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Name: John J. Bowen
Position: President, Johnson & Wales University, Providence Campus.
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Age: 50
Background: Born and raised in Utica, New York, and started working in hotels and restaurants at 16. Attended Culinary Institute of America, Stone Hill College in Massachusetts, then attended Johnson & Wales University and took an instructing job there in 1974, teaching management and finance. In 1987, Bowen was made vice president of administration for the university. In 1990 he became executive vice president, and in 1997 he became president of the Providence campus. Bowen is on the board of directors for Providence’s WaterFire event, is currently serving his second term as trustee of the Providence Foundation. He is also president of EUHOFA, an international association of hotel school directors.
Education: Graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, received a bachelor of science degree from Johnson & Wales University. Received a master’s degree in management from the American Management Association.
Residence: North Kingstown.
This year Bowen was chairman of former Providence Mayor Vincent Cianci’s Special Commission of Business, Tourism and Culture Task Force, assembled to address the economic impacts on Providence of last year’s Sept. 11 terrorist attack. Johnson & Wales was also a host site for the National Conference for Community and Justice’s Wall of Hope project, a community response to the Sept. 11 terror attack for which more than 10,000 Rhode Islanders and numerous businesses and organizations painted tiles.
PBN: I’d like to begin with your remembering back to Sept. 11. Like the day that John F. Kennedy was shot, it’s a day which everyone will remember for the rest of their lives exactly what they were doing when the planes hit the towers. Walk me through that day for you.
BOWEN: I had a scheduled meeting at the Radisson Airport Hotel, our university hotel, with the president and chairman of the board of Cuisinart. We were talking about an upcoming series for PBS, a cooking show, The Master Class. He was going to be a major sponsor. And we were brainstorming about ideas that we would present on the show, and I was trying to convince him to actually go ahead and contribute more dollars to the sponsorship of that. And ironically he had just flown in from New York City and his plane had just landed at T.F. Green across the street, and we were meeting at 8:30 in the morning. And I got a knock at the door around – as soon as CNN brought it up – I even believe it was right around 9 o’clock or a couple of minutes before. And the general manager of our hotel was there at the door with his wife, and he told me that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center, and that there was a TV monitor there if I wanted to go ahead and pull that up. So we turned it on and kind of had it in the background first. I think we, like everyone else in the world, thought ‘Oh my God, what a tragic accident this is.’ And then all of a sudden, boom, they go ahead and show it. Within minutes the second one hitting, and the Pentagon and the whole thing. I just said, time out, I can’t be here. I have one golden rule in my life – be where you’re at. And if you’re not comfortable there and you can’t concentrate then don’t be there. So I said ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got a team of people I need to gather and I need to go ahead and reassure our faculty, staff, and most important, our students.’
We learned in the days and weeks afterwards that some students’ family members, and some faculty and staff’s family members, were affected by this tragedy. People lost family members there, and loved ones. But none of our students was lost or hurt, and to the best of our confirmation none of our graduates was lost or hurt.
Tell me about the symposium you hosted this year in New York.
Every year there is an international hotel and restaurant show in New York City, and it’s in mid-November. And the organizers of that were really committed to going ahead and putting that event on. And we have our largest alumni event there every year, and so we were contacted to see if we’d still be doing it and we said, ‘absolutely.’ And in addition we started saying ‘how can we really support this whole thing and recognize that people are going to have these feelings, and how is it going to affect their business and everything else. So we decided as educators to do a symposium on this and invite industry leaders, and we would have the dean of our hospitality college be the facilitator, and go ahead and talk about what are you thinking? What are you feeling? And what’s going to be the economic impact on your business? And what can you do as leaders to be able to lead your organization out of this type of thing? And that was a wonderfully successful event.
At what point did Mayor Cianci approach you and ask you to chair his Special Commission on Tourism and Culture?
