Monthly Archives for February 2010

Another Day, Another DD: Desiree Departs

The most interesting end-of-the-week-dump-of-the-news-you-want-buried was the Friday afternoon announcement by the White House that social secretary Desiree Rogers would be leaving her post:

On Friday afternoon, Ms. Rogers said she would resign soon, after a year that was groundbreaking but grueling, filled with criticism of her statements, her handling of the Obamas’ first state dinner and even her designer outfits.

“It has nothing to do with being glamorous — that is all make-believe in the eyes of the press,” she said in a telephone interview. “I’ve always dressed this way. This is who I am.”

Like the First Lady, Rogers has some pretty fabulous threads, and her sense of style is definitely more hit than miss. But nevertheless, I find her comment, “I’ve always dressed this way. This is who I am” much more than disingenuous. It’s not that I don’t believe her. I do. I’m sure that her closet is full of designer duds. She can afford them, so why not?

Why not, indeed. As a private citizen Rogers can now wear whatever she wants whenever she wants. As a (soon to be former) employee of the White House, though, she had to abide by rules not of her making, difficult as that is, rules that are largely unwritten and rooted in professional decorum and common sense.

Let’s start with her job title, social secretary, and all that it implies. Unlike a cabinet-level official or a corporate capital-S Secretary, a social secretary is a small-s secretary, holding a critical and important position to be sure, but one defined by its attention to detail, its fealty to routine, and most of all its lack of original initiative. A social secretary’s job is no different in this sense from any other small-s secretary’s: make the boss look good. Anticipate problems and fix them before they happen or as soon thereafter as possible. Let the boss take credit for your work. And never, ever upstage the boss. If you do, you’ll find yourself at Union Station with a one-way ticket on the Lake Shore Limited.

Right now you are protesting: But Desiree never upstaged Mrs. Obama! They’re friends! They are friends, and Mrs. Obama’s generosity of spirit in permitting her friend-employee to grace the cover of WSJ is admirable. But as soon as the Salahis elbowed their way into last fall’s state dinner, Rogers became the center of attention, a position that is way, way out of her pay grade, as her other boss would say.

For me Rogers departure makes sense. She wanted to work at the White House, who wouldn’t? But she probably hadn’t reckoned with the crippling effects of tradition, the squeaking disapproval of her predecessors from prior administrations, or, most of all, the difficult and ultimately impossible transition from making the rules to following the rules.

Style Crone Anna Wintour and Victim of Fashion Desiree Rogers

A social secretary is the little wren that hovers at the perimeter of the pecking order: drab to the point of invisibility, she is at her best when nobody knows she’s there. It may be an upstairs job, but it requires a downstairs sensibility. And Rogers, who cuts a regal figure, whose familial and educational pedigrees are impeccable, and whose prior work experience is executive-level, simply does not fit that mold. That she thought she could break the mold was her hubris and her undoing.

I’m guessing that spending a year trying to be someone she so obviously is not was worth it to Rogers for the chance to be a White House insider. When forced to choose—her wardrobe or her livelihood—she didn’t drop a stitch.

Does the “D” in Dee Dee Bridgewater Stand for “Demagogue”?

As I slowly detox from the noxious racial environment cultured in academia, I find my thoughts about the now-quaint notion of “race relations” clearing. The mental fog that rises from incessant accusations of “white privilege” and tiresome dogma from privileged whites (faculty, in the main) that insists all African Americans remain shackled by the bonds of prejudice if not slavery is slowly dissipating, and I occasionally surprise myself by notions about equality, self-determination and brotherhood that the stultifying atmosphere in which I once lived and breathed would have suffocated aborning.

But it is not the challenges of attempting to have a rational discussion about race on a college campus that moves me to write; rather, it is an interview with singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, conducted by Neal Conan on Talk of the Nation, that took place last week. I cannot get Ms. Bridgewater’s comments out of my mind, nor can I rid myself of the sadness and, yes, quiet desperation, with which they fill me.

