Presidents on the Hot Seat
Posted on May 16th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
The Washington Post runs an AP story listing five university presidents who resigned or were fired during the last academic year.
For some reason, the headline identifies them as “college presidents,” when in fact they are all university presidents…
8 Responses
5/16/2006 4:22 pm
Also a hard year for two of Larry Summers’ biggest defenders:
When Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker made last year’s list (TIME’s 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL), TIME likened him
to “a rock star,” citing references calling him “handsome” and comparing his
hair with Robert Plant’s. But after the love fest, TIME dropped Pinker. A year
ago, things were good: his class gave him a round of applause when the issue
came out, and his mom bought 10 copies. He put the accolade both on his c.v. and
on the list of accomplishments he sent to the dean at the end of the year.
“He didn’t give me a raise though,” Pinker says. When forced to reflect on where
he went wrong in the past 12 months, Pinker said that not having a new book
might have hurt, though he hopes his pro-Larry Summers stance will keep him in
the news until his next book comes out in a year or two. Keep hoping, Steve.
Robert Plant hair only lasts so long.
When she was named to the list last year, Samantha Power, then just 33 but now
more than 34, had won a Pulitzer for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and
the Age of Genocide, and was teaching at Harvard. She was also speaking to
Congress about Darfur, which sounds even more frustrating than going to a
retirement home to explain why Paris Hilton is famous.
After asking a few questions, I concluded that Power totally wasted her year at
the top, never using her TIME 100 title so much as to get restaurant
reservations. (“Oh, nothing for two at 8:00? I see. I guess Hu Jintao and B.K.S.
Iyengar must have grabbed the last table then?”) “I don’t know why it didn’t
help my dating life, and I don’t know why I got no Red Sox tickets out of the
deal,” the now ironically named Power lamented. After some thought, she couldn’t
help but wonder if it was the photo TIME printed. “I look so steely-eyed and
TIME 100-worthy,” she says. “Not like any photo I’ve ever taken.” In her
defense, though, it’s tough when there are only 99 people in your dating pool.
And one of them is bin Laden.
The strangest thing I discovered was that even though Pinker and Power both were
on the TIME 100 list, both teach at Harvard, both were finalists for the
Pulitzer in the same year and both have the same personality defect that caused
them to call me backthey had never met. And as if TIME hadn’t given them
enough already, we will remedy that next week when they will finally talk and
laugh and exchange stories of past moments of influence at the TIME 100 party,
which, by the way, you are not invited to.
5/16/2006 4:31 pm
Funny. Where is that from?
5/16/2006 4:31 pm
Just heard that Larry Summers has appointed Kathleen McCartney the new Dean of the Ed School. Gotta love the lame duck appointments.
5/16/2006 4:34 pm
Don’t know anything about her….
5/16/2006 4:43 pm
Time’s Most Influential-One year later by Joel Stein
http://language-development.blogspot.com/2005/05/filed-under-light-hearted.html
5/16/2006 9:56 pm
Summers still has huge influence at Harvard. His favorite defender Nancy Rosenblum is about to be made Dean of FAS.
5/17/2006 12:50 am
Really? That seems so…improbable.
5/26/2006 1:23 pm
And also didn’t happen