Higher Education
Joseph Fink and Dominican University are definitely on a roll—just don’t ask him about Norman Mailer in the men’s room.

BY JILL KRAMER

The school that used to be known as Dominican College is now grown-up and making its mark on the world.

Renamed Dominican University in 2000 in accordance with its enhanced academic stature and the size of its graduate program, for the last three years it’s been ranked in the top tier of master’s universities in the West by U.S. News & World Report. But back here at home, it’s still thought of as that little place run by the nuns.

No matter. Despite the local misperceptions, in the 18 years that President Joseph R. Fink has been here he’s more than tripled enrollment, increased the budget from $7 million to $47 million and revamped the campus. The newest construction project is a 35,000-square-foot Science and Technology Center, set to open next year. Students are now conducting research in stem cell biology, breast cancer, sudden oak death and the spread of invasive weeds. And Dominican University has won the competition to host the 2007 National Conference on Undergraduate Research, bringing 2,000 scholars and keynote speakers to the campus for the three-day event.

The school was founded in 1890 as a Catholic women’s college, offering the usual programs in social services, education and nursing. In the 1970s, it was legally and financially separated from the Dominican religious community. Men began attending as science, business and athletics programs were added, although 77 percent of the student population is still women. And while Fink has beefed up the professional and technological curriculum, he has insisted on maintaining strong liberal arts requirements for all majors. Fink is also a firm believer in making higher education accessible to minorities and low-income students. About 40 percent of the school’s undergraduates are African-American, Latino, Asian-American and Native American. More than 75 percent of Dominican students receive financial aid.

Fink grew up in the suburbs of northern New Jersey, the son of a corporate executive. He started out teaching history but preferred expounding to grading papers and quickly moved into administration. He served as president of two East Coast colleges before being recruited here. He took charge at Dominican with visions of realizing what he saw as its untapped potential.

The campus today is a mixture of old and new, with recently constructed buildings scattered among the imposing and venerable original structures. It sprawls comfortably over 80 acres in a neighborhood of aging mansions in San Rafael. Mature broadleaf trees shade the narrow walkways, manicured lawns and well-tended gardens. Fink’s office is in the ivy-covered, three-story Guzman Hall, built in 1930.

I arrive in the late afternoon, after Fink has been talking all day and his voice is almost gone. He speaks in a low growl, stopping occasionally to sip from a glass of water. Burly and barrel-chested, he’s wearing gray slacks and a purple shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled to the elbows. He has a heavy-lidded expression, eyebrows raised, as if he were trying to stay awake. His mustache and beard, which lines his jaw, are gray, lighter than his hair. I decide to ignore his half-joking request to not publish his age—he’s 68. But I did agree not to print a funny story he told about meeting Norman Mailer in the men’s room of the Algonquin Hotel. If you ever meet Fink at a party, be sure to ask him about it.

• • • •

Enrollment here and at other private universities has been rising as state schools have lost funding. Now that the state education budget is looking healthier, do you expect that trend to reverse?
No, I don’t. Places like this and other small liberal arts institutions like Dominican have much smaller classrooms, much more individual attention, our graduation rate is much, much better than in the UC system or the California State University system. So I expect we’ll continue to see more people coming here and to other private institutions, even when the state starts putting more money into education. I always get in trouble when I do this, but let me be blunt. What’s happened at the University of California is that we have a system today that’s basically welfare for the rich. The median family income at UC today is greater than the median family income at Stanford University. If you’re making a quarter of a million dollars a year, you should probably be charged more than the person who’s making $35,000 to send your kid to Berkeley or Davis. In most states, the private institutions were there first and then the public institutions came along later because the vast majority of the population couldn’t get into the private schools because they didn’t have the money. Here, they started just about the same time so that trend did not occur. But in my mind, that’s very poor social policy. People from very, very wealthy families send their kids to private [elementary and secondary] schools and they have the money for SAT tutors and for computers at home and for general academic tutors at home. And their children are competing against what used to be called “Joe Sixpack’s” kids and he has to send his kids to public schools with much larger classrooms and he doesn’t have the money for tutors and the newest computer hardware and software. Until the state changes its pricing program for individuals and requires people to pay what they can afford we’ll continue to have an uneven playing field. This has also had an impact on the minority enrollment.