Bridgewater, who herself has an NPR gig, and Conan were ostensibly discussing her latest CD, a tribute to Billie Holiday in which Bridgewater covers a number of Miss Holiday’s famous numbers, including the eerie and troubling “Strange Fruit.” For the record, Ms. Holiday’s wonderful and eternally moving original of “Strange Fruit” needs no improvement.

As the discussion ensued, the interview took a sharp turn into contemporary politics when Bridgewater riffed on “Strange Fruit”’s subject matter, the lynching of blacks for purely racist reasons in the US South, comparing those murders with “the subtle lynching” of President Obama “that is going on today.” Bridgewater is fearless in pointing the finger of blame: “the first African American president, his lovely wife the wonderful Michelle Obama and his lovely daughters are being persecuted…suffering from racist thoughts and actions on the part of the Republican Party, just because. Just because.” Bridgewater goes on to observe that the President “can’t get anything done,” and explains it away by virtue of the GOP’s vicious thought crimes and (I guess) marauding gangs of violent, out-of-control representatives and senators. She finishes her soliloquy, and it truly was a monologue, for normally chatty host Conan uttered no more than a strangled “oh” during the entire peroration, by sharing the news that she calls her country the “Un-United States,” its society “pathetic,” and the warning that unless and until African Americans receive an apology for their suffering, they won’t be able to “move forward.”

A few days after the TOTN interview, Bridgewater talked more political theory with All About Jazz:

I have worked with Amnesty International, with Unesco for a long time, Unicef, I am a UN Goodwill Ambassador now. I speak my mind [laughs]. And the record companies ask me to shut up, to not be so political. And I was warned by my record company during the Bush administration that I needed to calm down my criticism of this government because I risked being blacklisted. And I was, like, “He doesn’t even know what jazz is!” What about freedom of speech? I call it a dictatorship, the whole patriot act. You can’t criticize the government? Our capitalism is out of control. Look at the economic situation today. Everybody was living beyond their means, everybody was living on credit, everybody! It’s out of control. Something had to bring it to its knees. The greed, the corporate greed. What a shame that the most powerful country in the world has the worst health system in the world. And on education, our children don’t even know how to spell, let alone interact in a social situation. Because of all of this new technology, nobody talks anymore! Oh, don’t get me started! Gather ’round! [laughs].

Well, I would laugh if such chaotic vitriol weren’t so destructive of our “pathetic” society. It accomplishes nothing positive, and either shuts down conversation between races entirely, or antagonizes the similarly hot-headed to reply with corresponding hyperbole of their own. Coward that I am, I spent my academic career adopting the former strategy when confronted with variations on Bridgewater’s all-too-familiar demonized characterizations of Republicans, and I resolved that when I left higher education I would no longer let such unexamined perversions of reality pass unchallenged.

But it’s hard, you know, to reverse a lifetime’s worth of assenting through silence. And that silence I think, in the minefield of race relations, is every bit as wrong-headed as the poorly reasoned, self-inflating truth-to-power kind of bombast Bridgewater’s using to peddle her CD. So I was heartened to read the comments that followed the singer’s NPR interview. While many of them egged Bridgewater on, a number of them reflected reactions similar to my own.

I hope that many more of the formerly silent, white and black, begin to speak up. Having an African American president should be the catalyst for two-way conversations about race, and Candidate Obama issued the invitation in his March, 2008 speech. It’s time Bridgewater, Conan…all of us…accepted.

The President and the Professor, Part Two

So “Obamism” feels at worst like a hodgepodge, at best like a to-do list — one that got way too dominated by health care instead of innovation and jobs — and not the least like a big, aspirational project that can bring out America’s still vast potential for greatness. Thomas Friedman, NYT, February 21, 2010.

I may have to reevaluate my knee-jerk animus against New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. His repetitive hectoring that President Obama should be nation-building is chalk-on-blackboard irritating, but to my astonishment, I found myself nodding in agreement with Friedman when I mentally erased “President Obama” and “nation-building” and substituted “College President” and “visionary thinking.”

