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Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Gary T. Rogers

Gary T. Rogers: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 - 2014

Interviews conducted by John Cummins in 2011

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Gary T. Rogers dated May 11, 2011. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Gary T. Rogers “Gary T. Rogers: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 – 2014” conducted by John Cummins in 2011, Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

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Table of Contents—T. GARY ROGERS

Interview 1: May 11, 2011

Audio File 1 1

Family background and early athletic experiences — Freshman year at Cal — Joining the crew team — Rowing — Teamwork and trust, in business and in the boat — Competition — Life lessons — Rogers’ college experience: balancing academics, crew, and other extracurricular activities — Rogers’ decision to attend Harvard Business School — Rogers’ All-University Athletic Award at Cal — “There’s no such thing as can’t; there’s only won’t.” — Moving to Cambridge, starting a family, meeting financial challenges — Jim Lemmon’s aphorisms— An attempt at putting together an Olympic trials crew team — Enticing Steve Gladstone with an offer of a new Cal boathouse — The California Rowing Club and the T. Gary Rogers Rowing Center — The Cal Crew Forever Fund — Changes in collegiate athletics — Demographics at the Harvard Business School — Funding athletics at public or private universities — Cal’s decision-making about priorities — Revenues for education in California — Bear Backers and Cal Sports — Cal’s relationship to donors — Investment performance of UC’s endowment — Fighting the effort to turn crew into a club sport — Funding for intercollegiate athletics — Title IX — Chancellor’s decision about cutting athletics — Sandy Barbour — Rogers’ donations to Cal crew — Mismanagement of Cal Crew Forever’s donation through insurance policies — John Wilton — Cutting sports and then restoring them — Perspective on alumni relations at Cal and at Harvard

Interview 2: August 5, 2011

Audio File 2 33

Steve Gladstone becomes Athletic Director after a search — Gladstone’s and Rogers’ meeting about the AD position — Department infrastructure —— Mark Stephens — The hiring of Jeff Tedford — The AD’s team — Gladstone’s decision to leave, and an unfulfilled promise to Mark Stephens — Chancellor Robert Birgeneau steps in — A new hiring committee — Steve Gladstone’s return to coaching crew — Harry Parker, Gladstone’s mentor — Tim McLaren, Mike Teti — Musical chairs in the world of crew — Olympic crew — Things fall apart— A failed fundraising effort — Gladstone’s hasty departure from the California Rowing Club —The beginnings of women’s crew at Cal and Rogers’ changing views about it — Rogers’ involvement on the High Performance Center’s subcommittee of the Olympic Committee — Title IX and discrepancies in funding of men’s and women’s crew teams — Mike Teti and the Cal program — Bernhard Stomporowski and the Cal Rowing Club — The fate of ten athletes Gladstone recruited before leaving Cal — Rogers’ role as a donor at many levels of crew — Bruce Snyder’s departure, salary issues, donors and university administration— Changes in donor involvement as state support for education

iv declines — Rogers and fundraising for Cal Crew Forever — The donor base for crew and other sports — Rogers’ $15 million donation to Cal crew — Sandy Barbour, Floti Mellis, and a strange response to a generous offer — Speculation about the impact of Title IX — Comparison of donor relations at UCB and Harvard Business School — Rogers’ interest in the quality of writing among MBAs — Partnerships and management of university endowments — Paul Wachter — The Swensen model of investment management — Faculty reductions at Berkeley — Poaching Cal faculty — Money — The 80/20 rule — “A chancellor is not a CEO.” — Views on the new Cal stadium — Managing seismic risk — Cost-benefit analysis — Spieker Plaza (never built) — More about the rate of return on Berkeley’s endowment — Foundations and the Regents — Cal’s poor business practices — Comparisons to the practices of other elite universities — Intercollegiate athletics — At Cal, “Athletic fundraising has been a joke.” — Craig Morton, Scott Biddy — The “pathetic” state of alumni fundraising at Berkeley — An outdated fundraising model — Steve Burch and Safeway, George Halvorson and Kaiser — Their expert advice not taken — Economic doldrums and confidence — Liberals and conservatives — The reunion of former chancellors — Financing excellence at Berkeley through tuition increases or other sources of revenue — The university as a place for new ideas — Politics, education, and economics — Optimism and persistence

[End of Interview]

Interview 1: May 11, 2011 Begin Audio File 1

01-00:00:01 Cummins: Okay, this is May 11, 2011. This is the first interview with Gary Rogers, who is currently doing an oral history with Vic Geraci on Dreyer’s Ice Cream. Principally, Gary was the founding owner of Dreyer’s, and all of that information is there, so these interviews will be dedicated to athletics, primarily. Thank you very much for agreeing to do this.

So, why don’t you begin by talking just about your own youth, your own interest in athletics and where it led you, and why it was important.

01-00:00:56 Rogers: Well, it’s really a story of serendipity. I largely grew up in Marin County, as the son of a mid-level engineer at the Pacific Telephone Company and a very traditional wife. I was the first of three boys, and I would characterize my high school days as being pretty geeky. I did go out for football; my father had been a football player and I was a third-string guard. Maybe in my entire football career of three years I saw thirty seconds of action. [laughing] I was the kid they put in when the game was either clearly won or clearly lost, for the last three plays, because I worked hard—but I wasn’t any good. And because my mother had been a tennis coach and a tennis aficionado in her youth at the high school level, I also tried out for the tennis team. And there again, I wasn’t any good.

So when I came to Cal I was following in my father’s footsteps. [He] had been an engineer at Cal. I was a typical freshman, I guess, scared of the academic load and all the stories that they told then, and probably still now, where you get together in that big room your first day at Cal and they tell you look to your left and look to your right—only one of you will be here on graduation day! I was quite taken with that. In those days we went down to what was still Harmon Gym to register, and it was literally manually going from table to table picking courses and activities.

So I went through that and I was leaving the gym, and out in one of those corridors as you left the gym was this little table, and a guy jumped up and introduced himself and asked me if I would be interested in joining the crew. And I didn’t know it at the time, but he had opposite his table a little tape on the wall that was at about six feet two, and so as freshman came by that broke that tape—and I don’t even think I really broke it, but I was close—he would recruit them. In those days that’s how the crew was recruited. And I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know if crew was sailing or water polo or something else. I didn’t have any idea what it was, and he started talking about rowing in boats. I had absolutely no interest.

01-00:03:47 Cummins: And who was this person?

01-00:03:48 Rogers: His name was John Halberg. He was the freshman coach in those days, and a nice guy but his pitch was not at all compelling to me. Just to get rid of him I gave him my name and my phone number and forgot about it. I had no interest at all, and I told him, “I’m not an athlete. I’m certainly not an athlete at the collegiate level. I’m an engineer and I have to make my grades, and thank you very much. I’m not interested in whatever crew is.” But he called me in my dorm that night, and again I just put him off. It was a nuisance. He called me the next night, and again I put him off. I just had no interest.

The third night—this is where serendipity changed my life—I got a call from a guy by the name of Jim Lemmon, who was to become a major mentor for me, but I certainly didn’t know it at the time. Jim Lemmon had a personality that was bigger than all outdoors, and you did not say no to Jim Lemmon. I would learn that lesson many times in future years. And so he started to recruit me for crew. Why they worked so hard on someone like me I have no idea; they were obviously going down a phone list of other people. But he was the varsity coach and he convinced me to show up at the corner of Harmon Gym the next day and get on a bus which would take me down to the boathouse. I was just afraid to say, “No, I really don’t want to do it.” I told him I would, so I did. And my life has never been the same since.

I look back now from that moment, and I think rowing on the crew at Cal was far and away the most important thing I did at Cal. We are sitting here today in an office that, had I not rowed on the crew, I would never have. But it’s on the Oakland Estuary, it overlooks the very body of water where I rowed thousands of miles, and we are overlooking the starting line of the old race course. I still get butterflies when I look out my window, because I remember so many times lining up on that course to row three miles. And so many of the lessons that have served me well in the ensuing fifty years, I can trace back to lessons I learned from Jim Lemmon and through the experience of being on that crew.

And today I find myself in a role where I’m mentoring lots of people, giving lectures on lessons learned in life. For example, I’ve been entrepreneur-in- residence at the Harvard Business School this last year. I’m meeting with lots of students there, I’m teaching classes, giving lectures, hosting lunches. And of course what I’m talking about is in a business context, but many of the lessons I’m citing that stood me so well in business were lessons that I can trace back to my time on the crew. I’m serious—it was so important to me.

01-00:07:44 Cummins: Can you, talk about what that experience was like? So you go down the first day.

01-00:07:50 Rogers: I go down the first day, they put me in a barge, which was a boat that was about eight feet wide, a flat-bottomed scow with oarlocks fitted on both sides

of it, so it was very stable. They could put in two rows of rookie oarsmen and they could teach you the fundamentals of rowing. People don’t realize when you’re in a shell, in a collegiate racing shell, it’s about fifteen inches wide between the gunnels and it’s sixty-two feet long—and it’s like rowing a log. It’s very, very tippy. If it weren’t for the oars it would tip over instantly. You have eight oarsmen plus a coxswain in that boat, and it’s about the most unstable thing known to man, so it takes an enormous amount of skill for eight people to row together and to keep that shell moving smoothly in the right direction. You can’t just jump in and start doing it, so the way they would bridge that training period in those days was to put beginners like me in this big scow. And I forget how many weeks I was in the scow before they let me get into a shell.

01-00:09:22 Cummins: But you were converted right away? You changed your mind?

01-00:09:25 Rogers: Well, yes, it appealed to me—I needed physical activity of some kind, probably more than I realized. But it released something in me that—it must have been the endorphins—but it’s hard work, first of all.

01-00:09:39 Cummins: Yeah.

01-00:09:41 Rogers: And just the value of the workout, physically, I think was good. I gradually found myself getting in shape. The ultimate [thing], at the end of this process, these athletes—it’s amazing. I don’t know what my percentages were, but I know today the athletes on the crew—it’s not unusual to have 6 percent body fat. You watch these athletes row, what they call a piece, for typically six minutes, just going flat out, working right at the threshold of real pain. The coach will say, “weigh enough,” which is the signal to stop, and they’ll take two or three deep breaths and they’ll be ready to go again. Their recovery time, their cardiovascular system, their level of physical ability is just stunning to watch. I don’t know that I ever reached that level that these athletes have today, but certainly for that era we too were extremely fit. I remember I could do thirty pull-ups at the end of my time in crew, and there aren’t very many people who can do thirty pull-ups. That’s just an indicator of how strong you get and how fit you get.

But here was this geeky kid, engineer, sort of unsure of himself, worried about making his grades, who came to love this sport—and I really threw myself into it. I was inspired by the other athletes on the team, I was drawn to it, started to get better at it. Every day was a process of improvement, which I liked. I think just in that there is a very simple metaphor for life. Life is about constant improvement. Building a business is about constant improvement. And son of a gun, I wound up the freshman stroke. In crew, you start numbering people from the bow, or the front of the boat, so the bowman is the

number one man, the number eight man is called the stroke, and because you’re facing backwards, this guy in the back of the boat, or the stroke, is the guy who sets the pace; everybody follows him. He faces the coxswain, so the coxswain’s looking forward, the stroke and all the other oarsmen are looking backwards, but everybody takes their pace from the stroke. So the stroke is a very important position, and the stroke and the coxswain together will decide what the stroke should be, but the stroke is the one, of course, who sets it.

So I wound up stroking the freshman crew, and I can’t remember what our record was. I don’t think we were champions. But just to move from where I had been to being the stroke of a collegiate freshman team was such an accomplishment for me.

01-00:13:00 Cummins: Absolutely.

01-00:13:01 Rogers: And I just absolutely thrived in that.

01-00:13:08 Cummins: What was the practice like in those days?

01-00:13:11 Rogers: Well, we practiced every afternoon, every weekday in the afternoon. We’d come down to the boathouse around four o’clock and we’d row, maybe the workout would be for two hours, but you would row ten or twelve miles on a weekday. And then on Saturdays you typically would work out in the morning and you’d row fifteen or more miles. There were times when—from the boathouse here on the Oakland Estuary it’s probably six miles to the mouth of the estuary, and then you would row from there out to the Bay Bridge. I remember looking straight up at the Bay Bridge many times, and then turn around and come back. So it’s a long way to row a boat.

01-00:13:59 Cummins: Amazing. I’ll say, I’ll say.

01-00:14:01 Rogers: But you begin to learn lessons. As I reflect back, these are lessons for life. I couldn’t be explicit about this then but they’re very clear to me now. It’s a very unique environment. It’s not obvious to anyone who hasn’t been involved in the sport, but let me just rattle some of these off. It is hard work, and therefore you have to give your all to it. To be in that boat, either in a workout or in a race and be pulling your guts out, makes no sense unless you have total confidence that everybody else in that boat is doing the same thing. You’re really wasting your time if you’re working that hard and you don’t believe that the others are working that hard too. So you tend to—you learn to develop this total trust in your teammates, because otherwise it doesn’t make any sense, and there’s a huge lesson in that.

When I give these lectures on building a business, my number one criteria is be very, very careful who you put on the team in the first place. We call it hire smart. Be sure that you’re hiring people from the top 20 percent of all qualified applicants for any job. And then trust them totally. That was our code at Dreyer’s. Once you got in the front door we wanted you to feel, and we treated you as if you were, totally trusted. We didn’t have any policies— we gave you a business card that said, “John Cummins, Salesman,” or whatever you were, and you turned it over and it would say, “Company policy: Use your own best judgment at all times.” That was it!

01-00:16:08 Cummins: That was it, yeah.

01-00:16:10 Rogers: And that only works if, like on the crew, you have people who are worthy of that trust. But what you find in crew is that there’s no room for flakes. Anybody who gets put in this environment who isn’t willing to commit totally to it, or who isn’t trustworthy, or who isn’t going to give it his all, doesn’t last. You just can’t—there’s no way you can fake it. Everybody in the boat can tell after a while. You can tell if somebody’s not quite putting the hook in that oar that everybody else is, and there’s no reason to do it unless you’re giving it everything. So it washes out the flakes pretty quickly. So you wind up with a team that meets that standard I just talked about and you just develop a bond, and you wind up trusting them totally and therefore being willing to put what the sport requires into it yourself. So that’s just one of the lessons.

Another very similar lesson that I think you learn uniquely in crew, and there may be other sports that one could draw these same lessons from—but you’d have to be an idiot to do what crew requires. We started rowing in September when the fall semester started and we rowed every day. We would often get Sunday off, but we’d row six days a week, sometimes twice on Saturday, through these workouts that I’ve described, every day until early April before we had our first race. Thousands of miles! Now why would you do that? You can’t do it just for the races. We all wanted to win the races and we all wanted to be Pacific Coast champions or national champions, and Cal has a history of doing that. But I don’t care who you are; you aren’t going to row from September to April if all you care about is the races.

But what you come to learn is that the essence of this sport is in the daily workout, and this is another lesson for life. A typical workout is where you row like I’ve described, but the coach will have boated, let’s say, two boats of varsity oarsmen, or varsity and junior varsity or whatever, and he’ll row a piece. He’ll have the crew row for six minutes. And maybe—let’s call it the varsity or the number one boat that day is two lengths ahead of the other boat at the end of six minutes. The coach will say all right, pull the boats together and change the four men, so on the water John takes Gary’s seat and Gary takes John’s seat, and then you row another six minutes. Now you find out—

is John making the boat go faster than Gary? Or is Gary making the boat go faster than John? And it’s not as simple as who is the stronger guy. They have these machines now called ergometers, so you can read someone’s ability to put work on an oar, but all of that has to go through many, many other important factors like: what do those two athletes weigh? You’re hauling that weight down the racecourse, so that the guy that weighs 240 pounds and can just pull like crazy may make the boat go slower than some guy that’s 180 who can’t pull quite as hard but for his weight can make the boat go faster.

And then you take a picture or video of a really good crew and you watch the precision—they’re rowing at thirty-five strokes a minute, which is boom, boom, boom, boom, and you watch those oars go into the water. In the old days we used to have these films that were sixteen frames per second and you can watch frame by frame, and all the oars in that boat they’re a third covered, they’re two-thirds covered, they’re fully covered all in a third of a second. It’s just so precise. The coordination—you watch the neck of the man in front of you, who of course is actually behind you in terms of the boat, but you learn to take signals just from the twitches in the neck. You get to the point where you’re so connected that you can row with that level of precision. As we were often taught, the key is to not slow the boat down, so you’ve got to be right there with it or you can’t—if you’re dragging your oar in the water or you’re imprecise in getting the oar in and out of the water, all those things make a huge difference.

So anyway, every day is combat. You’re teammates, you love each other, you trust each other. But at the same time, you want to be in the boat. You don’t want the other guy to be in the boat at the end of the day.

01-00:21:35 Cummins: Yeah, it’s the competition.

01-00:21:38 Rogers: So, you come to the workout because you love that opportunity to show that you’re stronger or you’re faster or you’re better than the other guy. And the coach plays to that, so every workout becomes a real day in the arena, if you will. And the people who are good in this sport love that! Okay? So the lesson in that for me, and this is such an important lesson in life, for me—I mean for me—is that the joy of life comes from the struggle. We all have these long- term goals. You have to have them right? But if you achieve a goal after working towards it for three years or four years or whatever, you celebrate, you have a bottle of champagne, and then you set another goal.

01-00:22:26 Cummins: Another one.

01-00:22:26 Rogers: And that’s a hell of a way to spend your life really, struggling towards these long-term goals and then having a brief celebration and going on with another

one. Life is much better if you learn to celebrate or take joy in the little daily wins, or in being challenged. I remember at Dreyer’s people would come to me sometimes and say, “You know, I’m so frustrated. I can’t sell this account,” or, “This machine in the factory—we just can’t get it to function properly.” And I would say, just be glad that the challenges you face are worthy of your talents and your experience. Think how dull life would be if it were the same all of the time.

Almost every night now I take a hot tub before I go to bed. I sit in that hot tub, I’m only in it for five or ten minutes, and I do two things. I say to myself: How did I spend this day? I’m never going to get it again and there are no mulligans in life. So this day is over, but how did I spend it? If I were to do it again would I do it differently? Did I get the most out of it? And then I ask myself: What am I going to do tomorrow? What am I going to do? It isn’t only what am I going to accomplish, but what’s the quality of tomorrow going to be? Am I going to be worthy of this wonderful thing called a day? And the next night I take another hot tub and I ask myself: Well, how did I do?

And it seems kind of anal, but I’ll tell you, it came from crew. It’s consistent with what I was just describing, and it has brought so much joy to my life, to approach it like that, that way. Literally approach it a day at a time, be very systematic about it, and ask yourself if you’re getting the most—life goes by so fast. I’m about to be seventy and I can’t believe how fast it’s gone by. But I can also say that every decade of my life has gotten better and more enjoyable than the one before

01-00:24:45 Cummins: It’s interesting, Tien, Chancellor Tien, did the same thing that you just described at the beginning of every day. He got up, religiously, at the same time every day, woke up—he didn’t need an alarm—that was the first question on his mind. What do I have scheduled for today and why am I doing it? And then at the end of the day—was I right or was I wrong? What would I change about this day so I don’t make that mistake again? Was it—I don’t need that meeting? Something like that, that’s what he did. It’s very interesting.

01-00:25:23 Rogers: Yeah, I’ll tell you what, it really brings a different way of thinking about your life. I really believe in that, and I think it yields a much better approach to so many things that we’re faced with now, sort of a sense of perspective. Anyway, I found it to be important, but it all started with crew.

01-00:25:46 Cummins: Right. Do you want to spend a little more time talking about the lessons? Or do you want to come back to that?