I understand that Dominican and other private schools are becoming more and more generous with scholarships, bringing in more low-income kids.
Sure. And that’s something we really are very proud of here. About a dozen years ago, we set up a program to respond to the demographic changes taking place in California, to try to bring in more people who normally couldn’t afford to come here and to provide financial aid for them. And it’s worked. We raised over $1 million from the Irvine Foundation to help with that. And it’s not just the scholarship money; we’ve made an investment within the institution in staffing and in other ways. We not only recruit the students, we support them once they come here. We work with parents, because many parents from traditional minority populations automatically think they can’t come to a school like this because it costs too much. My favorite anecdote is about a student who came here about five or six years ago named Rocky Chavez, who was the first member of his family to go to school. His mother and father never graduated from high school, his brother and sister didn’t go to college. He came here with scholarship support and he just blossomed as a student, wound up getting a $30,000 grant in his junior year to pay for his expenses, has gone on to medical school now and got another $30,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship Fund. And I learned that, because of his success, his brother and sister have now gone on to college. And his mother and father went back to get their GEDs so they’d have high school degrees. There’s a ripple effect that all of this has on people. Mario Cuomo once said that if you don’t invest in higher education for reasons of compassion, do it for reasons of common sense. And that’s so true. It’s much cheaper to put people through college than through four years at San Quentin.

I read that 75 percent of your students get financial aid.
We give away more than $10 million a year in financial aid and scholarships, and that’s almost 25 percent of our entire revenue. The school’s revenue is $47 million and we give away about 10.5.

There was a no-confidence vote against you a few years ago. What happened?
[sighs] In all the years I’ve been here, which are 18 now, we’ve been in pretty solid shape financially. And about three years ago, we saw that we were going to run a deficit. And you can’t run a deficit in institutions like this because once you do, it’s harder to come back. So in order to prevent that I had to freeze salaries and freeze hiring and lay some people off. And I took a 5 percent cut in my salary as well. I think we laid off nine people, out of 300 or so. But in a place like this, everyone knows everyone, so it becomes very hard.

What positions were they?
Mostly staff positions. But if there’s one less person in the registrar’s office, you wait in lines longer. And basically it was fear—people start to worry about what’s going to happen. Is this the beginning of layoffs? Are they going to continue? What’s going to happen to salaries? So it took a number of months to fix all of that. I had been spending a lot of time off campus raising money, so I wasn’t around as much as people wanted me to be. So I started spending a lot of time in meetings and communicating with faculty, students, staff—everybody. It was probably healthy for that to happen because it improved communication. I probably wasn’t doing a good enough job of balancing things. But within a year, we unfroze salaries, we started hiring people and giving salary increases and we’re running in the black now. So it was just a one-year thing. What happened was that we had an opportunity to hire a slew of first-rate faculty members in a year when we also gave away a heck of a lot of financial aid and scholarship money. So we went over the budget in hiring and financial aid. So it was less than pleasant, but it’s gone now and morale is good.

What brought you to Dominican?
Never thought I’d live in California. Came out because the guy who was chairman of the board here at the time called me and said, “I understand you don’t like California.” And I said, “It’s not that, I just don’t want to leave the East Coast.” And he said, “Come out and I’ll show you the school and if you don’t stay I’ll buy you the best dinner you’ve ever had.” So I thought, what the hell, I’ll come out on my vacation and take a look at the place. And at the time this campus was much more rustic. The lawns weren’t manicured. We didn’t have sidewalks for the most part or lighting. But it was a very charming place. And at the time there were only 600-and-some-odd students. And nothing was happening at night, nothing happening on weekends. So you could just see the potential. Here you are in this lovely setting, next to one of the most exciting cities in the world, with talent all over the Bay Area. It was too hard to turn down. So now I’m here and I’m never going back. I love living here. Best thing I ever did, personally and professionally.

