To get to Michael McPherson's office, a person must traverse up the stairs of Weyerhauser, take a left, walk down the narrow corridor, follow a short narrow brightly lit corridor past a calligrapher's intricately drawn portrayal of Noah's Ark, past a picture of Jimmy Carter's visit to Macalester and the obligatory pictures of Kofi Annan '61. A bright-eyed assistant, Kathleen, says hello and announces the presence of a visitor. Then the man that runs Macalester College steps out with a smiling face and open hand to welcome you into his office.

The office seems to suit the man; it is bright and inviting, comfortable but business-like. McPherson is almost surprisingly warm. One can sense that he loves his job but sorely misses the challenge of teaching in the college classroom. He speaks highly of those around him; faculty, staff, and students. McPherson is truly amazed by the amount of work that goes on in the blocks sandwiched between Summit and St. Clair Avenues.

Over the course of two interviews Macalester College President Michael McPherson spoke to The Mac Weekly about his life, his work, how he views the College and how he got to the position where he is now. He spoke of how much he has enjoyed the new Wilco Album, the family's standard poodle, pool and shoveling snow. Without further ado, The Mac Weekly interviews Mike McPherson:

Give a quick introduction. How did you get from Milwaukee to this point?

I grew up in Milwaukee and went to public school there, Rufus King High School, and went to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in the mid-sixties, majored in math. Stayed in Chicago for graduate school in economics; a PhD in econ, and really wanted (when I graduated) to get a job at a liberal arts college, that was a high priority of mine. I taught part-time in graduate school at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and I didn't feel like teaching was valued very much and respected very much there. I felt that a liberal arts college would be an environment where I could really develop as a teacher. So I looked for that kind of job and I got a job as an assistant professor at Williams College and was there for 22 years, eventually as Chair of the Economics Department and as Dean of the Williams' Faculty and then found my way in 1996 back to the Midwest at Macalester College.

How have those four positions changed your prospective, influenced your perspective on the liberal arts college and how they should be run?

Well, one thing I'd say is that it's really important as a president to stay in touch with that experience of being a professor and a classroom teacher. I've taught a couple times while I've been at Mac it's pretty hard to work into the schedule. It's important to remember that that's really the business that we're in. As a long time professor at a good liberal arts college I really internalized, got a great handle on those values of helping open up young people's minds to a richer and broader world of possibilities.

I think the effect of moving from faculty member to chair to dean to president is you're continually seeing those things on a wider stage. You start out thinking about your own work, then about the contribution that your whole department makes and the different contributions made by different people. Then as Dean of Faculty at Williams, you're thinking about the entire academic enterprise and the curriculum as a whole rather than just the curriculum of my particular slice. And then as a president the task is to see that set of academic things in the larger context of what the institution, as a whole, needs to accomplish and how it can keep moving forward. So it's sort of a continual broadening out.

With that broadening out, now as President you are not only looking at the academic side, you are looking at the financial side, the systems within the college. What areas within a college were you surprised to see when you became president? And which of those are challenging you the most?

Besides being a faculty member and an administrator, one of my of my big areas of research interest has been the economics of finance of higher education. So, I've actually, probably, because of that research interest, always had more reason to pay more attention to institutions as a whole and how the various pieces have to hang together. And that probably reduced the level of surprise I might have had otherwise.

One thing that's become increasingly clear as I've moved into these broader perspectives about the institution is how important it is to be aware of the lives of students as a whole. Obviously, places like Macalester exist for the sake of the education that occurs there, and that's the fundamental purpose. But for that education to be successful, what happens in the classroom has to integrate, effectively and positively, with everything that happens in students' lives. It's not an accident that we're a residential college and we ask people to spend the first two years living on campus, even if they're local people. I think it's a big challenge to make all that work together, and that includes everything from the organization of residential life with the residence halls to various kinds of extra-curriculars, athletics, the whole picture of student lives. In terms of students waking hours, only a fraction of those are spent in class or studying, and part of the issue is to make sure the whole experience is positive and productive.