01-00:25:51 Rogers: We can come back.

01-00:25:51 Cummins: Okay.

01-00:25:52 Rogers: I’m going to just go on with the story.

01-00:25:56 Cummins: It would be good for you to comment too on the academic side, as you’re doing all of this work with crew too.

01-00:26:03 Rogers: Well, what I found was, it’s the old aphorism that if you want something done ask somebody busy to do it, and partly because of crew I found myself becoming involved in other activities. The engineering curriculum was very challenging to me. I remember my first calculus class I was scared stiff. The Cal professor stood up and he had a very heavy accent, but he said, “I’m going to assume that everybody in this room understands what an integral is.” And I had no idea, I had never heard of an integral or what a function was. He also said, “I’m going to assume you understand what a function is.” I had no idea, so I had to run out, read up, and do the best I could to bring myself up to the speed of my classmates. I had not been well prepared in my high school for that.

And there were a lot of other challenges academically. But somehow I managed to overcome those struggles and I did well academically. I graduated as what they call a Tau Beta Pi; it’s sort of a Phi Beta Kappa for engineers. But I think more importantly I got into the whole collegiate life. I joined a fraternity in my sophomore year, I had an active social life, I belonged to all kinds of groups. One thing that’s interesting is I found myself, for some reason, on the Chancellor’s Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics. Maybe my coach nominated me to that, I can’t remember.

01-00:28:02 Cummins: And the chancellor then was?

01-00:28:03 Rogers: The chancellor was Roger Heyns.

01-00:28:05 Cummins: Roger Heyns.

01-00:28:06 Rogers: And the chairman of the committee was Walter Haas—

01-00:28:10 Cummins: Interesting.

01-00:28:11 Rogers: —at that time chairman of Levi Strauss. And so I got to know Wally really well. Years later, after I had graduated and I was in the army, there was a

reunion or a party around Christmastime of a bunch of my crew buddies here in Berkeley. At that time I was living in Marin and I was stationed actually on top of Mt. Tamalpais in the army. But I came back for this event, and the guy who was probably the best oarsman in my class, a guy by the name of Steve Brandt, who had been a national champion oarsman at Cal and also a fellow engineer, had gone on to the Harvard Business School. The Harvard Business School was something that had never even crossed my mind. It just was out of the question for me. My parents thought going on to graduate school was just a waste of time. I was trained to think that once I graduated from college I was going to get a job. I had gone in the service, but there wasn’t going to be any graduate school for me. Certainly my family wasn’t going to support me with any further education, and anytime that subject came up it was discouraged— it was considered putting off life.

01-00:29:43 Cummins: We should put a year in here, on the tape, so that we know right where we are.

01-00:29:47 Rogers: Well, that year would be—the time we’re talking about here would be 1965.

01-00:29:55 Cummins: Okay, fine. So you came to Cal—

01-00:29:57 Rogers: I graduated from Cal in February of ’64. I had to take an extra semester because the labs in engineering were not compatible with the workout schedule. So I took an extra semester, graduated, went right in the army. I think it was that fall when we had this party I’m describing. Maybe it was the fall of ’64. Anyway, Steve Brandt was there and we were down at the Kingfish.

01-00:30:28 Cummins: Yes, the famous Kingfish. [laughing]

01-00:30:30 Rogers: The famous Kingfish. And we all had too much to drink. Late in the night Steve Brandt, who was a good friend of mine and a fellow engineer and a fellow oarsman—we knew each other well and he was huge, he was six foot seven, big, big guy—got me in the corner and he said, “Rogers, if you don’t promise me right now that you’re going to apply to the Harvard Business School I’m going to kick you right in the nuts.”

That was the first time that I thought about the Harvard Business School, and obviously he had gone on to the Harvard Business School. He had found it very challenging and wonderful and he thought I would enjoy it, so that was his way of encouraging me to apply. [laughing] So I had a lot of time in the army, so I got an application and I filled it out and applied. I didn’t think in my wildest dreams I’d be accepted. But the reason I’m telling you this story is that I needed someone to get a letter of recommendation, so I went to my

friend Wally Haas. And so here the then Chairman of Levi Strauss wrote the letter that I’m sure got me into the Harvard Business School. And forty years later I wound up as Chairman of Levi Strauss. You talk about serendipity in life—it’s just so amazing how things happen.

But, so anyway, I was very active at Cal. I did well academically. I was a pretty good oarsman; I wasn’t a star, but for some reason in my senior year, and again I think it was because Jim Lemmon put my name into the hat, for some reason I was selected as the All-University Athlete for that year, for the entire Berkeley campus, which was quite an honor if you think about all the athletes.

01-00:32:36 Cummins: I’ll say.

01-00:32:36 Rogers: And then I remember there was then a higher level, which was all the UC campuses, every campus had nominated an athlete as All-University Athlete. We were down at the UCLA game, in the Coliseum down there. I remember being down on the field with C.K. Yang, the great decathlete, and he had just gotten back from the Olympics or something so he got the big crown. But anyway just, for this kid, a third-string high school guard who’d never played to be honored like that, it was just such a transformation for me. And it had implications for my confidence and my physical being and my whole philosophy in life, and it all came from that strange story that I told you about being convinced to try out this sport that I didn’t even know what it was. And as I say, it’s continued to today in terms of how I’ve chosen to live my life.

01-00:34:01 Cummins: Right, terrific. So do you want to go then—do you want to say anything more about your—and you can always come back to this, so you may have other ideas later and we can get them at that point. But do you want to stay with this for a little while? Or do you want to move on then and talk about whether you continued rowing, for example, how you reconnected with Cal, wherever you want to go with it.

01-00:34:28 Rogers: Well, let me just touch on a couple more lessons learned since we’ve kind of gotten into that, and then I’ll come back to, more specifically, my ongoing involvement with the Cal crew.

One more thing I learned from crew that has proven so valuable for me—Jim Lemmon had a great saying which was, “There’s no such thing as can’t; there’s only won’t.” And that motto, if it’s a motto, or that wisdom has gone through my head so many times in life when I’ve confronted almost impossible situations, and where most of my friends and family, wife, anybody rational, was saying, “Gary, you know you’re at the end of the rope.

Give it up.” And I would hear Jim Lemmon say, “There’s no such thing as can’t; there’s only won’t.”

And some way, somehow, I pulled the coals out of the fire, and one quick example of that is when I went to the Harvard Business School. Again, my family wasn’t going to support me financially and my dad wouldn’t even fill out the forms that were required by Harvard for financial aid. Not because he was nasty, just because as he wrote on the form, he said, “Gary’s married and on his own and my financial affairs are no longer relevant.” That was the way my dad felt. It was honest.

01-00:36:07 Cummins: Yeah.

01-00:36:07 Rogers: But Harvard’s reaction was well, if the family won’t even fill out the forms we’re not going to process the application. So I had no chance for financial aid at Harvard. My wife Cab said, “Hey, no problem. I’ll work as a teacher.” She had her California teacher’s credential and we thought that would be fine. So we moved. We were so naïve, we moved back to Massachusetts and of course Massachusetts doesn’t honor a California teacher’s credential, you have to have a Massachusetts teacher’s credential, all right? And then before we knew it, son of a gun, Cab got pregnant and she had a very tough pregnancy. She was very sick, so she couldn’t work.

So here we were, I think we had $2,500 or $3,000 dollars that we’d saved up in the bank, and it was mostly money that she had brought to the marriage. I hadn’t saved any money from my time in the army, $250 dollars a month or whatever we got paid. It just wasn’t clear how I was going to be able to stay in school at all. The tuition was, even in those days, was $2,000 a semester. So, the time was growing short. Literally, Cab and I, when the man would come to collect for the heating oil—they’d fill up a tank in the basement of our little apartment house and he’d come to collect, twenty dollars or whatever it was. Cab and I would hear the noise in the basement and we’d go hide in the closet because we didn’t have the twenty dollars to pay him. And it was, no kidding, that close. So, every rational bone in my body said, “Gary, you know there’s no answer to this, you’re going to have to drop out and maybe come back at a later time or something.” The school was so intense that you couldn’t possibly work and stay in school. That wasn’t practical. So I just kept hearing those words of Jim Lemmon ringing in my head. I knew there was an answer to my dilemma and I just hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

I would get the Wall Street Journal in the morning at about five thirty, on my porch, and I dreamed up this idea for trading over-the-counter stocks that had doubled their earnings over the prior year and that met certain tests. So I’d look at the paper—in those days they would report all the earnings reports and I’d look at just over-the-counter stocks, thinking that would they be less well

known and maybe there’d be more news value in a good earnings report like that. And then I’d put the stocks through a screen. In those days I had a terminal in my home that connected to the General Electric time-sharing service, which today you’d call cloud computing. It’s amazing the way things come around. Anyway, I put these things through this model and it would screen out the obvious—if a company earned $1,000 this year and $500 dollars last year it would be thrown out, that kind of thing. And then if a stock got through the screen I would call my broker in Boston, Merrill Lynch Boston, and we’d buy $300 worth or $500 worth and we would automatically sell those stocks two weeks later. So I would have a portfolio of six or eight stocks and we would constantly turn it over. Son of a gun—it was amazing! I started to make money hand over fist. We were making 10 percent a week, which is pretty good! And I graduated from Harvard with all my bills paid and about $50,000 in the bank.

01-00:40:11 Cummins: Amazing.

01-00:40:12 Rogers: And if it hadn’t been for that training, that philosophy—there’s no such thing as can’t, Gary, there’s only won’t—I would have given up. I could tell you a bunch of other stories, building Dreyer’s. There was just no way we were going to succeed in New York City, no way, and yet we overcame all the obstacles and we did. So there are just—you see over here on the wall something called the Jim Lemmon Litany. It’s a calligraphied—

01-00:40:49 Cummins: Oh yes, right there.

01-00:40:51 Rogers: —plaque, that when Jim Lemmon retired we gave him one and I had a copy made for myself. And the aphorisms on that plaque are just a great way to live your life. Some of them are pretty simple—races are not won on race day. It’s really true and it’s consistent with what we’re saying in all this.

01-00:41:17 Cummins: Yes.

01-00:41:20 Rogers: If you put everything you have on the oar—at the finish line you can look anybody in the eye, whether you beat them or not. It’s just a very well- integrated philosophy that has really served me well.

Okay, so what about the ongoing involvement with crew? When I graduated from Cal there were in the Bay Area probably twenty postgraduate crew guys or oarsmen—more than half from Cal, but others from Stanford, from Washington, actually from the East Coast; Harvard, Cornell which was a crew power in those days—that were interested in rowing in the Olympic trials, and this was an Olympic year, 1964. So in the spring of ’64 we put together a

group of about twenty guys with the goal of entering an eight-oared shell in the Olympic trials, which were held in May or June of that year.

And these were all very experienced—of those twenty oarsmen I remember twelve were national champions at least one year, so it was a very high-caliber group. And three of us were in the service; two guys in the navy and I was in the army, but other people had jobs or they were in graduate school or whatever. We were trying to row twice a day. We would literally row at Stanford at five thirty in the morning and we would row at Cal at five thirty in the afternoon. And it sounded great and it was necessary to be competitive.

01-00:43:21 Cummins: Of course.

01-00:43:22 Rogers: But there was no way we could do it. First of all, we weren’t able to row out of the Stanford University boathouse and we weren’t able to row out of the Cal boathouse, so we had to find a place. We used the water that those crews used, but we needed to have our own equipment and we weren’t affiliated with those college crews anymore.

So here on the estuary we got an electrical contractor to let us hang a used shell from the ceiling of his shop, and we would wade this thing into the water. There was no dock, there was no launch, we didn’t have a coach. It was just so pathetic in terms of being a really well-structured program. But gosh we tried. These were all good guys and they were all committed to the effort, but one by one they just started falling by the wayside. They just couldn’t do it; we had no money, no support, no infrastructure, like I say, no coach. We’d have people come down and coach us sporadically as they had time to do it, but they didn’t have a launch to follow the crew. We didn’t have a buoyed course, we just—

01-00:44:37 Cummins: Tough.

01-00:44:38 Rogers: —and we were begging and borrowing to even get shells to row in. So, long story short, it just fell apart slowly. People started falling by the wayside. At the end there were four of us, three of whom were pretty good college oarsmen and one guy who I think had rowed one semester in college but was a level below. So no matter how we rigged the boat it just wouldn’t work. He was a good guy. I won’t say his name, but he was a good guy and we stuck with it and we entered this four without coxswain into the Olympic trials in 1964. When we entered that Olympic trial we had never rowed a buoyed course. A buoyed course is about, I don’t know, twenty feet across, and you have to be able to steer that boat straight. So in a four without cox the way this boat was rigged the two-man had to steer with his feet. The footboards for that seat were on a swivel that was connected to the rudder at the rear of the

boat, and as the boat went down the course you had to steer it, but you were facing backwards.

01-00:45:58 Cummins: Yeah, I was going to say—

01-00:46:00 Rogers: So you had to take your line off the buoys as they appeared behind you, and we were rowing in a stiff crosswind. Well, I was the two-man, so I—

01-00:46:10 Cummins: Oh, you had to do that?

01-00:46:11 Rogers: —so I was steering. And I’ll tell you, we probably hit five buoys going down the course.

01-00:46:18 Cummins: Oh did you? Oh man is that tough.

01-00:46:20 Rogers: So we didn’t win, but you know, son of a gun, we finished. We gave it our best and I’m proud of that. But coming off that experience I said to myself, “Gary, if you are ever in a position to do so you are going to make it better for the next generation of oarsmen.” So that was really what was behind when we built the boathouse here.

01-00:46:50 Cummins: So talk about—how many years passed between—again, just to keep track chronologically.

01-00:46:58 Rogers: Well, golly, maybe twenty-five years later together with Martin McNair—I went to the 1994 Olympics and met Steve Gladstone there. Steve was a pretty good friend of Martin’s and mine, having been the coach at Cal up and through 1976. He’d gone off and been very successful at Brown in between, but Martin and I were bound and determined to get him to come back to Cal because we thought he was the best collegiate coach in the country. So we ran into Gladstone at the ’94 Olympics, and in some rash moment I said to Steve, “Look, if you’ll come back to Cal I promise you we will build a new boathouse.”

01-00:47:58 Cummins: Some rash moment! [laughing] Yeah, right.

01-00:48:00 Rogers: So he came back, and he was never explicit about demanding that, but we had an obligation to him. And so over a period of a number of years, it didn’t happen instantly, but we were able to raise the money to build a new boathouse. But truth be told most of the money was mine. It was an $8-million

boathouse, and I put up about $6 million of the $8 million, so they put my name on the front of it, so it’s the T. Gary Rogers Rowing Center down here.

As part of that new complex we took the old Ky Ebright Boathouse, which was the boathouse that we had rowed out of that had been there for many, many years, and we turned it sideways and put it adjacent to the new boathouse, but with the idea that it would house a club, which we called the California Rowing Club, so that postgraduate oarsmen who wanted a place to row would have a club to row out of. And in fact now that’s a functioning club down here and it works in support of the Olympic team. The U.S. team rows primarily in an Olympic training center down in San Diego but has a lot of clinics and what they call camps. They have people working here out of the California Rowing Club all the time.

01-00:49:34 Cummins: Interesting.

01-00:49:35 Rogers: And so it has supplied that need that really wasn’t there in my day, so I feel really good about that. We’re just getting started. Over time it will, I think, be a much more powerful force in US rowing.

So in addition to that I’ve just stayed involved because I really feel that if other young men can have the experience that I had when I went through Cal, the experience that I’ve just described—that’s something very much worth supporting. And so I have felt good about being the largest, benefactor of that program. In addition to helping build the boathouse, as I’ve described, I’ve led much of the financially oriented activities of Cal crew since I graduated. Way back in the eighties we founded something called Cal Crew Forever, which was an attempt to get an endowment going.

01-00:50:52 Cummins: Right.

01-00:50:52 Rogers: There were a couple of very small endowments that had been set up through the years, less than a million dollars in total. We started something called the Cal Crew Forever Fund and that endowment today is about $6 million of the total endowment for Cal crew of about $9 million, so that’s a fairly substantial endowment.

01-00:51:24 Cummins: Absolutely.

01-00:51:25 Rogers: And again, over half of those endowment monies are monies that I’ve contributed. Even though I might be willing to do even more, I have always said to the coaches and to the Friends of Cal Crew, the support group that I think it’s really important that I not do more than 50 percent.

01-00:51:54 Cummins: Yeah, that lets everybody else off the hook, huh?

01-00:51:56 Rogers: Well, it’s sort of a matching concept, but if somebody else puts in a dollar I’ll match it, okay? And even when sometimes I’m inclined, you know some team needs to go to Henley or they need a new boat or whatever, they will naturally come to me and I’m always sympathetic to that, but I usually say, “Look, I’ll put up half the money but the community has got to contribute,” because we need to have an ongoing support group that is broader than just a few individuals.

Cummins: Now the crew, as a sport, has changed dramatically since the time you were a student at Cal.

01-00:52:38 Rogers: Sure, like all sports now.

01-00:52:39 Cummins: Yes, exactly. And so do you want to talk a little bit about that and whether a student coming into Cal could even have the kind of experience that you had, for example?

01-00:52:55 Rogers: The sport has changed, as all sports have. In my day we didn’t have scholarships and we had almost no international athletes.

01-00:53:04 Cummins: Right.

01-00:53:05 Rogers: And those may be the two biggest changes. Today, of the squad of fifty oarsmen on the Cal team, about ten have what are really partial scholarships, so there is some financial support for the team but it’s still pretty modest compared to a sport like football.

01-00:53:30 Cummins: Sure, sure.

01-00:53:33 Rogers: And secondly, there has been a component of international oarsmen, people who have gotten experience in Europe or Australia, typically, who complement the Americans who are on the team. Some have been critical of that; I happen to be a big supporter of that. Having gotten to know many of these people, I’m a big believer that the world is flat and that it’s really good for everybody to have a level playing field. And if there are people who qualify for Cal academically who happen to come from Croatia or Australia, can compete for this sport that we’ve been describing and who are truly amateur athletes like we’ve been talking about, they share the values and are willing to put in the work.

The current president of the Friends of Cal Crew is a fellow by the name of Andreja Stevanovic, who came from Serbia, and he stroked the varsity crew back in 1999. I’ve gotten to know him well. He’s just a wonderful person. He came here, had very few English skills but certainly had the intelligence, eventually wound up coming to Cal as an engineer, was very close to the top of his class, captain of the crew, stroke of the crew, went on to become a teaching assistant at Cal, has joined an engineering firm and is moving up very quickly. He’s just a huge success story.

So, I don’t begrudge—these aren’t professional athletes that somebody’s going to hire to come row for Cal. And today, of the fifty oarsmen that are on the squad, I don’t know exactly but there are less than ten international athletes, so forty of these athletes are American farm boys or what they’ve always been. The other difference is that most of them, not all of them, but most of them have had some rowing experience. Rowing has become so popular that there are many schools, high schools, prep schools around the country where people have the opportunity to row in high school, so many people are coming to university with rowing experience.

But still, crew is one of those sports where you can come in as a walk-on, and every single team we have here has a significant component, maybe 25 percent of the team, who didn’t row before they came to college, so the opportunity is still there. It’s more competitive; like every other sport, the times have gotten faster. When we rowed, a good time for 2,000 meters, which is the standard race distance now, about a mile and a quarter, was about six minutes. Cal crew rowed 5:23 when they won the IRA back in 1999, which is the course record back in Cherry Hill, where they hold the national championship, but 5:23 from six minutes—that’s a big change.

01-00:57:31 Cummins: Absolutely.

01-00:57:32 Rogers: But the boats are lighter, the oars are lighter, the athletes are fitter—there’s all kinds of things that have contributed to that.

