Page 219 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows
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THE LESSONS
individuals, at all levels, as possible and then must keep those conversations
going over the years so he or she doesn’t lose touch with changing attitudes.”
Secretary Connor taught Cotter the value of having weekly staff
meetings and creating a climate in which people felt comfortable bringing
up issues and challenges. The secretary used the meetings to inform people
across divisional lines and to reinforce priorities. “And if there needed to
be arbitration or mediation about some conflicts that were developing, the
secretary would be there and in a reasoned way try to find something
that would work best for the whole and hopefully for each individual
department too,” Cotter said.
The lessons Cotter learned during his White House Fellows tenure
would serve him well when he was tapped to be the president of Colby Col-
lege in 1979. Colby is a small private liberal arts college in Waterville, Maine,
part of a group of elite institutions sometimes referred to as the Little Ivies.
However, in spite of its distinguished history and rural charm, there was a
major problem on the Colby campus: The fraternities were out of control;
in fact, before Cotter arrived, there had been an incident in which drunken
fraternity members had thrown furniture, including a piano, out of a frat
house on Fraternity Row. There was a fire, and when the fire department
came to extinguish it, students disconnected the hoses. Unfortunately, that
was not an isolated incident; there were continuous problems. Female stu-
dents admitted that they were afraid to walk through Fraternity Row because
of the verbal—and occasionally physical—abuse they suffered there.
“The faculty was just outraged about this, and many members of the
board were outraged too,” Cotter explained. “So this was a hot issue that
spring before I arrived at Colby, and when I was asked for my opinion of
fraternities at an open forum when I first arrived on campus, my answer
was, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about fraternities. I went to a college
that didn’t have fraternities, and so I need to learn a lot about it before I’d
be able to answer your question.’” Cotter swiftly devised a process to deter-
mine what to do about the fraternity and sorority system, and for the next
two years he carried it out. “The fraternity and sorority system had existed
since the 1840s at Colby. Now we had major complaints about sexism, the
abuse of alcohol, the low grade-point averages, and the financial and the
physical conditions of the houses,” Cotter said. “Nobody had made out a
series of collegewide expectations, so I said that before we do anything else,
we’ve got to make our expectations clear and then see whether or not the
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