Lessons in leadership from the late Sandy Boyd

Former University of Iowa President Willard L. “Sandy” Boyd passed away this past week. His legacy is his vision and the leadership approach that he nourished at the University of Iowa and beyond for decades.

Sandy arrived at the University of Iowa as a law professor in 1954, became vice president of the University a decade later, and then served as president of the university during the turbulent years from 1969 to 1981. Sandy is remembered for his steady leadership of the university through student protests and cultural clashes on campus and throughout the country. Sandy’s leadership style was perfect for the times. He once said that there are multiple ways to handle conflict. For example, if students stage a “sit in” in a leadership office to protest a decision, one might call the university police to have them removed. But that might not be very effective. Better, he said, was ordering some pizzas and then sit down and listen to them. It is, after all, their institution too.

This approach to conflict — listening to your constituents, even when they are oppositional, is what our best leaders have done, and it has helped us to solve problems. Sandy famously said, “the university must not be a prison of dogma but a port for conflicting views,” that “there can be honesty in our differences,” and that “respect can emerge from diversity.” His demand was that we engage with one another, even when we disagree.

Sandy was successful because he cared so deeply about the university, and that care was not grounded in the physical structures, but the people within them. One of Sandy’s most often quoted phrases is that the people, not the buildings, make an institution. During his presidency, many important structures rose in Iowa City, but the university succeeded because he loved the people within them.

Sandy was known for pithy phrases, but he led much more by deeds than by words. Perhaps Sandy’s most compelling wisdom was that it is always best to be concise. No university leader was ever criticized for giving too short a speech. At an important event in the life of a community, no one want to hear a leader blather on. The university once published a collection of his commencement speeches. The title of the thin volume? “Never too brief.”

After his presidency, Sandy left Iowa City to serve for 15 years as president of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. But his love for the university brought him back to Iowa City. He returned to the law faculty, built a resource center at the College of Law to serve nonprofit organizations throughout the state, and even gave us a short stint as an interim president. The resource center Sandy built, the Larned A. Waterman Iowa Nonprofit Resource Center (INRC), continues to this day as a consulting service that has helped build and sustain hundreds of nonprofit organizations throughout the state. The INRC’s original purpose was to help nonprofit organizations comply with state and federal laws, but the organization’s mission became as capacious as Sandy’s generous spirit, and his team began to provide strategic planning, fundraising guidance, and compensation advice to well-funded institutions like the Blank Park Zoo and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security, and to small community nonprofit organizations across the state that struggle to make their budgets.

By the time of his death this week at age 95, Sandy has been retired for years, but he continued to offer generous guidance and wisdom to university and nonprofit leaders throughout Iowa. During the pandemic, when his retirement community was closed to outsiders, Sandy would be wheeled outdoors to take visits on the back portico. Sandy was compelled to continue to provide help, and he insisted on fulfilling his important leadership role in the community, even when it was no longer easy. Sandy was a leader in our community until the end.

Kevin Washburn is dean of the University of Iowa College of Law.