IN A LEAGUE OF HER OWN PRINCETON'S FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT WANTS TO ADD COLOR TO CAMPUS AND TACKLE THE TENURE SYSTEM PRINCETON PRESIDENT IS IN A LEAGUE OF HER OWN

PRINCETON - Shirley M. Tilghman is just three days into her job asthe new president of Princeton University but she has alreadyidentified a major problem. It is green hair. Not that there is toomuch green hair on campus. But that there is none at all.

"I would like to think we could begin to attract students withgreen hair," declared Tilghman a few weeks ago. "We will take pinkand blue and orange hair, too."

And perhaps a couple of nipple rings to add some contrast on thisserenely picturesque campus, which some liken to the Talbots of theIvy League. In fact, what Tilghman would really like to attract tothis vaunted institution - which boasts not only some of the highestcaliber students in the nation but eight Nobel Prize winners amongits faculty - is some students who are not well-rounded. Somemavericks. Some dropouts. Some from out of the box. Some, one mightsay, who are a little like her.

Tilghman, it is true, does not have green hair. At 54, she hasshort-cropped grayish-brown hair. She wears baggy blue pants and nota spot of makeup. It is the guise of a closet radical. Tilghman is,after all, the first female president of the 255-year-old school andonly the second woman to take over as the head of an Ivy Leagueinstitution. (Judith Rodin, the first, has been president at theUniversity of Pennsylvania for seven years; Ruth Simmons was namedpresident of Brown in November but won't start on the job until thisfall.) An esteemed molecular biologist and one of the architects ofthe human-genome project, she railed against the male domination ofher field long before it was fashionable to do so. She has challengedthe university's ultimate sacred cow, the tenure system, saying itdiscriminates against women. A single mother of two, she recentlywrote President Bush a letter, urging him to allow controversialembryonic stem-cell research to continue. Bush wrote back: no.

Now, Tilghman, who has spent more than 30 years in a laboratoryanalyzing mammalian genes and claims a trailing list of honors andprestigious posts, has agreed to take off her white coat and take onthe running of a major American university, a job for which she hasas little training as she has experience.

"It is quite brave, I think," Tilghman laughs, waving her bottleof Diet Coke in the air, only half in jest.

It is also something of a surprise, to Tilghman as well as mostothers on campus. Although she has been a teacher here for 15 years,and a popular one, she is not widely known on campus. Only thosepaying close attention even knew she was one of five faculty memberson the search committee assigned to find a president to replaceoutgoing president Harold T. Shapiro, who retired after 13 years. Thecommittee had gone through 200 candidates when its members began towhisper among themselves early this year that perhaps they shouldconsider, well, Shirley.

Singular survivor

There were a lot of reasons for doing so. Tilghman's scholarshipwas impeccable, her intellect legendary. A tireless advocate ofteaching science to non-scientists, she won the hearts of many of herstudents and was awarded the President's Award for DistinguishedTeaching in 1996. Having served on a host of committees and panels,she had proven her commitment to the school. That she was a woman didnot hurt, nor did a personal magnetism that charmed the crustiest ofsenior trustees. Tilghman's Web site (www.molbio.princeton.edu/labs/

tilghman/index.html), for example, features a pair of brown miceover these words: "Our fearless leader is Dr. Shirley Tilghman." Not,certainly, something one would expect of her bespectacledpredecessor, an economist. In a way, even being a single motherseemed a plus.

"Shirley is a survivor," explained Lauren Hale, 25, a third-yeargraduate student and a member of the presidential search committee."That she is a single mother, says to me she can do a lot on her own.She has the ability to handle any challenges. She has overcome a lotto be where she is."

Where she is, at this particular moment, is sitting in a blackuniversity wing chair in her presidential office in storied NassauHall, surrounded by packing boxes and celebratory bouquets beginningto wilt. It is a steaming day outside and the campus' summersomnolence is broken only by the chapel's organist who is practicinghard and loud. Tilghman is already defining her priorities, such asdiversifying the student body and getting the faculty to make greateruse of the Internet in teaching. In becoming president she has had toresign from a number of cherished scientific posts, includingPrinceton's own new Institute for Integrative Genomics, which sheheaded for two years. Once her students complete their work, she willshut down her laboratory, where she has won recognition for her workon gene imprinting, the process by which genes are silenced dependingon which parent they are inherited from. Tilghman, whose work has thepotential for significant advancement in light of the genome'scompletion, confesses that the closure is, "sad. Very sad. It's beenmy whole life."

Well, almost. Tilghman, the daughter of a bank executive andhomemaker, was born in Toronto and attended Queen's University inOntario. (She is only the second Princeton president not to haveattended Princeton.) Even as a child, she was hungry for informationand opted for fact over fantasy.

"Shirley did not want to be read little fairy tales," said TraceyChapman, one of Tilghman's three sisters. "Shirley wanted Dad to domath puzzles with her. She would always say, `Come on, Dad. I have tolearn something.' "

Strength of will

It was that same appetite that led her after college to teachsecondary school in Sierra Leone, West Africa, where she met her ex-husband, then a member of the Peace Corps. Tilghman does not want totalk about her ex-husband, who is posted with the foreign service inHong Kong. But their breakup in the early-1980s left her in primarycharge of their two children, then ages 2 years and 6 months; and herlife teetered on the twin tracks of science and single motherhood.One of a team of scientists at the National Institutes of Health inthe mid-1970s, Tilghman had participated in the groundbreakingcloning of the first mammalian gene, and by the time of her divorceshe had been recruited as an investigator at the Fox Chase CancerCenter in Philadelphia. She was also teaching at the University ofPennsylvania. And driving a lot.

