Six months into his new job, Caltech’s vice president for business and finance Dean Currie has settled into his office and has started holding meetings to acquaint the campus community with the intricacies of the Institute’s budget priorities.

Son of a Preacher Man

By Michael Rogers

Growing up in Texas the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dean Currie, Caltech’s new vice president for business and finance, heard a lot of one particular Bible story. Educated at the elite Choate prep school in Connecticut and then at Harvard, Currie says that whenever he returned to his hometown of Texas City and sat in on one of his father’s sermons, the day’s lesson somehow always seemed to concern the New Testament tale of the prodigal son.

In that parable, a son who had deserted the family farm and squandered his wealth returns impoverished, desperate, and penitent, and is welcomed back like a hero by the father whom he had abandoned. When the other son, who had remained dutifully behind with dad, complains bitterly about his father’s reaction, the father explains, in a famous passage, that the time to rejoice has come “because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

Currie’s family didn’t own a farm, and he never pursued a career as a ne’er-do-well. But, as his father’s only son in a family full of preachers (his grandfather, uncles, and many of his cousins were Presbyterian ministers), it might be said that he strayed a bit from the fold. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1969 and then returning there to get his MBA in 1973, Currie became a career administrator in academia. And his fondness for a certain parable notwithstanding, Currie’s father was never disappointed in his son’s choice of profession.

“My dad never put pressure on me,” says Currie, who resembles a somewhat less beefy version of the actor John Goodman. “He wanted me to do what made me happy.

“Every preacher’s kid goes through the process of deciding whether he has the vocation or not,” Currie says. After finishing college and before entering graduate school, he got a job running a settlement house in Cambridge, opening up satellite community centers in the area. “I found out I had more of a gift for organizing things than for working one on one with people.”

But some of that early parental influence must have rubbed off: Currie decided to devote his organizational talents to the not-for-profit sector. He went to business school, figuring that management skills would be just as important in the nonprofit arena as in the corporate world. His opportunity came shortly before he got his MBA degree, when the head of Harvard’s business school offered him a role on the school’s admission’s board and a chance to become director of admissions and financial aid. “It was a powerful position and I knew it would be intellectually interesting,” says Currie. “That was the draw.”

Currie stayed at Harvard for 15 years, because, he says, “They kept offering me new jobs.” In 1977 he became assistant dean for educational affairs at the business school, and in 1980 he was named its associate dean for administration and policy planning. In the latter post, he oversaw 300 employees and was responsible for a $70 million operating budget.

But ultimately he decided it was time for a change. “It was hard leaving Harvard after all those years, but I had made the bulk of the contributions I had set out to make and it’s good to be repotted every once in a while,” he says. Currie decided to return to the familiar soil of the Lone Star State in 1988, accepting the job of vice president for finance and administration at Rice University in Houston.

Currie held the post for more than 16 years and is quick to credit his staff at Rice for the many developments he oversaw during that time. These included the creation of a budget office; converting Rice to new software for finance, payroll, and human resources; creating a cogeneration operation providing 80 percent of the university’s electrical, heating, and cooling needs; and participating in the university’s first bond financing, which attained a coveted AAA rating.

The bond issue helped solve a growing problem at Rice, Currie says. The university needed to raise money for new buildings as it expanded over the years, but the Rice charter specifically prohibited the school from assuming any debt. “We needed graduate housing badly,” Currie says. “First, I put together a company that was able to raise money for it.”

The company, called Graduate Housing, Inc., was formed in 1998, with Currie as president and chairman of the board. A separate entity from Rice, it had no assets or collateral, making it difficult to convince a bank to lend it the $5 million it needed to build the housing complex. Currie says he was eventually able to get a bank loan, because Rice said it would encourage first-time graduate students to rent there, guaranteeing a revenue stream.

“A few years later, we changed the charter so that Rice could borrow for construction. There was a lot of pent-up demand for labs, housing, classrooms, and administrative buildings, and we added 50 percent to the square footage of the campus while I was there.”