Over the last several months, Friedman has taken the US president to task for his failure to create and sustain an “overarching narrative” about the direction he hopes to steer the ship of state. Friedman’s earlier and more gentle suggestions about story-telling in the service of nation-building have given way to a harsher critique of the administration’s attempts at leadership as “at worst like a hodgepodge, at best like a to-do list.” If you are Rob Long at The National Review, you would shrug and say what do you expect from a callow politician who has not paid his dues (February 22, 2010, print edition); I, on the other hand, in keeping a promise to the doctor who worries about my blood pressure, think as little as possible about President Obama and instead reflect on Friedman’s stepped-up rhetoric as it applies to academia.

Small liberal arts colleges are like tiny principalities, their presidents the heads of state. The president can be a benevolent dictator, an ideological tyrant, a self-absorbed narcissist, even an actuary. Those are the ones who tend to fail at the job. Those who succeed at this most difficult of endeavors do so because they are first and foremost visionaries. Understanding to be sure of the harsh environmental factors that conspire to bring about the demise of small colleges, they are also clear in their own thinking about the value such institutions provide their students; committed to their institution’s contribution to the preservation, transmission and expansion of knowledge; tough-minded in their expectations of faculty, student, staff and themselves; and talented in the celestial navigation required to stay the course. Such captains are in short supply.

I know exactly why Friedman wrings his hands in despair over the “hodgepodge” that is President Obama’s agenda. On a college campus, a new and often neophyte president more than anything else wants to be seen by the trustees, faculty and anyone else who cares to watch as a can-do leader. This means he or she will immediately, very often with very little thought of the consequences, make sweeping changes. The kind of change you can believe in until the inevitable moment comes when you find yourself wondering to what end a new policy here, an overpaid, over-titled administrator there are all hurtling toward. By this time you hope that a kindly board chair will have a quiet word or two with the president.

Taking a page from Friedman’s play book, the trustee will say something along the lines of, “you know President, you need to let the faculty and students see the same fine mind the trustees saw when we hired you. Why don’t you share your thoughts with them so that they can see and appreciate the full flower of your vision and aspirations for our college?” The president will thank the board chair and get right to work envisioning the college of the future. It will be “diverse.” It will be “international.” It will “exploit technology” in service of teaching “critical thinking skills.” It will develop a “signature program.” Oh, and, lest you forgot for a moment, the college of the future will be “diverse.”

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And familiar too. Jumping on the diversity/critical thinking catamaran is the journey du jour for a college president seeking to advance a bold vision for his campus. That banshee howl you also hear is the dashing of this sodden vision as it collides with the trimaran of what faculty actually do, what students want and need, and what parents are prepared to subsidize. Could this catastrophe have been adverted? Perhaps, had the president not chosen the one-size-fits-all vision for the campus and instead called for all hands on deck to craft a genuine plan for the college.

This is not to say that faculty do not believe in (or at least pay lip service to) the chimera of “diversity” or what is essentially a vocational school concept, “critical thinking skills”; of course they do. But this shaky common ground of feel-good academic clichés is no foundation for securing the future of an institution whose survival depends on its ability to offer and deliver an education that is transformative for each student, at a minimum enhancing the student’s innate intellectual, moral, and creative capacities and from that base adding significant value to the student’s post-graduate years. “Value” in this sense has many meanings: productive and satisfying employment, extended aesthetic horizons, judgment informed by reasoned analysis and ethical principle; and a consciousness joyfully aware of and eager to participate in an ever-expanding universe of knowledge.

