Bye-Bye to Bobby : CalArts Sends Its President Off to Mickey-Mouse Job

A gold watch and a plaque simply wouldn’t do.

The California Institute of the Arts, where faculty and students redefine eccentricity almost daily, was not about to bid a mundane adieu to Robert Fitzpatrick, its president of 13 years. So, on Wednesday, dancers in feathers and masks cavorted before the 46-year-old Fitzpatrick as he was borne on a stretcher to a grassy hillside above the Valencia school’s West Courtyard.

There he slid down a white vinyl mat and was greeted at the bottom by 11 students with a custom-made “rap” routine:

CalArts was a dream and he made it come true

And this was the man who pulled it all through . . .

After careening down a slope, many college presidents would be surveying their tweeds for rips, but not Fitzpatrick. He wore Mickey Mouse ears, running shoes, corduroy pants and a sweat shirt to the ceremonies marking his departure to assume the presidency of the planned 5,000-acre, $1.5-billion Euro Disneyland resort and entertainment complex outside Paris.

Formality is not a long suit for either Fitzpatrick or CalArts. Ushers at graduation exercises have been known to hand out whistles and jars of soap bubbles, and Fitzpatrick likes to boast that “everyone from the gardener to the president here calls each other by their first names.”

Bobby Bobby Bobby, the rap-singers chanted. Bobby Bobby Bob.

It was Bobby’s hour.

Lunching on pasta salad and listening to jazz and Indonesian temple music, several hundred students, faculty members and friends gathered to wish Fitzpatrick well as he begins yet another career. He has taught medieval French, served as a Baltimore city councilman, held the post of dean of students at Johns Hopkins University, worked as a political organizer for Eugene McCarthy and Edmund Muskie and organized the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

But the time has come, he said, to move on. He noted that he has been at the helm of the arts college, which was founded by Walt Disney in 1961, for almost half its history. The college could benefit from another president’s “new vision,” he said.

“But it’s hard to leave a place where for 13 years you can be so positively surprised,” he told the crowd. “I walked into the men’s room this morning and someone was sitting there playing the flute--there’s great acoustics in there. Then I walked around the corner, and two or three students were working on a dance in the hallway. The ability to surprise and please each other is what this place is all about. It’s an incredible community.”

And so it seemed on Wednesday.

An eight-foot long mousetrap, originally a symbolic protest by student Cecilia Franconi against cafeteria food, was placed before the speaker’s platform as a reminder of the continuing Disney influence in Fitzpatrick’s future. Other mouse trappings were everywhere, from the ears sported by many students to the Mickey-shaped balloons hung around the courtyard.

Catherine Lord, dean of the institute’s School of Art, gave him a plastic case containing three kinds of mold--the product, she joked, of “biogenetic research” undertaken by the school’s avant-garde.

“It’s a reconstitution system for an environmentally controlled art school,” she said, explaining that the fungi eventually would turn into students with money, faculty members who don’t complain about money and “art that you don’t have to hire students to stand in front of on embarrassing occasions.”

The last reference was to the measure taken eight years ago when several rich prospective donors were visiting the school and some erotic student art was on display.

Novel Solution

Fitzpatrick, who is credited by the college with raising $58 million during his tenure, refused to censor the exhibit but was concerned that the art could cost the school millions of dollars in endowments.

“I hired 10 character-animation students to stand in front of the artwork,” he recalled as he accepted the “biogenetic” gift. “When the donors came by, they would chat and smile, the donors would chat and smile and then move on.”

The ploy worked, he said: “The students got their money, and we got the donations.”

Then the college president in sneakers put the fungi aside with the other gifts he received at his going-away bash: the homemade board game challenging players to find the person who once stole the president’s clothes while he was swimming, an etiquette book on preparing for corporate life, an Army surplus flak jacket . . . .