There isn’t much that daunts Henry Bienen, president emeritus of Northwestern University, among other titles.
After a 15-year tenure at Northwestern, an unusually long stay for a president, according to Bienen, and one that he says was longer than he’d anticipated, you’d think he would want to kick back and enjoy a semi-retired state.
Not so. Since he left his post at NU in 2009, he’s served on a multitude of boards of arts and academic organizations, including the Steppenwolf Executive Community Board and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Board, and he chaired the search for the Buffett Institute director. Bienen also decided to take on what he calls “not a reputation-enhancing job” as a board member of Chicago Public Schools.
After his CPS commitments ended last year, Bienen continued to stay focused on his emeritus and other board duties. And then a new opportunity as the interim president of Poetry Foundation arose.
We recently caught up with Bienen — who served not only as interim president last summer but became the Chicago organization’s permanent president last December — about his journey to joining Poetry Foundation and how he remains open to the next new thing.
Make It Better: How did the Poetry Foundation opportunity come about?
Henry Bienen: I was introduced to Dick Kiphart [the Foundation’s board chair, a longtime Chicago banker and angel investor] via Pat Ryan [the retired founder and retired executive chairman of the Aon Corporation, and chairman of the board of trustees at Northwestern]. I really didn’t think I wanted to do any more running of anything at that point. I said ‘I don’t think so,’ but we got together and I liked him a lot. I had only known him through Pat’s Lyric Opera box. So I agreed to do a few days a week on an interim basis.
At Poetry Foundation, the president serves on the board, unlike at Northwestern. I had something to do with the search [for the permanent president]. In the course of the search, I enjoyed the job, and the Board was interested in having me stay on for a few years.
Have you always been a fan of poetry?
Not a constant, lifelong poetry fan. In my 20s and 30s, I stayed current with contemporary poetry. Then I got very busy with stuff at Princeton. In my late 40s and 50s, I fell away somewhat, but always stayed engaged. I’ve always like to read poetry, and I have a lot of poet and writer friends from Princeton and Northwestern. Stuart Dybeck, Reginald Gibbons, Paul Muldoon, Joyce Carol Oates, Dan Halpern.
Do you have a favorite poem or poet?
At an earlier age, I really liked Yeats and Housman, poets of the late 19th, early 20th century and then later on, at Cornell, I had class with W.D. Snodgrass. I like the idea of the Poem of the Day [each day, the Foundation releases a recording of an actor or poet reading a poem aloud] … There are so many good people who write poetry, you don’t have to choose. I’ve gotten to know some poets I would not have known. I just got back from LA, where I encountered Tim Seibles. I really like his stuff … One of the perks of the job is books arriving on my desk.
What are your goals for the Foundation?
Our budgets are constrained in some ways. As an arts organization, we’re small. We’re lucky with the Lilly gift [philanthropist Ruth Lilly endowed the foundation with $200 million in 2003]. We have quite a good endowment — a $10 million+ budget. The magazine [Poetry, which the Foundation publishes] generates money topline but loses on the bottom line because we keep rates so low.
Our revenues come from our endowment, so we are at mercy of markets. At the end of the day, you pay for your goals. You can’t make very long-term commitments in part because you’re so conscious of the fact that we had dreadful markets.
We are looking to continue and strengthen partnerships, like multimedia — Jim Dine, who combines poetry and art, Emily Dickinson put to music. We partner with the Ryan Opera Center, the Joffrey.
And we’re not only partnering in Chicago, which is another goal of mine. We are taking poetry to Native American communities in Oklahoma and Seattle. There are a number of programs overseas that I inherited in France and Australia, for example. I’m looking to expand them, both geographically and in terms of audience.
I don’t expect a vast change. We do what we do very well. We’ll make tweaks here and there. We’re putting money into redoing the website, but that’s the way people are going to reach you. We get 35 million unique hits a year. We want to make it very user-friendly, make it easier to receive donations online.
We do a lot with the school system. Summer programs. We have interns from After School Matters. Mellody Hobson is a friend. We’re teaching poetry to teachers.
Of course we have Poetry Out Loud [a national recitation contest for teens created by the National Endowment for the Arts and Poetry Foundation].
How did you make the jump from professor to dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton to NU president?
I asked Pat Ryan if he was worried about bringing in a dean to run a much bigger organization. It’s one thing to be a medical school dean. They are in complicated positions, so that would be less of a leap. It’s almost a harder job to be a med school dean.
But the Woodrow Wilson school was unusual in a couple respects. One, it’s considered one of best schools of public policy and international affairs and it looks to work across disciplines, and two, it had a huge endowment. He said “it’s just zeros” and that’s right.
NU was more complex, as a research university, but Princeton was and is a school where you know people across fields. Some of my close friends were astrophysicists, poets. I got an understanding of different fields. I knew humanities, I knew big science, I had served on committees, I spent five years in Africa. I felt I’d been in tough places, traveled by myself all over the world. I figured I’m not much daunted after having slept on the side of the road in Tanzania and Kenya. I’m not bothered by people shouting at me or being annoyed about something.
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