Until and unless the president and the faculty agree that it is in their and the college’s best interest to jettison the hodgepodge of change and the pedantic to-do list and undertake a holistic appraisal of the college, its merits and its flaws, the will for the college to thrive let alone survive will simply not be there. And this is why is it is so fundamentally important that the president be a man or woman of vision. For appraisal is just the beginning. Once an institution has sound knowledge of itself it can begin to chart its future, but it needs the map that only a president’s vision can provide. A wise president will devise this map (or narrative, in Friedman’s terms) drawing from the appraisal and matching the strengths of the faculty with the steps the college must take to become the transformational institution it must be in order to survive. The relationship between the president and faculty must be symbiotic: the big picture is the buck that starts and stops with the president; the fine lines and details belong to the faculty, whose expertise and creativity add color and nuance. If a president lacks vision, or does not possess a vision grounded in the reality of the institution, then all of that expertise and creativity seeps from the canvas and becomes a disorganized, diffuse waste of resources.

The greatest tragedy of all, however, is when for whatever underlying neuroses or shortcoming presidents cannot tear themselves away from the codex that is their to-do list, and so the status quo remains, gradually devolving into a miasma of bickering and malaise. When this happens, if you are President Obama, you blame your predecessor; if you are a college president, you do the same.

Amy Bishop: I Don’t Remember. I Might Be Sorry. Do I Still Have a Job?

The comments attributed to Murder Prof. Amy Bishop in the aftermath of her rebuttal to her negative tenure decision read like a Letterman top-ten list. When handcuffed and shoved into a police car last Friday, she calmly told a reporter that her murder spree “didn’t happen. There’s no way. They’re still alive.” Then, after she’d lawyered up, she claimed to her counsel “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know when it began or when it ended or anything.” Careful readers will recall that this is the same I-can’t-remember excuse she used to great effect when she avoided being charged for accidentally blowing a hole through her brother’s gut. And the latest AP story has her mouthpiece Roy W. Miller paraphrasing her latest remark: he “also added that his client felt bad about the murders, and had stated that she was sorry. ‘I believe she has,’ said Miller, when asked about an apology. ‘We haven’t talked much on that, but she’s obviously sorry for all this mess.’”

So while both client and attorney have foggy memories about the crime and any possible remorse for it, Amy Bishop is still sharp as a tack about what matters most to her: “‘Do I still have a job out there?’ She asked me that yesterday,” Miller said. “She said, ‘Do you know if I have a job? I assume they fired me. Did they fire me?’”

Interestingly but not surprisingly, “they” have not: “University officials have said she remains on the payroll, but her $83,000-a-year job was ending at the end of the semester because she was denied tenure.” If it seems odd to you that gunning down six colleagues, killing three of them, does not constitute a fire-able offense, then you, dear reader, are not an academic.

Let me tell you what is going through the minds of those officials, even in the midst of what I have absolutely no doubt is genuine grief for their slain and wounded colleagues: will Amy sue us if we fire her now, without due process? As I have said here and here, process is everything in the academy, and the more arcane and complex the process the better, for it provides all the more opportunities for lawsuits. On what grounds do you think Bishop appealed her tenure decision? On the substantive issue of her job performance? Don’t be silly. On procedural grounds. And when those failed, on grounds of discrimination, which, if you buy into the “institutional racism/sexism” theory of colleges and universities, is nothing more than a specialized form of procedural appeal.

And why do you think so many of these decisions are appealed? Because there’s money for the plaintiff (who will shut up and go away for a tidy sum) and money for the lawyers, who do everything in their power to encourage cowering administrators to remain in their crouched and defensive positions. Think about that the next time you open your kid’s tuition bill and read about the “rising costs” that have occasioned its hefty hike. The suits at the University of Alabama Hunstville will take what they will justify as the prudent course of action: they’ll keep Bishop on the payroll until her contract expires, then wash their hands of her. They will justify this course of action as saving the university attorney costs should Amy sue for wrongful termination—on procedural grounds, of course. The costs to their souls, or to the hearts of the survivors and the victims’ families, will not enter their minds.

