Interim President Henry Bienen told The Daily in October he planned to step down from the role by late spring. 

Bienen’s second presidential term has included negotiating and signing a deal with the federal government Nov. 28 to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen research funding. 

Exactly three months later on Feb. 28, Iran launched a series of strikes on Gulf Arab states following a U.S.-Israel joint-military operation, forcing Northwestern’s Qatar campus, established during the tail end of Bienen’s first term in 2008, to initiate remote operations. 

Just after his 87th birthday, Bienen sat down Thursday with The Daily to discuss issues affecting the University, including NU-Q’s future, the federal agreement and where he hopes the next president will lead NU. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The Daily: What would you like to see from the next University president?

Bienen: I think you get somewhat ambitious people for these jobs, but you want the person to be ambitious for the University. How the University does will reflect back on the individual rather than vice versa. It’s not, I don’t think, personal ambition. It’s a great university, so the question is, how do you sustain its excellence and make it better? … In the long run, maintaining the quality of the University, which is always a work in progress — it’s going to be a substantial set of issues that the new person faces. 

If I ever get to speak to the new person, which I assume I will: A lot of good things happen. A lot of not good things happen. You have to have a kind of even keel in this job. It’s not the end of the world when not good things happen. And you shouldn’t get too excited. It’s nice when good things happen. You have to have another day, keep going to work and keep working at it. 

The Daily: Is there a confirmed date for the announcement of the new president? 

Bienen: Yeah, I think so, but I won’t say it. It won’t be long, I think. But I’m really not at liberty. I think the board should be free to say when it makes its announcement, even when I think I know.

The Daily: In our last interview with you, you had said that you didn’t know the University had a plan if ICE conducted enforcement on campus, and so does the Northwestern University Police Department have a plan in place at this point? 

Bienen: I don’t know. There’s been no ICE on campus. I hope there will not be any ICE on campus. But I don’t have a real answer to your question. 

The Daily: How is the NU-Q review process going?

Bienen: Yeah, it’s going. So I was planning to be in Doha for commencement, and a set of events made it hard for me to do it. The provost-elect is there now. … He and I and the provost are talking about Qatar a lot, and I think it’s fair to say Qatar is very eager that we renew the relationship. So that’s a process of discussion back and forth. And that process is ongoing. … 

Of course, Qatar is a board decision. I have my ideas. I’m positive about the relationship, frankly. … I do think at the end of the day, it’s a Board issue, and a new president has to sign off on this one. But the conversations are going on.

But the wild card is obvious in this fraught area. … There’s just a lot of variables, and nobody can predict with any certainty what the next month will bring, much less the next year. 

The Daily: Have there been any decisions about whether learning at NU-Q will stay remote going into next year? 

Bienen: My understanding is they’re planning to be on campus. That, of course, is subject to security. 

The Daily: The Daily spoke with two Pritzker professors back in December, and they told us that the federal agreement was illegal and the consequence of government coercion. Did NU ever conduct its own legal analysis of whether the funding freeze was legal?

Bienen: It’s the courts that decide what’s legal, not Pritzker professors, by the way. They may have their views, but they’re not the final word on what’s legal. … 

I had no idea — neither does anybody else know — what would happen at the Supreme Court, and that process would be two to three years, vast legal costs and huge uncertainty for people who had the grants or wanted new grants. 

So it wasn’t my opinion as to whether it was legal or not. It was a feeling that we would be sustained in the courts, up to some level, in a very difficult and complicated process. Mind you, even at Harvard, which won the case, the federal government’s still at them for various things. The federal government — I said this when we did this arrangement — the federal government has a lot of ways to make your life difficult, beyond funding: visas, scholarships, Pell Grants, claiming you did this or that and sending the Justice Department after you. And these folks have not been shy about doing it, so all those things weigh in on the decision. 

Is it coercive? Yeah. It’s coercive to stop your funding, to have an end result. I mean, I don’t know other ways you could describe it. 

