August 4, 2005

Bob Whyte near a habitat restoration area in Glen Helen. Whyte is resigning as the executive director of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute at the end of August.

By Lauren Heaton

The field of Ohio prairie grasses planted in the South Glen this spring swayed waste-high in the wind on a recent Monday as Bob Whyte talked about his five years as executive director of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute (GHEI).

Whyte helped the Glen’s land manager George Bieri and a group of community volunteers burn invasive species from the field and plant instead big bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass and other native species. He considers the project a good example of the positive ways people who care about the Glen can unite to support the 1,000-acre nature preserve.

“This project is representative of what the Glen is and should be about,” Whyte said. “This is wonderful. It makes me feel good, and this is what we should be doing to help the Glen.”

Whyte’s tenure at the Glen has not been as smooth as he would have liked, he said later in his office, which was full of packing boxes and scattered files. He announced in early June that he would resign from the GHEI after a difficult year relating to the community and members of the GHEI Board of Advisors and the Glen Helen Association. He said in an interview that these constituencies’ sometimes “inappropriate” criticism of his performance made it impossible for him to continue doing his job.

“I’ve recognized my limitations, and it doesn’t do me or the Glen any good for me to stay anymore,” he said. “This past year has been one constant struggle and nothing was getting done. My family and I decided it was no longer worth it.”

Whyte plans to stay until the end of August, after which he will begin another job. It’s a good job, he said, but one he preferred not to talk about, fearing from what he perceives as the personal nature of some of the criticism he has received, that some in the community could sabotage plans for his future.

Antioch College hired Whyte in 2000 as a faculty member and as the executive director of the Glen, with hopes that he could reconnect the Glen to the college and to balance the Glen’s budget, Whyte said. But from the beginning, he said, the GHEI was fraught with more “organizational disfunction” than he has seen in any institution he has been associated with.

Never before his arrival had all the constituencies responsible for funding and managing the Glen, the GHEI staff, the GHEI board, Antioch College and the Glen Helen Association, come together to discuss the Glen’s mission, Whyte said. The individual roles for each of these groups had never been clearly defined, and each one expected to have influence over the decisions that affected the Glen.

“It all comes down to power and control,” Whyte said. “It’s about who controls the Glen. And anywhere you go, there’s always resistance to change.”

The big picture

The main thing missing from the Glen was a comprehensive vision for the nature preserve and a balanced and holistic plan to manage both the land and the educational programs, Whyte said.

He said he chose to divert more resources than had been used in the past to maintain the trails, weed out invasive species, and restore parts of the Glen that had been trampled and compromised by visitors who strayed from designated hiking areas.

He also wanted to manage the Glen’s day and residential programs under one system, allowing the day program to grow and be supported in part by the residential program at the Outdoor Education Center. But reducing the longstanding independence of the OEC, the Glen’s primary education program and also its biggest revenue generator, was unpopular with OEC staff, who wanted to maintain the stability of their programs, Whyte said. Last summer OEC Director Sue Feller resigned, citing difficulties working with Whyte, and the assistant director, Brad Whaley, left when his position was eliminated.

Feller’s resignation coupled with complaints from community members, GHA members, Glen staff and GHEI board members who claimed that Whyte was difficult to work with and unwilling to consider perspectives other than his own, led to the resignation last August of four GHEI board members, including the board’s president, David Hergesheimer.

Since then Whyte has implemented the educational program he envisioned, with Susan Kamins as the OEC’s residential program director and Motyka Davidson as the director of day programs. The more centralized system is working well, he believes, and the conflict could have been avoided if others had given him the authority to make executive decisions about the Glen’s management.

Glen as resource, business

If the Glen is to survive, Whyte said, it has to change with the times and create more revenue-generating programs that not only pay for themselves but also make enough money to put back into the facilities and the land. Change is also necessary to sustain programs for schools whose budget cuts may not allow them to participate at past levels, he said.

The adaptability and constant maneuvering to please a market is a somewhat businesslike approach for a nonprofit organization, but Whyte feels strongly that in order for the Glen to be successful and continue its educational mission, it must evaluate itself regularly and always be ready for change.

“I’ve taken a business approach to generating money for the Glen, and I’ve taken a nonprofit approach by using the Glen to provide a service,” he said.

Whyte has many ideas, including initiating a graduate program in environmental education whose naturalists, instead of getting paid as they do now, would pay for the experience of being a naturalist and the credits they would earn toward their degree.

Rick Jurasek, the interim president at Antioch College, said he supports the idea, saying it is the kind of purpose the Glen should serve. “It is strategically and philosophically what we hope the Glen provides and becomes, namely a locus for collegiate-level learning,” Jurasek said.

Whyte also said he sees the potential for developing a teacher-training program if schools cannot afford to send their students, or a program for naturalists to go into the schools to teach.

One key factor in utilizing the Glen to its greatest potential is having Antioch recognize the Glen as part of the college’s effort to overhaul its curriculum. Instead of being seen as a drain on the college’s resources, Whyte said, the Glen should be seen as part of the solution to the college’s financial and programmatic problems. The Glen is a recruitment and retention tool that the college has yet to use, he said.

“The college needs to embrace the Glen as an educational resource and see it as vital to the survival of the college,” he said “Let the Glen be part of the solution.”

The lack of clarity on the roles of those responsible for the Glen has distracted the Glen’s leaders and prevented them from using the Glen in productive ways, Jurasek said. Though he would not say whether the organizational confusion contributed to last year’s conflicts, Jurasek said that the time spent searching for a clear structure of authority and defining leadership roles has been a “time sink” that has prevented the Glen from moving forward.

“The differences in the interpretations and assumptions held by all those responsible for the Glen often required us to spend more problem-solving time than we needed trying to figure out and enact a structure when we had very specific real-world challenges to solve,” he said.

Glen ‘has amazing potential’

From Whyte’s perspective, focusing on the positive aspects of the Glen and using the community’s love and passion for the nature preserve are the keys to its successful survival. The Glen “has amazing potential,” he said, and community members should recognize the accomplishments they have achieved in Glen Helen.

The first step for the GHEI, after hiring a new executive director, would be to redefine both the internal and the external structure of the Glen’s management, Whyte believes. The Outdoor Education Center should be approached as a part of the Ecology Institute, not as a separate entity independent of the rest of the Glen organization. The roles of the GHEI Board of Advisors and staff, Antioch, the Glen Helen Association and the local and area community must also be more clearly defined, Whyte said.

As Whyte had hoped, the Glen received news of a $150,000 federal appropriations grant through Senator Mike DeWine’s office last month, which will be used to repair aging infrastructure at the OEC. The funds will help upgrade the sewer, water and electrical systems, which have not been touched since the facilities were built in 1956, Whyte said.

With the $200,000 donated last year to the Glen from the Hackett estate, and the additional $200,000 raised in conjunction with Antioch’s capital campaign, the Glen has options, Whyte said, and could choose to start an endowment, spend money to do more fundraising or build more badly needed OEC classroom and office space.

“I feel really good knowing I’m leaving the Glen on a positive note,” Whyte said. “We’re losing an executive director, but let’s keep building on the positive accomplishments and build momentum to enable the Glen to move forward.”