Tony Lyle: The Don Quixote of academia

I first encountered Tony at Penn in the fall of 1960, when he was editor of Penn’s campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, and I was a lowly freshman heeler on the paper’s sports staff. Note that I did not say I met Tony, because I never did. (At the time, it was rumored that his middle initial stood for “Aloof.”) After several months I asked the sports editor, “Who’s that guy in the grey flannel suit who’s always hanging around the office?” It was Tony. At the DP’s annual banquet that spring, the features editor, Derek Davis, joked that Tony had inspired a popular song: “Did You Ever See a Mumble Walking?” Yet ten years later, that mumbling and supposedly empty suit came into his own with a vengeance.

At Tony’s funeral mass last week, his former Pennsylvania Gazette employees focused on what a difficult boss he was, how many people he fired, his impossibly high standards — and what a superb magazine he produced for 24 years before he himself was pushed out in 1995.

‘Sexuality of Christ’

Most college magazines are house organs designed to foster goodwill among the old grads. But it was Tony's peculiar conceit that he could produce an independent, high-quality magazine, comparable to the New Yorker, for a relatively intimate audience: his 80,000 or so fellow graduates of the University of Pennsylvania.

Eight times a year, under Tony’s direction, the Gazette's pages crackled with provocative and often brutally honest articles about subjects Penn administrators preferred to avoid: fraternity hazing, campus drug abuse, racial tensions, homosexuality, lapses in campus security. In the Gazette's letters pages, professors and alumni engaged in stimulating debates over sensitive issues like sex or religion (my favorite was a Penn professor’s study titled “The Sexuality of Christ”) and openly argued about the competence of Penn’s officials and programs. That letters section became my model in 1981 when I converted the Welcomat from a pedestrian Center City weekly paper into a free-wheeling open forum involving a similarly educated and affluent audience: residents of downtown Philadelphia.

By treating his Gazette readers like sophisticated adults, Tony gave Penn a uniquely valuable asset: a magazine that Penn alumni actually read and trusted, and that other universities admired and envied. Under Tony’s editorship the Gazette was consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten alumni magazines; three times it received the Robert Sibley Award as the nation's very best alumni magazine.

Collision with Judith Rodin

But Tony’s Gazette also drove Penn administrators crazy. A generation of Penn officials tried to make Lyle toe the party feel-good line, only to back off sheepishly in the face of his furious reminders that a university should stand for something loftier than money-grubbing.

Then Judith Rodin, herself a force of nature, arrived at Penn in 1994. In many respects Rodin proved a remarkable president: Over the next ten years she revamped Penn’s undergraduate core curriculum, reversed Penn’s negative self-image, transformed its forbidding surrounding neighborhood, and tripled its endowment and annual giving. More so than her predecessors, Martin Meyerson and Sheldon Hackney, Rodin instinctively grasped that a university president’s first priority is public relations. She also perceived the Gazette’s great value as a tool for spreading her message. Inevitably, Judith Rodin and Tony Lyle were two express trains on a collision course.

When Rodin asked Tony to publish her personal column in each issue of the Gazette, Tony refused, on the ground that it would undermine the Gazette’s independent posture (just as, say, the New York Times would resist such a request from President Obama). In short order Tony was given a scathing job evaluation, placed on probation, and ordered to submit story ideas to Penn’s development and alumni relations office for review prior to publication. In the fall of 1995, a Penn task force recommended altering the Gazette in a “substantive way'' so as to better support Penn's fund-raising goals. And that November, without a word of warning or explanation, Tony Lyle suddenly took early retirement at age 56.

Failure of imagination

That Tony was difficult to deal with seems beyond dispute. But some of America's greatest editors have been distant and inscrutable introverts too. (William Shawn at The New Yorker? Alan Halpern at Philadelphia Magazine?) Besides, universities (unlike corporations) are supposed to be places where quirky but brilliant loners can flourish.

Of course the Pennsylvania Gazette is ultimately Penn's property, and Penn can do with it as it likes — just as, say, you are legally entitled to deflate all the tires on your car. But why would you want to? And why would a university want to turn a great magazine into a newsletter?

To be sure, a good editor keeps his bags packed, and Tony’s run at the Gazette lasted even longer than, say, that of the celebrated Gene Roberts at the Philadelphia Inquirer. So Penn deserves credit for fostering the environment in which Tony flourished for so many years. Also, to be sure, Tony failed to see that many alumni would blame Penn for material published under his name in the Gazette (like a December 1994 report on the controversial Andres Serrano exhibit at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art, complete with Serrano’s notorious Piss Christ photo).

So you can't really blame Penn administrators for seeking changes. But you can blame them for their lack of imagination in approaching the problem.

Kinder and gentler

Suppose, for example, Penn had spun off the Gazette to become an independent entrepreneurial operation, like Penn's student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian. In that case, Tony Lyle could have functioned independently, and the university administration could have communicated directly with alumni by purchasing advertising space in the Gazette (for Judith Rodin’s column or any other PR needs).

Or Penn’s administration could have published a second alumni newsletter of its own. Stranger things have happened. Stanford University once had two competing alumni publications. WXPN-FM evolved from Penn's student radio station into a creative and successful alternative public radio station. Commentary magazine was once an organ of the American Jewish Committee.

Tony Lyle’s last 20 years were hardly wasted. Once liberated from his obsession to produce an intelligent college alumni magazine, this stiff-necked gadfly became, by most accounts, a kind, gentle, warm, and charming companion, even to the former underlings he had once sacked. At his funeral, much was made of Tony’s steadfast devotion to his longtime partner and his family, as well as the relief of AIDS victims in Philadelphia.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking of George Bernard Shaw’s line from Man and Superman: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” At his best, Tony Lyle was an unreasonable man. He was hired to drill for water and struck gold instead, much to his employers’ dismay. Let that be his epitaph.