The Frightening Similarities of Amy Bishop and Nidal Hasan

I can’t get the comparison of Assistant Professor Amy Bishop and Major Nidal Hasan out of my mind. The superficial similarities are all there: two highly educated professionals, both described as “oddball,” finding themselves in a place they never wanted to be. In Bishop’s case, that place was the purgatory of the terminal year post-tenure decision, where she lived in dread of what came next, the hell of unemployment. Hasan, marking time with the infidels before he could put his plan for jihad into motion, was in a kind of living purgatory as he waited for the moment when he too, like Bishop, would turn his weapon on his colleagues. Both yearned for paradise: Bishop’s being the blissful security of a job for life; Hasan’s a heavenly garden replete with the requisite houris.

It will be interesting to watch how Bishop’s story unfolds, and if it will follow the same trajectory as Hasan’s. Right now, the facts about Amy Bishop almost defy belief: as a teenager or young adult (the math is fuzzy here) she accidentally pumped a rifle bullet into her brother’s gut. As a graduate student she was a person of interest in an attempted letter bombing of a professor who evaluated her work. As a young mother, visiting an International House of Pancakes with her brood, she pummeled another mother who had the temerity to accept a booster seat, offered her by the IHOP staff, that Bishop wanted for one of her kids. As an assistant professor at the University of Alabama Huntsville her application then appeal for tenure denied, she apparently fell back on the tried-and-true. Pipe bombs proving unreliable, fisticuffs not lethal enough, she purchased a gun and then in another family outing, this time with her husband, went to a shooting range to fire at targets. Academic to the end, she stuck with what she knew—guns—and practiced to enhance her performance. In serial coups de grace, she shot her fellow department members in the head, blowing out their gray matter in a manner symbolic of her blown research program into the functioning of the brain’s neurons. Her research partner/husband/apologist then wonders in a supremely unfortunate choice of words about what “triggered” her rampage.

Likewise did similar apologists wonder what drove Major Hasan to commit mass murder. He was crazy, some said. He wanted out of the Army others argued. After what by all accounts was a jihadist slideshow presentation at Walter Reed Army Hospital was resurrected, those offering Hasan a one-way ticket to the funny farm backed off. Maybe he was a terrorist, after all. And here is where the stories of Bishop and Hasan diverge.

Bishop failed to measure up to the tenure criteria that obtain at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Because she could not meet the standards set for her and other assistant professors seeking jobs for life, she would be expected to leave the university when her terminal contract expired. She would not have her job for life; she would not receive a promotion to Associate Professor. She did not want to go. Hasan, in a nightmarish mirror image, did want to leave the Army. At least that’s what he is reported to have said, repeatedly. And although those charged with evaluating him at Walter Reed found many serious faults in his performance as a doctor and his attitude as a soldier, their solution was to avoid the messy paperwork of a discharge and send him instead to Fort Hood, where, they thought—wrongly—as it—grimly—turns out, he could do no harm. And they promoted him from Captain to Major.

The world that Bishop and Hasan inhabit is a bleak one of lethal consequences; that both were highly trained to delve into the mysteries of the human mind makes it bleaker still. One wonders what their studies revealed to them.

You Have to Read It to Believe It

When a college professor goes on a shooting rampage, it’s big news in the world of higher education. The following excerpt is from The Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter:

Last updated February 13, 9:39 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

More Coverage: Twitter: Live Updates From Huntsville | Forum: Personnel Policies and Workplace Violence | From the Archives: Advice on Being Denied Tenure

A biology professor who the police say began shooting at a faculty meeting Friday afternoon has been charged with murder. Three professors were killed and three others wounded in the shooting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

Please pay attention to the advice about where readers can find more coverage, and think about it in the context of the professoriate.

First up, Twitter. Any academic will tell you this is a reliable place to go for the facts.

Next up, a discussion about policies governing workplace violence. Typical, typical: a multiple homicide has just taken place, and the first thing the academic administrator will want to know is if his institution has a policy against murder. Presidents and provosts across this great land of ours will be burning the midnight oil and rousting their general counsels to make sure all policies, procedures, and processes are in order so that murderous assistant professors who might appear on campus are accorded their due process.

