New York magazine has an interesting article this week about former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, now president of the New School in New York City. Kerrey has been warring with his faculty over a variety of issues, leading to angry protests, votes of no confidence., etc. Why? Well…
…Yet most faculty say they would have been fine with all of Kerrey’s proposals (and then some) if he’d done one simple thing: Consult them. “He saw us as employees,” says Prewitt. “And senior faculty don’t think of themselves as employees of the president.”
Isn’t that one of those things you don’t admit in public? One gets the sense from the article that while Kerrey has some good ideas and is in a tough spot, he’s also kind of unfocused and may not have the right disposition for the job. Still…
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
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03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The apocryphal story about Eisenhower has physicist Isaac Rabi speaking out, “Mr. President. We are not the employees of the university. We are the university!” I suspect that’s apocryphal because I’m fairly sure Eisenhower respected Rabi enormously.
The larger point, and here the faculty are right, is that faculty are BOTH employees AND the intellectual core of a university. You don’t have to choose, and you shouldn’t … and evidently Kerrey is tone-deaf or arrogant enough not to see that point.
I agree and I also applaud the faculty’s attitude. It shows self-respect, and above all it shows respect for the principles of the university and education. Do we want lapdogs teaching our children?
Why is this supposed to be left unsaid? It is almost certainly correct as a description of the attitudes of senior faculty. And it seems to me a good thing: we should want senior faculty to think of themselves as being invested in the university more like a board (or like a co-op or as shareholders) than as simply employees in a corporation.
There’s an old story–I heard Lamar Alexander tell it–that when Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia he called a faculty meeting because he “wanted to meet the people who are working for me.” The faculty members laughed, because they didn’t work for anybody.