Robert Skotheim was at first amused when he was invited to become president of Occidental College, even for just 18 months. "I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of," he recalled.
After all, the former professor of American history had been in happy retirement for six years in the Seattle area after heading the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino and, before that, Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. And he was about to turn 75, with eight grandchildren about the age of Occidental students.
But then Skotheim began to think more deeply about Occidental, the well-regarded liberal arts college perched in Los Angeles' hilly Eagle Rock district, and the campus' recent traumatic history of executive revolving doors. He knew it needed a calming figure, someone "for cosmetic purposes, if nothing else, to suggest stability and continuity."
So he agreed to become president from last monthuntil June 2009, when a more permanent executive is to be installed. Skotheim said he hoped to get the campus past the publicly embarrassing resignation of previous president Susan Westerberg Prager after only 17 months on the job as a result of disagreements with trustees over her management style.
The campus, which has 1,877 students and 150 full-time faculty, seems relieved by Skotheim's arrival and the aura he projects of scholarly calm and -- yes, the term keeps coming up -- grandfatherly shrewdness. Students and faculty say the executive turmoil has not harmed basic education, research, social life and Occidental's impressive record in Division Three sports, but they worry that continuing troubles could start to badly affect the school.
"We are ready for stability," said Ali Raymond, a student activist from San Francisco with a double major in world affairs and Russian. Like all her fellow seniors, she has seen four presidents at Occidental in her four years:
Theodore R. Mitchell, who surprised the campus by leaving after six years to lead an education reform group; an interim president, Kenyon Chan, now chancellor of University of Washington, Bothell; Prager, a former dean of UCLA law school; and now Skotheim.
Through all that, Raymond remains a strong partisan of Occidental and its 120-acre campus of Mediterranean red-tile roofs and olive trees. She passed up admissions offers from, among other places, Columbia University and UC Berkeley, for Occidental's intimate scale and close faculty interaction. Also appealing was an unusually diverse student body, of which about 45% is not white.
