What Every College President Should Know About Mathematics

Abstract

Let me start with a very brief remark on the nature of the college presidency. The best characterization occurred to me somewhat accidentally when I was speaking to our California alumni during the primary races last spring. I found some remarkable similarities between the activities the political candidates were engaging in and and what I was doing. Therefore, I should like to characterize the college presidency as the unique job in which you first get elected to office and then spend the rest of your time running for office. It is a very peculiar multi-faceted job and it is not clear what kind of training is really good for a college president. But having a mathematician in such an office is a sufficiently rare event in the history of higher education that it might be worth considering whether there are ways in which being a mathematician is helpful to a college president. Obviously, there are a great many activities college presidents engage in where mathematics is totally irrelevant, but the opposite question is an interesting one. Therefore I will interpret the topic proposed for me by Professor J. L. Snell to mean Are there certain things about mathematics that all college presidents should know? I shall briefly mention some trivia and then go on to a few interesting examples from my own experience. Most people would say that it helps a college president to be able to read a financial statement. That is actually not as trivial as it sounds, because the purpose of most college financial statements is to meet a legal requirement, but to make sure that no one who reads the statement can find out what its contents mean. Secondly, it is good to be able to check the arithmetic in financial statements. I managed to find two errors in my first year as president, and I notice that this has had a salutory effect on the care with which these statements are prepared. But, more important is the fact that mathematicians are usually very good at explaining complicated mathematical things in fairly simple language to a non-mathematical audience.