A regular guy, that’s one way to put it. Buzz Shaw does things people can relate to, things people can laugh about.

He’s the chancellor of Syracuse University, yet he doodles on his agenda papers during meetings and plays tennis on Thursdays and still imagines himself as the Midwestern boy with loving parents and a crew cut who shot basketballs at a coffee can nailed vertically to the house.

Buzz watches his weight. He guards his money. He’ll join some friends for a poker game, buy in for $2.95, then camp out for the free food and beer. He’ll move an annual March meeting into New York City just so he can be in town for the Big East men’s basketball tournament.

The old SU chancellor, Melvin Eggers, drove a Cadillac as the business car. Buzz turned it in for a Toyota Avalon. Buzz reads a lot – regular guy books: Jonathan Kellerman mysteries and Tim Green thrillers. He enters his office every day at 7:30 a.m. and scans the daily papers. Then he walks from his office and heats the water everybody else uses for tea.

But Buzz’s regularity is just a half-truth. Weird things happened when, long ago, the regular guy left the white, two-bedroom house he’d lived in for all 18 years of his life, learned to become a teacher and then, almost accidentally, ended up making history instead of lecturing about it.

Buzz became a leader. He did things a regular guy would never think of doing, things a regular guy wouldn’t even want to do. Buzz learned to transform himself, at least partly, into somebody people can look up to. And his ontogeny, which always followed such an ordinary line, suddenly became extraordinary.

And so now, Buzz works like a leader, sometimes 80 hours a week. He makes money like a leader: $419,192 a year. He thinks like a leader, too. He studies social systems and writes books and coins aphorisms about management. (‘The ideal committee or group has between five and nine people.’ ‘Most speeches and meetings are about 35 percent too long.’) He does a lot of paperwork. Kenneth A. Shaw, that’s how he signs his official documents. Buzz is just an eponym for regularity.

Like a leader, Buzz dresses conservatively. Black, gray and blue suits. Polished shoes. Understated gold or silver jewelry. He doesn’t talk about weaknesses, even the minor ones. When Buzz had a small virus just a few weeks ago, he didn’t tell anybody. He never admits when he’s sick – that’s become a policy.

He’s distanced himself like a leader, too, because Buzz figured out long ago that power extends largely from charisma, and charisma relates inversely to how well people know you. Therefore, Buzz and his wife, Mary Ann, don’t have many close friends. Maybe four or five, Mary Ann guesses. And it’s not because they aren’t engaging or friendly. They are. But leaders, unlike regular guys, always pull away.

There’s a magnetic kind of strength to all of this, the kind of polarized power that comes from a man who, all at once, grips his everyman will and his headman obligation. Differences, you must understand, can sometimes make for a very strong bond. Buzz is a public figure who can be intensely private. He has a capricious personality that’s normally quite reserved. He’s naturally confident, but he lives with the insecurities of leadership. He’s a regular guy people can relate to; a leader people can look up to.

The regular guy never quite planned it like this – 27 years as an academic leader, 13 as the chancellor here – but strange attractions form when the right school finds the right leader, and yanking the two apart can be like dissecting a force field. Buzz Shaw, 65, is leaving Syracuse, official Aug. 1. After taking a year off, he’ll return to teach a leadership class at SU. Buzz announced his departure last April, then celebrated it this April, just last week in fact. Hundreds of people came to shake his hand.

What a magnetic personality, many said, and so few of them knew his trick.

Jim Fisher, the man who gave Buzz Shaw his first big job many years back, came up with this typology about leadership, and it’s worth mentioning quickly. Leaders draw power from all kinds of sources. Coercive leaders are popular; they’re also dangerous. Those who use coercive power – Saddam, Stalin, even somebody like Joseph McCarthy – are the people featured in history chapters, the people who plant a culture of draconian threats and fear.

There are other leaders, too. An expert leader: the kind you trust to fix your computer. A reward leader: the camp counselor who begs a kid to behave by tossing him a candy bar. A legitimate leader: the type who feels that power originates from the position itself – ‘Because I am your father,’ this type will say, and that is designed to be all the explanation you need.

But Jim Fisher, then the president at Towson State, always looked for a different kind of leader. A charismatic leader. Fisher looked for somebody who could lead with vision and energy and presence. Somebody who would be willing to fasten his life to a code of opposites – somebody who people could relate to and look up to, all at once. He needed somebody with charisma that worked like a magnet.

