Dr. Kevin Reilly
Knight Beyond Castle
Alumnus Kevin Reilly (Ph.D. ’79) hacks out a place for literary study within university administration
Dr. Kevin P. Reilly (Ph.D. ‘79, M.A. ‘74), President of the University of Wisconsin System, served as Provost, Vice Chancellor, and Chancellor for UW-Extension before taking over the presidency in September, 2004. From 1992 to 1996, he worked within the State University of New York System, first as Assistant Provost for Academic Programs and then as Secretary. Yet Reilly admits, when pressed: “Somewhere deep down is a displaced English professor.”
Reilly, on the phone from his Madison office, is only half joking. Slipped in between his publications on university administration and policy are essays on Irish speech and literary autobiography. “My dissertation advisor was Chester Anderson,” he remembers warmly. “Because we shared a deep interest in Irish literature and culture, he was a great mentor for me.”
Sustaining those literary interests, he says, “keeps the reptilian administrative side of the brain in check.” But it isn’t easy. “There’s a great quote by Hanna Gray [President of the University of Chicago from 1978-93], to the effect that in terms of her academic work she was hanging on by her fingernails.” Reilly laughs. “The writing and lecturing I’ve been able to do remind me why I got into the business in the first place. Most of us started out because we had a love of learning, we had a job in sharing that learning, and—especially in the English department—we were in love with artfully arranged words.
“I find in this job you have to read, talk, and write an awful lot," he continues, a little wry. “The best literature and the best literary criticism somehow persuade the reader to share the writer’s view of the world. The core job of a leader in a large university is to persuade the students, faculty, and constituents to share his or her view of the world.”
Knowing how to use words, Reilly notes, is the result of the study of writing. He remembers teaching Composition at the U: “That convinced me that teaching Freshman English—and I still believe this—is the toughest job in the University and probably the most important.”
Reilly cites Calvin Kendall, Toni McNaron, Art Geffen, and Ted Wright as particularly helpful teachers in his own development. But memories of his own teaching experiences seem most indelible: “A really spectacular opportunity I had was something called the English Quarter,” he raves. “An undergraduate took all of their credits in the English department, all 16 credits, focused on one topic. Phil Furia, Lonnie Durham, and another graduate student and I team-taught on the Epic Tradition. We started with Gilgamesh and went up to Finnegan’s Wake. It was more like a graduate seminar than an undergraduate course.”
In 1977, Reilly won the Twin Cities Student Assembly Award for “outstanding contribution to extra-academic student leadership and service” The award stemmed, he explains, from his tenure as Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies, filling in for Beverly Atkinson, who was on maternity leave. “It was a good way to meet a lot of undergraduates. I enjoyed doing that very much.” Geffen was Director at the time; Reilly still counts him as a friend.
“I always knew that I enjoyed some aspects of administration and leadership,” he notes. The year he earned his Ph.D., he looked at prospects for full-time teaching positions—and headed back to his home state of New York to become Assistant Director of the State Board of Regents’ National Program on Noncollegiate Sponsored Instruction. Within a year, he was Director of the program, which recommends noncollegiate continuing education programs for college credit.
By no stretch does Reilly sound regretful about his choices, especially when he talks about his current position as president of Wisconsin’s University system. “I stumbled upon a great quote by Garrison Keillor,” he enthuses, quoting: American universities have seen plenty of radicals and revolutionaries come and go over the years, and all of them put together were not nearly so revolutionary as a land-grant university itself on an ordinary weekday.
“Working and leading an institution like that is a real privilege—even on a bad day,” stresses the man responsible for two doctoral universities, 11 comprehensive universities, 13 junior colleges, UW-Extension, 30,000 faculty and staff, and a $3.7 billion annual budget. “It’s all about what the university does to improve people’s individual lives, and thereby the state of the Wisconsin.”
The father, with his wife Kate, of three children, Reilly may miss the relative obscurity and wide-ranging Wisconsin travels of his previous position as Chancellor of UW-Extension—which was all about hooking up university resources with residents across the state. “I could use a few fewer budget meetings,” Reilly grumbles lightly of the Presidency, “and more meetings with my constituents. You have to fight to preserve the time to get out and make your presence felt around the state. It’s easy in this type of job to get trapped in the castle.”
A fairy tale inversion: knight hacks self out of bespelled castle using sense of humor, commitment to access for all, and a pragmatist’s vision of possibility. Let the woman whose job he performed for a year tie up the tale. “I’m glad to know he is doing so well,” comments Atkinson, still a model administrator 25 years later, “but I’m not at all surprised.”