A university president is by definition not a scholar. A scholar reads and thinks all day. Or stares into a microscope and thinks. Or stares at equations and thinks. You can’t spend all day in meetings and at events and be a scholar. When are you going to think? Your whole life is going to be about sitting in rooms with uninteresting people and saying uninteresting things.
These academic bureaucrats are dime-a-dozen paper-pushers, so it’s not surprising they get chosen on the basis of how they look. They’ve got nothing else to offer. Several years ago, I told on this blog the story of my university’s equivalent of Claudine Gay who once regaled me with a story of how she went to China to a “Women in Leadership” conference and was shocked to discover that people there speak Chinese. “The whole country!” the woman in leadership chirped excitedly. “They all speak Chinese! We needed an interpreter because the people there? They speak like a whole different language!”
I was supposed to be particularly appreciative of this story because I’d said I was in foreign languages. We called this administrator “the Botox lady.” Out of sheer kindness, I spared the poor woman what would have been crushing news about Mandarin and Cantonese. She had degrees in “Community Building and Educational Leadership” and quoted Sheryl Sandberg. You can’t overload brains of this caliber with too much information.
Another top-level university administrator responded to my proposal that we teach American Sign Language with a story about a former boyfriend who once had a foot injury and had to use crutches. The point of the story was to illustrate that this administrator was very aware of the plight of the disabled. As the story progressed, I developed very strong eye muscles trying to keep my eyes from rolling all the way into the back of my head.
Yet another administrator listened to an angry question from a representative of the janitorial stuff who said that most workers are so underpaid they need a second job to make ends meet and responded with, “So on Sunday I was meeting with another university president and we went for breakfast to this restaurant – it was really fancy, like, a really good, expensive restaurant. . .” The story went on and on and I kind of lost the thread of what the administrator was trying to say. Janitorial workers didn’t like the story either. They heckled the fancy admin and the student newspaper branded them as racists the next day.
I mean, the fellow stands up in his $3,000 shoes in front of a bunch of angry janitors and chirps excitedly about going to a fancy Sunday breakfast with another rich dude. These are stupid people, my friends, stupid.
In short, nothing will surprise me when it comes from university presidents.
Clarissa's Blog 
Harvard used to do better. Yes, its presidents were administrators and bureaucrats. But oh my God, they were not this awful.
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“She had degrees in Community Building and Educational Leadership”
Well, if this is not a problem, tell me what is, unless you’re implying that these witless people are just figureheads, speaking puppets ventriloquised behind the scenes by those with real power.
Also, the tonedeaf response of the, again, witless students on the college paper is so pathetic: so many circus-trained monkeys repeating tired “anti-racist” tropes who still can’t see the reality of class-based injustice while it stares them in the eyes.
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Absolutely they are figureheads. Our university has a sister college that’s older and has more weight in the university system. But they’ve been tanking while we are growing and becoming more important. The Board of Trustees favors the sister school for personal and political reasons. So they hire these idiot figureheads to bring our university down and make the tanking sister school look better. And it’s so convenient to have a figurehead who’s black because then you can accuse anybody who criticizes him of racism. It’s a convenient racket, and we get trapped by it every single time.
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In SA, it’s been standard policy of the Communist Party to use representativeness/diversity to justify appointing party loyalists, known as cadres, into positions of authority since the ’60s.
The general incompetence of these cadres has had a predictable effect on the institutions they run.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/transformative-journey-to-regression
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“uninteresting people and saying uninteresting things”
Some years ago the ambassador to Poland from an Asian country paid a visit to the department where I work and I was part of the delegation showing him around. For some reason it was decided he urgently needed to see where the universtity was finally building a campus (most of the university is in diffferent buildings scattered around the city).
While we were trudging around looking at new buildings that have nothing to do with his country or our department I was hanging back and a colleague whispered: “Can you imagine how boring this guy’s life is, he has to do things like this every day and pretend it’s interesting.” Made me feel a little sorry for him….
