ROCHESTER'S 'BRAND' OF HOOSIER

Indiana University President Myles Brand '67 (PhD) has faced many administrative full-court presses in his 30-year career, although nothing compares to his widely publicized shootout with legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight last fall (which, incidentally, earned him a spot on Time's year-end "10 Best" list for sports achievements).

But Brand, who dismissed "The General" after determining that the famous coach had failed to adhere to a strict policy governing his behavior on and off the court, would rather focus on his academic game plan for the eight Indiana campuses that he oversees from his Bloomington office.

"Unquestionably, the dismissal of Coach Knight is the most difficult decision that I have ever had to make," says Brand. "He is a legendary coach at a school with a legendary reputation."

And it's the academic reputation of Indiana that is particularly dear to Brand's heart.

Shortly after the hoopla surrounding Knight's firing had subsided, Brand reiterated his position that academics come first:

"While intercollegiate athletics have a role to play in university life, the point must be strongly made that the focal mission of Indiana University and other institutions of higher education is, first and foremost, academic. This mission is teaching and learning, research, scholarship, creative work, and professional service."

Brand, who earned his doctorate in philosophy at Rochester, is something of a veteran at balancing the priorities and responsibilities that come with being an administrator at some of the top universities in the country.

He was selected to lead the Hoosier State's flagship public university in 1995, arriving in Bloomington after a five-year tenure as president of the University of Oregon and previous experience as a top administrator at Ohio State and the University of Arizona.

"I knew what Big Ten and high-profile athletics were like," he says.

Brand was not planning an administrative career when he finished his doctorate at Rochester.

Taking his first teaching job at the University of Pittsburgh, he became a full-time administrator at Arizona after being asked to fill in on an interim basis.

"Apparently it's true that no good deed goes unpunished," he jokes.

But he found that he enjoyed the work, even though, as he moved up the administrative ladder, the hours got longer.

"This is not a job, it's a life," he says. "One of the nicest things about it, though, is that every hour, every day, there is something different."

At Indiana, Brand oversees campuses throughout the state (although the eight branches are not a "system," the chancellors of the individual branches report to Brand), with a total enrollment of about 95,000 students and a budget of roughly $3 billion.

Some of those students-as well as many alumni, local fans, and the national media-put Brand in the spotlight beginning last May. That's when he announced that Knight would lose his job if he failed to change his behavior following reports that he had verbally and physically accosted members of the basketball team and staff in the athletic department.

In September, protests erupted when Knight was fired.

Brand says he was not surprised by the reaction to the news, but he says many media reports failed to paint a full picture of Knight.

Media portrayals focused on Knight as a cultural icon from a bygone era, Brand says, agreeing that the coach often fit that description.

"Locally, Coach Knight is known as a person who's done many good things in the community and for the university," Brand says. "I know his good points as well as his weaknesses, so the picture wasn't as black and white when it was looked at in a more contextual way."

While the balance between athletics and academics landed Brand in the public eye last fall, one of his current top priorities is restoring the balance between and among the arts, humanities, and the sciences.

He initiated a $4 million grant program last fall to provide research money to artists and humanists at Indiana as a way to offset some of the difference in funding that's available to them compared to what's available to scientists.

He has long been bothered that to many minds there is a strict divide between the arts and humanities on one side of the scholarly map and scientists on the other. The division is further enhanced by federal programs that give the lion's share of funding to scientists.

"We should not be looking at this as the arts and humanities versus the sciences," he says. "It's not 'versus.' It's not a zero-sum game."

Not that Indiana doesn't have an appreciation of science. The university is the network operations center for Internet 2, the next-generation computer network that includes many top universities (among them Rochester) across the country.

Indiana also is opening a School of Infomatics and expects about 2,400 students to enroll for a program to study sophisticated applications of information technology.

Brand says students in the new school will double-major, combining studies in information technology with studies in liberal arts or business.

It's another example of a "balanced" approach that he hopes will score well with all academics-students as well as faculty-at Indiana and in the world at large.

"The arts, humanities, and sciences are mutually supportive-and we need all of them," Brand says.

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