01-00:57:39 Cummins: You know it’s interesting, on this issue of globalization—that in a way that’s what the university is going through as a whole, it seems to me right now, because of the financial crunch. In other words, they’re relying now more on out-of-state, international students, which again is not a bad thing.

01-00:58:06 Rogers: Oh no.

01-00:58:07 Cummins: So it’s an indicator of a changing world, in a way, that maybe athletics presaged.

01-00:58:13 Rogers: I think the University of California is behind the power curve on that. I’ve been very involved in Harvard. Like I said, I’m entrepreneur-in-residence at the business school. When I went through that business school we had a smattering of international students. Maybe in my section of a hundred or so students there were three that would be international or foreign-born let’s say, and there were four or five women. Today, one-third of the Harvard Business School is foreign-born; one third! And one-third are female.

They accept one out of every eleven applicants at the Harvard Business School today. But if you happen to be a white male American who’s applying from Wall Street, your chances are one in forty; one in forty!

01-00:59:12 Cummins: Amazing.

01-00:59:13 Rogers: [laughing] Okay? And people don’t apply if they’re not pretty good.

01-00:59:17 Cummins: Yes.

01-00:59:18 Rogers: It’s self-selecting to some extent, but it has gotten so competitive. But what you just said is right. We can’t close our eyes to the fact that we live in one world, and as the pie gets bigger it’s better for all of us, and we shouldn’t feel competitive about it, we ought to play into it, and I think some schools really are.

01-00:59:48 Cummins: Yeah, it’s an interesting time, because the pushback on the admissions issue is well, this is “a state-run university.”

01-01:00:01 Rogers: Yeah, state-run, but it’s not state funded anymore.

01-01:00:02 Cummins: Yeah, exactly, it’s so fundamentally shifted.

01-01:00:07 Rogers: But what a strange place, John, because people still think of it as a state university. It’s still the University of California but the state funding is less, as you know, less than 20 percent.

01-01:00:20 Cummins: Yes.

01-01:00:22 Rogers: And yet the rules that were in place when it was 60 percent state-funded are still there, and the reason is they’re still dancing to the tune of the state

legislature, and all that has to change! You can’t continue to control and run an institution that you’re only funding with 18 or 19 percent.

01-01:00:43 Cummins: Exactly.

01-01:00:44 Rogers: And like I say, other universities, both private and public, I think are ahead of us in terms of recognizing that there’s a new reality and we can’t play by the old rules, especially when the funding model is so different.

01-01:01:03 Cummins: Well, it’s interesting—we can talk a little bit about this, maybe not this interview.

01-01:01:10 Rogers: Okay.

01-01:01:10 Cummins: Or we can, but there’s paper that I can send you by Steve Weiner. You probably don’t remember him. He was an associate dean of the School of Public Policy, he was acting dean of [Graduate School of] Education at one point, then he was the provost at Mills. He was also the director of the accrediting association, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

And the paper essentially says that we should literally eliminate the Office of the President, there’s really no need for an Office of the President, that these nine—ten campuses but nine undergraduate campuses—they could all have their own boards. You might keep a small number of functions for the Board of Regents, but each campus would have their own board and there would be much more latitude given to individual campuses in a whole range of ways, setting tuition, et cetera, which in the context of this conversation sets up a competitive model.

So, if the concern, for example, is that a Merced is drawing resources away from a flagship campus like Berkeley or UCLA or San Diego, see what it does out there on its own. It may change into a CSU campus, something like that, so it’s a kind of Darwinian approach, but within this context of competition. So it’s, again, it’s a very interesting and very significant change.

01-01:02:54 Rogers: Yeah, I think one of the arguments against that is in the new financial reality, the university, the whole system, has to move to more of a commonly orchestrated model. One of the battles I’ve had with the chancellor, on his Chancellor’s Advisory Committee, an argument I’ve made over and over again but I haven’t persuaded him—the chancellor likes to say at every speech he gives, “We are universally excellent. We are number one in everything.”

01-01:03:34 Cummins: Yes, yes, right.

01-01:03:36 Rogers: And I contend those days are over. You can’t be number one at everything anymore. When I go back to Harvard they talk about how they’re poaching on Cal faculty right and left. Now the chancellor denies that, okay? But I go down to USC and I hear the same thing. We are thought of by our competitors as being quite vulnerable because of the financial constraints that we’re operating under, and I think we’ve reached the point where we have to choose what the crown jewels are. And if we’re going to be number one in physics or we’re going to be number one in—pick your portfolio—we have to invest in those areas, but we can’t do that across the board. Agricultural economics may have to go to Davis, okay?

01-01:04:24 Cummins: Yes.

01-01:04:24 Rogers: And maybe UCLA has an expertise in history—I don’t know, but I mean—

01-01:04:30 Cummins: Exactly.

01-01:04:30 Rogers: Not that these things will go away at Berkeley, but I think this idea that we’re going to be number one in everything is no longer a reality.

01-01:04:41 Cummins: Right, right. Yeah, and that’s—obviously that’s a big decision, because the ethos of Berkeley, going back to the Smelser Report that we’ve talked about, is this broad-based, highly competitive approach. So in ’91, with Tien as chancellor—and that was the last big financial crisis—there was this big board that was set up to address this exact issue. Can we continue to be good at everything? John Heilbron was the vice chancellor at that time. He chaired this, and they spent two years on this and it was a big group and it generated all kinds of data and everything.

Basically it didn’t address that issue—I mean it didn’t make any change to address the issue. So the question now is, are we at that critical stage? Much more critical than we were then. There’s always this hope that the revenues are going to turn around and it’s going to be more money from the state. I can’t see that anymore, that’s just simply not—

01-01:05:49 Rogers: Maybe I’m getting cynical. I’m an old man, okay, but I have probably been on fifteen significant boards, so I’ve seen a range of organizational issues, and I hate to say it, but I have never been associated with any institution, public or private, that is so, both naïve and dysfunctional as our beloved university. And

I say that lovingly, but I go to these Chancellor’s Advisory Committee meetings and—I leave so discouraged.

01-01:06:41 Cummins: Oh obviously, yes.

01-01:06:43 Rogers: Okay? But I see these financial forecasts and I’ve written letter after letter to the chancellor saying —this is pie in the sky. You guys are kidding yourself, you’re not facing reality, and what you think is the worst case is not the worst case—it’s much, much worse. And I go back six months later and son of a gun, what was presented as the worst case is now the best case.

01-01:07:11 Cummins: Oh geez, well, exactly.

01-01:07:12 Rogers: And we’ve been through these cycles and there’s this hope that somehow somebody is going to bail us out again. And I understand it, because we’ve gone through an era where the monies were there to do that, and if the feds didn’t bail us out the state did or some fundraising effort did or something.

01-01:07:30 Cummins: Yes.

01-01:07:31 Rogers: But we’ve gone past that now. Look where we are right now. People are still hoping that somehow Governor Brown is going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire and that there won’t be further cuts. And we all hope that, we all like that to be the case, but—

01-01:07:51 Cummins: Sure, but—

01-01:07:53 Rogers: It’s not realistic; it’s just not realistic. And at a minimum you’ve got to plan for the case that there’s another big round of cuts coming. Marching to Sacramento and holding up signs and holding protest rallies and all that stuff, that doesn’t turn on the printing presses, it doesn’t create any money. The problem is there’s no money. [laughing]

01-01:08:17 Cummins: Yes. Well, let’s come back to this because we’ll cycle back to this.

01-01:08:23 Rogers: Yeah okay, I’m sorry.

01-01:08:25 Cummins: No, no, no—what got us onto this was the globalization issue related to athletics.

Now there’s another connection to athletics and fundraising, and Dave Maggard was the one that told me about this. In 1980 he set up Cal Sports ’80s, which was basically this fundraising effort to raise [money] for capital projects for athletics. And it ended up that Wally Haas and Roger Heyns co-chaired that. You probably remember this; you probably were involved in it.

01-01:09:05 Rogers: Yeah, I think I was.

01-01:09:06 Cummins: When Dave became AD in, I think it was ’72, or ’73, there was an outside group that was like the Bear Backers—I can’t remember what it was called but he mentions it. And when he became athletic director he went to Al Bowker and he said, “You know, I don’t think this is a good idea, to have this outside group. There’s all kinds of pitfalls and I want to change it. I want to bring it inside the university. Do you support this?” And he said, “Yeah, I support that, go ahead and do that.” So Dave went over to the city, met with that group. Stu Gordon was a very young guy at that point in time, but Stu was on that group and I can’t remember some of the other names—maybe Dave Osborne, I don’t know. But anyway, Dave [Maggard] went over and had the first meeting as AD. And they said, “Okay Dave, here’s how we’re going to be doing things.” And Dave said, “No, I’m afraid not, we’re not doing that.” And they said, “Well, then—”

01-01:10:15 Rogers: Good luck.

01-01:10:15 Cummins: Yeah, where’s the money going to come from? And Dave said, “No, we just can’t do that.” And so anyway, there was a lot of pushback but Bowker held firm. And then they set up the Bear Backers inside the university and then this Cal Sports ’80s thing came along.

Now, everybody raises the question about is there a connection between fundraising for the university and fundraising for athletics. But when you look at this historically there is no question about it. Dave said that, because we didn’t, the administration, really under Mike Heyman is when we got into the big leagues of fundraising, and Mike—

01-01:11:01 Rogers: I beg your pardon—you’re still not in the big leagues. Never have been.

01-01:11:04 Cummins: No, oh thank you, okay! [laughter] We’ll get back to that, as I said, thank you. So anyway, Mike calls Dave over, and he said one of my major goals here as chancellor is to build a fundraising machine, and that’s why I brought Curt Simic in to do it. And he said, “I know that Athletics is doing very well. You’re probably raising more money than anybody else on the campus,

maybe with the exception of Engineering, and we want to adopt your model. We’re going to adopt it and the only change is that you now have to come to me for approval before you go directly to these major donors.” Which Dave says in the interview, that he accepted that, and I’m sure there was some pushback that he doesn’t talk about—who knows, I don’t know, but I would think so. But Mike definitely said, “Yeah, that’s correct.” And then all those donors, and there were a significant number and they are very much the same people that are at Cal today.

So, that’s a kind of a little history, but I’m curious about whether you were part of that effort, or when you got involved what you thought about it, what you think about the connection between athletics fundraising and the bigger picture, and university fundraising.

01-01:12:29 Rogers: Well, I think there is definitely a connection. Everyone I know who supports Cal Athletics is doing so partly because of a fondness for the university, and what we’ve found on other—I’ve been around this long enough now to know that the same people that are in the Campanile Club are in the Sproul Associates or the whatever are also people that are going to be friends of whatever sport. No question about it.

And I think it goes beyond that. I think athletics have a face to the broader public of the university that is very positive—people follow the football team— whether they’re donors or not—they’re interested. They have a Go Bears sticker on their car or their license plate. It’s just—totally in agreement.

01-01:13:28 Cummins: Exactly.

01-01:13:30 Rogers: I think that’s pretty obvious. But I’m so disappointed in how the university relates to its donor community. They just, in many ways couldn’t do it worse, across a broad range of topics. I have a surprising number of friends, people who I won’t name, but I have had explicit conversations with a number of people who by any stretch of the definition are major donors, and potentially huge—these are mostly billionaires, okay?—who won’t give a penny to the university even though they love it. The reason is the record of investment performance in the university’s endowment is so pathetic that they have concluded that the university would do better for them to invest the monies themselves and give it to the university as a testamentary gift.

And it’s true. Over the last ten years the University of California average return on its endowment pool—the endowment pool for the entire university, all ten campuses or whatever, is about $7 billion—the average return on that endowment pool is 3.1 percent; 3.1 percent per year for ten years. Now I’ve really been interested in this and I’ve looked at that same number, that same return for the schools against which we compete for faculty and students and

reputation: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford was the sample I took. The average return for those four institutions is 9.8 percent.

01-01:15:40 Cummins: Wow, triple.

01-01:15:43 Rogers: Now if the University of California had done what those four schools had done on average—and by the way, Yale’s number was 14 percent. So taking that average of 9.8 percent; had that been achieved by Cal, instead of having a $7 billion endowment we’d have a $13 billion endowment. It’s $6 billion that we’ve left on the table through just horrible mismanagement of those funds.

Now how can you explain that to somebody who wants to give a major gift to the university? It’s just insane, it’s just awful. But I think even worse is I have been trying for forty years, as we’ve been discussing, to help keep the crew program viable at Cal. I remember Dave Maggard calling me one day and saying, “Gary, we’re going to turn crew into a club sport.” I said, “Like hell.” At that point I had invested $6 [million] or $7 million of my own money, and I was going to be damned if it was going to become a club sport. So I was in Maggard’s office in about ten minutes and convinced him not to do that. But I’ve been through these periods before, okay?

01-01:17:07 Cummins: Yeah, right. What year was that? Do you remember, roughly?

01-01:17:12 Rogers: Oh, it was maybe two years before Maggard retired. When did he retire?

01-01:17:18 Cummins: Oh, okay, he retired in like ’92, ’91.

01-01:17:21 Rogers: Well, it was right in there somewhere.

But, you know I have just fought the battle on an ongoing basis but it has never been worse than it is currently. I think the way the university has handled this recent—

01-01:17:43 Cummins: Cutting of sports?

01-01:17:45 Rogers: It couldn’t have been done worse. I think most people understand the financial pressure that the university is under, and I think properly done and communicated people would understand what happened there. But it was done so poorly. I was in those meetings with the chancellor where he said, “We’ve had two committee reports now. We’ve had one by the faculty and one by this alumni group,” which, by the way, really didn’t include any athletes. That was

kind of interesting, but setting that aside— So he came to a conclusion that, you called it deficit or contribution or a gap?

01-01:18:30 Cummins: Subsidy, whatever, exactly.

01-01:18:30 Rogers: Yeah, whatever, I hate all those words.

01-01:18:32 Cummins: Yeah, right.

01-01:18:33 Rogers: But the funding of the university for Intercollegiate Athletics has got to get down to $5 million. Now I disagree with that but I was willing to accept it because I understand pressures, and somebody has to set priorities and that’s the chancellor’s job. So I thought that was okay, and I thought that was done—even though I disagree with the conclusion I thought the process for getting there was reasonably responsible. But given what we’ve been talking about in terms of what I think, how important the lessons that athletics are is part of the university’s offerings, I’d make it a higher priority. But okay, $5 million. I don’t know if you were in that meeting, but the chancellor said, “Look, I don’t want to re-trade this. We’ve gone through a careful process and the decision’s made, and I’m not going to be open to ongoing discussions on this anymore.”

01-01:19:34 Cummins: I’m retired, remember, so I wasn’t there.

01-01:19:36 Rogers: Okay.

01-01:19:37 Cummins: But anyway, that’s what he said?

01-01:19:39 Rogers: That’s what he said and it was very clear. And so someone said, “Well, what would it take to reopen the door?” And he thought about this and he said, “It would take $100 million.” He said, “If someone comes to me with $100 million and says they want to reinstate those five sports, I’ll obviously listen. So I’m not just completely closed-minded, but we’ve got to get down the road. We’ve got other things to do.” I respected that. I’m a businessman, I’ve been through these things. I know you have to make tough decisions—so, so far so good.

Well, now think about what happened. Everything got re-traded. First of all, they haven’t admitted it but it is very clear that they did this without understanding the Title IX implications.

01-01:20:28 Cummins: And that’s incomprehensible.

01-01:20:30 Rogers: It is incomprehensible!

01-01:20:32 Cummins: Absolutely.

01-01:20:33 Rogers: But had they implemented that, they had to cut about eighty male athletes, and nobody had thought that through in advance. They give you all kinds of stories about how they say they did, but they didn’t. Let’s face it, they didn’t; we know they didn’t. And so then I think that reality, when the chancellor learned that all of a sudden, oh my God, we’ve got to somehow back up on this. And then the door was open to the re-trading, and every single sport has been able to get in there on some basis. And it’s been—you know it’s a far cry from $100 million. [chuckling]

01-01:21:12 Cummins: Oh, absolutely.

01-01:21:12 Rogers: And I just think it makes the whole administration, and particularly Sandy Barbour, look so bad. And I’ve been a real supporter of Sandy and I like Sandy. But the way that was handled was so bad. And coming down to crew as an example of this that I’m very close to—if it weren’t for the fundraising activities that we run out of this office—I have a full-time person and a person working half-time doing nothing but fundraising for Cal crew. Nobody’s ever acknowledged that or—I don’t care about that—but it’s just a fact. But believe me, if it weren’t for that effort, which is pretty damn good, if it weren’t for that effort, what the Athletic Department is doing to try to raise money for Cal crew—it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. I mean really, it’s pathetic. And there’s some well-meaning people there and they try to give us numbers, but the numbers are almost always wrong. We spend so much time just trying to get the facts straight from the university, it’s—

01-01:22:33 Cummins: From Athletics?

01-01:22:34 Rogers: From Athletics. It’s a real struggle, and they tell us one number one day and a different one the next day and the numbers are inconsistent. It’s just, oh! And then, it’s like the government, you know? One of my lessons learned in business is: never count on the government for help. The government’s your silent partner. They take half of what you earn in business but they’re almost never helpful.

It’s been true for Athletics relative to what we’re trying to do for crew. You’d think there would be an ombudsman. You think they’d have a helpful attitude.

But here’s an example—when we set up this effort I described earlier of Cal Crew Forever, one of the ways you could become a member of Cal Crew Forever, you could either give $10,000 to the endowment or you could buy a life insurance policy with a $25,000 face value. We had twenty-two guys, many of whom were our best supporters, buy $25,000 life insurance policies. And one of our crew guys who is an insurance salesman managed that and sold them and, all right.

So we’re going along and the Athletic Department said, “We really technically own those policies so we have to manage them, so give them to us.” So this very competent life insurance salesman, who had sold all these policies, bundled them up and gave them to the Athletic Department. So ten years goes by and I ask the question, “What is the status of those life insurance policies?” The answer was, “What life insurance policies?” So somebody goes looking for them and they’re literally in a box in the back of a file cabinet somewhere. No one had spent a minute on them, nobody was making sure that the premiums were being paid and so forth. And then to make matters worse, without consulting with anybody, not consulting with me or the coach or anybody, somebody in the Athletic Department made the decision to cash in all those policies. So we had half a million dollars, roughly, in life insurance policies, that got cashed in last year for $90,000.

01-01:25:05 Cummins: That’s hard to believe.

01-01:25:05 Rogers: Now, so we threw away whatever the difference is, all right? But worse than that—

01-01:25:13 Cummins: No consultation.

01-01:25:14 Rogers: No consultation, and imagine what the guys that bought these policies, how their reaction—they’re just saying, “The hell with you and Cal Crew.” And we don’t have very many major donors—to the extent that we have supporters, these are our best supporters. And all this was done. And so this guy Andreja I described, who’s the president of Friends of Cal Crew said to the Athletic Department, “You need to explain. You need to get those people together and tell them what happened. You owe them an explanation.” Well, that’s been going on for months and they don’t want to do it. They’re embarrassed and they just completely turned their back on that responsibility. That’s just one example.

I went to Sandy Barbour last November, November 2. I can show you the letter. I offered to fund, given this financial crisis we’ve been under, I said, “Look, if you look at the official numbers that have been published recently,” and these are numbers that I got as part of the Chancellor’s Advisory Council.