“The story went on and on and I kind of lost the thread”
The boring baroque response! An extremely useful tactic in verbal conflict but it’s most effective if the lower status person is using it (or the two parties are roughly equal). A higher status person using it against lower status people just creates anger and/or resentment.
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I was offered to get promoted to a higher-level administrative job both at my university and a different one. I didn’t even consider the offers because I’m a scholar and I only want to do my research, not trudge around these “events” trying to look interested.
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A lesson in power dynamics and loyalty tests. Like, nobody would have a problem with an black president of Harvard who is qualified to do her job, but then you would never know who is loyal to the regime and who is not. The idea is precisely to nominate a dimwitted plagiarist clown so obviously unfit for the job that only the truly loyal will support it.
This is all of DEI. They need to be intentionally ridiculous in their policies and in their hirings. It’s a dare.
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So true. My university wanted to hire a black top administrator. There were 3 black candidates. One was amazing. An alumnus, highly experienced, a brilliant person whom the university community loved during the interview process. Another was middling quality. And the third was an inexperienced, confused, young fellow who was clearly beneath the first two candidates.
The Board of Trustees chose the inexperienced, stupid guy.
And now every time one criticizes the stupid guy one is told it’s because we are all racists. Even though our preferred candidate was also black! Because all candidates were black. And we are fine with that.
100% this is not about skin color either for us or for the DEI bastards.
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“Your periodic reminder that just a few years ago, Claudine Gay tried to get a tenured black professor at Harvard fired, on demonstrably false allegations, just because his research challenged the BLM narrative about police shootings.”
As Dean, she personally asked the President to revoke Fryer’s tenure.
https://x.com/primalpoly/status/1734608310215827496?s=20
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Reduce the status tier of these Universities. Industries boycott the graduates of these schools.
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As far as I can tell, this has already been functionally happening for a long time.
At fancy graduate school in engineering, I met an alum who did engineering undergrad at a well known but somewhat-less-fancy institution, and he told me that many industries (oil companies was the topic of that discussion) do not hire undergrad alums from the fancy institution he and I were attending because they tend to not have any practical skills.
I heard similar stories from friends in different engineering disciplines, basically, “everyone who learns how to do anything goes to a trade school.”
It’s a shame, from my perspective, because fanciness does carry a lot of weight with smart, ambitious foreign students and it’s a shame that many of them are wasting their brains trying to compete for a highly coveted position at FancyUniversity when those brains could be more productively spent on developing better science and technology.
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Already happening. Started at least a decade ago. And it’s all universities.
Some years ago, my husband (who has a BA from a nice school, but not an ivy) made the startling discovery that 1) that degree would not help him get any kind of employment without a masters’ to go with it, and 2) putting it on a resume or job application was actively counting against him.
We experimented with it, and started sending out job applications both ways– with and without mentioning the college degree– and the only ones he got callbacks for were the ones where the degree was left out.
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“I mean, the fellow stands up in his $3,000 shoes in front of a bunch of angry janitors and chirps excitedly about going to a fancy Sunday breakfast with another rich dude. These are stupid people, my friends, stupid”
I don’t know Clarissa, there is a good set of the population that loves rich people and how they flaunt their wealth. How else do you explain so many lower class and poor people idolizing billionaires? Especially when said billionaires brag about not paying income tax
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They idolize billionaires. That doesn’t mean they want billionaires to be their boss.
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A billionaire is a person who achieved something. Musk, for example, built Tesla and all those rockets. Steve Jobs created Apple. These are humongous achievements, and it’s normal to be impressed. But our admin in expensive shoes achieved nothing for us. The #1 law of leadership is that first you do something for the workers, something they value. And then you can expect loyalty and support. This guy, though, only takes. We get nothing from him, and people aren’t dumb. They know he’s a dud.
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If you dig into his story a bit, Musk is not nearly as impressive as Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Buffet and some of the others. He started off really rich and bought into things at the right time, but he didn’t do as much of the real work as he takes credit for.
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