Those who are not into blind partisanship will appreciate this true story.
There was this really great university president who defended tenure, successfully resisted adjunctification and fought like a lion to save the employees’ pension plans in a broke state. He was also an ultra-conservative Republican.
The governor of the state where this happened hated this university president. The governor thinks the university’s Board of Trustees is his personal fiefdom and was extremely annoyed by the president’s defense of the workers’ pensions and decent working conditions. He was a Democrat.
The governor wanted to gut the pension plan and force the university into firing people by reneging on the state’s budget obligations to the university. And the university president wasn’t letting that happen.
So the governor filled the Board of Trustees with his close buddies and, together, they beat the good president out of office. Part of the governor’s strategy was bullying and threatening the Board members who disagreed with him. The strategy worked. Now this Democrat can happily proceed to destroy the pension plan and the public education in the state.
Of course, I know that this post will be politely ignored by all of my readers because this is what always happens to posts of this kind. Democrats don’t like hearing about a Democrat acting like a petty dictator to destroy everything good and progressive that still remains in the state. And Republicans are disturbed by the idea that a Republican is defending pensions and public education. But this is reality, folks. It doesn’t neatly split along party lines.
Clarissa's Blog 
Of course the glib and facile response is that the “Republican” was not really a Republican while the “Democrat’ was not really a Democrat. Both, for whatever reason, misidentified themselves.
I am not surprised about the Democrat. The fact that Democrats do such things is the reason I am no longer a Democrat. The Republican sounds like a Nixon or Eisenhower Republican. Either of them would probably have done this kind of thing.
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Only children expect members of any given political party to all act the same. I’ve known wonderful people (and sorry excuses for human beings) all across the political spectrum.
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I have no idea what each of them is like as a person, but what I find interesting is that a very conservative Republican fights for the pension plan, tenure and public education and a Democrat wants to destroy all this. It’s like a Republican campaigning for abortion rights or gay marriage! It’s just weird. 🙂
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The Republican is an academic and the Democrat is not. This for starters, although it hardly covers matters. Also note that many Democrats are not even liberals, let alone left of liberal. Look at what Bill Clinton did to welfare and with the Federal death penalty, just to cite a couple of examples. Look at foreign policy of all kinds of Democrats.
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All you’ve proven is that collective identities are bunk. Anyone who’s matured past the age of 12 already knows this, so I’m not sure why you’re acting like it’s some sort of unspeakable horror we can’t bare to contemplate. 😛
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The values of each political party have flipped completely several times before, too. Nothing has ever been along straight lines. For some reason this story makes me very happy.
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The story has an interesting development that will be posted tomorrow. (I’m generating suspense). 🙂
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It’s a state with many red-state rural sympathies attached to a corrupt big-city (and for a long time Democratic) machine. It makes things complicated.
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Yes, the governor hates us in part, I believe, because our area did not vote for him. But he is a total idiot if he doesn’t understand a university, whether it wants that or not, always is in the business of transforming republican voters into Dem voters. How stupid can he be, this governor?
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If it’s the same state and president I’m thinking of, both the governor and the university president are Democrats, and the university president, despite being from the red-state rural area, was connected to the corrupt big-city machine.
Maybe it’s not the same state and president I’m thinking of. The president I’m thinking of lost the fight against adjunctiification on one of the university’s campuses. A chancellor hired at that campus spent a couple million dollars a year on marketing to get 5% enrollment declines two years in a row. That chancellor used those declines to justify hiring adjuncts to replace all of the tenured faculty who retired or left to get away from the MOOC-supporting, union-busting, chaotic atmosphere the chancellor was building.
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If it’s the president I think it is, he’s a Democrat from a rural part of the state. On the other hand, it may not be the same president. The president that I’m thinking of has a campus that’s adjunctifying like crazy right now.
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