The average cost of crew, the subsidy, the funding for crew that’s come from the university, has averaged $340,000 for the last three or four years. So I went to Sandy and I said, “I will personally guarantee that through fundraising efforts run out of my own office and through my own personal contributions, I will guarantee you that that number will not exceed $250,000 for the next five years, if, in turn, you will agree that you will contribute that $250,000 if that’s necessary. Now if you can come up with some magic program to fund the $250,000 that’s over and above what we’re doing here, God bless you. But if you don’t do that you’ll commit that you’ll continue to fund the program for $250,000, which is 15 percent of the budget.”

So I’m saying look, I will guarantee 85 percent of the budget if you’ll continue to guarantee 15 percent. And that’s significantly less than the $340,000 that it’s been running, and we all know these expenses only grow in time. And my only requirement for doing that was that we increase the crew budget not reduce it. Now it’s being increased on my money, but we have a national championship program that’s operating on a shoestring, and I want to be fair to the coach. I think the fact that we make these kids stay with friends —or sleep on the floor of a fraternity house or something when they travel to a regatta. It’s just below what our standard ought to be. So I want to bump the budget by a couple hundred thousand dollars and I’m willing to guarantee it. I’ll fund it. But number one is that I be part of the budget agreement each year. There’ll be an understanding that we’re going to increase it by about that much, but at my cost. Number two [is] that we not cut the size of the squad and number three that we not cut the number of scholarships—that’s all I’m asking.

I made that proposal on November 3. I thought by November 4 this would be a done deal. Well, as we sit here talking right now on May 11, there’s been no agreement. I met with Sandy three times. I’ve gone to her office. She hasn’t come here, I’ve gone to her office. And each time she’s been very, “Oh Gary, we’re so grateful.” And she’ll say, “I’m sure we can do this. But then she’ll say something like, “I really need to check my numbers.” Then she will say, “I’ll get right back to you.” And then, I’m not kidding you, two months go by and I never hear from her.

01-01:29:31 Cummins: Wow.

01-01:29:31 Rogers: As we sit here right now I’ve called her every day for the last three days. She hasn’t returned my phone call. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m at a complete loss. I’m trying—it’s like if you had a goal—your goal is somehow, someway I’m going to raise ten dollars. And I come up to you on the street and I say, “Tell you what. I’ll give you five dollars.” And you say, “No, I can’t take the five dollars because it isn’t ten dollars. My goal is ten dollars.” [laughter] That’s what’s going on. It’s just so—it is so absurd and so badly

handled. Sandy told me—I’m being very candid here—Sandy told me, she said, “Look Gary, I’m all for this but my boss won’t let me do it.” And I said, “Really?”

01-01:30:26 Cummins: Being Frank Yeary?

01-01:30:27 Rogers: Yeah, yeah. So that happened. That was like a week before the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee, so I was really puzzled because I know Frank’s a really smart guy. And so I went up to Frank at the advisory committee meeting and I said that to him, “Sandy said you’ve got some problem with the proposal I’ve made.” He said, “I’ve never seen your proposal.”

01-01:30:45 Cummins: Oh, I was afraid you were going to say that.

01-01:30:50 Rogers: [laughing] So, so I mean—

01-01:30:52 Cummins: How long ago was that meeting? Fairly recent? The Chancellor’s Advisory [Committee]?

01-01:30:55 Rogers: Yeah, it was a month ago or something.

01-01:30:57 Cummins: Because this new guy is taking over now, John Wilton—Athletics.

01-01:31:02 Rogers: Oh, has he taken over Athletics?

01-01:31:04 Cummins: He’s taking over. On April 26 it was transferred. I’m sure that Frank still has his hand in there but Wilton is responsible.

01-01:31:10 Rogers: Okay, because I was just trying to get an appointment with Frank. I wonder if I ought to be seeing John instead.

01-01:31:15 Cummins: Yeah, I would check it. Whoever Frank’s staff—or just send Frank an e-mail, He always responds, so he would let you know.

01-01:31:25 Rogers: Okay.

01-01:31:26 Cummins: Or maybe they both want to be there. I know because I’ve heard a lot of criticism about the fact that Dave Rosselli left as the fundraiser and they have

not made a new hire in there. So that’s seven or eight months gone by with nobody raising money, and so that is—

01-01:31:48 Rogers: That team in there is so amateurish. They were well-intentioned but they just don’t have a clue. I’m going to write down that name.

01-01:31:55 Cummins: Okay.

01-01:31:56 Rogers: I’ve met him but I can’t—[walking away]

01-01:31:57 Cummins: Right. This is probably a good time to stop, if that’s okay.

01-01:32:02 Rogers: Yeah sure.

01-01:32:02 Cummins: It’s five to twelve and—

01-01:32:05 Rogers: Sort of As the World Turns. [laughing]

01-01:32:07 Cummins: Yes, yeah, exactly. And then I’ll set up another appointment with Jo.

01-01:32:16 Rogers: Okay.

01-01:32:16 Cummins: And, oh, John Wilton, W-I-L-T-O-N [spells].

01-01:32:19 Rogers: Yeah he’s an impressive guy. He was at the—

01-01:32:21 Cummins: Yeah, the World Bank.

01-01:32:24 Rogers: Maybe I’ll call him and say, “Look, I am struggling with this thing and I know you’re in a transition with Frank, but should I come see you? Or should I see Frank?” Maybe that’s the way to do it. What do you think?

01-01:32:36 Cummins: Yeah, that would be fine, absolutely.

Anyway, so what we can do then is continue the discussion about the connection between athletics fundraising and university fundraising, and then just issues in general about where you think all this is going vis-à-vis the big picture of intercollegiate athletics. Certainly I think we should talk a little bit

more about the cutting of those sports and then the restoring of them, and then what this Pac-12 TV contract might mean. How you would see it I think would be very interesting, as a business person, over the long term.

01-01:33:23 Rogers: Okay, yeah.

01-01:33:26 Cummins: And then just general issues of the state of intercollegiate athletics; the issues of professionalism, commercialism, et cetera, and what your views are on that.

01-01:33:36 Rogers: Well, I’ve got opinions on everything. [hearty laughter]

01-01:33:38 Cummins: Wonderful, okay. Well, I appreciate it, really.

01-01:33:42 Rogers: I hope that was a good couple of hours

01-01:33:43 Cummins: Oh no, no, this was—this was really good. It was excellent.

01-01:33:47 Rogers: I just see one little slice, but it’s a slice that kind of cuts across the whole cake.

01-01:33:52 Cummins: Absolutely, absolutely.

01-01:33:54 Rogers: I must say I’m currently pretty, as you can tell, frustrated.

01-01:33:59 Cummins: Discouraged, exactly. All right, I’m going to—

01-01:34:02 Rogers: I just feel like I’m trying to do God’s work. If I’m having the trouble I’m having, imagine the poor guy that’s trying to get a seat preference for a $500 gift.

01-01:34:19 Cummins: Oh yeah, exactly, exactly.

01-01:34:20 Rogers: It’s just—

01-01:34:22 Cummins: Right, that’s also something we should discuss, is the stadium, the high performance center, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, that’s great.

01-01:34:32 Rogers: But again, I have do have a standard of comparison because I’m a donor to Harvard—

01-01:34:38 Cummins: That’s exactly right.

01-01:34:39 Rogers: —and other institutions. And if I were rating alumni relations for Cal, I mean I’ll tell you, compared to “the competition,” in terms of level of organization, communication, professionalism, ability to make donors feel special and good, we are so far behind the curve it’s just pathetic.

01-01:35:10 Cummins: Wow, all right. I’m going to turn this off.

[End Audio File 1]

Interview 2: August 5, 2011 Begin Audio File 2

02-00:00:00 Cummins: Okay, this is August 5, [2011]. This is the second interview with Gary Rogers.

Okay, so let’s talk about Steve Gladstone becoming AD. I know you were involved with that and we’ll just—

02-00:00:18 Rogers: Okay, well, I’ll tell you that story as I can remember it. [John] Kasser had indicated his desire to leave. I don’t know anything about who did what to whom in that situation. I got a phone call, it might have been from Bob Berdahl, I’m not certain, asking me to be on the search committee for the new AD. I was very busy at that time, I don’t remember the details, but I said, “Much as I’m interested and would love to be involved and am honored to be asked, I just can’t do it, I’m too busy. But I would suggest that you put Steve Gladstone on the search committee.” And the question was, “Why a crew coach?” I said he’d been athletic director at Brown for an interim period when they were going through a search for a new AD. I think he’d been athletic director at Brown for at least two years, and I think Steve has a perspective on the psychology of sport that—the kind of things that we talked about last time in terms of the basic values of intercollegiate athletics—that he can articulate as well as anybody I know. And I think he’d be just a valuable addition to the committee, and hey, having a coach on the committee isn’t all bad! [chuckling]

02-00:01:52 Cummins: Oh, yeah.

02-00:01:53 Rogers: And you have one of the most successful coaches in one sport, in the history of the sport, actually the most successful coach. So Berdahl put Gladstone on the committee and time went on, and I would occasionally get feedback from Steve, just bits and pieces of how the process was going. And after, as I remember, a fairly protracted period of search it came down to three candidates. I heard from Grant Inman that the three candidates were pretty marginal and that Berdahl was leaning toward the inside guy. There were two outside candidates whose names I can’t recall, but there was an inside candidate who had been an assistant AD under Kasser.

02-00:02:51 Cummins: Driscoll, Bob Driscoll.

02-00:02:52 Rogers: Bob Driscoll, yeah, and that he was going to get the nod. I didn’t know Bob Driscoll particularly well. I don’t know that Grant did either, but I was concerned that even though Bob had been around for some time he didn’t

34 have much of a fan club and he hadn’t shown much in the way of leadership, that had been apparent to me at least.

So Grant called me and I called Bob Haas, and the three of us met very quickly and decided that our advice to the chancellor was that he was making a big mistake. And so I think I made that phone call to Berdahl and an emergency meeting was held the next day, because this was, as I remember, maybe on a Wednesday or on a Thursday, probably on a Wednesday that this was all happening. The chancellor had a press conference scheduled to make this announcement on the following Monday. We didn’t have much time here.

And we met with the chancellor, I think on a Thursday, and so Haas and Inman and I got a meeting with the chancellor in his office and we said, “Bob, you’re making a huge mistake. This is not good.” And he said, “Well, I know this is a compromise candidate but there’s no way I’m going to appoint either of the two outsiders.” There were real problems with both of them in his view. And he said, “At least we know Driscoll is a good solid guy, and even though he may not be a star I’m pressed for time. We’ve been at this for a long time. This is what it’s come down to and he’s going to be my choice.”

And we said, “Our advice is to put off the search. The worst thing you can do is pick a mediocre candidate for a job that’s this sensitive and important.” And he said, “I can’t put off the search. I’ve scheduled a press conference, and by God I’m going to stick to it, and so my decision’s made.” And we kept pushing back, and so Berdahl said, “Well, given the shortness of time—we’ve only got a day or two here, I don’t know how you can consider another candidate.” And so I said, “Well, have you considered Steve Gladstone for the job?” And he said, “Well, no, not really.” But he said, “I must say that I’ve been very impressed with Steve’s contributions to the search committee and I’ve been very, very impressed with him. If he were interested in becoming Athletic Director I would think about that very seriously.” And he said, “I’d need to meet with Steve before Monday.”

Well, it turns out I knew at that time that Steve was up in Washington, because the Washington race was on Saturday and that’s the biggest race of the year for the Cal crew. So he had his crew up there and he was getting ready for the race. I called him on Thursday afternoon and said, “Steve, guess what? I put you into the hopper to be the next athletic director. I think you can do it, and I think you can get the appointment if you play your cards right but the time is of the essence.” And he said, “Well, Gary, I can’t leave the crew up here on Saturday. The best I could do would be to fly home Saturday night.” And I said, “Well, then you better do that. Let’s meet in my office on Sunday morning so you can go see the chancellor Sunday afternoon and see what happens.”

So we met in my office at Dreyer’s at about eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Steve and I spent the entire morning—Steve had the race on Saturday, flew

home Saturday afternoon, we met Sunday morning. And we talked for about four hours; we talked about every aspect of this. We talked about whether it was really the right thing for him to do in his career. We talked about if he were to pursue it what he should tell the chancellor, what his game plan should be, how he could make the case that he was the right guy, and all the other peripheral issues.

I had prepared a list of why he shouldn’t take the job and we went through that list. And I said, “Steve, I think this could be interesting to you, but let me tell you the reasons why you ought to consider rejecting this opportunity.” And I took him through those in detail, one after another. I said, “You’re the most successful crew coach in the history of the sport, and becoming the athletic director is going to have an impact on that. My recommendation to you is that you tell Berdahl that if you do this you want to continue coaching too. We’ll put together an organization under you—and Steve, I’ll help you do this.” This is where Mark Stephens came in, but I said, “I’ll help you put together an infrastructure so you can sit on top of both of these responsibilities and continue to be the crew coach but also the athletic director, and that you demand that as one of your conditions.” Anyway, we came up with four conditions and that was one of them.

Steve left my office at noon on Sunday, and I didn’t know for sure what he was going to say to the chancellor. It was kind of—I would have put it at fifty- fifty in terms of whether he was going to really pitch for this job or not, because he had a lot at play there in terms of his life. So I got a call from him that night and he said, “Well, I talked with Berdahl and I decided to go for it. I told him my conditions and he waved his hand and he said all those are fine, and so I guess he’s going to make me the athletic director.”

02-00:09:17 Cummins: That was Sunday, yeah, Sunday night.

02-00:09:18 Rogers: Yeah, so the next morning he had the press conference and announced Steve would be the next athletic director.

02-00:09:26 Cummins: Do you remember what the other conditions were?

02-00:09:29 Rogers: I bet I have them here somewhere. [short discussion with Rogers’s assistant requesting that she look for notes from meeting with Steve Gladstone]

02-00:10:40 Cummins: One of them I think had to do with the changes in the administrative operation.

02-00:10:49 Rogers: Yes. Let’s see, that he would get an increase in salary but he would continue to coach crew, so he was doing two jobs. And that the increase in salary—I think he’s asking for a $100,000 bump in his salary to be athletic director, but that would be less than what you’d have to pay a new athletic director, so that one of the conditions was that we would take the difference and apply it to upgrading staff under the AD.

02-00:11:21 Cummins: Yes, right.

02-00:11:22 Rogers: And there were four people we were going to put under the AD, and we had to specify how much we were going to pay them or something like that.

02-00:11:28 Cummins: Right.

02-00:11:29 Rogers: If we could spend the salary. And Mark Stephens came into the middle of that. Mark himself had been—I get confused about this and the next step.

02-00:11:43 Cummins: Mark was down at Santa Anita Racetrack.

02-00:11:46 Rogers: Okay, so Mark comes into the picture when Steve is leaving.

02-00:11:53 Cummins: Well, he’s hired, Steve comes in in April, and then Mark comes in around September I think, something like that.

02-00:12:03 Rogers: Okay, because I remember interviewing Mark. I’m forgetting the timing. But okay, so Steve had taken over as athletic director, we’d agreed to put this infrastructure under him, I helped Steve recruit and interview, we found Mark, Mark became Steve’s main man, with the hope that when Steve left he would step up and be—

02-00:12:25 Cummins: Mark would move in, yes.

02-00:12:27 Rogers: That was the deal. All right, so time went on. Steve’s greatest accomplishment, more than anything else and he would tell you this himself, is the hiring of Jeff Tedford.

02-00:12:44 Cummins: Yes.

02-00:12:45 Rogers: And Steve did that; I give him enormous credit for that. He did that against the advice of most of his staff. He felt that among all the candidates they interviewed to be the head football coach, Jeff Tedford was the only one who needed to win, not just wanted to win—they all wanted to win. But he said Tedford’s the kind of coach that, he just has to win. If he isn’t winning he just isn’t happy, and he needs to win. He needs it for whole constitution, for his personality, for his self-image, for everything—he needs to WIN! And that’s what Steve liked about him.

But I think in other respects, even though Steve was, as I said earlier, someone who understands the psychology of sport, the values of sport, can articulate to a group why those things are important—as an administrator he lacked a lot of capability. He just wasn’t a particularly good administrator himself.

So Steve I think was a reasonable leader for the Athletic Department, had a good sense of priorities, had a triumph in the hiring of the football coach, which of course is enormously important.

02-00:15:33 Cummins: Right.

02-00:15:34 Rogers: And we got Mark Stephens in there, who really held the thing together. Everything went through Mark really. We had other—because Steve had four direct reports and they all had different responsibilities, but Mark was the guy that was doing the heavy lifting.

02-00:15:56 Cummins: Mark, Teresa Kuehn[-Gould], Bob Rose did the public affairs. Because at that point—well, not right then, it was when Steve was leaving that I took over Athletics, so he was there for that summer and then Sandy Barbour came in around September, October. But, when he was hired, right after, I guess, the press conference or the announcement, he came into my office and we worked all these details.

02-00:16:34 Rogers: Oh, is that right?

02-00:16:35 Cummins: So yes, so I remember.

02-00:16:37 Rogers: All right good. Well, you were a party to it.

02-00:17:11 Cummins: Yeah. The next thing that I recall was the—I guess it his first day on the job or close to it anyway, and he had people come in and Chris Dawson and Kevin Reneau were released.

02-00:17:29 Rogers: Yeah, right.

02-00:17:29 Cummins: So that was the next issue we had to deal with it at the chancellor’s office level, because that didn’t follow personnel—

02-00:17:37 Rogers: Yeah, it was a good decision but it caused, I know, it caused lots of problems.

02-00:17:43 Cummins: Yeah.

02-00:17:46 Rogers: Who was it—it wasn’t Chris Dawson—there was another woman that he fired who brought this big lawsuit.

02-00:17:52 Cummins: Oh, Karen Moe Humphreys.

02-00:17:53 Rogers: Yeah.

02-00:17:54 Cummins: Yes, exactly. And I was involved in that because I had responsibility for all the whistleblower cases.

02-00:18:01 Rogers: Okay.

02-00:18:02 Cummins: And so that was a federal lawsuit on gender discrimination, so that put it into the whistleblower status.

02-00:18:08 Rogers: I just hated to see the university settle. It just feeds that machine and I just hate that stuff.

Anyway, so my view of Steve, in a nutshell, is what I’ve already said. After watching him for two and a half years and seeing the price that was being paid by the rowing program because Steve was trying to do two jobs and there are certain things that only an athletic director can do, so Mark could only pick up so much of the PR or interfacing with the rest of the university and those kinds of things. So one day I sat Steve down. I was sort of Steve’s consigliere in those days and I said, “Steve, you have a choice to make. It’s been great. It’s been great for you, it’s been great for the university, it’s provided an interregnum here I think. But it’s really not working and you need to decide whether you’re going to be athletic director or rowing coach, one or the other, because I think you’re not going to be able to do both at the level you demand of yourself, and my advice to you is to go back. You can go down in the books as maybe the best rowing coach in the history of the sport, certainly one

of them, and maybe you’ll get the crown, because I’m sure you have some victories left in you. But you’re not going to go down as the greatest athletic director in history, by a long shot.” [laughter] I just said that to him.

And so he thought about that and he came back to me a day or two later and he said, “You know, I think you’re right. I’ve done this now. Things have gone okay but we have Mark here. I think Mark would be a good athletic director.” He didn’t say “better than me,” but that was the implication, “and so maybe it’s just time to pass the reins to Mark.”

So with that we went to Berdahl. I think I was with Steve when we went to see Berdahl, and we told Berdahl that and Berdahl subsequently interviewed Mark and told Mark—I’m sure Mark told you this—told Mark and told me and told Steve that Mark would be the next athletic director.

02-00:20:46 Cummins: Which he says didn’t happen.

02-00:20:48 Rogers: Well, but it was promised to him.

02-00:20:49 Cummins: Yes.