How so professionally?
It gave me the opportunity to take an institution that was faltering and in some severe difficulty both fiscally and with enrollment and turn it around. It had been placed on warning by the accrediting agency because of its fiscal condition. And the board did a search and brought in a guy named Neil Webb and things got a lot better. But within six months after he started he was killed in a plane crash. It was December of 1987. It was the PSA flight where someone got on the plane with a gun and shot the pilot.

What a tragedy!
Yeah, it was. I was told it took something like seven minutes for that plane to crash. Can you imagine how long those seven minutes were for those people?

What’s your feeling about working in administration as opposed to teaching?
I really liked teaching. I used to teach history. But I enjoy the challenges of administration work more because the pace is much faster. And it’s a constantly changing landscape. I still enjoy reading a lot of history but I haven’t taught in some time. The last time was a team-teaching situation, which was marvelous because I didn’t have to grade any papers, I didn’t have to grade any exams. It’s a great way to teach. A faculty member claimed I did “color commentary” as opposed to teaching.

At what point did you decide on education as your career?
My undergraduate degree was at Ryder University in New Jersey. I had a 25-year-old philosophy professor who had a great influence on me. He was the kind of person who, in addition to his regular load of classes that he taught, he would also invite people to a private class to work on something that wasn’t in the standard curriculum. There were about a dozen of us, we’d meet once or twice a week at his home and smoke pipes and eat pizza and drink beer.

Do you have a family?
I have two families. I have a family on the East Coast from my first marriage, two children, 28 and 31. I was already divorced when I took this job. After I came here I got married again and I have 9-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. There they are up on the wall. [points to two framed, greatly enlarged head shots]

Didn’t the idea of becoming a father at the age of 59 give you pause?
[sighs] Well, it did. Their mother was much younger than I. And after we were married a few years she said, “Joe, you have children and I don’t.” And there’s no way to argue about that. So I said yes. Of course, I thought we were going to have one and we have two instead. But as long we’re doing this personal stuff, I may as well tell you that I’m engaged again.

Oh, the second marriage ended!
Yes, in 2002. I’m not very good at marriages. I’m good at colleges.

Did you warn Number Three?
Yes, she’s a brave soul.

Do you have joint custody of the twins?
Yes. It’s a very loose arrangement because my schedule is so hectic and I travel.

What do you do in your spare time?
I love to read. I used to work out a lot. I haven’t done that recently but I’ll probably start that again. When twins come along they kind of change your life. You know, when you’re married and living at home with your children, you come home at the end of the day, you say hi, pat their heads and go off and read the paper or do whatever you do and the next morning you see them and talk to them a little and then you’re gone. You spend a little time with them on the weekends. But when you’re divorced and you know you’re only going to see them twice during the week and then all day Saturday and Sunday, you’re with them all the time. You don’t say, “OK, I’m going to go off and read a book,” because you don’t want to give up that time. I’m not advocating divorce, by the way, but it changes the amount of real quality time parents spend with their kids. Because when they’re there, they’re the focus of my attention. Nothing gets in the way of that. So that takes blocks of my time away. And there are things I used to do that I’m not going to do now. So the kids are my hobby now. And they’re great fun. Watching twins grow and develop is just fascinating. To see how their personalities develop and change, it’s just a joy.

I imagine that having the perspective of an older father probably also contributes to your wanting to spend more time with your children.
That’s true. Also, when my first two children were growing up, I was working my way up the ladder and couldn’t control my schedule. I think I work harder now than I did then, but I can control it more. I can pretty much dictate when a meeting is going to take place. Unless it’s a foundation officer. They tell me what to do—I’ll be there whenever they want me to be there if they give me some money.