It was 1969, and Jim Fisher, who remembered Buzz Shaw from their days together at Illinois State University, decided to offer an ordinary man something extraordinary.

Fisher remembered how Buzz, as an undergrad basketball star at Illinois State, used to host recruiting trips and win the athletes’ hearts with his charm, so simple but so rare.

Fisher remembered the story of how Buzz met Mary Ann, a blind date in January of 1962. And then how the two went dancing at a swank club in Chicago Heights, and how they’d marry just a few months later, and how Mary Ann would later describe the whole thing as, well, just so easy. Yes, a rare charm. This is what Jim Fisher had discovered.

Fisher remembered how Buzz, while working at Illinois State as a 27-year-old administration assistant, walked into the president’s suite one day and discovered a swarming mob of students occupying the office, sitting on tables and leaning on bookshelves and blocking the doors. They were angry about things. Too few black students. Not enough minority faculty members. They had plans for fighting. And then Fisher remembered how Buzz did what nobody else would have done, how Buzz listened calmly and asked questions and allowed the angry students to fume. And then within minutes, the group had moved to a conference room, and Buzz, by the end of the whole thing, was taking down times for when they could get together again. ‘He’d turned it around so masterfully,’ said George Pruitt, who led the student movement, ‘he had us figuring out how to solve his issues.’

So here was Jim Fisher, who had just been named president of Towson State University in Baltimore. His vice president was stepping down with a bleeding ulcer. He decided to offer Buzz Shaw his first big job.

Buzz arrived at Towson a regular guy – charming and boyish, a guy who played gym basketball with students during lunch breaks. Buzz became Towson’s new chief academic officer – the vice president – not a true leader yet, but Fisher knew he soon would be.

‘Look at you,’ Fisher said one day. Buzz was wearing a corduroy sport coat with a big brown spot, the product of an ironing hack job. His tie, a gift from his sister-in-law, looked homemade. A pattern of tears and frays outlined his shirt. His socks didn’t reach high enough to cover his legs.

‘What do you mean?’ Buzz asked.

‘If you want to be a president,’ Fisher said, ‘you have to look like one.’

And with that, Jim Fisher pushed the regular man and the symbolic leader together and watched what happened.

It worked like a science equation. By 1977, schools wanted Buzz, just 38-years-old, to be their president. He got a call from Southern Illinois University, located in Edwardsville, his hometown. Soon, five members of the school’s search committee were sitting in his living room, chatting with Mary Ann and making small talk about the family’s three blond-haired children. Buzz dressed like a leader and spoke like a charmer. As the committee members were leaving, one of them, David Werner, turned to the others and said, ‘This guy is going to be on the front page of Time Magazine one day.’

Buzz spent nine years in Edwardsville and then left for the University of Wisconsin, his last stop before SU. But it became extraordinary, during that time, how people were drawn to Buzz and how Buzz could inspire change. Buzz would sweep through town and – viola! – universities would become better coordinated and meetings would run more efficiently and school morale would skyrocket and everything would align perfectly. Yes, like a science equation!

Syracuse needed a new chancellor in 1991, somebody to replace Mel Eggers, and SU had just the perfect financial mess for Buzz to realign. Only Buzz felt so content in Madison, Wis., where he headed a 26-campus network and lived in a mansion with a tennis court out back and everybody he loved inside. Buzz’s three children – Ken, Susan and Sara – were already grown, but magnetism has strange ways of working – Ken and his fiancée were living in a guest room atop the mansion garage; Sara was living in the mansion as a Wisconsin undergrad; and Susan, the middle child, was there too, working on her advanced studies. A few years earlier, she’d completed her second year of college at a college in Illinois when she came back to Madison for a summer, saw her family together and decided she never wanted to leave so long as she could help it.

Buzz didn’t want the public to know he might depart, so Syracuse had to be careful. One word about this in the papers and he’d take his name right out of the running. SU flew Buzz into Hancock Airport, then trustees treated him to after-hours meetings in hotel lobbies. They didn’t take him onto campus. They didn’t leak his name to the press. Finally, after some long talks, the trustees pried Buzz away from Madison, and Syracuse got the leader it had wanted from the start.