02-00:20:50 Rogers: Okay so, right then Berdahl was in the process of leaving, so Birgeneau comes along.

02-00:21:03 Cummins: I chaired that search by the way.

02-00:21:04 Rogers: Okay, I wasn’t on that committee.

02-00:21:07 Cummins: Right.

02-00:21:08 Rogers: And so you may know better than I do. But Birgeneau—I get these guys confused—Birgeneau heard that we were in the process of changing the AD.

02-00:21:27 Cummins: Yes.

02-00:21:28 Rogers: And appropriately said, “Well, I’d really like to get an oar in that water,” so to speak, and I think met with both Mark and Sandy, and said Sandy—

02-00:21:43 Cummins: Well, what happened was there was a—the search process moved quickly. We had this guy named Bob Beaudine who was the person we chose to conduct

the search, and I had interviewed people and picked him. And so once he was chosen he said, “Okay, where are you?” We had already set up a committee which was large. He said, “That was your first mistake.”

02-00:22:11 Rogers: Yeah, right!

02-00:22:12 Cummins: And so—

02-00:22:14 Rogers: And I can say, having done a lot of these, you really want about four or five people.

02-00:22:15 Cummins: Yeah, exactly. He said, basically, you want to make this decision with the chancellor and the vice chancellor and that’s about it.

02-00:22:24 Rogers: Right.

02-00:22:24 Cummins: And so, but he said, “We’ll make this work.” And Bob Haas was on that committee.

02-00:22:30 Rogers: That’s right.

02-00:22:31 Cummins: And so he said, “Basically, here’s how we’re going to do this. There will be,” if I’m recalling this correctly, “there will be two meetings of that committee. The first meeting I will come in and I will explain how we’re going to do the process, and the way we are going to do this is that everything will come through me. We will do all the requirements of the university, we’ll advertise, that kind of thing, all those résumés will come to me. Anybody on the committee that has anybody they want to suggest, that’s fine, that would come to me. I will then provide them with a list of ten, who I think are the best, and we will then set up an interview process. It’ll be very carefully orchestrated. Nobody who is a candidate will know who else is a candidate. We’ll do this at an airport hotel, that’ll all be taken care of, and we’ll make the decision that day. Okay, it’ll be like that [snapping fingers]. If you drag on these things then people—you just can’t do that.”

[portion sealed by interviewee]

Rogers: Anyway, so that’s that chapter. And so Steve went back to coaching crew and winning championships. I think that the Cal crew has been the national champion in six of the last eleven years.

02-00:27:36 Cummins: Yeah, amazing record.

02-00:27:38 Rogers: And Mike Teti, Steve’s successor, is continuing that record.

02-00:27:43 Cummins: And what happened there? I’m going to interview Steve. He’s coming out here on the 20th I think.

02-00:27:49 Rogers: Oh is he?

02-00:27:49 Cummins: For five days, so I’ve been in touch with him and he said, “Sure I’ll do an interview.” And I guess that’s what you referred to as a management style, but he tends to put things off, and he said, “Oh, this will force me to do [it]. I know I’m coming on the 20th.” Anyway, so he’ll be here and I’ll ask him this question too. But how did that turn out when he left? Why did he decide to leave? Why did he go to Yale? That kind of thing.

02-00:28:20 Rogers: Well, I’d like to hear him answer that. He decided that he wanted to retire from being the crew coach. And he was sixty-five or six or something like that, had this incredible record.

02-00:28:40 Cummins: Right.

02-00:28:41 Rogers: And so we all were understanding of that and put on a hell of a retirement party for him.

02-00:28:49 Cummins: I’ll bet.

02-00:28:50 Rogers: I flew his early mentor, the Harvard coach, Harry Parker—who’s the dean of crew coaches—Steve worked for him very early in his career and has always looked up to him. I flew him out here with his wife, put them up for a weekend in San Francisco. He was the main speaker at the party we had for Steve down at the boathouse. It was a huge crowd. It was just a wonderful thing. And then Steve was, at that time, talking about maybe writing a book or maybe getting involved in a prep school. He had a list of things that he might want to do. He certainly wasn’t going to retire in the classic sense.

And somewhere in there, and I get my timeframes confused, but I had hired Tim McLaren to run the California Rowing Club. We had gone to Australia and recruited Tim, who was then the Australian national coach.

Tim McLaren had been this incredibly successful Olympic coach for Australia and won many, many Olympic medals. And so I was able to get him to come take over this rowing club. But Steve and I had the idea for it. It stems from what I told you last time, where I wanted to have a place where postgraduate people could go.

02-00:30:51 Cummins: Right.

02-00:30:51 Rogers: And we had that now: the wonderful historic Ky Ebright Boathouse with all the heritage there and it was all set up, and so we got McLaren to come coach. And things were really going well. It was exactly what we wanted it to be. Tim had gone and met with Mike Teti, who at that time was the US Olympic coach, and had formed a really good relationship with him.

Steve and I been more confrontational. Our idea was this California Rowing Club was going to challenge in—that the national program was the national program but some of the boat classifications are open to trials, and increasingly fewer and fewer of them were under the rules set up by the part of the Olympic committee that deals with rowing. And we thought that was a mistake. They called that the team approach, and we were going to work to open up some of those rowing categories and then we were going to put in competitive crews. That was sort of the sitting-here, beating-our-breasts approach.

We hired Tim McLaren and he very quickly went back to Princeton, or near Princeton where they have the Olympic training center. He met with Mike Teti, who he knew I guess from these competitions over the years. And he said, “How can I help?” It was a so much more constructive approach, and Mike Teti sent some athletes out here to train, and so McLaren quickly became an important input to Mike’s effort.

And we had our club here. It was a good deal but it only lasted for a couple years, because the Olympic committee called me and said, “Mike Teti, who has been doing this now for two Olympiads, has decided to move on in his life. And so we have an opening for the Olympic coach, and we’ve searched the world and we think the best guy is Tim McLaren.” So this is such a game of musical chairs, all right? So, I said, “Great. I’m certainly not going to give McLaren away, and I think Tim’s great, and so how can I help?” Tim said he wanted to try to keep the club going but at the same time run the Olympic program. I was supportive of that to start with, because I didn’t want the club to fall apart. But it was very—it’s so similar—Tim might even be a worse administrator than Steve, if that’s possible. [laughter] Steve would be at the bottom 5 percent and Tim’s worse than that. And Tim’s one of these people, who unlike Steve, likes to do everything himself. Steve delegates everything;

McLaren delegates nothing. Neither of those approaches is very effective, but they’re both world-class coaches for sure.

So anyway, it became clear that if Tim was going to do the Olympic thing he was going to have to do it out of a bigger facility, and there were only two choices. One was to pack up and go back to Princeton where Teti had been headquartered. The other approach was down in San Diego there’s another Olympic training facility and a really good rowing facility, a lake with a good course and that sort of thing, in Chula Vista, which is just east of San Diego. And so I had sat Tim down right here and I said, “Tim, you know I really think that the time has come for you to give up the California Rowing Club thing and go on and either base in Chula Vista or base in Princeton.” And Tim had been flying all over the country trying to have athletes train in all three of these facilities. It just wasn’t working. His first year as Olympic coach was really pretty disappointing in terms of international competitions, and so forth. And there was a lot of upset around that because that meant that some of the athletes that had been here would have to go with Tim. Tim ultimately chose Chula Vista, and his athletes had to uproot their lives, and so people were mad at me. It was just kind of ugly. I seem to specialize in that.

And so anyway Tim moved on, and Tim had three of his kids at Cal at that time. His daughter is a very good water polo player; in fact two of his daughters are very good water polo players. So that left an opening for the rowing club. So I said, “Steve, this is your baby, your baby and my baby, and maybe the right thing would be for you to coach that.” Well, he jumped at it. He thought that was a great idea. But while Tim was in the process of moving out—Tim and Steve never got along—so Tim had to clear out before Steve would take that role.

So in the interim I tried to get Steve involved in fundraising. And Steve, working with a woman who I had hired in this office who also wasn’t very effective, spent almost a year trying to raise money for the California Rowing Club, to fund it so I wouldn’t be the sole funder. And that effort was a complete bust. Over the course of the year they made only four presentations. All four were presentations I set up for them, and in no case did they land even a dollar. So it was a complete bust. And frankly I think Steve did it because I asked him to but was uncomfortable in the fundraising role really, at least at that level where he’s talking to corporate people or the corporate sponsors, and he wasn’t very effective and either didn’t work very hard or didn’t know what to do. Steve isn’t connected in that world and didn’t know where to start and didn’t whatever—it didn’t work.

So then the club had to be restarted because Tim took most of the athletes with him for the Olympic team. And so Steve—the next chapter in this story is that Steve was to be recruiting the next family, the next round of athletes. And so there a number—this was early this year and I’m running around. I only give 5 percent of my time to this whole rowing world, but Steve gave me

the impression that he had maybe ten or a dozen athletes that were going to show up here at the end of this last school year. So in June, May or June, that would be the core that would begin this thing. And so I thought it was under control, and I was paying Steve a salary, out of my own pocket, this whole time.

So we get to—and I can’t remember the times exactly, April or May or whenever it happened, and Steve came in here and said, “You know Gary, I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to go back to college coaching, and there’s an opening at Yale and I’m going to be the Yale coach.” Well, the thing that really irritated me—hey look, people are welcome to change their mind and to do things, but what really irritated me is that he just left—I said, “You expect me to go down there and meet these athletes that you’ve recruited and say, ‘There are the boats.’ I’m not a crew coach. Steve, this is really bad, especially given the relationship we’ve had. My God.”

He was on a plane a week later, just gone, and never a thank you. He wrote me a nasty letter for being upset with the fact that he left so quickly, which, I just—to this day I can’t understand. But he had, I think, and this is my supposition, but just based on facts, I think he had bought a house in New Haven and I think he had enrolled his daughter in a school there—

02-00:39:43 Cummins: So he had been planning it.

02-00:39:44 Rogers: —before he even told me he was considering it. And then within a week he was gone, and I’ve had no communication from him since. So that was a really ugly ending to a long, long relationship. I thought we were partners. And this is the part that’s really sensitive. I wouldn’t want—I know you’re going to interview Steve—I wouldn’t want Steve to know this part. You can tell him I’m disappointed, I think he knows that.

02-00:40:09 Cummins: Oh, I’m sure he would know.

[portion sealed by interviewee]

02-00:43:13 Cummins: So how was it when the women’s crew—how did women’s crew and men’s crew work together, or not?

02-00:43:25 Rogers: Good question, good question. When women’s crew started up as—and this was pre-Title IX but really was given the impetus by Title IX—many of the old crew guys, including me, thought women’s crew was an oxymoron. It’s kind of like women’s wrestling and women’s boxing, somehow it just—it was hard to get, going back twenty years. And so—I wasn’t going to do anything to get in the way of women’s crew, nothing wrong with it. But I certainly

wasn’t going to get sucked into becoming a big sponsor of women’s crew. I had my hands filled with men’s crew. So the support group that we’ve been involved with over the years, and it’s literally run out of this office, is the Friends of Cal Men’s Crew. We have a men’s fund and it’s all—when it came time to build the boathouse it was pretty clear that just to be fair we had to provide equal facilities for the women. So there was no question about that; I didn’t fight that at all, and the women have every bit as good a facility as the men.

And what is interesting is over time I’ve really changed my view. Maybe there’s hope for this old fossil. First of all, the women’s crew at Cal has been very successful.

02-00:45:08 Cummins: Yeah, absolutely.

02-00:45:09 Rogers: They won national championships and [women’s crew] has really proven itself. Now that I’ve gotten involved at the national level, I’m on what they call the High Performance Committee for rowing, which is the rowing subcommittee of the Olympic Committee. And of course we are every bit as supportive of the women’s program at that level as we are of the men’s program. I was just in Switzerland, in Lucerne, at what they call the Gold Cup race, where the US women’s Olympic team won the World Cup, the world championship, which is a prelude to the World Championships which are held in another couple of months, which is a prelude to next year’s Olympics. So the US Olympic women’s team is really good and they won the gold medal in Beijing, so for women’s rowing it’s a big deal.

So psychologically, somehow, I’ve come to support that. It’s still—we can talk a lot about Title IX and the negative implications of Title IX, but one of them that makes me sore is that we’ve had to—we and me personally—have had to or have elected to support men’s crew consistently and with a lot of money. And the women get a free ride. The women don’t raise any money and their attitude is we don’t have to raise any money. We have tried many, many times to reach out and say, “Look, we’re having a fundraising auction and would you guys like to be part of it?” And their attitude is sort of, “Well, we really don’t have to. We’re entitled.” The university has to spend—you guys go out and raise money in an auction or you guys get your donors to give 60, 70 percent of the cost of the program. That money is given to the university, which means it counts as Title IX funding which means the university has to match it for the women, all right? And so the way that comes back is we just get more pressure—

02-00:47:51 Cummins: To raise more.

02-00:47:52 Rogers: Yes, and that’s the position I’m in right now, which is every dollar I raise or offer to give to men’s crew—I’m going to tell you the story later—but they won’t even accept it. Now they haven’t told me—they haven’t had the guts to tell me why yet.

02-00:48:11 Cummins: Oh, this is related to the last interview when—

02-00:48:13 Rogers: Yeah.

02-00:48:14 Cummins: Okay, we’ll get to that, for sure.

02-00:48:17 Rogers: So, that whole implication really has me in a muddle, yeah.

02-00:48:23 Cummins: Right. Yeah, that’s an interesting take on Title IX, from an Olympic sports point of view. Most of the Title IX conversation is the number of scholarships for football and how you balance that, this kind of thing. But that’s interesting. One of things I heard was that when Steve was still coach there wasn’t a lot of good feeling between the men’s and the women’s [crew].

02-00:48:54 Rogers: Right, right.

02-00:48:54 Cummins: But when the new coach came in it just changed—

02-00:48:57 Rogers: Right, that’s all true.

02-00:48:58 Cummins: —overnight. So can you talk a little bit about that? Just from your own perspective, because you also said that, was that the new coach? Or was it McLaren that—when you said also had turned things around completely? In this conversation, he came out, he went back to—I guess it was the new coach right? Tim that went back to see {McLaren?}on the East Coast and changed that whole dynamic? So, that’s interesting.

[portion sealed by interviewee]

So anyway, I don’t want to lay that on Teti, because I really think Teti is a genuinely good guy and I think he’s doing wonderful things here at Cal.. And this new coach that we’ve hired for the rowing club now, we’ve hired a guy named Bernhard Stomporowski who is a German rowing coach who built up a club in Germany, was hired by the Swiss to run a rowing club in Zurich, was quite successful building that up, and was then recruited away to run the

vaunted Don Rowing Club in Ontario, Canada. And that’s where Mike Teti and his wife Kay [Worthington] did their rowing and won their medals, so there’s all a big circle, right?

02-00:56:01 Cummins: Yeah, interesting.

02-00:56:02 Rogers: And so Stomporowski has a huge respect for Teti and what he’s achieved in the sport. So when I approached Stomporowski to come coach here with the idea that he’d be side by side with Mike Teti, it would be like painting at the feet of Michelangelo! He just said, “yes”, [snaps fingers] it was instantaneous, “Yes, I’ll be there.” He didn’t even ask how much he would get paid. So Stomporowski shows up in about two weeks and hopefully all these pieces will be back in place for a while. So we’ve got Tim off running the Olympic team, at least the men’s side of it, and I think that’s really in good shape now. We’ve got Teti running the Cal program, and that just couldn’t be doing better, and we’ve got Stomporowski coming in to run the rowing club.

02-00:57:02 Cummins: So what happened to those ten athletes that Steve had recruited?

02-00:57:08 Rogers: There was nothing for them. Some of them came and rowed for a while, and Teti and his assistants, Luke Agnini, have been great and just holding things together there until Stomporowski arrives. So they had a program this summer where they actually went out and coached some of these kids, and they’ve been very supportive of me and they’re all pissed off at Gladstone for bailing out like that. Steve didn’t even say goodbye to those people and it was really pretty awful.

02-00:57:46 Cummins: And that’s a fairly tight-knit community.

02-00:57:48 Rogers: Yeah, yeah!

02-00:57:49 Cummins: I mean worldwide and you think, my God! Because that stuff travels all over the place in two seconds. You’ve got ten athletes out here that were recruited and he disappears.

02-00:58:04 Rogers: They came to row for him and he wasn’t there. Now he told me there were ten. How many there really were, I’m not counting noses, but there were certainly some.

02-00:58:12 Cummins: Right, enough, a number. Amazing.

02-00:58:17 Rogers: But anyway, life is interesting, I’ll tell you.

02-00:58:21 Cummins: Okay, let’s talk about the role of a donor. I’m interested in all of this and you’ve talked a lot about the club here and your involvement on the Olympic—I didn’t quite realize how involved you were at all levels, so this is great. So we can talk about any of that but begin by talking—and because you’ve got this experience at Harvard—are you on the USC or do you have involvement [Rogers shakes his head]? Okay, so it’s principally the Harvard—is it the Board of Overseers?

02-00:58:59 Rogers: Yeah, I was in what they call the Deans Council at the Business School.

02-00:59:01 Cummins: Right.

02-00:59:02 Rogers: That has now run its term, so I’ve been on it for four or five years and now I’m rolling off.

02-00:59:09 Cummins: Okay. And you talk about that in the first interview, the comparison, the way that they deal with fundraising, the quality of their program, et cetera. And so from the point of view of athletics, but you’re not only doing athletics—talk about the role of the donor. And you certainly have addressed some of this, your expectations, et cetera.

I think I told you the story about Bruce Snyder and Wally Haas and Budd Cheit and Tien, didn’t I? [That's] where Bruce is recruited away in ’92 to Arizona State, the salary is doubled, $250,000 to $500,000. Wally Haas calls Cheit, says, “Would you please call Tien? I can handle this.” He calls Tien and Tien says, “No, I can’t have a coach being paid more than a—” Remember?

02-01:00:09 Rogers: Yeah [laughing].

02-01:00:11 Cummins: And you, okay so, now it’s interesting. When I heard that, and that came out of one of these interviews with Budd, I thought that’s interesting that Wally Haas, who was just a great guy, as you know, would not call Tien directly. I was puzzled by that, because he certainly could have, without any question. So I don’t know whether he thought it was not the appropriate role of a donor to do that, but that all changes. And it changes—it tracks with the decline in the state resources in a dramatic way. Obviously donors are critical, nobody doubts that, and so how do you work this? In a public institution, in a private institution, just what are your thoughts on all that? We could talk a long time on that. [laughter]

02-01:01:09 Rogers: Do you want me to start with just my role as donor to crew? Or do you want to put a broader perspective on—

02-01:01:15 Cummins: However you want.

02-01:01:16 Rogers: Okay.

02-01:01:16 Cummins: Yeah, we’ll probably cover it all.

02-01:01:18 Rogers: Well, my role as a donor to crew, I have to say, it’s been so long. I started something called Cal Crew Forever—I think it started in the 1980s.

02-01:01:35 Cummins: Right, and you talk about that in the first interview.

02-01:01:39 Rogers: And it’s been a long and frankly lonely struggle.

02-01:01:45 Cummins: Well, and you’ve carried the burden.

02-01:01:47 Rogers: Well, I’ve been looking for partners to help with the funding.

02-01:01:48 Cummins: Financially and—

02-01:01:48 Rogers: And I told you this before, my partner Rick Cronk, with trying to do a similar thing for water polo, pulled out his little contact list and there was Don Fisher and there was Warren Hellman and there was Bill Harlan and there was Ned Spieker—three of those guys are billionaires. [laughing]

02-01:02:10 Cummins: Exactly.

