Outgoing university President Dan Mote explained his governing philosophy to a crowd of about 70 students and faculty in the Stamp Student Union yesterday, emphasizing the limits of his power and the breadth of his responsibilities.

While people often compare Mote’s job to that of a CEO, he said his authority is far more limited. A CEO can hire and fire workers basically at will and sell off or close underperforming units, but Mote has less influence over the day-to-day lives of his employees, many of whom are protected by tenure and generally operate on their own terms.

“You don’t have the direct influence a CEO does,” he said in the roughly half-hour speech. “How does the university function when no one has to do what the president says?”

Mote also explained how he is the only university employee who must answer to and balance demands from every constituency — from research partners to state legislators to Terrapin sports fans to students, faculty and staff.

“If you make an honest list, you’ll find the number of constituencies … is huge,” he said. “Each  constituency sees a slice of the pie, but they tend to see themselves as the pie.”

“There’s only one person on the campus who can speak for and to all the constituencies,” he added.

The solution, Mote said, is to create a vision that everyone in the institution — 37,000 students, 250,000 alumni, 3,000 faculty and 5,000 staff — can see themselves in and want to be a part of. If people are excited by a vision, he explained, they’ll follow along.

And getting them excited requires miracles, Mote explained.

“You need to do things that people think you cannot do,” he said, citing the development of the M-Square Research Park and the addition of three Nobel laureates to the university’s faculty as such things many dismissed as impossible when Mote first arrived at the university in 1998.

At the end of his speech, students were given a chance to ask questions. One asked Mote to name one thing he wanted to change about the university, causing the president to consider the work that’s yet to be done.

“I’m not satisfied with our international programs,” he said, also listing the university’s slow embrace of new teaching methods as an area for improvement. But, he said, if the university remains on the right track, it can be truly elite within the next seven or eight years.

The speech, the second-to-last event in the Student Government Association’s inaugural speaker series, focused primarily on the leadership style of the outgoing president, who will retire Aug. 31. It also allowed the SGA, in the words of President Steve Glickman, an opportunity for “thanking [Mote] for the past 12 years.” 

Most of the students at the event were members of the SGA or other student groups, and they said they appreciated the insight into Mote’s handling of the university.

“It was very personal, very directed at the student community,” Graduate Student Government President Anupama Kothari said. “It’s been an eye-opener, about all the constituencies he has to deal with.”

robillard@umdbk.com