The Daily: If you were to go back to November or October, whenever the negotiation process started, and redo the process of negotiating the deal, is there anything that you would do differently?

Bienen: No. I think I’ve said this in other connections. On the day we got the agreement, (Board of Trustees Chair) Peter Barris and I were both asked to sign it. Maybe because I was an interim president. I don’t know why they wanted the chairman of the board to sign it. He had to sign it as well as I did. They came forward with new provisos. I think I’ve said that I would not have signed it. Told them, we’ll sue you. So that always was an option. It was not my preferred option, but it was always an option. If they crossed the lines, which I thought those additional provisos did, I would not have signed. And I told Peter, you want to go get a new president, get a new president. And he had the same view. He wouldn’t sign it. 

The Daily: Are you at liberty to share what those provisos are?

Bienen: The first one was a couple of paragraphs. I couldn’t believe I was reading it, because the whole agreement was based on the fact they couldn’t look back to relitigate all the stuff from Deering Meadow. This is it. Nobody looks back. But you didn’t have to be the greatest lawyer in the world, which I don’t claim to be, I’m not a lawyer. I read this paragraph and it looked to me like you could easily look back. And so it just vitiated the whole stuff we were bargaining about, so I could not sign. I never even took it to our lawyers. They would have said the same thing. Don’t sign that if you care about not litigating, relitigating. 

The other one, which I won’t spell out, but was about something I was thinking of doing. Ironically, they had no idea I was thinking of doing this, but the very fact they asked me to do it made it impossible for me to do it, because I said to myself, and I said to the Board, and I said to senior staff, if they intrude on our prerogatives, which this did, I won’t do it. And the thing they wanted me to do, I ironically was thinking about doing, and they made it in my mind impossible to do because they asked me to do it. Once they asked me to do it, they had infringed on my view of autonomy of the University. So I still think it’s a good idea, but I never did it because they asked me to do it. 

The Daily: Where do you hope the next president leads the University?

Bienen: To ever greatness is a trivial phrase. It’s a great university. I care about it deeply, and I hope it’ll just go on being good and getting better. That’s what you want for every institution. It’s a very strong place. I think it’s going to be a strong place in difficult times for higher education, and I don’t just mean the next couple of years of the Trump administration. I’m very nervous about budgets in the U.S. I don’t think we have sustainable budgets. … 

So you’ve got to have to do something about these deficits. And I don’t think that’s a great climate for the research universities. We can’t price ourselves. We can’t keep raising tuition. 

We’ll raise tuition. We’re going to raise tuition again next year. I’m going to have a raise for faculty, but it’s not going to be big numbers. You can’t do this in this game. … 

What I am committed to — and I will continue to do this if the next president wants — I’m very committed to this campaign for financial aid. I think it was the right thing for us to focus on, and I will work as hard as I can. We have to raise our financial aid.

The Daily: On the topic of faculty and staff raises, you also mentioned the budget constraints. Where will the funds for these raises come from?

Bienen: We have space in the budget for what I would call modest raises. I want to announce it soon. …

One other last thing that I would like to see happen here. On financial aid, we’re creating what I would call a barbell effect in our student body. So you have people who qualify by having low family income for financial aid, and then you have wealthy people who can afford to send their kids here, but there’s a huge middle belt of people who get squeezed. And they get squeezed even if their family income is more than $150,000 a year, which doesn’t sound small, but they may have multiple kids, they may have expensive housing. We don’t have exactly the right formula for financial aid, to my mind, and we need to push the level of income up so that more people in the middle class qualify, while preserving financial aid for people. 

To me, the universities have to be institutions of social mobility in the country. They should be good at that. And that means that a lot of smart people who come from families that have low income. … You want to get your best students in here, irrespective of income, and we need to find a better mechanism, and we’re working at it. I think we will. I want to get that done before I’m out of here.

Anavi Prakash, Lexi Newsom and Isaiah Steinberg contributed reporting.

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