02-01:02:10 Rogers: On the Cal Crew list, try to find somebody worth a hundred thousand dollars! [laughing] So, I feel like—and I’m proud to do it and I’ve been lucky to be put in a position to do it, but I’ve been the only major donor to this sport up till now. And one, thank goodness we’ve been able to put a very small team here in this office who has been able to build up—because, truth be told, the Athletic Department has done the worst imaginable job at this. Now, I don’t know if it’s because crew’s an Olympic sport or a minor sport or whatever, but they’ve had people flow through there, every month it’s somebody else,

the numbers are always different, they screw around with stuff. It’s been a negative—it’s been an anchor for us.

So, I took it over myself here years ago and I’ve hired people who work in this office who basically do a pretty professional job I think, contacting the friends of Cal Crew. And we have an organization that meets regularly and we’ve got a good website now, we’ve got a good mailing list and we’ve got events that people really look forward to and it’s in good shape. But it’s all been done out of here, every bit of it I think. So, my total investment, maybe I covered this last time, but I think about—I’ve given easily $15 million to this sport.

02-01:03:52 Cummins: And that’s just Cal-related, right?

02-01:03:54 Rogers: Just Cal crew.

02-01:03:55 Cummins: Just Cal, $15 million to Cal, exactly.

02-01:03:58 Rogers: That doesn’t count the rowing club or the Olympics or anything else.

02-01:04:03 Rogers: And I don’t know how much my efforts have raised beyond that, but it’s probably at least another $15 million. And, hey look, I’m not looking for thank you notes or more plaques to put on my wall, but I think if the way I’ve been treated is typical of the way other donors to Athletics have been treated there’s a huge opportunity to improve at every level. Remember the story of the life insurance policies?

02-01:04:50 Cummins: Yes, it’s astounding.

02-01:04:51 Rogers: I could tell you more stories like that. It’s so awful! We have our core donors who are going through that explanation, so we reach out to them and say, “Hey, we’re going to try to raise $300,000 this year and we need help from you,” and they go, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

02-01:05:15 Cummins: It’s interesting that it doesn’t turn into anger.

02-01:05:19 Rogers: Yeah, well, it has. In that group through my intercession with John Wilton— I’ll get to that, but I think I finally have the guy I can talk to. There are some chapters to go there and there’s a mystery that which I don’t understand, but I think he’s a good guy. I think they’ve agreed to hold a meeting and to invite

the people who bought those policies in and they’re going to try to explain what happened.

02-01:05:47 Cummins: Good.

02-01:05:48 Rogers: So at least that’s a good start. But it’s been a battle, it’s been a struggle, it’s been—when we have our meetings of the Friends of Cal Crew we spend half the time, unfortunately, bitching about the lack of support and help we’re getting, and how confused and how the numbers are always wrong. And how they take money from one year and they say, “Well, you didn’t raise enough money last year so we’re going to account for that. We’re going to put that in the deficit from last year. You have to go raise more money for this year.” They do all this stuff without even telling you, and it’s ugly.

And that kind of leads me to what I’m currently struggling with. I think I mentioned it last time. But I went to Sandy Barbour last November, knowing sports being cut, knowing the issues that the university’s facing and this $5 million bogey and all that. So I thought to myself okay, how can I be supportive? What more can I do? And I have this, I think I mentioned, I have this philosophical limit that I really, even if I could do it, wanted to do it, I really shouldn’t do more than half of what the support system is doing. So that’s kind of my limit, my thinking. But I ran a bunch of numbers and I went to Sandy and I said, “Look, this sport has been costing you about $340,000 a year in variable costs.” This isn’t the allocation of overhead, but variable costs. And that was a number I had gotten from one of my meetings as part of the Chancellor’s—

02-01:07:45 Cummins: Executive Advisory Committee, yeah.

02-01:07:47 Rogers: So I thought those numbers should be good. And I said, “That number is only going to go up, so here is what I’m willing to do. I’m willing to personally say that if we take that number down to $250,000 and cap it so the university’s variable cost for rowing, for men’s rowing, goes from $340,000 to $250,000 and will not increase for the next five years. I will guarantee that I will pay everything else either through my fundraising efforts here or through my personal contributions, and I’ll give you that warranty, so whatever it costs. I need to put a cap somewhere, so I won’t contribute more than $750,000 in any given year. And this is only for the variable costs; I don’t want to get into allocations of fixed costs. That always leads to bad decisions. So you do what you’re going to do with that. But hey, it’s an open checkbook.”

And I thought she’d be on her hands and knees. I thought they’d be all over me, why not? I had a couple of conditions, I said, “Look, part of what I want to do here, and I’ll pay for it, is I want to take the funding for crew, which has

been salami sliced down to about $1.2 million—I want to take it back up to $1.4 million. But I’ll pay for it, so it’ll be no cost to the university. And I want to be sure that we’re working toward making crew an NCAA sport. Everybody agrees with that, so we’ll stay on that track. And that we won’t cut the current number of athletes or the current number of scholarships.” That’s all I asked. That’s not much of an ask.

And Sandy’s first response was this is great and we’re so grateful for what you do and all that kind of stuff, and she said, “But I really need to make sure I’ve run my numbers.” And I said, “Here are the numbers; they’re pretty simple.” She said, “Well, I’ve got a bunch of stuff I’ve got to look at. I’ll be right back to you.” Which I took to mean within a week, but two months go by and I haven’t heard from her. So I call her and I have another meeting and we go through the same thing again, and she says, “Oh, this is so great. I know we can do this and I’ll be right back to you.” And I go another two months. I go through that three times, three times! I can’t figure out what is in the way.

So we have one of our Friends of Cal Crew events down here at the boathouse and Foti Mellis came up to me

02-01:10:49 Cummins: Mellis?

02-01:10:49 Rogers: I like Foti okay? But Foti comes up and he says, “Sandy has asked me to give you the response to your proposal and I’m going to do it. I’ve got it all laid out for you.” Like he’s doing me a favor. “But I can’t do it until after the IRA. I’m just too busy.” This is like a month before the IRA. So I’m saying, you know something? I am not going to—whatever regard I have for Foti Mellis—I’m offering millions of dollars here and I shouldn’t have to deal with Foti Mellis and I shouldn’t have to wait a year. I was prepared to do all this for last year’s season. I made the proposal in November. I would have done it right away, so we went through a whole year of them not getting the benefit of not getting of what I was offering. And so I said the hell with it. So I went to John Wilton and I sent him the communications—

02-01:11:51 Cummins: Well, you had mentioned the last time too that you had mentioned this to Frank Yeary, right?

02-01:11:55 Rogers: Yeah, I did.

02-01:11:56 Cummins: And he said he never heard of the proposal?

02-01:11:58 Rogers: That’s right. Sandy said that Frank—

02-01:12:00 Cummins: Right.

02-01:12:01 Rogers: I told you that Sandy said Frank had turned it down or something. I went to Frank; Frank said he never heard of it. Anyway, so I went to Wilton and I showed Wilton the correspondence that I had with Sandy and I expressed what I just expressed to you, my frustration. And John is sort of new on the job, I understand that, and so he said, “Let me look into this and I’ll get back to you.” So again, three weeks or something went by and I called him, or I sent him an e-mail and I said, “What’s going on?” And he pleaded for more time. He said, “Look, this is complicated and it interrelates to all the other things we’re doing to Athletics, and we just settled the baseball thing. Please be patient.” I said, “Fine, I understand, I know what a mess things are in, and as long as it’s on your list that’s fine.”

So about, I don’t know, about a month after that, which takes us up almost to right now, maybe a month ago, he came down here and we visited the boathouse. And we came here to my office and we talked about this whole thing. And what he had done is he had put together some numbers based on numbers that the Athletic Department had given him, and he shared that budget with me and it was wrong. It was just—all the numbers were just ridiculously—

02-01:13:36 Cummins: Now was this specific to crew, or in general?

02-01:13:37 Rogers: No, just crew.

02-01:13:38 Cummins: Just crew.

02-01:13:39 Rogers: But even the amount of money we’d raised was off by a factor of three. They had it at $75,000 or something. We’d raised $300,000. The whole thing was all screwed up, so I went through it with him, line item by line item and I pointed out how screwed up it was. So he said, “I’ll go back and we’ll get to the bottom of this and we’ll get it fixed.” And then about a week later he called me and he said, “You’re right, a lot of these numbers are wrong.” So I said, “Look, let me take what you’ve tried to put together here and let me have my staff put what I think are the right numbers and then we can—”

So I’ve got a meeting with him next week where I’m going to take him through what the real numbers are. We know, we’ve got the budgets, we’ve got the numbers here. We know what we raised; I know what I contributed.

02-01:14:31 Cummins: Of course, of course.

02-01:14:32 Rogers: And so I will share that with him and I will show him—it’s pretty simple, but I will show him what the impact of this offer I’m making will be and how it’ll take the cost down but the budget up. There’s something going on there. There is something going on there and I think it’s Title IX related. This is my speculation now. Nobody’s had the courage to say anything to me. I can’t imagine this would—

02-01:15:05 Cummins: Why not? Why not? Why would they not say—

02-01:15:08 Rogers: John, I don’t know.

02-01:15:08 Cummins: —look, we have this Title IX issue.

02-01:15:10 Rogers: I don’t know. I just can’t—I don’t know. One of the things I said to Sandy when we had our second meeting, she said, “You know, there’s a mandate that all these sports pay for themselves completely.” And I said, “Okay, fine, I’m all for that.” But I said, “This offer takes you 80 percent of the way there, so why wouldn’t you accept this? Are you in fact saying, ‘Look Gary, unless you pay for all of the sport , [we’re] not going to take anything?’” Could that be the response? Are they saying, “Gary can afford it. Why doesn’t he pay for this whole sport?” She says, “Oh no.” She was insulted, she said, “Oh no. We certainly wouldn’t do that. That’s just preposterous.” I said, “Okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insult anybody. But I can’t understand why you haven’t just said yes to this.”

And somehow I think maybe that’s gotten embroiled in this Title IX thing, because it’s sort of like, unless we figure out a way to finance women’s crew, we can’t raise money for men’s crew—going back to the analogy that I shared with you earlier—I think the way the Title IX accounting works it doesn’t matter where the money comes from, the university is still spending it for a men’s sport and therefore they’ve got to have a dollar to spend for a women’s sport.

02-01:16:50 Cummins: The only other thing I can think of is that they have a concern about—because you said something about they can’t reduce the number of scholarships, that was one of the conditions. How many scholarships are there?

02-01:17:08 Rogers: There are ten.

02-01:17:09 Cummins: Ten. These are—that’s ten full-ride—

02-01:17:13 Rogers: Yeah, yes—

02-01:17:15 Cummins: —which can be divided up?

02-01:17:16 Rogers: Yeah.

02-01:17:16 Cummins: Right.

02-01:17:20 Rogers: I’m sure they’re not full-ride, but I think there are ten.

02-01:17:23 Cummins: Well, whatever it is. But I don’t quite understand that based on the bigger picture that you’re laying out. But whether they think that—I know they would prefer to have money come in to the total Intercollegiate Athletics Program that they can then allocate. But that can’t work either. That’s impossible, that’s not going to work. So, that’s the only thing I can think of.

02-01:17:56 Rogers: Well, I think I’m getting close. I’m sure John will ultimately tell me.

02-01:18:00 Cummins: Yeah, somebody will tell you, exactly.

02-01:18:02 Rogers: But your question’s right, why—this is where I come back to my comparison with Harvard.

02-01:18:07 Cummins: Yeah.

02-01:18:08 Rogers: I’ve given money to help the Harvard Business School to teach writing to its MBA students. One of the things I’ve been frustrated in, in my business career, and it’s just one of those things that a lot of my peers talk about, which is it’s hard to find anybody today, even with a Harvard MBA, who can write.

02-01:18:21 Cummins: Yeah.

02-01:18:22 Rogers: Writing is a lost art.

02-01:18:23 Cummins: Exactly.

02-01:18:24 Rogers: People can text, e-mail maybe, but to put a coherent paragraph together— there are obviously some business school graduates who can but there are a lot who can’t. And I remember how Harvard tried to train me to write when I was in business school there. That didn’t work either. It’s very hard if you think about it. You have seven hundred kids in a class, and if they don’t have basic writing skills how do you do it? How do you correct all of the papers? How do you deal with that?

02-01:18:59 Cummins: Exactly.

02-01:18:59 Rogers: So I’ve been talking with Harvard about that for some time and I’ve given them significant monies, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to come up with a beta site, with a test approach, integrated with one of their existing courses or—I’m not a professor, so I’ve asked the school to tell me what they want to do. But I’ve told them if they can come up with a new program they are supportive of, I’ll fund it.

And I have funded this thing for several years. It hasn’t worked, okay? It just hasn’t worked for various reasons. But the communications have been great. They write to me, they give me very clear accounting of how my monies have been spent, the things they’ve tried. They’re sort of abashed at the fact that they don’t see it as being a success so far. But hey, I’m fine with that. But there’s a clear understanding. I’m not upset with them. We’ll try something else.

It’s just the other end of the scale from here, where I’m trying to be a partner. The whole reason I offered this thing was because of the pressure the department’s under. Believe me, I don’t need to put more money into anything, including crew. But I’m willing to do it, and I’m so frustrated at the lack of response. It’s been over—it’s been a year now, almost a year now, not quite a year.

And so, you asked me about the relationship with donors. I don’t know how many other donors are suffering this issue that I’m suffering but I know some are. And then this all plays into that endowment issue, where—I know too much about the endowment, and I wouldn’t give major monies to that university. Maybe when I die, okay? But why should I give money to an endowment that’s earning 3 percent a year when the competitive rate is 8 percent? It’s insane, and I know a lot of other people who have come to that same conclusion who are major potential donors to this university. So, I’m trying to be constructive there, and I think I’ve told you parts of that story. I’ve been working hard on this up to the Regents’ level.

02-01:21:32 Cummins: Right.

02-01:21:33 Rogers: And I’m making some progress there. I like doing this just because it’s like doing the Sunday crossword puzzle. I like the process. [laughter] I told you last time how life is about the process.

02-01:21:44 Cummins: Challenge, yeah, exactly.

02-01:21:45 Rogers: So I’m preaching to myself. I’m saying, “Gary; even if it’s frustrating, you ought to enjoy the process.” So through my good friend Don Perata I was introduced last week and went up to Sacramento and met with Darrell Steinberg and took him through the story that I’ve shared with you, and he just couldn’t believe it. He’s just wide-eyed. They are always looking for money up there and to have somebody come in and say, “You guys have thrown away $6 billion.” He wanted to go to the press-— I said one of the concerns I’d had is [if] this finds its way into the newspapers, because this would be horrible, all the other negative publicity. This story would make a great Chronicle headline about how the university is throwing money away. And he said, “No, I think I’m going to plant it.” [laughter] I said, “No please, don’t.” But I think he was semi-serious. We’ve had a couple of conference calls that I’m sort of driving to have with the head of the Regents Investment Committee, Paul Wachter, and Sherry Lansing, the Chairman of the Regents, she’s been part of that. I know I have her attention, so I’ve got a one-on-one meeting with her, and I’m pushing forward.

02-01:23:27 Cummins: Well, what kind of answer can they give? Again, it’s one of these things— what is it, that they don’t have a really good professional—

02-01:23:34 Rogers: I’ve gone on my own initiative and my own costs—I’ve flown all around the country and I’ve had hour-long sessions with the chief investment officers for Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Michigan. So I’m doing what you’re doing with me. I have hour-long interviews and I’ve asked them that question: what are we doing wrong? Because their results are so stunning. And I now have this set of feedback, which is so cohesive. And with very little variation they all told me the same thing.

The first thing you have to do is you have to set up a governance system for this that is not political. Where you’ve got a board, in many cases they set up investment companies, and the only reason they do that is to separate the investment company and process from the university’s politics. It allows them to be much more effective in recruiting talented people into the Harvard Investment Company as opposed to the Harvard treasurer’s office or something. So they say that’s really important, in that you have people who sit on that board over the CIO who are constructive, helpful investment

professionals and have contacts and it helps with—okay. That actually comes out as one of the primary recommendations.

Second recommendation is you’ve got to get capable people; it’s like anything else in life.

02-01:25:19 Cummins: Yeah, of course.

02-01:25:20 Rogers: You’ve got to have people who play at this level, who understand. You’re dealing with, in our case, an $8 billion endowment. Which is about what these other endowments are. They’re in the $8 billion to $25 billion range, so we’re in the game we just don’t have the management.

And in order to get that manager, and this is key—you have to be willing to pay at a competitive rate. These people on average have a base salary, and you get right back to your problem with the athletic director over the football coach—base salary at $800,000 and a bonus out of what they call the alpha. If you don’t know what the alpha is, it’s the difference between what you earn and what your comparators earn. So if you don’t outperform your peers, you don’t get a bonus, but if you do your bonus could go as high as $4 million. And some of these guys have been earning that. This guy David Swensen at Yale is the dean of these guys and has written the book on how to manage endowment monies. One important element is that you’ve got to be willing to pay for talent and performance.

When I took this series of recommendations to Paul Wachter, who runs the regent endowment committee, his first response was very supportive. He sent me back an e-mail saying, “I agree with everything you’ve said. This is terrific.” But he said, “There’s no way that Yudof is going to agree to pay a CIO this kind of money. Until we get over that hurdle this is all just an exercise in futility.” So, I said, “Okay, let’s have a conference call.” And so that was the conference call that Sherry Lansing, Mark Yudof, Paul Wachter, one or two other people were on. And Yudof was hesitant, but Lansing interestingly said, “Gary’s right. We have got to step up to this. I’ll take the heat. Listen, I live in this world. I know what it’s like, and the heck with the Chronicle. We’re past that. This university would go down the drain if we worry about political correctness and Chronicle reporters. What do they know? Let’s just do what’s right.” And so there’s that.

All these people will tell you that there is what they call the Swensen model and you have to follow it. It starts with asset allocation and it gets more complicated than that, but this has been written in stone for fifteen years and every high-performing endowment in the country starts with the Swensen model. Over the last ten years the University of California at Berkeley has been as far from the Swensen model as you can be. [laughing] And when I

talk to them at the treasurer’s office here in Oakland, they couldn’t—they almost couldn’t tell you what the Swensen model is. It’s just black and white.

Now all of them have their own little variations on that theme, but they all start there. But David Swensen and all the others will tell you that that is just a prerequisite. Then it’s how you apply it. It’s like any other business: How do you execute? What do you do? The place I got to know David Swensen is on the Shorenstein Real Estate board. David Swensen is also on that board. David Swensen is the biggest outside investor in Shorenstein’s funds, so that’s where I first got to know David.

But here he is running a big endowment for Yale but he’s taking the time, and it’s very important for him to be right there on the board where you’re making decisions on how those funds are being applied, where the University of California is as far from that as you can be. They will invest in a fund of funds that is taking a set of fees and maybe is putting some money with Shorenstein, right? But any idea—they have no influence. Shorenstein probably doesn’t even know that they’re one of the indirect investors.

And then, the University of California has got to report publically everything they’re doing with all their endowment monies. And there are a lot of outfits like Shorenstein that don’t want that.

02-01:30:42 Cummins: Of course.

02-01:30:43 Rogers: So they just keep shooting themselves in the foot with all these ill-advised policies. So getting close to the managers, being close to how the money is actually being invested, what building are you buying? That’s the difference between success and failure in some of these cases.

And I don’t know, I’ve got two or three other points, I can’t remember what they are. But this isn’t rocket science, and all of our competitors, the people who are recruiting away faculty and offering scholarships to students and plotting our demise—and they are—you go to Harvard and they talk about recruiting faculty from Cal. It’s one of their goals.