Just last week, when Syracuse celebrated the tenure of its 10th chancellor and hundreds of people stood in line to shake Buzz’s hand, Buzz strode to the podium and told the Goldstein Auditorium crowd that he couldn’t have done it without Mary Ann’s love. He said that Syracuse University has a bright future. And after that, he didn’t say much else. Ninety seconds, tops. Then he was done.

A very regular ceremony – cheese and crackers; nothing like the black tie send-off Mel Eggers had enjoyed – but that’s exactly how Buzz wanted it. Simple charm, remember.

Oh, what he didn’t mention in that speech. How he arrived at Syracuse when the university faced a $40 million deficit. How reporters were asking him questions that now seem unthinkable – ‘Would he fire Jim Boeheim?’ – because an NCAA investigation threatened to derail the SU basketball team. How a 20-percent decrease in Syracuse’s applicant pool endangered both the school’s finances and academic reputation. How important people all around him were unhappy, people like board member Joe Lampe, who met Buzz in New York City, said he wanted to resign, and told him, ‘If there aren’t some radical changes, this university is going to be in big – big – trouble.’

But only some of Buzz’s changes were radical, which is how you orchestrate things when you live by a code of opposites. If everything becomes radical, then how can the traditionalists support you? No, no. Buzz knew better. Buzz would insert so many values, so many opposites into his restructuring plan that everybody – faculty and staffers and students and administrators – could find a reason to grab on.

Buzz would lead with the opposites he reflected in himself.

Buzz, the leader who transforms universities, needed to decrease academic spending. Everybody knew this. But just when SU’s 14 schools and colleges were pitching plans to operate with smaller budgets, Buzz decided to raise funding for the School of Architecture, the Maxwell School, the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Every other school faced even more significant decreases. The decision enraged some faculty members from the slighted schools. But it also forged SU’s identity into the next decade. ‘It was not across the board,’ former Vice Chancellor Gershon Vincow said. ‘We did not take the easy way out and say everybody gets the same percentage.’

With much help, Buzz drew up a plan to cut 450 jobs, raise tuition and decrease enrollment. The whole thing, published in 1992, featured dozens of specific initiatives and took up eight full-printed pages in the Syracuse Record.

Then, Buzz the regular guy made a speech about it, and most people walked away laughing. Restructuring a school is like making sausage, Buzz said. It’s messy at first, but you’re left with a satisfying product.

Buzz the leader generated great ideas. He created a scholarship program to attract the upper-level students Syracuse needed. He enacted the freshman forum to make the transition to college more personable. He bolstered financial aid, hopeful to diversify the student body.

All the while, Buzz the regular guy kicked aside the pedantic academic culture and lived comically. He did push-ups on the sidelines at football games and wore a goofy orange hat during commencement ceremonies. Yeah, Buzz attended the chicken-dinner galas all chancellors must sit through, but he did them his way. Once, when Buzz presided over a ceremony in which the school released a new class ring, he opened with a solemn speech. Then he got wacky, and started talking about how the ring gave him special powers. And you should have seen the faces drop when a staffer charged Buzz from behind and Syracuse’s chancellor – empowered by the ring – administered a faux karate chop right in front of 100 people. Turns out he’d organized the whole thing.

Because of uninhibited antics like that, people started talking. Buzz heard rumors that he drank too much. ‘And the thing is,’ Buzz said, ‘I’m not opposed to drinking. But the nature of my work is such that I don’t drink when I go out if I’m on the clock, and I’m mostly on the clock. I can’t afford to lose my edge. I drink so little – and it’s mostly beer when I do – that the breweries would go broke if everybody was like me.’

Buzz gave honest responses to most of the questions people asked him, regular guy responses, and it made him popular. During all his time at Syracuse, through all the cutbacks and layoffs, the local editorial writers almost always gushed about him. Yet when necessary, Buzz could also speak like a leader.

‘At my level,’ he’d say, ‘you end up making decisions that are very lonely. You seek everyone’s counsel, but in the last analysis, you have to take all credit and blame. It’s you. You can say you consulted, you can say you were influenced by others, but it’s your decision, and that’s very lonely.

An ordinary childhood, Buzz calls it. Ordinary stories. The kind of themes and scenes you’ll find in most coming-of-age novels.