Tilghman says she juggled her responsibilities in part by "braincompartmentalization. When I was at work, I thought about work. I didnot think about the children. I did not feel guilty. When I left, Iput on the Mom switch. I did not feel guilty." A lot of being asingle mother, she adds, "is controlling guilt. I mean, it's justwasted emotional energy." But the fact is that Tilghman rarely hireda baby sitter and walked out of her lab every day at 5:30 p.m. Andwhen her children went to sleep, she opened her work books. Inretrospect, Tilghman, whose daughter is a Princeton senior and whoseson recently graduated from high school, says she would never do itwith so little help again. "I feel like I was a fool," sighedTilghman, who is a staunch advocate of making the sciences morefriendly to women. "I did it in the most stupid, ignorant waypossible. If someone were to ask me for advice, I would say,`Mortgage your future! Get help!' It would have been a lot easier forall of us if there had been someone other than me being responsible."

Her students helped. Tom Vogt, who has worked with Tilghman for 15years, first as a graduate student and then as a colleague, recallsthat when Tilghman rushed out of the Fox Chase lab at night sheinvariably left behind an ice bucket filled with the enzymes she hadbeen working with that day. Her students, he says, routinely emptiedthe bucket, and even did some baby-sitting. But, "no one minded inthe least," said Vogt, 44, now a researcher at Merck & Co. "Shirleywas extraordinary. No one could keep up with her."

Even before she had children, Tilghman was noted for her singularfocus. Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy ofSciences, who has recruited Tilghman to serve on a host ofcommittees, says, "Shirley is obsessed with science. She once told methat her marriage broke up because her husband wanted her home andshe wanted to be in the lab. I mean, she was in the lab onThanksgiving."

Making an imprint

That obsession, by Tilghman's own admission, has incurred someprice. The cost is one that she describes as, "a more humane way ofgoing about your life." Tilghman tells of how she once admonishedVogt not to be so long-winded and told him, "that the next time youcome into my office you should have a list of what you want to talkabout and when you are done, you need to leave." Even Vogt allowsthat Tilghman's efficiency is also one of her weaknesses. "Shirleydoes not suffer fools," said Vogt. "She won't coddle a lamediscussion. She is not malicious. She just moves on."

Partly in an effort to reduce the stress in her life, Tilghmanaccepted a teaching job at Princeton in 1986, where her commute was alot shorter. It was a good fit. Two years later, she became aninvestigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland,which funds an elite corps of scientists, and she fast becamerecognized as one of the nation's hottest biologists exploring theway genes work. By the decade's end, Tilghman was chosen to sit onthe National Research Council's committee considering the mapping ofthe human genome. She was chosen because, like many other scientistsat the time, she was suspect of such large goverment-sponsoredprojects, said the NAS's Alberts. Ultimately, the committee endorsedthe mapping and Tilghman was instrumental in developing a blueprintfor the genome. In 1996, Tilghman was awarded one of science'shighest honors and was made a member of the National Academy ofSciences, of which only seven percent of the members are women.

"She was chosen (for the genome committee) because she was askeptic and a wise person," said Alberts, who also chaired thecommittee. "Shirley is just Shirley. She is enormously articulate,but in such a nice way. She is a good leader and a good consensusbuilder. That is why she has been so successful at Princeton."

Consider, for example, The Woman Issue. Princeton is one of thesmallest of the Ivies with 4,500 undergraduates and 1,735 graduatestudents. It is also one of the most conservative. Women, who havebeen admitted only since 1969, account for only a fraction of thetenured faculty and gender has been less than a burning campus issue.

But, in a way, Tilghman has already changed that. As a member ofthe school's powerful Committee of Three, which oversees promotionsand appointments, she has lobbied hard to increase the numbers ofranking women. Nationally, she has called on the federal governmentto deny funding to scientific conferences that do not include womenon their panels. In a 1993 op-ed piece in the New York Times,Tilghman declared that the demands of tenure had forced many women toforgo having children and suggested that the system be abolished."Tenure," she wrote, "is no friend to women." Although she has sinceexpanded her criticism of tenure, she's brought a near taboo issue tothe fore. Her commitment is also individual: On Sunday mornings, shehas been seen in her office tutoring a friend's high-school-agedaughter in biology.

"The wonderful thing is that Shirley overcame the gender issue forherself, but she still speaks about it, she still fights," said SusanOverton, director of Princeton's Women's Center. "A lot of womendon't do that."

Many other issues, of course, will dominate Tilghman's presidency.There's a new residential college in the works. Hopes are high thatthe new Genomics Institute, which will integrate a host of thesciences in conjunction with the human genome, will become auniversity flagship and a national model. Although Shapiro iscredited with quadrupling the endowment to $8 billion, fund-raisingis a perennial task.

But right now, Tilghman is thinking about her office walls. Theyare a deadly shade of haze. A kind of diluted mud. There's a portraitof a rakish Woodrow Wilson, one of Princeton's former presidents,smoking a cigarette. A couple of university prints. A print of thesong "Old Nassau." Tilghman looks around the room and rolls her eyes."I'd say a little color is in order, wouldn't you," she said."Anything but gray."

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