The Woes of Being a University President
Every so often, someone writes an article about how tough it is to run a university these days—they've been doing it for at least the last ten years, and probably the last 50. One interesting change is that a standard requirement for these articles is that they must now include a reference to Larry Summers.
Case in point: this Los Angeles Times piece, "PhD in Patience Required." (Registration also required.)
The writer, Elizabeth Mehren, focuses on the case of
Ralph J. Hexter, a classics professor and dean at Berkeley—three nouns which, combined, would give Larry Summers a coronary—who became president of Hampshire College. The search process, Mehren argues, is mortifying.
"It is almost incomprehensible to business people why we go through this," said Deborah Raizes, head of the committee seeking a new president at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. "They ask me, 'Why would you let people who are going to be working for someone have a say in who their boss will be?' "
Well, that's one view of the world, isn't it? Imagine, letting people who will be working for someone have a say in who their boss will be.
Here's my favorite part of the article, though:
At a "meet the candidate" forum, the slender, gray-haired classicist said, he was taken aback by how brash some students were. The first student who interrogated him, Hexter said, wanted his vision for Hampshire, admonishing him not to "use any of the usual cliches, like 'excellence,' or 'distinctiveness.' "
When I was writing
Harvard Rules, trying to explain President Summers' vision for Harvard, I grew increasingly frustrated; the man's every speech seemed a vine-like collection of cliches. Pull the vines apart one by one, and...and...well, there just wasn't much there at the end. And yet, every time I picked up the paper, Summers was being congratulated for his bold vision. Was I missing something? One wanted to be fair—Summers is, after all, an extremely smart guy, and he certainly had
proposals—but there just didn't seem to be any there, there.
I would like to have heard Summers answer this student's question.