02-01:31:35 Cummins: Well, what George Breslauer told me yesterday is they’re reducing the number of faculty by 100 FTE.

02-01:31:41 Rogers: Are they?

02-01:31:43 Cummins: That’s huge, and I said, “Well, what does that bring the number to?” That’s 1,400 FTE, faculty. When you go back to Tien in ’91 it was 1,756.

02-01:32:00 Rogers: Was it really?

02-01:32:03 Cummins: Seventeen fifty-six FTE, and then we went through those three years of voluntary early retirement because the budget crunch was so bad and it brought it down to like 1,250. Then we went back up to somewhere between 1,600 to 1,650 and now dropping down to 1,400. And that’s astounding, that’s really astounding.

02-01:32:26 Rogers: But you know John, I think that’s what we have to do. I would rather see us do that and take care of the faculty that—

02-01:32:33 Cummins: That are there.

02-01:32:34 Rogers: Protect the jewels in the crown.

02-01:32:36 Cummins: Yes.

02-01:32:36 Rogers: Let’s face it, we are going to go through a very tough time here.

02-01:32:39 Cummins: No question.

02-01:32:40 Rogers: And we’ve been very naive over the last three or four years on how tough it’s going to be. We’ve been wishing and hoping—

02-01:32:45 Cummins: Of course.

02-01:32:46 Rogers: —money’s going to come from Washington, money’s going to come from Sacramento. Let’s all go up and hold signs and lobby the governor. None of those efforts have borne any fruit.

02-01:32:55 Cummins: Right, exactly.

02-01:32:55 Rogers: And better—I’ve been through this in business so many times—better to step up and do what you have to do. You can always add it back if you’re too pessimistic, but you’ve got to be realistic, you’ve got to understand the environment that you’re in, and you’ve got to protect your key assets. And what we’re doing is we’re putting everything on the table. We are just a target for—I met the president of USC the other day. A really impressive guy, can’t

remember his name But he’s done great things down there, and he too said there’s never been an easier time to poach Cal faculty. For USC! God, what’s the world coming to?

02-01:33:36 Cummins: Yeah, and George said yesterday that in the council of deans meeting when he laid out this five-year model and what the implications were, et cetera, they said, “I’m not going to tell my faculty that; they’ll leave.” That’s the situation, and I think it’s true when—this gets back to what we talked about last time about being broad-based and excellent at everything, which I know you’re working hard to say you can’t do that. If you’re cutting back a hundred FTE, how can you possibly do that then? So at least there should be some real—

Now their argument back would be these are—the way they get those FTE is they’re through retirements and things like that, so they can control that pot of money, use it for other purposes, et cetera. So it’s a pot of money basically. But they’ll say that it takes a long time to actually get to the point of saving money if you eliminate a department.

Or they’ll use the example of UCLA. We talked about this, I think, last time, where in the early nineties Chuck Young merged Public Policy, Nursing, and something else into one school with one dean, et cetera,. They, according to George and what he was saying yesterday, they save some money, it’s not clear how much, but it creates all this tension and friction within the unit because all these people want to do their own thing the way they’ve always done it, et cetera. That’s not probably news to you. You’ve probably heard that.

02-01:35:31 Rogers: Well, that’s what I was referring to at the very beginning—I think what is happening in athletics and at the university broadly is the need to face the same reality that we are seeing in our entire society and our entire economy. What you just said about the faculty is a classic example. In the good old days, which was only five years ago, we could afford what you just described, where if a faculty member gets upset, oh my God, of course we’re not going to put him with somebody else that he doesn’t get along with, or if he doesn’t have his own HR professional or if he doesn’t have this or that—guess what, those days are over forever.

And these faculty councils or the faculty senate, they’re just—maybe it’ll take another five years before they wake up and realize that we’re out of money. Money talks and you have to get more businesslike, you have to get more efficient—you can’t have every branch of the University of California be a research campus and you can’t have everybody specializing in everything. And you can’t have a place like Berkeley, much as we love it, be—it’s ludicrous to say we’re best in everything.

I call them myths. A lot of these myths that have grown up that we thought we could perpetuate forever are no longer affordable. And it’s just like we’re going to have to deal with Medicare and Social Security and pensions and unions and all these other issues that are on the table. We’re going to have to really get smart about how we introduce technology, about how we leverage the Internet into the whole learning process. We’re going to have to ask fundamental questions about what is important now in higher education in California, what are the roles of the community colleges and the state colleges and the university, and how do we allocate funding against the new definition of those roles, which may be very different than the master plan that Pat Brown implemented.

We’re going to have to wind up with a much more practical, common sense, efficient model, and I’ll tell you what—it’s going to hurt. It’s going to require major change. And some of these little empires that people have built up that is their whole life are going to have to challenged just like Athletics is being challenged. Everybody’s going to go under the microscope. How does this fit the current charge, mission, charter of the University of California at Berkeley? And I think we’re just starting to ask those questions, because I’ve attended about five of those meetings now.

02-01:39:05 Cummins: The executive—

02-01:39:05 Rogers: The Chancellor’s Executive Committee.

02-01:39:06 Cummins: Right.

02-01:39:07 Rogers: And I recently pulled out the letters that I’ve written to Birgeneau. And I’m not here to say I told you so. If you go back and read those things I wrote him three years ago—

02-01:39:18 Cummins: It’s coming true.

02-01:39:19 Rogers: —where I say basically what you think is the worst case is going to be your best case, and you have to get real. You’ve got to face the facts. I did that because I think one of the things that happens in life, and certainly in business, is you develop a refined gut. When you start out early in your career you make your decisions mostly from the head, and I heard George Shultz give a talk the other day about how, as he’s gone through his life, he’s more and more relied on his gut.

I’ve been through this issue of downsizing so many times, and I’ve made every mistake you can make and I’ve wished my way, I’ve tried to pretend

that problems are going to go away, and I’ve learned that the best way to deal with a problem is to confront it, face the brutal facts. You can always find a way through it and in retrospect it wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be. And hey, we were very proud of our University of California at Berkeley ten years ago. We were all very proud.

When you look at what has happened to that course handbook in the last ten years—it’s probably doubled. So what would be wrong with the concept— you wouldn’t do this literally—but what would be wrong with the concept of saying all right, we’re going back to the size of university we had ten years ago and we’re going to revisit the course catalog with that in mind. And a lot of what we offer is going to have to come out but we’re going to be able to afford what it is we decide to do. That’s what a business would do.

When I took over as chairman of Levi Strauss, maybe I told you this, we did a study where we found that we were making 92 percent of our profits in fifteen countries, but we were doing business in 150 countries.

02-01:41:20 Cummins: Amazing, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? [laughing]

02-01:41:22 Rogers: Well, you can do the same study at Cal and I’ll tell you what—you’d find some of the same things. Usually there’s an 80/20 rule in effect.

02-01:41:35 Cummins: Well, it’s interesting—how would you contrast, because what everybody talks about, Berkeley being unique, is this faculty shared governance, and you’ve got to consult with everybody. And everybody is afraid to move without talking to ten people first, and there’s a lot of strength to that—at least there was. Now, it makes it very much more difficult, so a chancellor is not a CEO.

02-01:42:07 Rogers: Right.

02-01:42:08 Cummins: He can’t just say we’re going down this path and that’s that. So what are your views on that?

02-01:42:16 Rogers: I just think you’ve got to bring a business view to the whole thing. We are in a situation now where decisions have got to be driven by what we can afford.

02-01:42:24 Cummins: Right.

02-01:42:25 Rogers: So I would say all right, John Wilton, give me a realistic number. Give me a number that you’re willing to lay down for and say you can count on at least this much money for this institution over the next three years. And it can’t be

can’t be hopes and prayers. It can’t be some magic person in Washington that’s going to give us another half a billion dollars. Cut it to the bone, tell me what I can count on.

And if I were Yudof what I would say is , “We’re going to change the system. We’re in a new world now. Everything’s changing, and we’re going to have a CEO of each of these campuses and the CEO is going to be in charge. We’re going to decide for that campus what it can afford, and we’re going to be the best there is at what we decide to do. But it’s going to mean downsizing like this institution has never seen before and it’s going to mean changes in responsibilities like this institution’s never seen before. And if we lose faculty, so be it. We’re going to lose faculty anyway. We’re in a new world now, and we’re going to look at how the best universities—the universities against which we compete—we’re going to look at how they’re managed and we’re going to emulate the best. And if we do that we can keep—there’s going to be some change, but we can keep the faculty. We’re going to pay for what we’re trying to do, but we’re not going to be all things to all people.” One of my good friends likes to say, “You can only make some of the people happy some of the time, and that’s enough.”

02-01:44:19 Cummins: And that’s enough.

02-01:44:20 Rogers: In business, that’s what you do. You try to make everybody happy and you’ll go broke.

02-01:44:24 Cummins: Exactly.

02-01:44:26 Rogers: You can only make some of the people happy some of the time, but that’s enough. So I would take that approach if I were the czar of Berkeley. [laughing] I would say look, I don’t care what we did last year or five years ago. It’s a new deal; here’s what we are going to do.

02-01:44:43 Cummins: So if you apply this to Athletics, which is what you were saying the last time, and the chancellor settled for way too little in terms of the hundred million versus the twenty pledges, whatever, that’s what you were saying. In other words, you can’t continue to function the way that you’re doing, now you’ve just gone back. It’s a short-term solution again, and you’re going to be back here five, six years from now dealing with the same problem.

02-01:45:08 Rogers: Yeah, I think that’s right. But I also think that—I don’t know if I finished that theory of mine. But did I tell you I think that whole thing got hung up in Title IX? Did we go over that?

02-01:45:20 Cummins: Oh yes, we talked about that. Yeah, and they’re of course saying no, it didn’t, but I—

02-01:45:26 Rogers: They’re hiding.

02-01:45:27 Cummins: Right.

02-01:45:29 Rogers: I’ve heard from inside sources enough now to know that they really didn’t understand the implications of what they were doing, and they had to bring back enough sports. They were going to have to reduce the number of male athletes by eighty because they put themselves in a new Title IX category.

02-01:45:47 Cummins: Right, right. That’s hard, it’s incredible to me, as I said the last time, because they had done this in-depth analysis of Title IX. It was in 2007 I think.

02-01:46:03 Rogers: But John, if you had dealt with the Athletic Department like I have, you wouldn’t be surprised. This is typical, not unusual, they screw everything up.

02-01:46:15 Cummins: So tell me your view now on the stadium and the High Performance Center, and the financing model for that and how you think that—the seat licensing and the—

02-01:46:26 Rogers: Oh God, well, if I had—it’s always easy to say if I’d been in charge—but I wouldn’t have done any of those projects. I wouldn’t have built the new Bay Bridge. What are we doing spending $9 billion to improve a bridge that doesn’t increase its capacity by one car? You’re building half a bridge for $9 billion, two of which is to assuage the egos of two mayors because they didn’t like the original design. They wanted to have a big tower deal. That’s $2 billion of taxpayer money.

And we’re doing the same thing with the stadium. Okay, the stadium’s right on the Hayward Fault, and I know seismically that’s bad. And if there were an earthquake when the stadium’s occupied, it could be dangerous. But the stadium is only occupied five times a year.

02-01:47:18 Cummins: Five or six.

02-01:47:19 Rogers: The odds that an earthquake’s going to hit—it’s de minimis, and I think society has to take certain risks. When they had the Loma Prieta earthquake we lost what, one person off the Bay Bridge?

02-01:47:31 Cummins: Yeah.

02-01:47:33 Rogers: Well, they spent $9 billion to save one life. If you’re going to do it that way take that $9 billion and invest it in education or invest it in healthcare or invest it in—you’re going to save a lot more than one life with $9 billion. So in terms of cost benefit the idea of completely redoing Memorial Stadium is crazy. I overflew Memorial Stadium in a helicopter just three days ago. It’s a huge project.

02-01:47:58 Cummins: Yeah, it’s incredible isn’t it.

02-01:47:59 Rogers: It’s amazing what they’re doing there.

02-01:48:00 Cummins: Isn’t it? It’s unbelievable.

02-01:48:01 Rogers: But the money they’re spending—for what? I just wouldn’t have done it. And the High Performance Center, it’ll be nice to have, but given the financial picture we’ve got that wasn’t a necessary investment.

02-01:48:19 Cummins: But see there are two interesting points there. One is Blum insisted on it, as the chair of the board, you know that, and “You have to do this or you can’t play there.” So that was—

02-01:48:29 Rogers: Yeah, but that’s the problem we get into. It’s political.

02-01:48:32 Cummins: Yeah, exactly, so that was one issue. And then the Tedford contract, and we’d promised Tedford and so we have to do something. But, we could have seismically upgraded the stadium, just dealt with the seismic issue. It would not have looked pretty et cetera, for about $35 million, to hold that west wall up so it’s not going to collapse when you have an earthquake and there are people in there. For $100 million—this was one of Mark’s ideas—you could build a building for $100 million someplace near there that could accommodate the coaches and the sports medicine and that kind of thing but would not have—instead of spending $500 million for this.

Now, do you think that the seat licensing—what’s your view on the seat licensing? There have been a number of failures on seat-licensing programs elsewhere, and in this environment, this economy, it’s very hard to see how—

02-01:49:39 Rogers: Well, when they first came out with that I just thought it was crazy. I just thought it was, I mean come on, for six home games a year? A college game? Give me a break, and those numbers were so large. Now I must say, I ponied up. But I was able to do it in a way that really just incorporated what I was giving to the crew anyway. Okay, so I was giving the crew $200,000 a year, so that became my seat license and it flowed through to the crew.

02-01:50:11 Cummins: Yes, right.

02-01:50:12 Rogers: So I did it because it was possible to do it that way, although it got pretty complicated. You’ve touched—you get me going here John—you’ve touched on so many things that I think are part of what has to change. To have the Chairman of a Board of Regents say we either have to do this or we can’t play there—he’s really saying look, I don’t want to have taken this risk on my watch.

But I just think we need to be more deliberate about these things and to say what can we afford and what we can’t afford. That’s fine to say when you’re used to getting whatever you need in the way of money and construction funds. Look at that university, that campus, you still have cranes everywhere. They’re building like—so there’s money that’s been set aside when times were good to do all this stuff, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. But we can’t afford to maintain our faculty. There’s something screwy about that.

But again, I would just look at things differently. I think everything needs to have a cost-benefit analysis, and I think the benefit you get for that High Performance Center is not worth what it’s costing. And the benefit from that—maybe you could have done some kind of Rube Goldberg scheme to hold that thing together in an earthquake a little better and not seat people near the fault line, something, I don’t know.

But Ned Spieker had a proposal. Ned Spieker is one of these—you talk about donors—Ned Spieker would make my stories look like child’s play. Ned Spieker put up the money for Spieker Plaza and it was never built. Do you know that story?

02-01:52:13 Cummins: You mean the swimming complex?

02-01:52:14 Rogers: No, I mean the Spieker Plaza.

02-01:52:15 Cummins: The Haas Pavilion and the plaza in front.

02-01:52:18 Rogers: He gave money to the Haas Pavilion and the plaza in front, which was to be named Spieker Plaza. Well, they never built Spieker Plaza, and he was very nice about it and they ultimately came along. I may be wrong about this, but I think he gave some more money so they could finish that.

02-01:52:36 Cummins: Yeah, they had put down asphalt, they didn’t put down the bricks and the pavers and then didn’t tell him.

02-01:52:42 Rogers: Right, yeah, okay.

02-01:52:44 Cummins: And so he saw it and it was blacktop

02-01:52:50 Rogers: It’s not a very good way to deal with a major donor, someone who’s built the whole aquatic complex.

02-01:52:54 Cummins: Right.

02-01:52:56 Rogers: Well, on top of doing all that Ned came to—I think this was when Gladstone was still in the athletic director seat, or shortly thereafter that, where he proposed, he said, “Look, I can do the Memorial Stadium deal.” He does big projects all the time.

02-01:53:16 Cummins: Yes, right.

02-01:53:18 Rogers: And he didn’t say that he would fund it all, but implicit in what he was saying was that he was prepared to pony up at least some of the cost of this. But he was saying for something like $200 million, that he had a plan—

02-01:53:35 Cummins: Right, this would have been the big building, take down the west wall and build it all right there, and it would have included some component, some academic component for law and business.

02-01:54:43 Rogers: I think we are missing it on so many fronts from donor relations to endowment management. If you talk to Scott Biddy he will tell you that on this endowment question it would be so much better if the Regents would only give the Berkeley part of the Regent’s pool now to the new Berkeley Investment Company, let Berkeley manage its own funds, and that that’s their goal.

Well, two problems with that. One is it’s actually not the way to go. You don’t get better endowment returns by taking what’s currently in total an $8 billion endowment, but it’s really a $5 billion endowment that is in the regents pool and $3 billion that’s scattered around these campuses, the biggest chunk being at Cal but UCLA has a piece. All these Chief Investment Officers I’ve talked to have said you have to have about $5 billion to be in the game, and none of these campuses have anywhere close to that. Most of them are in the hundreds of millions. And you don’t turn this over to a bunch of amateurs like me that try to run an investment for a piece of the university—that would be the worst way you could go. So in my view that whole idea is wrong for lots of reasons, practical reasons, but secondly politically. When I talk to the people at the Regents they say we really need to get these foundation monies into the same pool as the Regents pool, and they’ve tried that once—they talked about that, might have a revolution among them. But it goes back to what we were just saying, we can’t—the practical aspects have got to trump the niceties and there are ways to do that.

What I’m proposing is that first of all the Regents get their act together and do some of these other things I’ve talked about and then start, in effect, what would be a mutual fund and say, “Look, if you want the advantages of an $8 billion endowment and this good manager and this team and this investment company that we’ve got, look we will open it up to you on a basis proportional to your corpus and it’s up to you. It’s up to you.” But I’ll tell you what, it wouldn’t take long and all these foundations would buy into the pool—

02-01:57:25 Cummins: Once they see the returns, yeah, exactly.

02-01:57:28 Rogers: And it’s also so interesting I don’t know how many people have read the report that the university puts out on the endowment monies in any detail, but there is so much subterfuge in there it is unbelievable. Every single campus, ten campuses, everyone has a separator comparator group that they measure their foundation’s returns against. Every single one of those ten beats their comparator group. Now there are campuses that over the last ten years have earned 1.5 percent, but they found a comparator group they beat.

02-01:58:07 Cummins: Yeah, that they can beat.

02-01:58:09 Rogers: [laughing] It’s just, and—

02-01:58:13 Cummins: Discouraging though, isn’t it?

02-01:58:14 Rogers: Well, and then you have things like the difference between a mean and a median, and so you have these comparator groups where they’re taking the median of this group they put together which, when you really look at it, the median is some college that has $30 million in its endowment or something. That’s the median, so they say well, we’re comparing ourselves to the median of this big group. Well, yeah, but it’s really not a comparator. And they’re doing the same thing in the treasurer’s office, and I’ve been pushing on this in my new role in this Advisory Committee to the Regents that I’m on. But the latest report we got, they were comparing themselves with a group that has a median size of $300 million. We have an $8 billion endowment and we’re comparing ourselves with $300 million. They say, “Oh! We beat them!”

And then all these other universities put their reports out. They all have a June 30 year. Well, I’ve been able to get, just from public information, all the other—those five universities I’ve been comparing against, I’ve been able to get all those reports in about two months. So June, July, end of August, early September, I have all the other data. The University of California’s report doesn’t come out until February—February! That’s six months later.

02-01:59:51 Cummins: Right.

02-01:59:52 Rogers: And I can go on and on, but it’s just so bad. So it’s like the Athletic Department. You can’t imagine how it could be worse, and yet nobody’s asking questions.

