|
During the 1980s and 1990s, one of Ohio University’s most recognizable public faces belonged to Dean of Students Joel Rudy.
Rudy left OU in 1998 to briefly take a job heading up a national fraternity, but never left Athens. He and his wife still live in the Roxbury Drive home they bought 33 years ago, when Rudy came to OU to serve as director of residence life.
“One of the misconceptions of all my friends was that we moved to Oxford (Ohio, home of Miami University),” he said.
Rudy has stayed active in local affairs, serving on the boards of a handful of organizations. He has little direct contact with OU these days, but follows developments at the university as reported in local media. He admits, albeit a bit reluctantly, that what he reads about the university’s current direction often disturbs him.
“I don’t have a reason to be on campus,” he said during an interview at his home Saturday. “At times I wish I did. Most of the time, I’m glad I don’t.”
Rudy’s loyalty to OU would be hard to question; the room where he sat down for an interview, for example, is subtly Bobcat color-themed.
“The room you’re sitting in is obviously a green-and-white room, and that was by design,” he pointed out. This was done to create a friendly space for the busloads of student pre-college advisers the Rudys used to invite to their home. “That’s really why we built this room, because we wanted to entertain more students,” he said.
During his years at OU, Rudy said, he believes he and other members of an administrative team under then President Charles Ping worked effectively to put the education of students as the top priority, and to promote “a sense of genuine shared governance” between faculty and administrators. Whether those are still priorities at OU, he said, sometimes seems questionable.
“I do keep track to some degree of what’s going on, and things have certainly changed,” he said. He expressed concerns that an increasingly hands-on Board of Trustees, focused on the financial bottom line, may be moving OU away from its primary mission of educating undergrads. He also worries that there may be an upper limit of enrollment numbers at which that educational mission becomes unmanageable.
“As idealistic as it may sound, I heartily believe that the highest priority has absolutely got to be educating the students,” Rudy said. “I have said, ‘When the institution crosses 20,000 (students), its direction is going to change.’ And it has.”
WHEN RUDY RETIRED IN 1998, it was partly because of an unexpected offer from his old fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, to become its national director. With the blessing of then-OU President Robert Glidden, he took the job, and helped spearhead a campaign to create a strategic plan for the fraternity that he’s still proud of. He decided it was time to call it quits after about two years, however, when, on a drive back from Cornell in New York State, his wife suffered a heart attack. This caused him to realize he needed to spend more time at home.
“Thank goodness she recovered quite nicely,” Rudy recalled. “But I really had to make up my mind at that point.”
Since going into full retirement, Rudy has spent more time with his two grandchildren, and has accepted board seats with local organizations including the Hillel Foundation, an OU Jewish life group, and the Athens Photographic Project, which uses photography as therapy for people with severe mental illnesses.
Much of his time over the last few years was spent on a more personal service project – caring for the aged wife of a deceased friend, former OU administrator Robert Mahn.
When Mahn was dying, Rudy recalled, Rudy gave his wife, Jean, a ride to the hospital. During the visit, “Bob asked me if I would please watch after his wife” after his own death. Rudy vowed to do so, and took the promise seriously.
After Robert Mahn’s death, he said, “I began caring for her… She wanted to stay at home, and Bob had made that possible through a trust.” He recalled that one reason Jean Mahn didn’t want to end her days in a nursing home was that she had “a beautiful little shi tzu (dog)” that she wouldn’t be allowed to take with her. Last August, he said, “she died with that little puppy right next to her… I felt good that we were able to fulfill a promise that I had made to Bob, her husband, and to her.”
RUDY RECALLED THAT when he first came to OU in the ’70s, it was facing hard times much like those the university is facing today. Enrollment had dropped to around 13,000, with the accompanying budget impact. Though enrollment is now much higher and growing at OU, he noted, the university is once again facing a budget crisis.
“They’re going through a tough time, and have been,” he said. “They’re wrestling with a lot of the same things we were at the beginning of the Ping years.”
Rudy’s admiration for Ping is obviously deep and unfeigned. “I learned more as a person and as a professional working with Dr. Ping than I learned anywhere else in my career,” he said. And one of the things he admires most about Ping is his relentless focus on OU’s educational mission.
He recalled Ping’s first meeting with a new member of the OU trustee board, a successful businessman, who asked the president why he hadn’t received a profit-and-loss statement for the quarter. Those in the room held their breaths to hear Ping’s answer.
“Charlie Ping was a very patient man, and he thought for a moment,” Rudy recollected. “And then he said, ‘When you come to the commencement next June, and you sit on that platform, you will see our profit-and-loss statement crossing the stage.’ And I think that was some indication of what was being valued.”
When Ping was president, Rudy said, the Board of Trustees “let him do his job, and he in turn let his staff do their jobs.” These days, however, Rudy said, he sees a trustee board that is “increasingly focused on the dollar,” and increasingly willing to make direct administrative decisions.
“I don’t know how someone working as president, reporting to a board, can effectively operate that way – I really don’t,” Rudy said. At the administrative level, he added, “I see salaries that are off the wall. I see interesting staffing. To his credit, (OU President Roderick) McDavis has been honest in saying, ‘We need to increase our enrollment because we need the money.’ But I think that is very unfortunate that that is the reason we’re increasing enrollment… I think that in the long run, the students will lose, and that bothers me very greatly.”
|
&lscript>
Great Story Mr. Phillips! One suggestion: you should of mentioned his time as president of the Athens City School Board, where he did a fantastic job leading the district during a difficult time.