Susan Desmond-Hellmann on leading a public university where every email and expense is public record. She relies on an internal ethical compass shaped by regulated industries rather than external criticism, and sees herself as representing the university's values, not her own interests.
Chapters
When you take on a role like this, particularly at a public university, you are— you're like the mayor, you know, in many ways. There's a lot of rules that govern what I do and don't do, and there's the Public Records Act that anybody who wants can ask for all my emails and my trip reports and things like that and my stock holdings and gifts and travel and so forth. How do I deal with that? Well, what I try to do is, is two things. One is I've always had a wish to make sure that having worked in a highly regulated industry and with patients for so much of my life, my most important compass is inside, not the newspaper, not what people say about me. And it is very possible for me to disappoint myself and nobody knew it. I like that saying, I'm my own harshest critic. I am so my own harshest critic. So one is to make sure that in being a public figure, I don't turn towards avoiding what the paper says about me or the unions say about me or whatever as my metric and keep my internal compass of what I expect from myself. But also to understand that in this role, I represent the university, so the stakes are different. It isn't me, Sue Hellmann, private citizen. It's me as representing the university and what we stand for and what we do. So it takes a lot of self-coaching.
