Leadership and Crisis (8 page)

The intellectual climate at Oxford was similar to that of Brown. The vast majority of Rhodes Scholars were politically liberal. Indeed,
of the thirty-two from the United States that year, I was the only one to publicly admit not voting for Bill Clinton. The students at Oxford were amazingly bright, but often they were also amazingly ignorant of our Judeo-Christian heritage. I met an intelligent woman who had gone to Harvard who pulled me aside and asked me, “Who was St. Paul and why is he so important? And what is the difference between the Old and New Testament?” I was dumbfounded, wondering how someone educated at the best schools in the world could know so little about the fundamentals of Western civilization. When I had been interviewed for the Rhodes Scholarship, they had asked me detailed questions about the Muslim faith, who Mohammed was, and when the Koran was written. I didn’t have to believe these things, but I was expected at least to know about them.

One of my courses at Oxford was a class on justice taught by Ronald Dworkin. When I enrolled I knew nothing about him. On the first day he told us the first half of the class would be lectures and the second half would be student presentations. He asked for volunteers and I raised my hand. “Okay, good,” he said, pointing at me. “You can go first.” After the class broke up I went to the library and read everything I could by him. To my surprise I discovered he was one of the most prominent political theorists in the world. I also found I disagreed with almost everything he wrote.
Great
, I thought.
I’m going to have to stand there and tell a world-famous political theorist why he’s wrong
. But that is precisely what I did.

Given my interest in medicine, I focused my presentation on why healthcare could not be addressed properly by modern liberalism, but only by the Judeo-Christian tradition that affirms human dignity. When I finished, the other students were in a state of shocked silence.

Instead of being offended or threatened, Dworkin invited me to lunch to discuss the issues at length. It turned out he was writing a book on healthcare and asked me to help him. It was a great learning experience, and while we never managed to agree on the issue, it was a wonderful opportunity to debate important ideas and policies, policies I’m still dealing with today.

After spending two years at Oxford studying how a just society should provide healthcare, I found myself less interested in practicing medicine and more interested in making the system work better for the patient. My interests had shifted to policy, but I still told myself, and my parents, that my eventual goal was to be a neurosurgeon.

But when I had a chance to do something different, I took it. McKinsey, a global management consulting firm, was looking to recruit business associates from unconventional, non-business backgrounds. I went along with some buddies to an interview. And why not? If you made it to the second round they put you up in London at this incredible hotel. If you made it to the third round they flew you back to the United States for free.

Despite my cavalier attitude, I made it to round three. For my free trip home, I chose to go to Washington, D.C., because that was where I had the most friends. I was told to pick a different location because McKinsey’s D.C. office didn’t like doing non-traditional hires. But I stuck to my choice; and I told them up front I only intended to work as a consultant for a short while before I went to med school. To its credit, McKinsey hires a lot of people who don’t want to be consultants long-term; the company trusts that if it can give you interesting, exciting work with other smart, motivated people, you might decide to stay. I gave myself a two-year time limit.

I made a conscious decision to learn about business and corporate management—and this was the place to do it. McKinsey consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman had practically defined innovative corporate management for two decades in their influential best-selling book,
In Search of Excellence
.

I worked with senior management on interesting, complex cases of highly successful companies. My previous experience had been academic—the worst thing that could happen was that I might get a bad grade. At McKinsey I applied my analytical skills to real-world problems involving the livelihoods of thousands of people. It was intense but rewarding work, as we built teams with corporate employees and helped them solve problems.

McKinsey encouraged us to tell clients that if we were not adding tangible value to the company they should fire us. We were not hired to be yes-men and women. I remember one time we were working directly with a big client, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Our team worked like crazy, including weekends, holidays, and even vacations. In return our director took us out sailing and kept us well-fed, even though my team perceived that the client wasn’t taking our advice. I wasn’t the most senior person on the team, but during a meeting with the client, I told him directly that I didn’t think we were adding value, because the company was ignoring our advice.

My director on this project later called us into his office. I told him what had happened. My teammates, however, didn’t back me up. I was sure I was done with McKinsey. But then I got a voicemail from the director. He said he was proud of me; I had done exactly the right thing. That’s what you were supposed to do—speak up.

I was only at McKinsey for about eighteen months, but a lot of things I believed to be true about the corporate world were reinforced
during my time there. I learned the difference between working hard and working smart, that what matters is results; I learned the importance of hiring rising stars, even if you might not keep them long; I learned that “personnel is policy”; and I learned to avoid micromanagement. I was also beginning to realize that I was going to have to make an important decision in my life: did I want to help hundreds of people directly and personally by being a doctor, or thousands of people indirectly through public service?

CHAPTER 4

TO EDUCATE A CHILD

I never made it to med school, but I’ve had plenty of opportunities to diagnose problems. At age twenty-seven, I was asked to head the University of Louisiana system, which oversees eight universities. It is the sixteenth largest system of higher education in the country.

Education has always been important to me because I had the powerful example of my father. He grew up in a home with no electricity or running water, and his parents had little formal education and spoke no English. So when at age six it was time for my dad to go to school, it was all up to his own initiative. There was no parent-teacher meeting or school bus to pick him up. His parents didn’t deter him, but they didn’t encourage him either.

You often hear stories about how someone’s mom or dad had to walk six miles to school, uphill both ways. Well, in my father’s case that was largely true. He did walk six miles a day roundtrip from his house to a small village school in northern India, and he often had to do his homework by lamplight. He was the only one of nine kids to get past the fifth grade.

The Indian education system was brutal. Every step of the way they would weed out average or below-average students, because there were a lot more students than available slots. And yet this young boy in Khanpur, carrying books from his house to a small village school, would go on to earn a degree in civil engineering.