And finally, the best is last. A link to advice for those who have been denied tenure.

One woman is alleged to have committed the terrible crime of opening fire on a roomful of her colleagues, and the reaction of the Chronicle is to advise others not to follow her example. Words fail me.

The Professor and the President, Part One

Sarah Palin is in hot water again, for a remark she made about President Obama’s years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. At her speech to the tea party convention in Nashville, she talked about the ongoing war on terrorism, and said: “To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” She’s taken a lot of heat for that remark, and the academics who read Inside Higher Education as religiously as I do have their panties in a twist over her comment.

With their petulant narcissism, the good professors focus on themselves, rather than the substance and import of Palin’s statement: “The attacks on Obama aren’t new to politics, and they reveal longstanding stereotypes about the professoriate that continue to speak to a subsection of the electorate for whom higher education is regarded with skepticism, a number of political thinkers and academics said in interviews.”

Not so the case of Professor Emeritus Thomas Haskell, late of Rice University, however. His panties have gotten so bunched up that he’s been able to locate the racial bias in the fabric of Palin’s comment: “’For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual,’” Haskell says. “’But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black.’”

The only thing that is black and white about Palin’s comment is a truth so obvious it’s little wonder those searching for subtext and covert prejudice missed it. A professor’s job is what? To expand the world’s supply of knowledge. To question that knowledge…test it, revise it…rinse and repeat. To share what he knows with others so that they can test it, too, and then build on it or refute it. The reason a scholar spends his life in the ivory tower removed from society is that his isolation gives him the requisite liberty to explore society or whatever small corner of it he trains his expertise. Without scholars, without professors, commanders-in-chief would lose their greatest weapons: knowledge and expertise. Without commanders-in-chief, scholars and professors risk losing their freedom of speech and inquiry. Each has a job, and those jobs are not the same. They are complementary, yes, but the skills sets are different. It really is a simple point. Palin is correct, as bitter a pill as that is to swallow.

And all that bitterness produces political bile that has to find an outlet, and where better than a White House press briefing? The president’s always classy press secretary just had to take Palin’s bait. Ham-fisted Robert Gibbs completely missed the irony, though, when he mocked Sarah Palin’s handy cheat sheet of a few key words. Perhaps Gibbs never took a class in which the professor referred to his notes. Perhaps he’s never worked for a boss who’s consulted a teleprompter in order to know what to say next.

Presidential Politics, College Edition

I’m reading Game Change, which is every bit as juicy as I’d hoped it would be. I recommend it highly.

As I read about primary fights and smoke-filled rooms, though, my thoughts are carried back into the past, and try as I might to resist this tide, I can’t. So I will share with you reflections on how presidents of another venerable American institution, our liberal arts colleges, are selected. The money involved and the stakes at risk are teeny-tiny compared to our national elections, but the hubris and the ego of the players every bit as supersized.

Much soul-searching takes place campus-wide when a president announces she’s leaving. Such an announcement comes for a variety of reasons; it could be because the president has gained a new perch on a higher branch of the tree of learning, or because he’s ready at last to start living large on his pension, swollen as it is by deferred compensation, or because the faculty is coming after him with flaming torches and weaponized copies of the college’s governance documents. No matter. The trustees will gravely instruct the faculty to think deeply about the qualities most important for the institution’s next leader, and will themselves endeavor to answer the same question. Not, you understand, that they actually will do the q-and-a themselves. No, for that and other time-consuming tasks they will hire an executive search firm, just like Fortune 500’s do.

The real fun begins when the board, which—contrary to faculty conceit—is the hiring authority for bodies presidential, inevitably must choose between the lady or the tiger: academic vision or fiscal know-how. There is not a board of trustees of a liberal arts college, even the ones with bloated $1 billion-plus endowments, that does not agonize over this awful decision.

