see that as you walk past people and they naturally smile at you. We have had such an incredibly welcoming reception, whether being greeted by students on campus or by shopkeepers in Easton. It will be a wonderful place for the family.”

He was drawn to the medieval period because of the influence of his art-history professor, and also because it was intellectually challenging, requiring him to look below the surface, to consider meanings beyond the obvious. His scholarship has cast a new light on the Sainte-Chapelle, the stained-glass-saturated Paris church dedicated in 1248—under the patronage of King Louis IX— to enshrine sacred relics, notably Christ’s crown of thorns. “One has to look beyond the religious images to understand what those images really mean,” says Weiss. “All the things that I’ve studied are fundamentally or explicitly about religious subjects, but in fact they’re much broader than that. So my study of the Sainte-Chapelle is really about the way in which that building, which is completely dripping with religious imagery, is a political and social monument that speaks to the ambitions of the king. And as it turns out, people in the Middle Ages were no different from people today in that they had the same kinds of curiosities and concerns. But they expressed those curiosities and concerns through a more limited range, namely, through Christian subject matter. I’ve found the possibility intriguing of trying to see beyond the surface of that subject matter.”

Sandra, Teddy, Dan, and Joel tour a wintry campus.

“I think Dan has every capability to have a huge impact on this century’s education.” —Tony Coles, trustee of Johns Hopkins University

Although he was invited into the Ph.D. program, Weiss—contemplating a career in museum administration—left Hopkins to study nonprofit management at the Yale School of Management. With his M.B.A. in hand, he joined the global consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. “None of the work that I did was in any way involved with higher education,” he recalls. “That said, however, I learned more about how to be a teacher and to work in a collegial environment at Booz Allen than I did anywhere else. It was a total meritocracy—whoever had the right answer for the client would prevail, whether that was the senior partner or a brand-new associate. There was no thought of hierarchy.”

He says that he also learned that “in order to be a successful consultant, you have to be able to develop skills in expressing your ideas clearly and compellingly. And that was a very valuable lesson for a teacher. I had to organize my thoughts clearly and intelligently and make a compelling case for students to engage in what it was that I cared about. If I didn’t do that, then I would have lost the students in the same way that I would have lost the clients.”

After four years as a consultant, Weiss returned to Johns Hopkins and to Ph.D. work in art history. He joined the Hopkins faculty in 1992, three weeks after defending his dissertation. He was chair of art history from 1998 to 2001 and then, before being tapped to take the helm of the Krieger School, dean of the faculty in 2001-02.

One

“The closer we get to excellence, the harder it is to do better. The decisions that we’ll make in the next ten years are going to be harder decisions than the ones we’ve had to make in the past, because we’re getting closer to that rarefied level.” —Dan Weiss

of his longtime faculty colleagues, Steven Nichols, chair of Romance languages and literatures, points to Weiss’ work on the Sainte-Chapelle as the sign of an original thinker. “What he did was to take something that was under everybody’s nose, the set of windows of the Sainte-Chapelle that deal with the Crusades, and showed a very different way of looking at it. Through that process he unearthed a whole series of things having to do with politics, religious reforms, and cultural movements. There’s an Italian term, meraviglia, it’s a kind of wonder, marvel, awe—the excitement of discovery. That’s the quality that has propelled Dan as a scholar.”

Nichols has cotaught with Weiss and considers him a gifted teacher with a particular knack for encouraging student engagement. That assessment is echoed by Meredith Pasmantier, who took a survey and two other classes with Weiss and became one of his advisees. “He had such enthusiasm for the material that it was always an energetic atmosphere. It was never that he was talking at the students; he would always engage them. And he has such a wonderful sense of humor that you would find yourself laughing through the lecture. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that in art history,” she says. She later transferred to Columbia to be near her mother, who was receiving cancer treatment in New York. Even after she transferred, she says, Weiss remained a mentor.

Pasmantier is aiming for a career as a professor in theater studies. She says that goal reflects Weiss’ enduring influence. “I remember how he would perfectly time every lecture. He would never seem to be consulting notes, but everything was perfectly laid out and would end perfectly on time, on just the right theme.”

Weiss is thematically wide-ranging as a scholar. Part of the “enormous privilege” of working in the academy, as he puts it, is “the time to reflect and think about whatever one wants to.” Much of the Crusader-era art that he explores is steeped in representations of war. And the intersections between war and culture have shaped his scholarship in other areas. He has written about Masha Bruskina, who was born in Minsk in the Soviet Union, and during World War II volunteered as a nurse to care for wounded Red Army soldiers. She also helped them escape by supplying them with civilian clothing and false identity papers. Bruskina was informed on and then captured by the Nazi occupying troops. Looking defiant and dignified in facing death, she appears in photos of the first public execution of Soviet partisans. But in later Soviet narratives she was officially identified as “unknown,” despite evidence of her identity as a young

“That’s one of those important things that a president does—to be able to say in very clear terms where it is that he’s trying to lead the institution. I’ve seen his effectiveness in being able to get support from above and below.” —Steven Knapp, provost of Johns Hopkins University

Jewish woman—elements of a troubling history that prompted Weiss to explore “the spirit of resistance” and “the politics of denial” as parallel strands in the story.

