FAS Sells Out
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is selling Mass Hall to the university's central administration, which plans to end its partial-use as a dormitory and expand the presidential bureaucracy.
The symbolism here is pretty powerful, largely because it's so dead-on: FAS, in desperate need of cash, is giving up its ownership of the university's center; the Summers bureaucracy is growing larger and more powerful; the students are getting screwed as a result.
Here's what I think is especially curious: The Crimson's Zachary Seward writes, '''two sources said that Dean of the Faculty
William C. Kirby was given little choice in approving the sale or the sale price....”
That sentence begs parsing. Follow up please, Mr. Seward. Who initiated the deal? Who told Kirby that he had little choice? And why? And what would have been the outcome if (the horror! the horror!) he'd actually stood his ground.
Surely Kirby could have said no if he wanted to, or had the guts to. What's the worst that could happen—he'd be fired? That would be the easiest departure to spin since Elliot Richardson resigned from the Nixon Administration.
The very idea that the once-powerful dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard "was given little choice" tells you all you need to know about the shift of power at the world's most powerful university.