The board at a small Ursuline women’s college, the College of New Rochelle, recently had to decide. In justifying the board’s choice, the chairman said,

“Although financial needs and educational needs are both part of the picture, in the College of New Rochelle’s case, financial needs are absolutely paramount at this time,” said Michael N. Ambler, a former lawyer at Texaco and a member of the college’s board since 1993. “We felt that the crying need for the college over the long haul was financial in order to keep it alive, and without that, we were nowhere.”

To pull the CNR back from the brink of nowhere, the board in its wisdom dispensed with a search and named the vice president of finance, eight-year employee Judith Huntington, president. Ms. Huntington is a former audit manager at KPMG and holds a baccalaureate degree.

The chairman elaborates on the board’s choice:

With “virtually no endowment” (about $20 million, for an enrollment of 6,000 students), “the financial requirements of CNR are very difficult to meet,” Ambler says. “We have balanced our books, based on regular revenue and rather small gifts from alumnae, and Judy has been responsible for a great deal of our ability to do that.”

Huntington, he says, has nearly a year to more fully “familiarize herself with the educational side, to the extent she didn’t already have it.” Hiring a president with stronger academic credentials and lesser financial bona fides could have put the college’s future at risk, he suggests. “If we had an educator as president, I’m not sure the college would survive.”

There are two sets of Monday morning quarterbacks that sit in judgment of a board’s actions: the faculty and the alumnae. Both groups at the College of New Rochelle began full tilt analyzing the decision, writing letters and issuing statements. Did these manifestos take the board to task for its failure to consider the academic mission of the institution? Did either group question if the board investigated whether the education offered by CNR might be the reason for its shaky finances? No, of course not. In fact, education seems to have been the last thing on the quarterbacks’ minds. They were upset—stop me if you have heard this one before—over process. Seems the trustees conducted their “search” under cover of darkness, so sure enough

a group of alums wrote an impassioned letter (which was soon followed by others) urging the board to “recognize that more than anything else, at this critical time, the College needs a rigorous, open, inclusive and transparent process to identify the best person to lead CNR.”

The head of the Council of Faculty had these fighting words to offer: “I understand the concerns of others and respect and share the concern for the procedures that were followed in this case, we’re all best served at this juncture to be behind [the board’s decision].”

I wish President-elect Huntington all the best. She seems like a nice lady with a big job ahead of her. But I weep for my former professional home, of which CNR is but a leading indicator of the demise of liberal arts colleges should they continue down the path it has blazed. The choice between academic vision and fiscal know-how is no choice at all, because if you don’t have the former you don’t need the latter. A sustainable budget that sustains a poor curriculum is sustainable in name only. The financials might be balanced, but after the students have gone and the faculty are left scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened, the accountant can shut off the lights on his way out.

The College of New Rochelle isn’t the first institution to make this potentially fatal mistake; it’s just taken it to the next level. For years many colleges have instructed their search firms to find them a president who can raise money. The search firms do their best to comply, but with this “or else” dictum guiding their actions they must range further and further afield from the traditional academic leader, a man or woman of scholarly accomplishment, comfortable in the classroom and capable of making informed decisions about the business of education—teaching, learning, and research. Instead, they offer up pseudo-executive types, who may or, more likely, may not have had up-through-the-ranks academic careers, but who know their way around a spreadsheet and a cocktail party of high rollers.

Sadly, the colleges who look for this kind of savior in a pinstripe suit often get exactly what they want. The new president arrives. The beans are counted. The procedures are put in place. The outside experts are brought in. Never mind that the faculty is in turmoil, so distracted are they by the thought that something new or, horror of horrors, something additional might be asked of them, that they fail to realize the Sturm-und-Drang of the new regime has sapped them of any capacity to invigorate what very possibly is an anemic academic program much in need of a transfusion of new ideas, new commitment, and new passion. The place grinds to a halt, but, by golly, it can account for every bean!