Currie says that while he and his wife, Carol, enjoyed life in Houston, where they raised two children—David, soon to start law school, and Sarah, about to begin her senior year at Harvard—they decided last year that they might be ready for something new. Rice had hired a new president and Carol had just received her PhD in public health from the University of Texas when Currie heard that Caltech was looking for a new vice president for business and finance and applied for the job. After a series of interviews late last year, he was hired in December. He arrived on campus and started work in February.

“The interview process convinced me that this would be an interesting place to come to,” Currie says. “The first person I met wasn’t the president or provost. It was a faculty member—Preston McAfee,” the Johnson Professor of Business Economics and Management. McAfee had come to Caltech from the University of Texas, so the two men were able to connect. They easily fell into a discussion about McAfee’s research, which concerns auctions and bidding, and industrial organization. “It was fun that he was willing to engage with a bureaucrat.”

Of course Currie did eventually hook up with Caltech president David Baltimore, who says he is looking forward to working with him. “Dean is immensely talented, has a wealth of experience in finance and business administration at two great academic institutions, has boundless energy, and is an extremely thoughtful person. He will be a great asset to the Institute and will help us meet the challenges that lie ahead.”

Although Rice, like Caltech, emphasizes education in science and engineering, it also has a large humanities component, as well as schools of music and architecture, and a graduate school of management. It also plays Division I sports, including football, and is a larger institution than Caltech, with 2,850 undergraduates and 1,950 graduate students, compared to the Institute’s approximately 900 undergraduates and 1,200 graduate students. Rice had net assets of $3.9 billion as of June 30, 2004, compared with Caltech’s net assets of $2.1 billion for the year ending September 30, 2004.

But Currie has plenty on his plate at Caltech. He oversees a wide variety of departments, including human resources, facilities management, security, and the financial services, controller, and accounting offices, among other operations. He says that he has been spending his first few months on the job talking to as many people in the Caltech community as he can and combing through the Institute’s Archives to get a better sense of the institution.

“There is a special organizational genius about this place that is still a mystery to me,” he says. “How Caltech can replicate itself at the scale of excellence with the number of faculty it has is amazing. If you gave me $4 billion, I don’t think I could re-create Caltech. There’s something about the positive genius for identifying, recruiting, and supporting faculty that makes extraordinary results happen.”

Most institutions direct their research into areas for which ample funding already exists, Currie says. “At Caltech, the faculty asks, ‘What are the interesting questions?’ and then they find the funding to pursue the answers. This place is so different. It has a powerful but not obvious capacity to sustain itself at an extraordinary level.”

Currie says that he knew before coming to Caltech that the Institute had recently gone through a period of belt-tightening, including a salary freeze in 2003. Although Caltech’s endowment has recently bounced back to $1.32 billion, after falling from $1.57 billion to $1.09 billion three years ago, Currie predicts that there are still tough times ahead.

“It appears to me that there is a structural deficit here that goes back a long way,” he says. “We inherited a situation where our predecessors probably spent more of our endowment than was healthy. You can’t do a one-time salary freeze and bring it all back into balance. I’m trying to understand how we can feel poor if we’re so successful with our research and capital campaign.

“The research engine generates money, but large amounts of money are also spent on research,” he says. “The financial markets haven’t been as kind to us as they were in the 1990s.” Improving the Institute’s investment portfolio will help strengthen the Institute’s finances, and Currie says that the Institute is moving in that direction. Caltech has to deal with an increase in benefit expenses and capital costs from building projects, but unlike other universities, it can’t generate much additional revenue from tuition since the student population is small and fairly static. “It may take several years to address the structural deficit. Whatever we do, we cannot jeopardize the core genius.

“This is a wonderful place to be and my job is to support the work that the Institute does,” Currie says. “No one grows up thinking, ‘I want to be in academic administration when I grow up.’ But I enjoy working with smart people whose goal is academic excellence. Harvard, Rice, and Caltech have that in common.”

When he’s not on campus, Currie enjoys reading, playing a bit of tennis, and hiking. The proximity of so many trails in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains was one of the attractions of the Caltech job, Currie says. “There are not many parts of my job where you can see immediate, tangible results. But once you’ve climbed a mountain and reached the top, you can look down and say, ‘Hey. I’m here.’”