New UW provost is a rising star who faces tough challenges
C. Wayne Clough. Photo by Bob Veltri.
The UW’S new second-in-command is not afraid to admit that he flunked the first eight exams he took as a freshman. “You know that story they always tell you at freshmen orientation?” he asks. “‘Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. Only one of you three will be here at graduation.’ Well, the implication was that I belonged on the left or the right,” he recalls.
That UW Provost C. Wayne Clough (pronounced “cluff”) survived those first weeks of college and pulled out a 2.5 G.P.A. for the semester is, he says, “a miracle, a real miracle.” His downfall, he explains, was bad study habits (“I didn’t take notes.”) and having too much of a “good time” in his fraternity.
But the shock of failure pushed him toward success. “I said to myself, ‘Lo and behold, I’d better do something about this.’ I thought about my parents. If I owed them anything, I owed them this.”
He started taking notes, he got a tutor for chemistry who taught him better study habits, he laid off the frat parties. His grades skyrocketed to 4.0 and, by his junior year, civil engineering professors were encouraging him to go on to graduate school.
“He’s one of those guys, when he does something, he does it well,” says UW Geotechnical Engineering Professor R.D. Holtz, who has known Clough some 20 years. Clough became a model student, earning a civil engineering B.S. and M.S. at Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley.
After teaching stints at Duke and Stanford he became dean of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. On August 16 he replaced Laurel Wilkening in the UW’s number two position as provost, the University’s chief academic and budget officer. Answering only to President William P. Gerberding, Clough writes the UW’s budget and sets the direction of its teaching and research missions.
When Clough speaks, his rural Georgia roots can be heard softly. Born in 1941 in Douglas, Ga., a town of 5,000 southwest of Atlanta, he best remembers the summers, when he and his friends would spend most of their time fishing or playing in the woods.
He was attracted to civil engineering because he thought he would be outdoors rather than behind a desk. “I liked engineering. I liked the ability to solve problems,” he says.
Clough has become a legendary problem solver in the field of geotechnical engineering. With his specialty in soil mechanics and tunnels, he has tackled major projects like the 52-mile Superconducting Supercollider tunnel in Texas and a trolley tunnel running under downtown San Francisco. In Seattle he has been a consultant for major excavations such as the Columbia Tower, the Bank of California Building and the West Point Sewage Treatment Plant. He has won numerous research grants, authored or co-authored 42 articles and six book chapters, and has won six awards in his field. In 1990 he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineers.
“You’ve got tremendous talent there,” says Gordon Demby, one of Clough’s former students who now works for GeoEngineers Inc. in Redmond. “He is the most inspirational teacher, a natural leader and an excellent speaker. He’s going to be a star.”
The University of Washington may need a constellation of stars in the near future. Across the country higher education faces hard times. In Washington, a tax rollback initiative might lop $73 million off the UW budget come November.
Clough is philosophic about the challenges. “Everybody is having their budget problems,” he notes. It’s easy to look like a good manager when times are good. “In some ways you can do a better job in down time than in the good times.”
The new UW provost is intimately acquainted with “down time.” The state of Virginia recently cut its higher education budget by 22.5 percent. Though Virginia Tech tried to compensate by raising tuition, as engineering dean he had to absorb a $1.8 million drop in state funding.
That meant a loss of 30 faculty positions, which he tried to cover through attrition or by shifting faculty support to research grants. He also eliminated about 30 courses. “I’m not a believer that every little course has to be taught because four students want it,” he declares.
“You have to define your core and take your resources into your core.”
At Virginia Tech the core was undergraduate education. When the cuts were over, Clough’s college was teaching more undergraduate courses than before the cut, “something I’m proud of,” he says.
One of those teachers was Clough himself. In fact, save for one exception, Clough has taught every semester since he became an administrator at Virginia Tech. He feels teaching “sets an example” for other faculty, so he stayed in the classroom after taking over the civil engineering department in 1983 and becoming dean of the college in 1990.
“I love to teach,” he says. “That’s why I got into this profession.” His abilities as a teacher won him an excellence in teaching award at Virginia Tech. While, in the beginning, his duties as UW provost are likely to prevent him from teaching a course, Clough hopes to find a forum “where I can have contact with regular students.”