So you can imagine that when I was growing up, there was no tolerance for complaining about school, teachers, or homework—and this is still my attitude toward education today. Parents and kids who complain about too much homework, rigorous standards, and testing for results need to realize that high expectations, while sometimes challenging, are important. We need to set meaningful expectations for the students, parents, and even the adults in the school system.

My parents made a lot of sacrifices to ensure I got a good education. By the time I was four, they were taking a portion of their modest salaries and paying tuition for me to attend Runnels, a small private school in Baton Rouge. (At that time public schools were generally not offering pre-K or any other classes for four-year-olds. After the fourth grade, I was enrolled in public schools.) Runnels, where I spent the first five years of my schooling, was more than a school; it was a community. It had a mix of students, including white, Asian, black, disabled, etc. The teachers sent their children there, and they would discipline their own kids the same way they would discipline any student. What made Runnels great was excellent teachers, an orderly classroom, and parents who cared deeply about their children’s education.

Some of those teachers profoundly affected my life and the lives of many others. Mrs. Couvillion, who taught reading, was one of the toughest teachers we had. We would sit on a “magic carpet” in her class and read all sorts of books. Most of my friends didn’t like her because she was demanding and set high standards, but I enjoyed the
challenge. She was also popular with all the parents because of the results they saw when their kids took her class. It didn’t occur to any of those parents to indulge their children’s gripes about the hard work she demanded or the high standards she established.

Once we had a read-a-thon in which you had to find sponsors to pay you for each book you read, and the students who raised the most money won a prize. Ignited by Mrs. Couvillion’s inspiration, I read fifty-five books before my dad finally told me to stop. “Wait a minute, how much money do I have to give?” he asked. “No, no, stop reading. That’s enough. I’ll go buy you a prize instead.”

Mrs. Williams was my science teacher. I met her for the first time when I was dropped off at her house because she had offered to drive me to school. She was running after one of her sons with a shoe in her hand. I don’t know what she did when she caught him—but it scared me to death. I decided then and there I would never misbehave in her class. Since our small school didn’t have lab equipment or expensive science displays, Mrs. Williams would bring the body parts of real animals in bags to class to teach us about biology. (I think her husband was a hunter—at least I hope so.) She was smart, passionate about science, and had a great knack for creating a fun learning environment. Her love of biology became my love of biology. The moral of the story is simple: good schools start with teachers who inspire students and create expectations that challenge them.

Many of us have wonderful recollections of the neighborhood school that was a hub of community life. The school was just that: a community of teachers, parents, and administrators working together. It’s a shame, but we seem to have lost some of that in America today. In my own family, we try to uphold my dad’s commitment to education. I have dedicated much of my public life to improving schools in
Louisiana. And my wife Supriya, who is a chemical engineer, has established a non-profit foundation to encourage the teaching of science and math in Louisiana. She visits classrooms across the state to demonstrate science experiments to illustrate the role that math and science play in our daily lives, and to deliver interactive whiteboards and laptops purchased with private dollars.

When I took over the University of Louisiana system, I was struck by how many in the education establishment were trying hard, but were simply setting the wrong goals. The state was funding universities according to how big their enrollment was, rather than their success in educating students. In other words, the system was rewarding universities for recruiting students, but not for keeping them in school. Just as football teams don’t win championships on draft day, colleges shouldn’t declare victory on the first day of class. Victory is only achieved when a student graduates and begins helping to drive our economic future.

As governor I’m fighting to drive home a new priority for Louisiana colleges. It’s a novel concept that will rock the educational world: graduate the kids you enroll. Pretty crazy, huh? Louisiana has the second lowest graduation rate in the South—less than 40 percent. We would never accept having the second worst football team in the South, and we shouldn’t tolerate the second lowest graduation rate either.

Our reforms work like this: we’re asking state colleges to enter into six-year contracts. The contracts require these schools to retain and graduate their students at a higher rate, provide a rigorous education, eliminate low-performing programs, and do a better job transitioning students from two-year to four-year schools and from four-year schools to a job. In return for accepting accountability, we grant the schools more financial flexibility and operational autonomy.

It’s all driven by a simple premise: every time a school fails to graduate one of its students, it hurts the economy and sends a person into the job market with nothing more than accumulated debt and a lack of education and training. And every time we graduate a kid with a degree that doesn’t actually qualify him for a job, we do much the same thing. We need to provide students with the training they need to have productive careers.

Sure, my dad graduated in civil engineering because he was good at math, but more importantly, he thought people would pay him to design things, and he thought his family would appreciate his having a paycheck and providing a roof over their heads. For him, education was a means to achieve mobility and independence, to get ahead, and to care for his family.

What makes for a good education is no secret: motivated teachers, competition, measurable results, supportive parents, classroom discipline, and the right incentives. Unfortunately, the higher education system often encourages and rewards the exact opposite of what students need to succeed and what our economy needs to grow and expand. Moreover, this establishment often just flat-out resists change, especially when suggestions come from an “outsider.”

When I headed the University of Louisiana system, I remember a faculty senate president pulling me aside to complain that I was looking at education all wrong, because I was emphasizing the importance of education in developing our economy. I was ignoring the intrinsic importance of having a liberal arts education, he said. (I guess his theory was that you can’t have the proverbial starving artist without the starving part—though I am not sure the hungry artists out there would agree.) Now, of course we should cherish education for the well-rounded value it brings to our lives, even if
it doesn’t always provide a specific economic benefit. But in terms of public policy, when we’re spending taxpayer money on education, it makes sense that we direct it in ways that will help our economy grow.