More recently Weiss has embarked on a Vietnam-era project. It centers on Michael O’Donnell, who was shot down while piloting a helicopter and listed for decades as missing in action. He was also a poet whose poem “Save Them a Place,” which reflects on lives wasted in war, appears on physical and virtual sites dedicated to Vietnam veterans.

As he takes on the assignment of mastering a new campus culture, Weiss has made frequent visits to Lafayette. He has also read through the Skillman and Gendebien histories of the College—which, he jokes, together are longer than a standard history of the Crusades. He’s laying the groundwork to lead the College through a comprehensive strategic-planning process.

“What I found very exciting and appealing about Lafayette is a sense of community, a commitment that everyone has to creating a learning environment that is productive and rewarding and comprehensive. And that’s something that I’ve been trying to do in my own way at Johns Hopkins. So I think those experiences that I’ve had here will translate rather well to Lafayette. I want to make sure that I’m respectful of the culture and the community. But at the same time, I will bring new ideas and new perspectives. I think the challenge is to manage that balance in a way that is productive and collegial. I’m not going to come in with lots of ideas that don’t fit well into that community. By the same token, I’m not looking to fit into a community that doesn’t need to move forward or change.”

One of the most important strategic issues facing the College in the next several years, Weiss says, will be “to develop a viable approach to our athletics program that is consistent with the mission of the College.” He calls himself a firm believer in a strong athletics program. At Hopkins, he’s helped oversee a bifurcated program—Division I lacrosse, Division III in other sports. Ideally, he says, the Patriot League would have been able to maintain its commitment to its basic principles—”presidential oversight of athletics, academic comparability of athletes and non-athletes, and no athletic scholarships.” But Lafayette is the only college in the league that doesn’t award athletic scholarships. “We are now,” says Weiss, “in a position that is, over the long term, probably untenable, which is to be the smallest school in the Patriot League, the only one not giving athletic scholarships, and trying to compete at the Division I level.” He doesn’t have predetermined answers, he says, but he does welcome sparking “a very careful and collegial process among students, faculty, administration, alumni, and trustees to talk about how athletics ought to be envisioned.”

Students organized an April reception to meet the new president.

Hopkins’ William Conley isn’t surprised that Weiss would place such an emphasis on the collegial process of change. Conley, who was hired by Weiss as dean of enrollment services, worked in Lafayette’s admissions office in the early 1980s. Weiss is not a maverick, he says, but he is “a bold thinker.” Just as he worked to transform the undergraduate experience at Hopkins, he is likely to challenge an ethos of risk-aversion at Lafayette, Conley says. Conley calls Lafayette “a sleeping leopard.” As he puts it, “Dan is going to figure out where Lafayette can make some bold decisions to differentiate itself from other liberal-arts colleges.”

For his part, Weiss says, “Lafayette is in many ways an absolutely wonderful place that need not be any different than it is. It has a lot going for it. But that isn’t what the leadership of the college aspires to. What I see is a platform to do more. Lafayette wants to be a place that embraces its history and tradition but that has stronger academic programs than it has today, that continues to challenge itself to increase the quality of the experience—not just the quality of what goes on in the classroom but the learning environment comprehensively. The difference between Lafayette and a lot of other places is it has the goods to do that: It has the resources, it has the commitment, it has the infrastructure. And it has had the leadership that now allows us to ask hard questions about how we can do better. The last 12 years under Arthur Rothkopf have been exceptional.”

Weiss says he expects to see Lafayette adopt a version of what, in the Hopkins context, is known as selective excellence. He’s especially attuned to the need to build up the arts and humanities. Nationally, colleges and universities have been concentrating resources in the sciences and technology. But with a targeted strategy, the arts and humanities too can be a source of “buzz,” areas of excitement and visibility, he says.

And so he sees challenge and an opportunity ahead. “It’s my sense that there’s a very strong egalitarian principle at work in everything that happens at Lafayette. Everybody is deserving. At some level that is a very appealing thing. But if we are going to go to the next level of academic excellence, we’re going to have to make investments in some things more aggressively than in other things. We’re going to have to be identified for a handful of academic programs that are the equal of any in the country.” Those programs, he says, are likely to make connections among disciplines, and they’re likely to build on core strengths. They may even exploit unrealized strengths, such as Lafayette’s proximity to New York and Philadelphia and the possibility of tapping into the intellectual energy of those two cities.

“The closer we get to excellence, the harder it is to do better,” he says. “The decisions that we’ll make in the next 10 years are going to be harder decisions than the ones we’ve had to make in the past, because we’re getting closer to that rarefied level.”