Butler President's Crimson Roots

As the nation's basketball fans tune in to the NCAA tournament's final game tonight between hoops behemoth Duke and an upset-minded upstart, Butler University (located near Indianapolis), one of the keenest spectators will be Butler's president, Bobby Fong ’73. A profile in the New York Times portrays Fong, one of the few Asian-American university presidents in the country, as an avid baseball fan who collects baseball cards, and as an English literature scholar who maintains a passion for Oscar Wilde that he acquired while earning his doctorate at UCLA. “My real job is being a professor of literature,” he declares. In another Times piece, Fong praises Harvard president Drew Faust for her concern that “success is too narrowly defined in certain ways,” and asserts, “I think what we love about sports, as we do about art, is seeing human excellence.”