 It’s possible for a student to have spent four years at Phillips Academy without ever getting to know Neil Cullen. Yet, for as long as this year’s seniors have existed, the unobtrusive administrator has played a key role in academy life as a cool hand at Andover’s financial helm.
As chief financial officer during two eventful decades, Cullen has overseen PA’s fiscal administration, business and personnel services, facilities, technology and telecommunications, public safety, town-gown relations, risk management and legal affairs.
“If it wasn’t academics, admission or fund-raising, it was my job,” reflects Cullen, who retires this spring. A member of the eight-person Dean’s Council, Cullen supervised about 180 of PA’s 600 employees. One of them, Director of Technology and Telecommunica-tions Valerie Roman, says, “Neil is best known for providing his people with the support and guidance they need to succeed and grow.” Because of his big-picture view, his compassion, diplomacy and clarity, and what one co-worker calls his “unmatched wisdom,” even colleagues who did not report to him sought him out as a mentor and adviser.
Not always a numbers cruncher, Cullen majored in English at the University of Rochester, where participation in Greek life and student orientation sparked an interest in education careers. Subsequent experience as a first-wave Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a remote Nigerian village reaffirmed his love for the learning environment.
Returning Stateside after two years, Cullen entered Cornell University’s elite graduate program in education administration. One of the other seven participants was Betsey Weingart, who became his wife. After receiving master’s degrees at Cornell in 1966, the couple relocated to Michigan State University, where Neil had spent a summer as a foreign student adviser. Over the next few years, he earned a Ph.D. degree in higher education administration there while working in MSU’s experimental undergraduate school, Justin Morrill College.
With only one education finance course on his transcript, Cullen got a baptism by fire in the subject on his next job.
Originally he joined Brooklyn College of the City University of New York as executive assistant to the provost. But he hit Flatbush in 1974, during the first sparks of a New York City fiscal crisis that in two years would become a “full-blown conflagration,” he says. Personnel changes, financial setbacks and the takeover of the city college by the state landed the newcomer right in the fiduciary hot seat as state authorities recognized in Cullen a rare blend of numerical talent and communications skills. As he puts it, he could “add and talk.” Becoming chief financial officer, he helped guide the transubstantiation of Brooklyn College from free public university to a tuition-charging school. Enrollment shifted from 35,000 to 18,000 students. Among the formidable tasks was cutting $10 million out of a $60 million budget on two months’ notice, with 150 faculty and 200 staff layoffs.
“It was an awful time in human costs and cultural conflicts, but I found educational finance, with all its challenges and complexities, quite engaging to me. I knew I had found my niche,” he says.
In 1979, Cullen left Brooklyn to become CFO of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Dedicated to research and promulgation of U.S. public policy, Brookings invented the federal bureaucracy to help prosecute World War I, he says. Cullen, who displays a photograph of founder Robert Brookings in his office, enjoyed working in a center of brilliance and power, but by 1986 he felt ready for a new challenge.
He found one at Andover, which he learned about through an executive recruiter. “The job,” he says, “fit like a glove.”
During 18 years at PA, Cullen has helped maneuver the school into a position of financial equilibrium, served as a catalyst in a massive campus renewal and piloted the endowment through some difficult financial waters. Moreover, he has served as a key player in several extraordinary initiatives. |
Because of his big-picture view,
his compassion, diplomacy and
clarity, and what one
co-worker
calls his “unmatched wisdom,”
even colleagues who did not
report to him sought him out
as a
mentor and adviser. |
Working under heads of school Donald McNemar and Barbara Landis Chase and in close collaboration with trustees and other administrators, Cullen and his four direct “reports,” Director of Facilities Michael Williams, Director of Technology and Telecommunica-tions Valerie Roman, Director of Personnel and Business Services Deborah Martin and Comptroller Elliot Hacker, helped, for example, to put in place:
 the rehabilitation of the Abbot campus, an award-winning mixed-use development project that benefited the academy, the community and the relationship between Abbot Academy graduates and the coeducational Andover;
the preparation and implementation of PA’s first bond issue, used to repair and renovate the campus after long years of financially mandated neglect, aka “deferred maintenance”;
the transformation of PA from a virtual technological abyss to a technologically with-it community ready to take on the electronic challenges of the 21st century;
the fiscal strengthening of the school through a carefully modeled reduction from 1,200 to 1,079 students with a corresponding downsizing of the physical plant for leaner operation; and
the financial legwork accompanying the $214.5 million Campaign Andover in its preparatory, active and wind-down stages.
Cullen has made his home on campus with Betsey, who retired as a PA fund raiser last year, and their children, Rebecca ’90 and Douglas ’93, longer than he’s lived anywhere else. But this summer, the Cullens will move to Boston to enjoy the city’s cultural and educational resources while figuring out what to do next. Neil’s not sure what that will be, but he shares with his spouse an avocation in choral singing, and, as a sometime Quaker and Unitarian-Universalist, he is eager to explore Eastern religions, particularly Taoism.
“Betsey,” Cullen says, “points out the irony that I am interested in the Tao and the Dow. Right now, though, my only certain plan is, after 25 years as a CFO, to pause and reflect.” |
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