02-02:00:02 Cummins: Amazing.

02-02:00:06 Rogers: But, having said all that I’m still a loyal alum. I’m involved. I’m enjoying the process.

02-02:00:14 Cummins: Well, that’s important, because you could just throw up your hands [and say], “It’s not worth it.”

02-02:00:23 Rogers: I’m tempted to but it doesn’t go with my theory.

02-02:00:27 Cummins: No, no exactly, from the beginning.

02-02:00:29 Rogers: The struggle you know, enjoy the struggle, but it is a struggle I tell you. It is a struggle. And I think other people are throwing up their hands. I think it could be so much better.

2-02:00:41 Cummins: Right. So, I don’t know what—it’s twelve now—whether you have another commitment or not. We could go for another half hour.

02-02:00:51 Rogers: Yeah.

02-02:00:52 Cummins: Is that okay? Okay, because there’s just a few more questions here. So we’ve talked about—

02-02:01:00 Rogers: Are we on target? Is this helpful to you?

02-02:01:02 Cummins: Oh absolutely, oh no question, no question. So now this is the more general now, the big issues about where is intercollegiate athletics going nationally. How do you see that? We just went through this Pac-12 contract, all the pros and cons related to that, more money but more travel, games on Thursdays and Fridays, that whole thing.

Again, to get to your point here about these are just major changes and we may not—the old folks may not like X, Y, and Z but you’ve got to get used to it. I was talking to Mark Stephens in the interview two days ago about possibly creating a new model where you take football and men’s basketball and just move it over here, come up with a new way to organize it, to manage it, and then deal with all the Olympic sports separately. It would help with Title IX and everything else. Interesting ideas. Anyway, just your general views at this point.

02-02:02:23 Rogers: Well, I think it’s really just a corollary to what we’ve been talking about. I think we need to get real; I think we need to get practical. I think if we’re going to have an Athletic Department it’s worth running it well. I’m amazed that we’ve had the performance that we’ve had with the incompetence I see. Somehow, someway these coaches pull it out.

02-02:02:55 Cummins: Yeah, third in the Director’s Cup. That’s pretty amazing.

02-02:02:57 Rogers: Yeah, it’s very impressive, so maybe people like me are full of it. Maybe I’m just an old fogey who likes to complain about stuff, because if you’re getting those results— But it’s just like the economy; I’m really worried for the future. In all my experience as—when you’re running things like we’re running them and with the funding issues that I see coming, and with all these mysteries that I just can’t figure out with this story that I’ve been telling you, there are major things wrong. And I think when you have major issues you need to step up and address them, and I think there are some pretty obvious ones.

[portion sealed by interviewee]

I think the debate about Athletics, to me, it’s been had. I think the chancellor’s right and there’s no reason to retrade it. I don’t agree with this $5 million bogey. I’m a big fan of intercollegiate athletics being part of the university experience, but I accept the decision that’s been made. I think that can be dealt with, but in order to deal with those constraints, you have to be even better. You have to be more efficient and you certainly have to be better fundraisers, and I think athletic fundraising has been a joke.

They hire people like Craig Morton for Christ’s sake. I mean, come on. I remember when Y. A. Tittle was retired from the Forty Niners and he came into my office and tried to sell me some insurance. [laughing] I knew more about insurance than he did. And God bless Craig Morton. He was an All- American when I was in college. I know the guy, I love the guy, he’s a good guy, but in today’s era the Craig Mortons aren’t going to help you with your alumni relations.

You need the Scott Biddys. You need professionals, and just like we don’t have good endowment management, we don’t have any kind of—again, I see it in these other things I’m involved with where I see people really doing a good job with donor relations. Some of the political things I’m involved with, that I’m giving money to, are so much more—they’re just in a different league. In terms of making you feel like—communicating with you, keeping you informed, being grateful for what you’ve given them, and on an ongoing basis knowing that you’re important. That’s a big part of what we’re not doing well.

02-02:06:33 Cummins: It’s interesting just on that point about—for a period of time, Scott Biddy is now the exception—but this view that faculty members could run the Development Office—and I’m not being critical of anybody, Don McQuade, Dan Mote, that whole thing. Curt Simic was a professional and then we went through this faculty approach, and so it’s just another indicator, I think. At the same time [they] raised a fair amount of money too. So whether we could have raised more is a question, but anyway, it’s a—

02-02:07:18 Rogers: You know, with the reputation and credibility of the University of California at Berkeley, the number of alumni we have, the percentage who give is pathetic. The amount of money we raise compared to what other universities raise is pathetic. The way we manage it is pathetic. The way we relate to donors for the most part is really—it was designed thirty years ago. It’s chronically out of date and I don’t know anyone who feels good about it really.

And these obvious questions, some of which we could talk about—we spend so much time and money—why should this debate that I just took you through be going on, given the crisis we’re facing? Isn’t it obvious to anyone that having ten little tiny pots of money, trying to compete for endowment returns, given the history we’ve had that’s so bad, why is it such a battle to get that teed up? I’m enjoying doing it but I’ve been working on it for two and a half years.

So, we’re just getting in our own way and I see the same analogies in the economy. These debates that are going on, and I don’t mean to be a know-it- all, but I see so many things that this government is doing just being totally counterproductive. People are just starting to stash their cash. Banks are starting to charge you if have more than so much cash in their bank—can you imagine? [laughter] The cash just piling up and people are afraid to invest it because there is so much uncertainty in the environment we’re going into.

I sit on the Medical Center board over at UCSF, and Mark Laret, at the last board meeting said, “I hate to admit this, but I really can’t predict what the impact of Obamacare is going to be on this hospital.” He said, “I tried hard, we’ve staffed it, we’ve worked—I know it’s going to be bad but I have no idea how bad, and so how can I plan for it?” If that’s going on—I’m on the Safeway board so I talk with Steve Burd, the chairman of Safeway. Steve Burd has 175,000 employees. He has managed that employee pool for the last five years with no increase in healthcare.

02-02:10:16 Cummins: Amazing.

02-02:10:17 Rogers: He’s done really innovative things, but they’re pretty simple and its incentive- based. If you’re overweight and you lose weight, your co-pays get better; if you’re a smoker and you quit smoking, your cost of insurance is down. It’s basic stuff like that.

So, he’s running this $45 billion company, takes the time, sets aside his issues with the company, goes back to Washington and volunteers himself to get involved in the debate back there about how to manage healthcare. Here’s a guy with real experience, with 175,000 employees. That’s a pretty good beta site, some really good ideas. You ask him today how many of those ideas got into the healthcare bill? Zero. He said it was a total waste of time for him to go back there, nobody wanted to hear his stories, nobody wanted to pick up on the experiences he had. Nobody, okay?

Now go to George Halvorson who is running the biggest healthcare organization in the United States, Kaiser Permanente, which is having the most success at cost control because they’re focused on prevention. George Halvorson has written seventeen books on hospital administration and

healthcare. The guy is as much of an expert as you can find. He did the same thing. He went back to Washington and agreed to testify and meet with committees. I asked him, I said, “George, how many of your ideas got into this healthcare bill?” He says, “Less than 5 percent. ” He’s so frustrated, okay?

So I call it the twenty-eight-year-old-lawyer syndrome, where you have all these people who have no expertise, have never been in the business they’re regulating or involved with, whatever it is they’re supposed to be in charge of. Because they’ve been given a portfolio they think they can proclaim what we ought to be doing, and as the poor people who get hit with that stuff, people are just throwing their hands up and saying, “I don’t know what’s going to come next.”

02-02:12:34 Cummins: It’s amazing.

[portion sealed by interviewee]

02-02:17:45 Rogers: Yeah, but I’m not frustrated. Like I say, I love my life, I enjoy these things. I have a boatful of challenges I’m working on, but I wish I were more sanguine about some of the decisions that are being made.

02-02:18:04 Cummins: Where do you see this economy going? When I walked in the door you were saying yes, it’s a gloomy day, a lot to be worried about. I was listening to NPR on the way down here, about are we in a double-dip recession or not? What is going to bring us out of the doldrums? Do you have any sense?

02-02:18:32 Rogers: Well, I am always an optimist, okay? And I am very pessimistic.

02-02:18:40 Cummins: Well, see the thing that bothers me is these kinds of stories, because it requires such a new way of thinking. And if we’re so stuck in these old ways—even if you look at just the data—we were discussing the difficulties of getting good data out of Cal and Athletics. And then you look at the kind of data that the government is providing, whether it’s on manufacturing or jobs or whatever, and over this whole period of time they’re constantly revising their data and it’s worse and worse. What the hell is going on? It doesn’t give you any confidence, I think is the—

02-02:19:28 Rogers: No, it doesn’t, no. What is there to give you confidence? Look, I don’t profess to be an economist, and I’m very much in this conservative camp today that we’re spending beyond our means. We have to deal with that; we’ve put that off for too long and I’m all for finding ways to cut back. If we didn’t have that constraint, if we weren’t so far out on the curve of accumulating debt, if our

deficit wasn’t as large as it is and if we weren’t in this impossible situation of having to claw our way back up that cliff, then the Paul Krugmans of the world are right.

There ought to be more stimulus, if we hadn’t gone through these stimulus packages the last two years—yes, that’s the classic response, that’s what the monetary people ought to be doing. They ought to be buying more treasuries, putting more money into circulation, putting people to work doing what Roosevelt did in the thirties. That’s the classic government response to an economic downturn like this. The problem is, we’ve already shot our wad— we had some stimulus programs that were completely ineffective because they were targeted at the wrong things, they kept, basically, governments in business. That’s what they did, and those government employees are now getting laid off which are adding to the problem. But there is no appetite for additional stimulus; it’s silly to even talk about it.

02-02:21:05 Cummins: No.

02-02:21:05 Rogers: Because guys like me are saying NFW. [laughing]

02-02:21:07 Cummins: Yeah, the only optimistic note in this long article in the New York Times this morning on are we going into a double-dip recession, that article, was right at the end it said maybe the full impact of the previous stimulus hasn’t been felt yet.

02-02:21:30 Rogers: Oh boy!

02-02:21:31 Cummins: [laughter] And that was it, seriously.

02-02:21:33 Rogers: You know, John, I usually watch Fox News before I go to bed. And so I forced myself last night instead to listen to Rachel Maddow. She was interviewing some very liberal economist and they were saying, maybe the shock of the market being down 500 points will influence these conservative, whatever they call them, to understand that we need more stimulus. And I was just thinking—you guys are in never-never land. We are so far apart, the lack of understanding of what might influence the Tea Party people to go back and support a stimulus plan or more government spending or whatever, is so far from what Rachel Maddow was wishing for that it’s like they’re on two different planets. And I’m sure the reverse is true too. I’m sure if you take these conservative radicals in terms of what might influence the liberal wackos—I’ve never seen such separation in our system.

02-02:22:52 Cummins: And it’s very, very worrisome, I think. So it’s hard to see how we’re going to come out of this.

02-02:22:59 Rogers: I think we’re into a double dip. I don’t see—the bright spots are very bright but they’re also relatively small. Silicon Valley is on fire.

02-02:23:12 Cummins: Yes.

02-02:23:13 Rogers: Because they’re doing things differently, because that’s what they do there, so the Facebooks and the LinkedIns and all these people, they’re going public and they’re doing what you do in boom times and their profits are all up. The economy is seeing the effect of this belt tightening and this increase in productivity. The private sector has done what the university and the public sector should have done, but now they’re about finished and they are seeing these very significant results from it, so profits are good.

02-02:23:50 Cummins: Right, profits are good. Jobs are terrible.

02-02:23:52 Rogers: Jobs are terrible, revenues are flat, people are making more money on the same revenue base because they’re more productive, but they are not growing in terms of revenues or jobs.

02-02:24:18 Cummins: Right. But it’s interesting when you go back to the university again and you think about—I think one of the most discouraging things about that is that it is just a huge bureaucracy, so when you try to insert new ideas into a huge bureaucracy like that, that has been hit twice in a decade There’s this level of a kind of a depression and inertia that, because they’re so unaccustomed that they don’t know what to do. In other words they would just—you take whatever idea it is, okay your idea—take the idea that you want to move three UC campuses to CSU campuses or that you don’t really need an office of the president, set all these—they just can’t comprehend that.

02-02:25:20 Rogers: Right, right.

02-02:25:21 Cummins: They can’t. Between the last interview and this one I was at this former chancellors reunion. Did you know there was a former chancellors reunion?

02-02:25:30 Rogers: No.

02-02:25:30 Cummins: Anyway, so Atkinson and Chuck Young put this idea together.

02-02:25:35 Rogers: Oh they did, huh? What fun.

02-02:25:36 Cummins: Yeah, it was fun just to—and somehow I got invited to this but the—

02-02:25:44 Rogers: They must like you, John.

02-02:25:45 Cummins: I have no idea. There were three of us that were kind of helping on this, but anyway—and the only ideas they could come up with, first of all nothing related to what I just said, that wasn’t even discussed. Yudof came and met with this group on the second day and [Albert] Carnesale said, “Look, if your goal is to be the best public university, you’re already there, and your competition, along with the University of California, is going downhill. So you’ll probably remain, but it’s all going this way. If you want to be the best, among the best, then one option is to double tuition immediately, so go from $12,000 to $24,000, have the state contribution, which is currently $12,000, that gets you to $36,000, so you’re getting in the ballpark of what the competitors who are the best are charging for tuition. It helps you with financial aid for the middle class, it deals with one of those key questions. The second idea was to set up a kind of—

02-02:27:04 Rogers: That last comment is because the Pell Grants would continue? Is that what you’re saying?

02-02:27:08 Cummins: Well, basically it gives you more flexibility. So you would have $36,000 per student to deal with rather than $24,000.

02-02:27:16 Rogers: On the grants and programs that fill up that gap?

02-02:27:19 Cummins: Yeah, that’s right. And the state contribution per student, the $12,000, would only be for financial aid. So it would make it harder for the state to cut back on the university, because one of the difficulties was trying to find stability in the budget of the university. So that was one idea. Now I think the likelihood, again, of something like that happening politically is just hard to comprehend.

02-02:27:49 Rogers: Zero.

02-02:27:51 Cummins: The second idea was to set up a kind of an annuity where the state would set aside a certain amount of money and the university would match it. So, they had this plan at Oregon.

02-02:28:05 Rogers: Oh yeah, yeah, I heard about that.

02-02:28:06 Cummins: It would be a $1.6 billion annuity.

02-02:28:09 Rogers: That’s on such a smaller scale.

02-02:28:11 Cummins: Yeah, exactly, so whether that would, again, it’s trying to look at a stable source of funding. But in terms of any—

02-02:28:17 Rogers: Oregon’s a good example of a—it’s not even in the same league, of course, as Cal, but given their resources they do a really good job.

02-02:28:26 Cummins: Yeah, so anyway, I think that’s what’s so discouraging. And I was just thinking when you were talking about the federal level and your involvement with the Federal Reserve, and you try to do something different. I mean hell, okay, because that person doesn’t have a PhD—holy God. So again, that’s what’s very worrisome. It’s that this huge bureaucracy, wherever it is, a university or the federal government or whatever, cannot even accommodate—it’s like these new ideas disappear into a void, and how do you deal with that?

02-02:29:11 Rogers: It’s a broader question, but many of my peers would tell you that the greatest value in the concept of the university, going back to Oxford days, is the exchange of ideas, and the openness to change and thought and stimulation.

02-02:29:38 Cummins: Exactly. Right.

02-02:29:39 Rogers: And how have our universities gotten—I see this at Cal, I see it at Harvard. Everybody is just talking to each other and the conventional wisdom just prevails, and everybody thinks the same thing and they all read the same newspapers and they all vote the same. There is not one person on the poli sci faculty at Cal that you could call a conservative, not one. How does that happen? So do you agree with that?

02-02:30:07 Cummins: I don’t know everyone. I don’t know, but it, that’s certainly the perception. There are very few, like Jack Citrin I would put in the conservative category.

02-02:30:16 Rogers: Yeah, Jack Citrin is a good example, okay. Is he poli sci? Yes, I guess he is.

02-02:30:21 Cummins: Yeah, he’s poli sci.

02-02:30:22 Rogers: And Ken Jowitt, who left—

02-02:30:23 Cummins: Ken. Bob Price is probably another one.

02-02:30:25 Rogers: Okay, all right, well, maybe I overstated it—but you know what I’m saying? There is a—it’s sort of the Larry Summers problem. I don’t like Larry Summers, but asking a question about facts, okay? He had a report that said what, men were better than women at something?

02-02:30:48 Cummins: Right, and he’s crucified.

02-02:30:49 Rogers: Just for raising the question. In a university you ought to be able to raise it. That’s what a university is—you deal with facts and questions and hypotheses, and it’s gone to the other end of the spectrum.

02-02:31:02 Cummins: It’s the same way, again, in athletics, where you can have whatever your views are about the issue of athletics, and you have a group of faculty that very predictably come up with a senate resolution and they’re automatically put into this category— stereotyped—and so there’s no engagement.

02-02:31:40 Rogers: They aren’t one of us; they shouldn’t use the same restrooms we do, because somehow we’re just not worthy.

02-02:31:47 Cummins: I know, I know. Yeah, it’s really dangerous.

02-02:31:48 Rogers: That’s what I saw with the Fed, remember that story I told you? That's the same thing. If they're not part of our sorority, if they’re not trained in the Greek letters somehow they’re not worthy.

02-02:31:59 Cummins: Exactly.

02-02:31:59 Rogers: It’s another outgrowth of the same thing. God, how could a crew coach come to the faculty level, for Christ’s sake.

02-02:32:09 Cummins: Or in your case, how could a businessman know how to run a university? We’re so different. It’s really good that you just keep hammering away,

because most people won’t. I would think, anyway, that after a period of time you just say—

02-02:32:26 Rogers: Yeah, you just throw your hands up. Well, I do really enjoy the process, I must say. I taught myself to eat my own spinach here, and do what I preach to all these kids. But the one thing I worry about is that I’m not—I don’t want to be obnoxious. I really don’t want to be—if I don’t understand the world that I’m trying to deal with here—I do understand finance, I do understand the endowment returns, I have the facts okay there. But if for whatever reason there’s a political arena that I just don’t understand, if I get to the point where I see that or if I see people getting pissed off, or even if I see people disagreeing with me en masse—I've yet to have anybody that I’ve shared those numbers with say anything other than, “This is horrible.”

02-02:33:25 Cummins: Absolutely.

02-02:33:26 Rogers: So that encourages me.

02-02:33:28 Cummins: And you’re making progress.

02-02:33:30 Rogers: I’m making slow progress.

02-02:33:31 Cummins: You’re talking to Regents, you’re on this committee now, so that’s great, that’s really good.

02-02:33:35 Rogers: No, that’s right. And I’m—listen, I’m bound, I believe in optimism and persistence. Believe me, I will do this or die trying.

02-02:33:46 Cummins: Well, that’s what I told these faculty that signed the resolution, I said, “You know, you should really feel good, because you have forced a discussion about a subject that a lot of people have an interest in, and changes have been made as a result of those,” et cetera. So, it’s really too bad that we’re in this situation where nobody can talk to one another. It makes it very difficult.

02-02:34:08 Rogers: Yeah.

02-02:34:09 Cummins: I’ve got to go too.

2-02:34:11 Rogers: Well, I’ve enjoyed this.

02-02:34:12 Cummins: This has been great.

02-02:34:13 Rogers: Whether it helps you with your research or not, I don’t know, but I certainly have opinions about everything. Whether they’re right or not, I don’t know. [laughing]

02-02:34:21 Cummins: No, no, it’s been very, very helpful.

02-02:34:23 Rogers: Well, I’ve enjoyed it, John.

[End of Interview]