Sadly, not uncommon at all. Mislead, perhaps. Not told the whole story, most definitely. I'm sure the same thing has happened with Nellis and perhaps Julie. The pandemic has just brought the issues into full daylight.

This is true, but he didn't complain about it much; he went about finding solutions.

I found the following quote on p. 250 of the Hoover History, which is a good summation both of the Baker presidency and Baker as a man:

"The experience of Ohio University under Baker is a striking revelation of the decisive influence of an executive's personality. At no time since the founding of the university have relations among the students, the faculty, the administrations, and the trustees been more cordial. Baker voluntarily joined the ranks of the freshman counselors, is fond of making informal, unannounced visits to men's dormitories, frequently invites staff members to dine with him. Off the campus he has done much as an individual to make Ohio University better known. Repeatedly he has brought its name to the attention of the public, and lately, in a most distinguished way, when he went to Geneva, Switzerland, during the summer of 1953 to serve as chairman of the United States delegation to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Even with this signal honor he still maintains that his proudest distinction was the election to honorary membership in the Ohio University Student Council."

Anyone think that Nellis is in this same league?

That's a very interesting question. It's impossible to know for sure, but Baker was a family friend and my father was very close to him; in fact, Baker personally recruited my father back to Ohio from the Naval Postgraduate School in Annapolis, Md, in 1950. So, perhaps, I have a little more insight into that question than the average BA poster.

Baker was not the showman that Alden was. He didn't seek publicity for himself personally the way Alden did. In a word, he was more humble. I personally also think he was shrewder than Alden. I think he would have been able to assess the total situation better than Alden and would have made wiser decisions. Though Baker was capable of and made many decisions that were not popular at the time he made them, his style was more as a consensus builder, when that was possible. Alden's style was more dictatorial and autocratic; he was not a consensus builder. I'm sure Baker would have loved to have stuck it to OSU, but he was a respected academic in a way that Alden was not, and his methods of achieving his ends were quite different. He tended to work behind the scenes and rely mainly on personal contact and personal diplomacy. He wasn't comfortable conducting his business in the same kind of public way that Alden did. In short, I think under a longer Baker term as president you would have seen markedly increased growth similar to what happened under Alden, but you would not have seen such things as the re-routing of the Hocking through the beautiful State Hospital grounds, the building of the Convo, and the starting of the 110 Marching Men of Ohio. You would have seen strong growth, but in a more measured way, if that makes sense. In this context, I think it would have been more likely for Millet to have been seeking advice and following Baker than the other way around. Again, no one can answer a question like this with a definitive answer, but that's my best guess.

Interesting. I'm really intrigued by your description of him being a much more serious academic than Alden, and I wonder if that would have led him to seek a third way that didn't involve forcing the state's only AAU university into open admissions, and as an unintended consequence having Ohio forced into them also. Back then, the animosity wasn't on OSU's end (that would come later); it came from Ohio and Miami. OSU was willing to cooperate in changing and developing the system as evidenced by the fact that they literally established Miami's fledgling doctoral programs for them, and the first few years of diplomas actually read, "Miami University in conjunction with The Ohio State University." That's something that I'm sure has been flushed down the memory hole in Oxford. If that willingness to cooperate on OSU's part could have been leveraged to change the system in way that didn't become all about elevating Miami, I think we'd see a very different system today.

Instead, it seemed to be all about crippling OSU with the result something similar to Yamamoto's apocryphal quote of "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." OSU, once Rhodes was gone, would subsequently go about consolidating their power among the political and corporate establishment in Ohio with a real cynical ruthlessness (this part I witnessed up close and personal at the statehouse), cranking their fundraising to ungodly levels and stockpiling talented high ACT kids on their branch campuses while the rest of the system faces crippling enrollment challenges. In essence, the 60s created an institutional culture in Columbus where OSU came to view the rest of the system as a potential threat rather than potential partner. You saw the result of it all when the UC President gave an interview about Ohio needing "multiple flagships" and the Governor and legislative leaders tripped over themselves to publicly shoot him down as fast as possible.

I'm far from an expert on any of this -- my father was an academic and ultimately acted as dean of faculty for ~10 years at a pretty well-regarded state college in Virginia -- but other than what I picked up through osmosis, I didn't learn much. However, what you describe about OSU's place in the state seems very relevant to me in this discussion of our last Presidential search.

What, exactly, are the selling points of the job? We may well have aimed too low -- I'm in no real position to know either way -- but if we did, I wonder if that was a reality of where we are as a University?

I'm not sure that Ohio would ever consider it, but I've always wondered what would happen if we hired an up and coming Provost or Dean from OSU who could work with them constructively as well as tap into their corporate and political power base in a way that wouldn't be viewed in Columbus as a threatening reawakening of institutional challenges of the 60s. We tried cooperating with Miami once and got screwed; maybe trying it with OSU could work. In any event, I think there is too much generational bad blood and mistrust on both sides that it will never happen. The window for that was the early to mid 60s.

That being said, I think we aim low by trying to hire an existing President of a so-so university rather than hire that young up and coming Provost or Dean from an AAU school. If not OSU, then somewhere like Minnesota or Wisconsin.