It started in a white, two-bedroom house, the property his parents bought when they married, the home they’d both die in. They lived on Abner Place, in Edwardsville, Ill.; the Corn Belt, the Land of Lincoln; the provenance of regularity and greatness, all at once. Buzz’s father worked in the factory across town, Wagner Electric, where he made brakes and electrical parts. He had a nickname for everybody he knew. ‘Dolly.’ ‘Toadie.’ ‘The Brain.’ Any reason for a nickname would do. His son, Kenneth, referred to himself as ‘brother,’ except it sounded more like ‘buzzer.’ And that’s when he started calling his only son ‘Buzz.’

Buzz enjoyed sports like any kid, but he played them better than most. He ran to the drug store every Wednesday night to purchase ‘The Sporting News,’ and after yanking a few coins from his pocket, he read the thing cover to cover, memorizing numbers and lineups. Buzz had a lot of friends. Together, they’d cut through the Shaw backyard and dash to the nearby elementary school, where they’d shoot hoops on the playground. Or they’d trek into the nearby woods and play capture-the-flag. Or they’d head up to the YMCA – just a three-story house somebody must have donated – to play checkers or pitch horseshoes. They’d stick together until dark.

‘We’d say, ‘See ya tomorrow,’ and we really meant it,’ childhood friend Hal Patton said. ‘We knew where the other would be – either this field or this sandlot. We’d always be there.’

Then Buzz got to high school and sports became serious stuff. Almost 2,000 people crammed into the gym every Friday evening. Edwardsville loved basketball, just like all the small towns do in the movies, and no more than in 1956 – Buzz’s junior year – when the team advanced to the state championship. Guys on the team would arrive at school every morning at 7:20 and shoot free throws until the morning bell. When school would let out at 2:30 p.m., the team returned to the gym until 5. There wasn’t time for much else. Buzz had girlfriends in high school, sure, but coaches kept a rule that you couldn’t date on school nights or nights before games. Edwardsville played its games on Fridays and Saturdays, which left, well, Sunday afternoon for girls. You can imagine why Buzz said the school seemed more like a basketball factory.

Still, Buzz did all the ordinary things guys did. He worked summer jobs in factories. He watched pro wrestling on Saturday nights. He finally got his own room when his older sister, Elizabeth, got married. But all the while, Buzz didn’t think much about college until he realized his basketball skills would get him there.

So then Buzz ventured to Illinois State in Normal, Ill. – yup, the place is called Normal – where he started for the basketball team and finally motivated himself, for the first time, to pay attention in class. A history teacher, that’s what he wanted to be. He got a part-time job in the dean’s office to keep busy. He learned how to use a phone with more than one line. And, simple as this, he just kept going… a degree in 1961… a wedding in 1962… a master’s from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1963… a son, Ken, in 1964… a daughter, Susan, in 1966… a Ph.D. from Purdue University around the same time… … another daughter, Sara, in 1969… and then, just a few days later, a phone call from Jim Fisher. How would you like a big job?

OK, so they’d take one risk. One simple, ordinary risk. They’d leave the Midwest and head to Baltimore. They’d pack a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and an infant into a Ford station wagon, and they’d stick the youngest in a laundry basket, and they’d listen to the other two make noises at every passing Volkswagen Beetle, and they’d sing songs and learn about patience and wonder what might happen next. Eight years later, five people from a search committee in Edwardsville were sitting in their living room.

‘His life, honestly, would make such a great movie,’ Elizabeth, Buzz’s sister, said. ‘A Walt Disney sports movie, where this kid grows up in a small town, plays basketball really hard and gets a scholarship. He has wonderful and healthy children and comes back to become a university president in the same area where he grew up.’

Stuff like that got people thinking and wondering. Not just Buzz’s folks back home, but everybody – those in Baltimore and Madison and Syracuse, and those who answered Buzz’s phones and returned his backhands and listened to his speeches, those close to him – his wife and his three children and his great friend Jim Fisher – yes, all those people wondering…

Wondering, if maybe, just maybe, the very extraordinary is really just a mass of ordinary.

‘Buzz is the nearest to a self-actualized person I’ve ever dealt with,’ Jim Fisher said, ‘which means he simply doesn’t need any applause or external reinforcement.

‘But it also means he could’ve walked away long ago and been just as happy as a regular old teacher and a Little League coach.’

Published on April 21, 2004 at 12:00 pm