Now that you're in this position, looking back at your time in college, the mid-sixties, a tumultuous time, how did that time affect your growth? How did college affect your growth as a person?

The two things that come to mind, one is the great thing about a great college, and the University of Chicago was a great undergraduate college, is the tremendous sensing of possibilities, that there's no limits to how far you can go, or how deeply you could go into a subject. Following on my high school experience, which wasn't terrible or anything, it was a tremendous sense of liberation.

The other thing for me, which I'm sure has had a big influence, is that I've always felt like a big fraction of my learning happened in the residence halls and my relationships with other students. I was hooked up with a group of people, most of the time, who just loved to argue and discuss stuff, not particularly stuff in classes (although sometimes that was true). I remember a lot of times being up until 5 a.m., often sitting down in the lounge where the pool table was, alternating shooting pool with debating some question of theology or something, something I didn't know anything about but really developing my capacity for argument, for hearing other people's point of view.

You mentioned pool. Tell us about your pool history.

I really hadn't played pool until college. I lived in a place in Chicago called "New Dorms". There was a pool table and a billiards table in the basement of the residence hall and I devoted probably more hours than I'd care to think about learning how to play pool. I would have to say I became pretty good. I won the residence hall pool championship, my greatest athletic achievement.

Do you still play pool?

Off and on. I checked, and there is no pool table in the basement of the President's House. Every once in a while I get to some place with a pool table and I'll shoot a little bit.

Have you ever played with any students from Macalester?

I don't think so. I'm open to it.

Some sort of intramural competition?

I'd be there for it.

You'd be there?

Yeah, but I don't play for money.

Going back to your time in college. How did the political atmosphere of the '60s influence you?

Maybe it can be correlated with the somewhat uneasy atmosphere surrounding the political happenings in the world right now.

Vietnam was different. I certainly think that if we have a war with Iraq, and if we haven't done a lot more than we've done now to establish the legitimacy of that cause, that it's going to produce huge strains on college campuses, including this one. The thing about Vietnam is that it really snuck up on people; it was a very gradual thing. It was originally a pretty popular war. By '68 even major figures in the American establishment, most famously Walter Cronkite, were taking public positions against the war.

I was not really involved to any extent in protest activities. I went to one or two marches but it was more out of curiosity than real commitment. I got pretty heavily involved in electoral stuff. I worked for Gene McCarthy and his Wisconsin campaign, and put a lot of energy into that kind of political activity.

Let's shift gears. Tell us about your wife and two sons.

Don't forget the dog.

I didn't know there was a dog.

The dog's a big part of our lives now. My wife Marge is from Chicago, we've been married for 31 years. We're both really happy to be back in the Midwest and an urban environment. Williams' town is a lot of things but city it ain't. We really love being in the city.

My two sons are 26 and 21. They're both pretty deeply committed musicians and that's a tough path to carve out in this day and age. The older one is a guitarist in a blues influenced indie-rock band on the east coast. The younger one is the bass player and head of a local hip-hop group called Heiruspecs, which is playing atMacalester in a couple weeks. They've had quite a lot success, they played at Carleton last night and they're opening for Mason Jennings in Madison tonight.

That must be a source of pride.

I completely love it. Seeing those young men up on stage performing, doing something they love, is just a great experience.

Is that something you aspired to?

Nah. Just fantasizing. Is there any American male that doesn't fantasize about being a guitar player at some point?

Do you draw any influence from your experience as a parent that affects the way you view the student body?

Yeah. They're always these transitions. When you're first a professor, people sometimes get confused by whether you're a student or a faculty member. I can remember being thrown out of the faculty lounge a couple times at Williams because people thought I was an undergraduate. And then there comes a point when kids are younger than the students, and you envision them eventually moving into this age. And then there comes a point which I'm at now when the students look distinctly younger than my kids and the parents look distinctly younger than me. There's a real generational "thing" that goes on through your life.

One of the things that really came through for me raising my sons has been a great lesson in the fact that the right kind of educational experience is different for different people? That's something that's important to keep in mind? A place like Macalester, which is incredibly demanding, offers a great thing but we have to be really clear that that's not what every 18 year-old wants or needs, or is ready for.

