A ceremony celebrating the life of NCAA President Myles Brand will honor his many accomplishments but also will provide a glimpse into an often complex and always influential man through the eyes of the people who knew him best.

The NCAA and Indiana University, where Brand was president from 1994 through 2002, will host a tribute to Brand on October 28 at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The 90-minute event will honor the leadership and vision Brand provided to higher education and  college athletics, but Brand’s family, friends and colleagues also will reveal him as a lover of nature, the arts and of the American West.

“Myles had a great love for wide-open places and a great appreciation for the power of Mother Nature,” said John Walda, who chaired Indiana’s board of trustees during Brand’s tenure there and who often hiked with Brand in the West. “For a guy from the East Coast with sophisticated tastes in art and music, he was so expansive and always embraced new ideas and opportunities.

“We took our wives to the Cowboy Poets Festival in Elko, Nevada, for example. There the four of us were, with Myles and me in our blue jeans, Western shirts and cowboy hats. Now that’s quite a picture. He loved to explore the creative side of other people and other places.”

Walda, now the president and chief executive officer of the National Association of College and University Business Officers, is among nearly a dozen speakers scheduled to present in-person tributes. Several others will provide videotaped messages.

Speakers include current Indiana President Michael McRobbie, University of Georgia President and NCAA Executive Committee chair Michael Adams, and Brand’s son Joshua.

Shirley Ann Jackson, president at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where Brand earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy, also will honor the former NCAA president, as will current Indiana Sens. Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar, and distinguished NCAA basketball coaches Pat Summitt of Tennessee and Mike Krzyzewski of Duke. (Click here for a list of participants.)

Of philosophers and cowboys

Marshall Swain, who attended graduate school with Brand at Rochester in the mid-1960s and would go on to chair the philosophy department at Ohio State, will provide insight into the values that helped shape Brand’s character as a young man.

Swain and Brand in fact collaborated on and published a paper on the nature of causation while they were at Rochester – the first professional publication for either during a time when it was rare for graduate students to do so. Though Swain and Brand were attracted to Rochester because of the program’s emphasis on the history of philosophy, both men wound up working in analytic areas, Swain in the theory of knowledge and Brand in the theory of action.

“Myles retained that interest in the historical perspective in philosophy throughout his life,” said Swain, now professor emeritus at Ohio State. “Those interests I am sure informed his ideas about education and social good. The sort of things he was writing papers on and trying to accomplish at the NCAA were very much issues of social and political concern, and he approached them as a philosopher. He remained a philosopher throughout his life, and you can see that in the position papers he wrote while at the NCAA. They really are philosophical essays addressing issues of practical importance in college sports.”

Swain and Brand remained connected after graduate school. Brand began teaching at Pittsburgh in 1967 and then chaired the philosophy department at Illinois-Chicago from 1972-80. Swain, who went to Penn, was a visiting professor at Illinois-Chicago for about six months during Brand’s tenure there. That’s where Swain met his wife, Connie, who at the time was teaching Brand’s son in grade school.

Swain eventually nominated Brand to be the provost at Ohio State, a post Brand held from 1986-89. Brand had left Illinois-Chicago to head Arizona’s philosophy department, where he was quickly recruited as dean of the school’s College of Social Sciences. There, he created what has become a flourishing cognitive-science program before the Ohio State post became available.

“It was clear by then that he was becoming a talented administrator,” Swain said.

However, Brand and his wife Peg had to mull moving away from the Western culture that they found so attractive.

“They both had become fond of the Western scene and horseback riding and all of that,” Swain said. “Coming to Ohio State meant they would have to give that up – not that we don’t have horses in Ohio – but it would have been much more difficult to maintain that kind of lifestyle here.

“I think Myles was looking forward to being a cowboy again after his retirement, but he was of course robbed of that possibility.”

Of leadership and friendship

Nils Hasselmo knew Brand at Arizona when Hasselmo was provost. The two also were presidents at Big Ten Conference institutions in the 1990s (Hasselmo at Minnesota) and worked together as board members of the Association of American Universities (Brand as chair of the board for a term and Hasselmo as president).

“Myles was always a very stimulating colleague,” Hasselmo said. “Although our disciplinary backgrounds differed – Myles was a philosopher, I a linguist – we had many interesting conversations about areas where our disciplines intersected, such as in cognitive science, as well as about more general issues in higher education.”

Hasselmo emphasized that Brand’s creation and early development of the cognitive-science program at Arizona has borne “handsome fruit.”

“The program has continued to attract outstanding faculty and graduate students and has now become a School of Mind, Brain and Behavior,” Hasselmo said.

He also noted Brand’s keen sense of the nature and responsibilities of the research universities where both men worked.

“He was convinced, and convincing, about the need for strategic investment in research, building nationally and internationally distinguished research programs in selected areas, and providing outstanding graduate education in connection with those programs,” he said. “But he was also strongly committed to high-quality undergraduate education, especially catering to students with strong scientific and scholarly interests.

“He also understood land-grant universities and made sure that the land-grant universities he led fulfilled their ‘third mission’ of service and outreach to the broader community. Myles was an intellectual leader with great ideas, as well as a leader who could get his ideas implemented. That is, he was a true leader.”

NACUBO’s Walda praised Brand’s educational accomplishment, noting in particular what he called Brand’s “crown jewel” while at Indiana, which was a merger between hospitals at the university and in Indianapolis to form Clarian Health Partners, which today serves the entire state of Indiana.

“Myles had a great vision for the future of academic health care,” said Walda, who worked with Brand on the massive project. “He also had a keen understanding of the challenges involved in bringing together an academic culture with a private physician practice culture. He never underestimated how difficult that would be, but he had boundless energy to bring these two very different sides together.”

Walda said Brand had “high aspirations for every job he did, and that was what inspired me to back him to be president of IU. He always said he wanted Indiana to be not just a good university but a great university. His record of accomplishment bears that out.”

Walda first met Brand during the interview for the IU presidency.

“We met in an airport lounge and spent half of the planned hour-long conversation talking about the university and how he might be a fit,” Walda said. “The rest of the time we spent talking about each other’s interests in life. It turns out that we had so much in common – a love of the outdoors and of reading and learning.

“Myles as president and I as chair of his board would make a lot of decisions together, and as is the case with any big university, there were a number of them. But you could always count on one thing: If Myles was involved in making the decision, it was going to be made for the right reason and not for a secondary reason, which sometimes takes a lot of courage. Myles certainly had that courage.”

But beyond being a savvy and influential leader, Brand’s friendship is what Walda, Hasselmo, Swain and others are likely to emphasize in their remarks at the October 28 ceremony.

“One thing about Myles is that he was a good friend,” Swain said. “He was very humble, and good at what he did, and even though he was an important figure, he was still just Myles and a good friend.

“When he came to the NCAA, he was moving into a different kind of job – one he was very excited about. He loved that job – he was in many ways as happy there as I’d ever seen him.”

Swain saw Brand perhaps the most, from his days as an ambitious student to his many leadership roles in higher education and intercollegiate athletics.

“Connie and I vacationed with Myles and Peg in Hawaii just after he accepted the presidency at Oregon,” Swain recalled. “Myles was certainly into relaxing, snorkeling and things like that, but at the same time you could find him sitting in a beach chair looking out at the ocean and writing his first presidential speech at Oregon. Things were always on his mind.

“As I work on my comments to give at the tribute, it makes me very sad to have to do it, but it’s nice to remember Myles in this way. It’s what you do for your friends.”