A week or so ago Pamela Paul, an opinion editor at the New York Times, wrote a piece that caught my eye: “It’s Easy to See What Drove Jonathan Holloway to Quit”. Though I correctly anticipated what her essay was going to say, I was eager to read it and happy to have done so. In the broad sense the subject of the essay is a troubling aspect of American higher education, the field in which—as a classroom professor, not an administrator—I pursued a long career. Few of the newspapers’ readers are likely to have recognized Holloway’s name immediately, but of course I did. That is because Mr. Holloway, a distinguished scholar and seasoned university administrator, is the President of Rutgers, which is in effect the University of New Jersey, the main campus of which is in New Brunswick, about fifteen miles from where I live. I do not know him personally, but most professionals in American higher education, and certainly most people even vaguely aware of the leadership class in our state, would be familiar with his name. President Holloway is much admired by many people I know in the Rutgers community. Since the default stance of American professors toward the higher echelons of their institutional administrations is often, unfortunately, one ranging between indifference and disdain, I find that significant testimony. The presidency of the state university of a large and populous state is hardly the kind of job that most able and available academics would disdain. But I have known or known of several other manifestly able, high-ranking university administrators who have “quit” or very much wanted to. Why should this be?
All situations have their distinctive attractions and unpleasantnesses. Yet the reasons behind President Holloway’s announced retirement are probably relevant to situations facing the presidents of most large and complex American colleges. I am invoking his story not for its individual singularities but for what I suspect are broad commonalities. According to Ms. Paul’s account, President Holloway has soured on his job because some circumstances do not allow him time and space to exercise leadership as he would like to do, while others require that he spend much time doing things he does not find congenial. Several high-ranking administrators of my own acquaintance have told me in so many words that the job is simply not as much fun as it once was and as they would want it to be. In these instances “fun” means productive as opposed to unproductive workaholism. A good deal of the disenchantment is in fact exacerbated by what might be called the politics of college presidencies—a topic to which I shall briefly return. But as higher education has in this country become bigger, more expansive, and more sought after, institutional life has become more ambitious, more demanding, more complex. Imagine trying to “lead” the University of California, for example. Dwight Eisenhower probably had an easier administrative task in supervising D-Day. Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor or mega-president of the UC system, famously summarized the disparate interests of the major constituencies with whom he had to deal as follows. The undergraduates were interested in sex, the faculty in parking, and the alumni in football. Joking, yes, but….You may notice that quantum physics, business accounting, and Sumerian syntax are not on the list. In fact, a college president has quite a long roster of chores that, at first glance, may seem to have little direct connection with education. The first of these, in most instances, is of course fund raising. As is the situation currently with regard to major political candidates, the ability of a “leader” to rake in dough is taken as an emblem of a wide range of other desirable abilities.
For one thing, the job has simply become more complex and demanding over the years. Education has become ever more expensive and ever more bureaucratic—the latter feature very often having to do with the increasing role of government agencies. Without declaring that government interaction with academic finances and organization is either good or bad, it is manifestly complex and time-consuming. Political considerations, especially in state-financed institutions, are of course simply part of the job, but they are also time-consuming distractions.
This has been going on for quite a while by now. The incrementally increasing commerce between government officials and college administrators is always burdensome, increasingly complex, and sometime distracting. Only rarely is it amusing, and then often in a noirish fashion. It is more than fifty years since Tom Wolfe published his trenchant essay entitled “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”, and I suspect that by now even the essay’s title might seem mysterious. Mau-mau was an African term used to refer to the Kenyan rebels and/or their guerilla tactics in their struggle against British colonists beginning in the 1950s. In Wolfe’s metaphoric usage it meant the bullying, harassment, and intimidation of the mainly white bureaucrats by the mainly black activists with whom they dealt in the administration of supposed anti-poverty programs which had swiftly descended into graft mills. Canons of politically correct political discourse had not yet become so rigid as to banish entirely the recognition of the grim humor in such sensitive topics. (The companion essay by Wolfe—"Radical Chic”—was about a cocktail party thrown by the famous musician Leonard Bernstein at which the guests of honor were prominent Black Panthers.)
What is the appropriate political role of a college president? Expecting people to be apolitical is like expecting them to be ahistorical or asexual. The late Robert Goheen was a president of Princeton with whom I worked but whom I came to know well and admire exceedingly only years after he had retired. When criticized for allowing it to be known (when asked repeatedly) that he preferred the Democratic Party candidate in the election of 1968, he memorably defended himself: “A college president is not a political eunuch.” The Ivory Tower was not completely immune from political consensus, but promotion to tenure in the sociology department was not always invariably dependent upon the obligatory but insufficient prerequisite of being a card-carrying member of the Spartacist League—presuming that that sodality even issues membership cards. In our national politics, which for my lifetime have been dominated by two political parties, a vote split of 55/45 is likely to be described as a landslide. On college faculties the faculty split along political lines is twenty, or more likely fifty, to one. In my judgment, actually, the much discussed lack of political “viewpoint diversity” in academic institutions is less the fruit of an ideological conspiracy than a natural expression of the voluntary affinities of self-perpetuating powers. Just saying…The theoretical basis of the idea of faculty appointment on continuing tenure is that it might protect qualified scholars with eccentric, unpopular, or controversial, or heretical ideas.
It is the ambition of the professionals in higher education to broaden the intellectual and cultural horizons of their students. One way they continue to do that for some thousands of them is through the competent teaching of foreign languages and “study-abroad” years. One can hardly overpraise these staples of the liberal curriculum. But that is different from saying that a college president should be required to preside over a quasi-official, independent foreign policy. That, however, is what many of the protestors at prominent institutions, now temporarily rudderless, have been demanding. I am referring to Harvard and Penn, whose prexies were essentially canned, and Columbia. Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik—in my opinion the most impressive of the three—simply gave up in disgust. At least I think she was disgusted. Certainly, a lot of other people were, starting with me.
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