New President

While everyone was distracted by the national election we acquired a new prez at our university. There has been a lot of heavy breathing about the appointment. One concern expressed is about the close relationship between the incoming president and the board of trustess involved in his selection. A second concern is about his lack of academic credentials as a former faculty member or administrator. Here is our take on the new president.

1) We have been in residence with 5 or 6 presidents at our university. Our teaching and research activities did not change one bit under any of them. There may have been some small effects on our annual salary increases related to the amount of money allocated to our college or department, but the real or imagined differences would be small, and any president would likely have done the same thing.

2) University presidents are concerned primarily with the external environment of legislatures, corporate donors/partners, and alumni as donors and supporters. They do not get deeply involved in internal matters except in times of fiscal crisis when a major reallocation of resources is required. Our university does not seem to be in a crisis situation and we would expect that future allocation of resources will continue as in the past, with the strongest programs in engineering, some sciences, and management being the most favored.

3) Our new president is more of a technocrat than an ideologue, although many of the heavy breathers would not agree. We view him as someone who likes data, and his proposals will be data-driven and thus may be contested on those grounds. Faculty will not be able to blow smoke up his ass about the traditions of higher education; he will simply listen to faculty concerns and state: this is the problem, what do you propose that we do about it.

4) Many faculty will have their shorts in a knot over the president's history with privatization and the fear that it will be applied at our university. Most major research universities, including ours, are eager to "rent" their faculty or research capabilities to corporate sponsors, but we can't see much that would be privatized.

5) The new president's lack of academic credentials may indicate that he will not undertand the norms and traditions of academic governance. That is a good one and certainly gives us a laugh. We have had the experience of working with a Dean and a President who had extensive careers in academe as faculty and administrators but who had a fondness for ignoring faculty when it didn't suit them. In fact, the Dean had a curious practice of having the faculty vote several times on the same question until they got it right.

Bottom line: The new president will not matter much unless there is a crisis that provides the opportunity for major changes. Why would anyone want to be president of a university in a crisis situation?