New President

Our university has selected its new president. What we know about the new president is:

a) He accepted a job offer from another university just a few months ago and now ditched them for us without any warning.

b) The other university had to find out they were being discarded from the newspapers. The new president explained his actions by saying that he didn’t want to miss “an opportunity of a lifetime.”

c) His current university had spent about $109,000 on this search only to be stuck with the need to conduct another search a few months after hiring this president.

d) He also told the school he is abandoning that our university “wooed” him which is not true. He made active efforts to be hired.

e) He will be making $55,000 more annually in salary as a result of ditching the other school.

This story tells us that the new president is:

a) opportunistic;

b) ruthless;

c) lacks scruples;

d) doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him as long as he gets what he needs.

These are REALLY GOOD SIGNS.

And I’m not being in the least sarcastic. Our senior administrator’s main job duty is to go to the state legislature and claw our funding and our pensions out of the dishonest and grasping arms of our legislators. And who would you rather have defending your pension plan: an absent-minded, sensitive, ultra-polite, kind, extremely honest intellectual OR an opportunistic shark who ruthlessly pursues the goal of getting money?

The university president needs to know how to beg for money so that I don’t. He needs to be fixated on money, unscrupulous, dishonest and tough so that I can be principled, otherworldly, scholarly and genteel. It’s the perfect division of labor, people.

P.S. We don’t need to mention any names in the comments, as usual.