Let's move on to some things that are affecting Macalester right now. There is a perception among some students that Macalester is not doing enough to get American students of color to come here. Respond to that.

We'd really like to do better, it's an important part of a conception of ourselves to be quite diverse a place. We're quite diverse internationally but we're less diverse than we want or should be in terms of domestic U.S. students. There are other types of diversity to care about besides racial or ethnic diversity but that is one that's important and we'd like to do better. It's a big challenge because high quality, selective colleges compete intensely for all students but particularly students of color. We admitted more students of color last year than in any year in Macalester's history but we didn't get the most students of color we've ever got because we lost a lot of them to other good colleges.

I think some of the steps we're taking in the way multicultural affairs are organized here with a new dean will help. But it's hard work; there are no magic bullets.

Respond to this statement: "People of one class, across the world, are from more similar backgrounds than different economic classes in the U.S."

Among our U.S. student population, you would probably find stronger representation of students from working class and middle class backgrounds than most liberal arts colleges. Something like six percent of our students come from families whose parents earn more than two hundred thousand dollars per year. The average of that figure for schools that are comparable to us is over 20 percent. That's a plus for our education to have that kind of economic diversity.

In the international sphere, we do offer financial aid to all students that we admit that need financial aid. The reality is that, particularly in developing countries, it's rare for a student to finish secondary school unless they come from a relatively privileged background. So you're not going to get a lot of really low-income people from rural areas coming to any American college.

But in terms of the proposition put before me, I think it's a mixed bag. There's a tremendous amount of diversity in perspective and cultural background among countries and populations in the world and there are some commonalities from being in a class where education is accessible.

Respond to the following words and their relation to Macalester: Drugs.

A factor in life on almost any campus. I think our approach is to try to treat it in the first instance as an educational issue and help make people make good choices. A good choice in my understanding, is to not do it.

Alcohol.

Again, there's no American campus where students won't get involved with drinking. We're really concerned that they be responsible, that they not hurt themselves or hurt other people, that they not make themselves vulnerable.

Related to that, ZAP (Zero Adult Providers).

I don't know a huge amount about ZAP, but it does make me uneasy. The police have an obligation to enforce the law and they certainly have an obligation to intervene when people are being disruptive or undertaking some kind of misconduct. One gathers the impression with ZAP that there's an aspect of almost trying to go and search out folks to go after rather than respond to trouble. That makes me uneasy. It's very important that our students be aware that that's out there; it's not our idea, it's not under our control, we try to inform folks about it.

Moving to a slightly less substance-based subject:

Football

I feel good about the early returns about the choice we made to go independent. I would attach less importance to being 4-1 than to the fact that we're playing teams that we're competitive with. I saw the second half of the Principia game, and I would have felt great walking out of there whether we won or lost, because it was a great experience for the athletes involved on both sides. It was really challenging and both sides rose to the challenge. The big thing, for an athletic contest, is that you want the outcome to be in doubt; you don't want to know who's going to win before it happens. Too much of the time when we were playing MIAC schools, we really knew going in that we were going to lose, and that's not good for anybody on either side of the ball. So I think fundamentally that's a positive step for us.

I like the idea of including one distant trip in the football schedule. We make investments like that in other sports

One final question, when you leave—

Oh, our dog! Gracie, a 4 year-old black standard poodle. Standard poodles are the bomb.

When you leave, what do hope people will see as a lasting accomplishment of your time here?

In a job like mine there is nothing that I do alone. I'm so acutely aware that everything I do depends on a huge number of people, and we have absolutely terrific staff and faculty and trustees and students and alumni. It takes everybody's effort to do it. What I'd like to see, and I think we're seeing it right now, is I love to see a campus where people are doing what they believe in and they believe that what they're doing really matters. I'm sure that's always been true at Macalester but I think we've had some success in strengthening that sense of common mission and common purpose. I think people are just doing fantastic stuff here and taking pride in it. That's not my legacy, it's our legacy. That, to me, would be a great legacy whenever they carry me out of here.