Let’s talk about some of the programs you’ve established here at Dominican. Tell me about the partnership with LINES Ballet School. How did that come about?
Through a faculty member here who had a connection with LINES. I was on the board of the San Francisco Ballet for a while and I was interested. Dancers can only dance for a limited period of time and they’re normally dancing when they would be in college, so this program allows them to come to school. I think it’s a great idea. I’d like to see other institutions doing it more often with people in the artistic community, whether they’re in voice or dance or acting. It looks like it’s going to be a very interesting program. It’s very early yet. This fall will be the first time students will be enrolled in it. One of the really fascinating things that’s happened here at Dominican is that 15 years ago we couldn’t afford to hire faculty members. About eight or nine years ago we started to have enough revenue to hire more faculty members, but they were newly minted Ph.D.s who started at the bottom of the pay scale and did not have a great deal of experience. But in the last five years or so we’ve been able to hire people at the top of the pay scale and we’re getting these very creative people from other areas. They’re coming in with their own grants and their own connections and they’re getting students placed at interesting paid internships—places like Harvard Med and Stanford. And they’re getting grants for service learning.

What’s service learning?
To arrange for students to get credit for going out into the community and become involved. We’ve had faculty members doing undergraduate research with students and they’re going off to conferences and presenting papers. That’s something you normally do as a graduate student, but undergraduate research is kind of limited outside of the very large institutions like Harvard. But now we’re becoming a model for that sort of thing in smaller institutions. Imagine how exciting it is—you’re 20 years old and you’re going to write a paper with your biology professor and your name is going to be on the paper and published in a decent journal. That’s heady, exciting stuff. We’ve had students giving presentations all over the country now. And in 2007, next spring, we will host the National Council for Undergraduate Research, NCUR, here on our campus, for their annual meeting. That’s only the second time they’ve been in California. We’re going to have 2,000 students and faculty members on this campus from all over the country. We’ll fill every hotel in the San Rafael area, that’s for sure. And it’s coinciding with the time we’ll have finished the new Science and Technology Center as well. So the most exciting thing that’s happening here is the rise in academic excellence and having these very dynamic faculty members, teachers and researchers.

It sounds like you’ve had great success with fund-raising.
Our first capital campaign started about 10 years ago. We had a feasibility study done and they told us we could raise $15 million and we’ve raised more than $50 million.

So what’s the secret to your success?
Strong executive leadership. [chuckles] No. It’s the fact that the place has been growing, it’s successful and foundations and philanthropists prefer to give money to successful projects that also have the need. So you say to them, “I want you to invest in a student body that’s becoming diverse and is going to have a strong impact on Marin County and the Bay Area and California and beyond.”

What’s your vision as to the impact the school will have in the community?
We have enormous impact on this community. Aside from the educational opportunities we provide here, there are cultural opportunities. We have lectures here that are free, we have music performances, drama performances, we have art shows here on a regular basis. And the service we provide to this community is enormous. For example, we have an occupational therapy program here and all of those students go out and give free time in clinics and other organizations. An occupational therapist ordinarily gets paid $40 an hour. If we added up all the hours these students have spent in the last five years, we’ve donated $2.5 million to this greater community. People in our psychology program go out and donate their time. If they were being paid for those services, it would be enormous. Nursing students go into hospitals. There are 350 teachers in this community who are graduates of this institution. The county superintendent of schools, Mary Jane Burke, is an alumna of Dominican. So we have a tremendous impact. But people often don’t realize this.

Why is that?
There were nuns who were president of this institution from 1890 to 1980. To change the way people think about the place is not an easy thing to do. The first year that I was here, I was at every Rotary and Kiwanis meeting ever held and I’d always get the same questions: Do you have boys there? And I’d say, well, we’ve been coeducational for about 20 years now. Do you train nuns? No, we’ve never trained nuns. Do nuns run the school? No, not since the 1970s. Are you a priest? No, I’m not a priest. To make people in the community as aware of this place and as proud of this place as they should be is really the primary goal that I have.

PHOTO OF JOSEPH FINK BY RORY MCNAMARA

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