My recollection: The mayor called me within that two-week period and just said, ‘John, I’m very concerned about the economics of this, and I can’t think of anybody more qualified than you, and your leadership capacity and also as a leader of Johnson and Wales, the premier hospitality and tourism program in the country to go ahead and do this.’ And I said, ‘Mayor, how can I say no to you. You know, I love this community, and absolutely.’ We met and quickly came up with a list of about 40 people in the community who we thought could help us on this. And we had a series of meetings and conducted studies, and really found out that for Providence, we would not be as hard hit by this event as other cities that are more reliant on airport traffic. We just felt that, all right, we’ve got to look at this unique thing. How can we promote this city without hurting the airport, but how can we get people here? It gave us a unique opportunity to bring together all of the tourism councils – because we’ve got so many people doing different things – and say, ‘All right, politics aside, we are going to go ahead and make Providence great again, and we’re gonna have minimal effects of this. But we’ve got to check the egos and the politics at the door.’ And we did. And we were able to get hoteliers, the arts community together, the restaurant community together and come up all creatively to offer packages, where if you came into Providence for the weekends you’d get a discounted rate on a hotel and theater tickets and restaurants.
And then, shortly thereafter, the people at the National Conference for Community and Justice called and they said that they had an idea that they wanted to share with me. So they did, they ran it by me, and it was called the Wall of Hope.
And what’s your involvement with them?
I’m a board member and a strong advocate of theirs for nearly 20 years. They had the idea that this healing process needs to take place, and how can we bring together a very diverse group of people for one event, to be able to go ahead and work together and just see that we’re all brothers and sisters here. Somebody might be Catholic, somebody might be Jewish, somebody might be Protestant, or Muslim or an Arab – we’re all the same, and we’re all feeling this pain. And I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I encouraged them to go ahead and do it. And that pretty much took on a life of its own. People came to the plate and tiles were donated – over 10,000 tiles were donated. They asked for volunteers to paint tiles.
And maybe the best way to explain this is my own personal thing. When I heard about this initially, they asked me to open up the university and host a party here and let people come in, and the suggested donation was $10 a tile. So I said ‘open it up to everybody here at the university, and if they’re short, the university will make a contribution for them. Anybody who wants to paint a tile will be allowed to paint a tile.’ And so I felt good leadership was for me to go down and paint a tile. So I went down, and I’m not a great artist, but I figured, ‘I’ll go down and take a stab at it.’ And I was not prepared for what was about to come. Before they let me paint a tile, they wanted me to fill out a sheet that said who I am and all that, and ‘what are you feeling?’ In leadership, you’ve really got to keep your feelings in check, because I have learned that making emotional decisions is not something I’m particularly proud of going ahead and doing. It’s better to make intellectual decisions. And all of a sudden for the first time since this whole event, I had to think, ‘what do I, John Bowen, as a human being, really feel about this?’ As opposed to, ‘I gotta be strong, I gotta be the leader, I gotta be up front, all eyes are on me and I’ve gotta be self confident so that everybody knows they can be a bit more assured.’ And all of a sudden I had to sit there, and I sat there for 20 minutes. I had this rush of emotions and feelings. I remember Mayor Giuliani talking about that as well – he didn’t have time to go ahead and really acknowledge. It may sound odd or strange, but when you’re in a crisis like this the adrenaline kicks in and you need to do what you need to do. And you kind of leave yourself to last. And that was the first time I was able to sit down and really vent all of the emotions that the rest of the world was feeling. But I thought that was great – beyond me, to have over 10,000 people take the time – time out. What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What are your emotions? – And then to reflect that in a tile. This is a great country. We are going to be able to come back from this. And the great ray of sunshine here is we’re all going to come together.
What did your tile look like, the one that you painted.
Um, it’s personal. It’s positive and it’s uplifting.
You said that 10,000 folks in the Providence area painted tiles?
Yes, over 10,000. The Wall of Hope, it’s called. It was looking for a home, and the Providence Journal stepped up to the plate and roughly 25 percent of the tiles will be put on the Providence Journal building forever. The remainder of them for three years will be in a temporary site down by Water Place Park, and then ultimately there will be a permanent display at the Heritage Harbor Museum.
Am I right that there’s going to be an unveiling on Sept. 11?
Correct – September 11th. There’s a whole series of events there, including a prayer service and a vigil. There’ll be a ceremonial WaterFire lighting. You know, after September 11th last year we also had a WaterFire, which I thought was a beautiful healing process, and I applaud WaterFire this year for going ahead and doing another. This is a sad time, it’s a reflective time, and I don’t think we should be doing this in cocoons. We should be out among people, even if we’re strangers walking. I think in a strange way it’s reassuring – to both know we’re going through this together.