When he guides his students, Clough sometimes breaks away from the classic engineering tools: paper and computer terminals. A first-day assignment in one undergraduate course would send his students into the field. “I told them to look at the campus buildings, tell me which ones are cracked and tell me why they are cracked.”
The students came up with some outlandish explanations, but that led to a point he wanted to make about geotechnical engineering. “I always tell them they are ln luck, because in my profession there might be five right answers to every problem.”
Many of his students now are top faculty at other institutions, such as Berkeley, Northwestern and Georgia Tech. “I had not intended to go on for a Ph.D.,” says Demby, a former student who followed Clough when he moved from Duke to Stanford. “Wayne made it so challenging, so inspiring, I had to do it. He is such an inspiring individual that he can just make work seem like fun.”
Students and colleagues continually comment on how hard Clough works. In fact, the only slightly negative comment about him came from a secretary who said he was “a workaholic.” If asked, Clough will admit that he works hard. “I look at work as almost a religious thing. You spend 70 percent of your waking time at work. You might as well do something. You enjoy.”
The other 30 percent of his waking time is spent with his wife, Annie, and his two children, Matthew, who is 24 and a student at Virginia Tech, and Eliza, a 20-year-old student at a local community college. You might also find him swimming in the local pool, where he goes every other day to stay in shape. He also enjoys hiking and skiing and occasional games of volleyball. “Our faculty team has gone undefeated the last eight years against our students,” he boasts.
Then there is his voracious appetite for reading. At his first meeting with Clough, Physics Professor Ernest Henley noted that the candidate was reading a book of poetry, “something much more esoteric than one would expect,” says Henley, who was chair of the search committee. Engineering Professor Holtz backs up that impression, stating, “He reads more than most of us engineers do.”
“I tend to keep my nose to the grindstone, reading things,” Clough admits. Asked for a list of his favorite authors, he offered Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner, John Grisham and a personal friend, Henry Petroski, author of The Evolution of Useful Things.
His Reading habits should put him in good stead with liberal arts faculty who might be suspicious of an engineer. “He has a good sens of what needs doing,” notes Henley, who served as dean of arts and sciences for seven years. “They just have to get to know him.”
“Wayne Clough will be an excellent provost here,” adds President Gerberding. “He is a distinguished engineer with the requisite amount of academic administrator experience. It became clear to the search committee that recommended him, and to the rest of us during his two visits here, that he is also a person of broad learning and interests.”
An engineer with broad interests can bring some strengths to the provost’s office, Clough says. He cites his knowledge of computer technology, his familiarity with high-level research, his experiences integrating technology into teaching, and his practice of total quality management.
“The key is finding ways to be efficient without being a slave to efficiency,” he explains. “I believe universities thrive on creative chaos. That can be snuffed out in a flash if you are heavy-handed. You have to be very careful how you use your resources.”
In an era of tight resources, the new provost hopes to overcome academia’s tendency to “overrefine things,” he says. “I’m a believer in a broad-based education.” When he taught at Stanford, he was impressed with how many courses his engineering students had to take outside of their field. Under his tenure at Virginia Tech, 40 percent of the engineering curriculum was outside of the college.
Clough sees this approach as one part of the larger issue of diversity, which he hopes to foster at the University. He also wants to help explain the idea of the university to the public at large. “All universities provide a basic education to our students,” he says, “but each of us does something unique and different.”
While he says he has a lot to learn about the UW, he notes it is a “top-notch” school and the “leading institution in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a leader in links to the Pacific rim countries, he adds.
Clough also cites the UW’s research reputation. For the last 25 years, the UW has been among the top five institutions winning competitive research grants from the federal government. “He recognizes the balance and the need for both teaching and research,” says Holtz.
His new job will be a balancing act, not only between the tensions of research and teaching, but between the need to do more and funding that will pay for less. It’s the kind of position that can take a rising star and turn him or her into a falling meteor.
Henly says Clough is equal to the task. “He is somebody who can provide intellectual and educational leadership. He has a vision of where this University should be going, and he will inspire confidence throughout the University.”