So our university’s president is retiring. I don’t know what the story is but he has been battling the Board of Trustees for at least a year. Maybe they finally managed to push him out.
I know it’s fashionable to despise this president (I don’t want any names here, people) but I like him. Yes, he is no scholar and his thesis (or probably both theses) was plagiarized. But in the current environment a state university in a perennially broke state cannot afford a president who is a scholar. We need a politician and a hustler. And this president was both. He fought like an animal in the state legislature for every penny the state owed us.
He carried us with almost no losses through the economic crisis that toppled educational giants. We were hiring massively for tenure-track positions just as everybody else was freezing tenure lines and adjunctifying. So yes, he doesn’t really have a doctoral thesis. But the 150+ scholars our university hired in the toughest economy for a long time all do. As Cornell cut professor’s phone lined and fired people in absentia and Yale made adjuncts pay for photocopies of class material, at our university we continued to travel to conferences and expand our TT faculty.
Given that the Chancellor we recently hired is the kind of person who thinks it’s a good idea to quote Lean In to scholars and students, I fear our new president might also be a disappointment.
Once again: we can discuss this without any names or addresses.
Clarissa's Blog 
I have similar feelings about my University president. To some extent, I think a good university president can’t be a good scholar. I think they are two completely different skill sets. In fact, they are antithetical skill sets in some ways. The constant socializing, the meetings, the “donor dinners”, the political maneuvering that’s a daily part of a president’s life would make the true scholar types hide their head in horror. Presidents should promote scholarship certainly but they shouldn’t hold it as a personal priority as they don’t have time to engage in scholarship anyway.
I will say that there are worse books to quote than _Lean In._ At least that text promotes the idea that women should commit to the workplace. (I think Stay At Home Mom’s really hate that book.) But my president regularly quotes from a book that I can’t name here because it would a) potentially “out” what my institution is and b) would make you despair for humanity. Nobody should be quoting this book for anything. Trust me. 😉
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I hope it isn’t The Secret. Because that would be really tragic.
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Scholarly research, grant writing, teaching and administration are all separate skills. If you limit your candidate pool for the last three on the first then your institution will suck.
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At this point, all we need is somebody who will live in the state congress and ram our budget through the resistance of the state representatives. Whether the president has done any teaching or not is irrelevant. We will do the teaching, the research and the grant writing if the president saves the budget.
Our state is broke and it’s an absolute miracle that we have been doing so well.
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Yeah, the UC system appointed Janet Napolitano as its president, presumably for the same reasons. She’s currently head of homeland security and should have a lot of influence in political circles. Hope that translates into something good for the students.
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