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I remember that you always thought partisan politics was tough, but after being a college president, you thought academic politics was tougher.
It starts with the fact that higher education cherishes shared governance. The faculty really believes that they are the heart of the university. The students also think they are the heart. Administrators aren’t sure, but shared governance means that we got a totally different kind of institution. Former Secretary of State George Schultz put it very well. He served in private industry, in government and in higher education. When asked what’s the difference, he said, “In private enterprise you give an order and expect it to be carried out. In government, you give an order and hope that it will be carried out. And in higher education, you give no orders.” Evans is sworn in as governor for the first time in 1965. He was later named one of the top 10 governors of the 20th century in a University of Michigan study. Photo courtesy of Dan Evans.
Oh, sure. In issues that related to budget mostly, I was trying to ensure that there was substantial and continuing support of research in higher education.
The University of Washington has consistently done well on federal grants. Why?
Because it has a superb faculty.
These are all awarded on a competitive basis.
And so we are competing against Stanford and Harvard and Michigan and all of the fine universities in the country on every one of those grants. And we are just very good. … The faculty are willing to work together and create interdisciplinary groups.
You retired from the U.S. Senate. Two years later you were appointed to UW Board of Regents. Looking over your 12 years on the board, what would you say are your significant accomplishments?
The most important job of a board of regents (or a board of directors for a company or a nonprofit) is selecting leadership. You set policy, but you don’t run the place. In fact, boards that try to run organizations generally run into disaster.
We had, during my 12 years, two chances to select new presidents. I served in the last years of Bill Gerberding as president, and he was a superb president. … Frankly, we thought we’d done a good job in selecting Dick McCormick and he turned out not to be the right president for the University. It wasn’t that he was bad, but he ran into some problems and he lost the confidence of the Board of Regents.
We then went into a new search. We did the search twice because we weren’t quite satisfied at the end of the first one. At the end of the second search, Mark Emmert was selected. I have every expectation he will be a president in the mold of Charles Odegaard and Bill Gerberding. I hope he stays with the University the same length of time, and I am confident he will take the University to that next level.
 Evans speaks at the ceremony where the Graduate School of Public Affairs was named in his honor. Photo by Mary Levin. The next level above us now is to be in the half dozen best public universities and in the top 10 of all universities in the country. I think that that is very much achievable. The UW had its troubles when you were a regent. Football Coach Neuheisel was fired for participating in college basketball betting pools. The volunteer team physician for women’s softball was caught distributing drugs without a prescription. And the UW’s physician groups had to pay $35 million to settle billing fraud charges in Medicare and other programs.
We ran into problems. Each member of the Board of Regents was assigned different areas of the University to pay special attention to and mine happened to be medicine and athletics. And it was during this time that we had all of the extraordinary problems.
But it was a challenge that was very useful. I worked hard on the billing problems at the University. I still believe very strongly that the University was unduly penalized and that there was not sufficient understanding of both of the complexity and the difficulty of the billing process. The challenge from the U.S. attorney, I just think, was that they wanted a pelt on the wall rather than really what would have been appropriate under the circumstances. But we lived with what we had to do. We were under the kind of situation where it would have cost more, with much more difficulty and time spent, to take it all the way to court, even though I thought we were right.
On athletics, I think what happened is that athletics itself grew rapidly into the monster that it is today, nationally. It has become obsessed with big-time money. I think it’s out of control. Nationally, we need to rein in the amount of money spent on athletics. But Barbara Hedges, I think, did a good job as director of athletics. She created a whole new set of facilities. But the job finally got just too darn big. Web Special: Full text of interview between Gov. Dan Evans and Neil McReynolds
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