Behind the desk of Don Michael Randel hangs a plaster cast of a frieze from the Parthenon in Athens. Other walls display renderings of medieval French cathedrals. There is also a set of chrome-and-stainless-steel Barcelona chairs by Mies van der Rohe.
Randel, who will be leaving Cornell University to become president of the University of Chicago in July, explained that growing up in the Panama Canal Zone in the 1950s both sensitized his palate for good architecture but also taught him the value of down-and-dirty places where a different sort of education can be acquired.
Which brought him to the subject of Jimmy’s, the 55th Street tavern that is at the center of a debate on and off the Hyde Park campus. True to his reputation as a sagacious administrator, Randel has yet to tip his hand on academic issues dividing the U. of C., but he already has a clear take on the venerable Hyde Park watering hole. It was denied a new liquor license by the city in December, shortly after Randel was named the university’s 12th president.
“Some people might dismiss Jimmy’s as just a grubby joint,” Randel said. “But a good joint is an educational adjunct. It’s a place to swap ideas as well as down beers. Though as a college administrator, I know students can confuse those two functions.”
Seeing Randel in his longtime academic setting, where he has been provost since 1995 and held other positions for three decades, almost instantly reveals the wide-ranging tastes and eclectic intellect of the man who will replace Hugo Sonnenschein at a critical moment in the history of the 108-year-old institution.
He is obviously a man of unusual breadth and candor, who one minute is discussing chants of the medieval monks and another recalling his own under-age pub crawls in Central America. Though he has had his moments of controversy here, his departure is viewed with genuine sadness in the town and on the university’s picture-book campus, laced with gorges, some as deep as the tall academic spires they separate. Especially after a winter storm, Ithaca looks like an idealized Hollywood version of a New England village.
By academic trade, Randel is a musicologist, a scholar of musical history. He said the route to his scholarly career began through accidents of upbringing. His father was a transplanted Oklahoma businessman and jazz buff whose Panamanian musician buddies made Randel, a teenage trumpet player, the mascot of their late-night rounds.
“If you were tall enough to put some money on the bar, you could get anything you wanted, and you can guess what went on in the back room,” recalled Randel, now 59. “My earliest ambition was to go on the road with Les Brown and his Band of Renown.”
Randel never did become a sideman with Brown, a dance-band leader of the ’40s and ’50s, though he still plays what he calls “cocktail lounge piano.” Yet he is convinced that his adolescent experience in demimonde jazz joints provided cultural basic training for his post at the U. of C.
At the same time, Randel confesses to a certain relish for tending to the easily bruised egos and Byzantine politics indigenous to the ivory tower.
“I’m an amateur anthropologist,” he said. “The various departments of a university are like tribes, each with its own rites, customs and ways of behavior.”
According to colleagues at Cornell, those cultural sensitivities have served Randel well in his years there. Persis Drell, professor of physics, noted that an academic administrator’s job is complicated by a unique power structure. Theoretically, a provost or dean carries a lot of authority. In practice, professors are protected from a flick of the whip by tenure, a lifetime job guarantee.
“You tell the faculty to jump, and they stand still,” Drell said. “Randel has the ability to get things moving by giving you the feeling that he is looking out for you.”
Though that view is widely shared, there are dissenters, most notably a small coterie of supporters of a former graduate student named Antonia Demas. In 1996, a year after getting her PhD, Demas accused a Cornell professor of plagiarizing her doctoral research in nutritional science. Her claim was rejected by a faculty investigating committee, and she subsequently filed a lawsuit, which is pending.
Randel wasn’t involved in the affair’s early chapters, but he had to sign off on the faculty committee’s report that rejected Demas’ complaint. Demas felt he didn’t give her version of the affair a proper hearing.
“When I heard Randel had been picked by the University of Chicago,” Demas said, “I couldn’t believe they would want him heading their university.”
Randel also was approached by members of the President’s Council of Cornell Women, an influential alumnae group. He invited them to his office to discuss the controversy. What was said at that meeting is in dispute.