I am a great fan of capitalism. Maybe I even think that greed is good. But as a capitalist I look at liberal arts colleges who hire accountants as their presidents and I scratch my head. Isn’t the first principle of capitalism to make your product so good it’s the one everybody wants to buy? Are penny-perfect spreadsheets and word-perfect governance documents an acceptable substitute for an education that will enable students to stretch their minds, test their principles, and expand their aesthetic capacity?

I don’t think so.

NOTE to readers: All quotations are from “Finances First,” by Doug Lederman in the Febuary 8, 2010 edition of Inside Higher Education.

The Joke’s on Us

So Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island) calls Scott Brown’s successful candidacy for the US Senate a “joke.” The representative’s addled reasoning has something to do with “seven out of ten of Brown’s voters [being] labor households” and Brown’s swearing-in date. If, in fact, seventy percent of Massachusetts’ union members helped elect Brown, the Democratic party is in deep, deep trouble. But what exactly is the joke here? According to Howie Carr, it’s Representative “Patches” himself. I agree that Patches is good for a few laughs: he gave a rousing stump speech for Brown’s opponent “Marsha” Coakley, after all. And he has the darkly humorous habit of DWA, driving while asleep. But I am not a fan of Carr, so I am uncertain that young Kennedy is the punch line here, however easy and irresistible that conclusion might be.

I think what caught up with the representative is simply the time of year. It put him in a jocular mood (or would have, if he knew the meaning of the word). February, when winter gets down to business, is the worst month of the year, a joke of a month really. Think about it. February begins with a needle-nosed rodent opining on climate change. It ends a few days short of an authentic month. And in between are the Oscar nominations, the Super Bowl, and Valentine’s Day. All risible, in my opinion.

First up, the Academy Award nominations. Since the last time I saw a movie in a theatre was during the last millennium, one might suppose I am not qualified to have an opinion, but come on…ten nominations for “best picture”? Now that is a joke. Is the American viewing public so blessed that a double-digit number of pictures are so terrific that they can vie for the title “best”? Given that one of the nominated films, Up, is a cartoon, and another, Avatar, seems like it should be considered a cartoon since I understand there are oversized Smurfs running around in it, the number ten does seem a bit inflated. I don’t believe George Clooney is capable of making a good movie, let alone a “best,” so I’d knock Up in the Air out of contention, too. The rest of the nominees seem awfully predictable to me, and for the wrong reasons.

What can a single woman say about Valentine’s Day: Wait until next year? Chocolate is bad for my complexion? Fredericks of Hollywood messed up my order? Best to go into twenty-four hour seclusion, to forestall putting herself in the harm’s way of being the butt of “good-natured” joshing about her spinsterhood, or, worse yet, being forced to listen to others’ romantic escapades. Her attitude is best expressed by a memorable remark from a long-ago colleague of mine: “Valentine’s Day. What a joke.”

But then there is the light at the end of the tunnel, the Super Bowl. I have never understood football, and have no interest in educating myself. But I look forward to “game day,” as the NFL stupidly insists it be called by every entity that’s not an “official sponsor,” as much as any rabid fan. On Super Bowl day, the stores are deserted, parking anywhere is not a problem, and one is free to roam this great land of ours without fear of traffic, crowds, or lines at the supermarket. Try visiting a Home Depot or some other manly refuge tomorrow afternoon (or whenever it is the game is on); you’ll feel like you are in an episode of the Twilight Zone…the usually bustling aisles eerily silent, the overpowering aroma that inevitably hangs in the air when a critical mass of guys with ass cleavage congregate strangely absent, and wives who’d ordinarily hang on to hubby’s side for dear life are listing oddly to left, as if leaning on their phantom meal ticket. But the best thing of all about Super Bowl day is that all that’s left to endure when it’s over is the winning team’s victory parade, then it’s bye-bye bruisers till next fall.

So, Patches, I forgive you. I don’t think you meant what you said. I think you were simply a victim of February.