It would be naive to measure the success of a university president on keeping everyone happy.
“Nobody gets through unscathed,” outgoing University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer said on Monday, shortly before heading home after watching daughter Amy graduate from Stanford University.

The pay is great, the prestige wide, but the challenge daunting. At the UO, you must appease 21,500 students, most about a third of your age; donors who help pay the bills; a faculty that can be cantankerous; a community that can erupt over, say, a large “O” on the side of a stadium; Salem; and, of course, Phil.
Given such a landscape, avoiding an occasional land mine is no more realistic than playing volleyball at Alton Baker Park without stepping in goose poop. In either case, the measure of success at the end of the day isn’t clean shoes; it’s still being upright.
And Dave Frohnmayer, who retires two weeks from today, stands tall at the end of the day.
Frohnmayer, 68, doesn’t leave with any sort of John Wayne bravado, nor would you expect that of him. He’ll leave June 30 the same way he arrived, by simply being the down-to-earth, gracious man he was when he arrived in 1994.

“The key is the resiliency to bounce back,” he said.

For the record, his 15 years represent nearly twice the average stay for college presidents these days; that, in itself, says something. To wit: that nice guys don’t always finish last. That you can succeed without being a cunning politician specializing in honey-laced sound bites.

The public Frohnmayer has been firm, effective, efficient — “My Three Sons’ ” Fred MacMurray as the protective father, though willing to take off the gloves when sensing that the university has been wrongly dissed. (See his stinging response to a professor’s guest editorial in January saying the UO’s athletic tail is wagging the academic dog.)

That said, the true measure of a public servant isn’t how he or she comes across in the oft- orchestrated media moments but in the everyday private moments. The moments when there are no political points to win, no image to further, no constituency to appease. And such moments only enhance the Frohnmayer legacy:

When sending notes of encouragement, a trademark of his.

When driving to Salem with Sam Dotters-Katz, the 2008-09 ASUO student body president, to lobby a cause. “He’d speak to you in a way that’s so humble and so down to earth that it’s almost like you’re just talking to a friend,” Dotters-Katz said. (And, of course, would often stop at Pioneer Villa Restaurant at the Brownsville exit to get vanilla sugar-frosted cookies with speckles.)

Or when, while teaching a UO class on leadership, using his own mistakes to make a point.

“You need to keep a sense of balance and perspective,” he told me.

Without it, you risk becoming the ego-driven leader who ignores the larger good. Or, conversely, the overwhelmed leader who personalizes the failures to his own demise. In 1969, interim UO President Chuck Johnson literally drove himself to death, a fact not lost on Frohnmayer, who refers to Johnson often in his leadership classes.
Balance. Frohnmayer is a Republican in a Democratic hotbed, but can come across to some conservatives as farther left than Cape Blanco. (See his hands-off stance after a far-left student paper, The Insurgent, published cartoons mocking Jesus.)
He’s an An Old School guy — he’s driven minivans since 1992 — who welcomes New School ideas. The volume of federal research grants more than doubled on his watch.

He’s an optimist in an often-cynical world. After losing two daughters to the disease Fanconi anemia — reason enough to bow out of public service — he not only stayed at the UO tiller, but, with wife Lynn, founded or joined groups to support families afflicted by the disease and to fund research for a cure.

“I don’t know that one ever gets over such losses, and I think of the girls every day,” he said, “but everyone has losses and grief; that’s part of life. We know that the girls would not have wanted us to be embittered or paralyzed by loss of them.”

I’ve marveled at that Frohnmayer resiliency. Been awed at how he has stayed a “people person” amid all the politics; his eulogy of former UO President Robert Clark in 2005 mirrored his deep respect for the world’s quiet difference-makers. And I cringed slightly when he took the microphone at a 2001 Fiesta Bowl rally in Tempe, Ariz., and pumped up the crowd with Blues Brothers zeal, later saying, “I couldn’t resist.”

Then and now: standing tall for the university he loves.

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