Randel recalls explaining that to prove she was plagiarized, Demas had to show that her ideas were original, rather than commonly held in the field. “He was implying that Demas’ scholarship was shoddy,” recalled Elsie Dinsmore Popkin, a member of the group. She and a few others saw Randel’s performance as a classic example of trying to turn a victim into a victimizer. Still, the group ultimately declined to take up her cause.
Further evidence of Randel’s image as a square shooter was the route to his current position. In 1994, Cornell was looking for a president. When the search committee drew up a short list, Randel, then dean of arts and sciences at Cornell, was the “inside” candidate. Hunter Rawlings, then president of the University of Iowa, was the “outside” candidate, recalled Philip Lewis, currently the dean of arts and sciences.
Rawlings got the job and asked faculty who was best equipped to serve as his No. 2 man. The answer was Randel, whom Rawlings appointed provost. That was a rare gambit in the ivory tower: Machiavelli advised rulers to get rid of defeated rivals as potential back stabbers.
Yet by all accounts, beginning with Rawlings, Randel has rewarded that trust.
“Don and I are essentially on the same wave length,” Rawlings said, “which is invaluable, since I’m on the road so much of the time, as a university president has to be. Also, he’s a true intellectual not just an administrator.”
“People may not agree with Don’s decisions,” Lewis said, “especially when they’re on the losing end of one. But it’s difficult to find people who don’t like him.”
While crossing campus in the midst of a snow storm recently, Randel pointed to McCraw Tower, a century-old campus landmark. On Halloween, two years ago, a prankster put what appeared to be a pumpkin atop its 173-foot spire. When it didn’t spoil, as would be expected of vegetative matter, he ran a contest for student teams to identify the object. The winning group flew a balloon that took core samples that proved it was a pumpkin.
“Since I set up the contest, people said I should retrieve the thing to verify the winner,” Randel said. “I went up in a basket, hung by cables from a huge construction crane, leaned out and nabbed it.”
At Princeton, during his own undergraduate years, Randel soon realized that the scholarly world offered an opportunity to put together his two loves, music and books.
“It hit me that there could be a way to make a life in music without having to sleep in the bus, while riding to the band’s next gig,” Randel said. “Looking at my professors, I said: `This is a sensational life. How can I get into it?’ “
His proficiency in Spanish provided the route. In graduate school, he won a fellowship to Spain to study manuscripts of medieval music, housed for centuries in the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos. That gave him not only a PhD from Princeton, but his first book, “The Responsorial Psalm Tones for the Mozarabic Office,” a study of the Spanish equivalent of Gregorian chants.
A record company subsequently recorded Randel’s monkish hosts singing from those same manuscripts, producing a surprise, best-selling album, “Chants.” The monks were paid a fraction of its considerable earnings, and in 1997 the monastery’s choir master sued for a better deal, asking Randel to be an expert witness. The Spanish court has yet to render its decision.
“A distinguished German scholar appeared on behalf of the record company, and it was all very civilized,” Randel recalled. “While we waited to testify, he asked me to contribute a paper to a journal he edits.”
After his research in Spain, Randel got a teaching job at Syracuse University. After two years there, Cornell brought him to Ithaca, where he has remained for three decades. In between writing and editing subsequent books, including the prestigious Harvard dictionaries of music, he steadily moved up the administrative ranks.
Last year, Randel and his wife, Carol, started building their dream house–a stunning modern structure with exposed I-beams, soaring ceilings and great expanses of plate glass. It sits on a secluded site in the forested hills above campus. They had assumed it would be a permanent address.
Two weeks ago, on their second night in a house they will soon be leaving for the U. of C.’s presidential mansion on University Avenue, Randel sat down at a grand piano. He worked his way through “My Funny Valentine” and other staples of his cocktail-lounge repertoire.
He said it wouldn’t be easy to leave their new home. Then, brightening, he recalled that William Rainey Harper, the U. of C.’s founding president, was a horn player like himself. Harper had a porch built on an earlier version of the university president’s residence so he could look at the Midway Plaisance while practicing.
“Maybe I should have a front porch added onto our presidential mansion,” he said, “so I can sit out there and get back to playing trumpet.”
Carol Randel turned to her husband.
“Dear,” she said gently, “maybe the porch should be out back.”
