Saying you’ll do it for 80k feels like a misstep, as it can only mean you’re endowed with generational wealth. Add this to your white male problem and it looks bleak, much as I hate to be a buzz kill.
Yes! V&T is one of my favorite pizzerias in the city, and easily the best within convenient walking distance of Columbia. Unfortunately, though Columbia used to cater basically every student event I'd have to cover by ordering pizzas, they'd almost always cheap out and order from a rather awful hospital cafeteria nearby. I always found that endlessly frustrating, but then again maybe I was eating enough pizza at that time in my life already.
I’m an alum too - Law School, class of ‘01. While I understand it, it’s hard for me to take the anger at the student protestors and their professors to heart. I met too many of them while I was there.
I’ve spent time on plenty of college campuses in my life, but I’ve never met as many goofballs as I did in Columbia’s undergrad population - students and professors. They’re not serious people and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
My immediate thought was Jeff Sachs -- he has the credentials, the connections, and he doesn't mind pissing off powerful people -- but then I remembered his very vocal position on Gaza...
I saw Jeff Sachs give a big speech about ten years ago and honestly he struck me at the time as a jejune justifier of the generic technocratic status quo. I've been impressed with his relative outspokenness since but have to wonder just where he was over the preceding few decades.
With each box of hospital pizza I would grumble and shake my fist at Low Library and then come to my senses and grab a couple of slices anyway. (If I was greedy about it I could even get a free breakfast out of the deal...)
After 20 years in academia, I have come to a very different understanding of a university president's role. Here, I speak of what should be, not what actually is.
The primary function of a university is education (which includes research). As an administrator, a president's job is to administer - that's it. A president should not "do" anything. Their only job should be to administer. All decisions about personnel, priorities, etc. should be handled by the appropriate stakeholders. Funding should come from tuition and fees; research money requests should originate from faculty/researchers and should only come from private sources. Research teams should be allowed to capitalize their work - if you create silly putty, but it fails as a synthetic rubber, yet goes on to earn gobs of money as a toy, then that money can be used to fund further research.
A university president should be elected from the ranks of the institution and serve a 5-year term. No president should make more money than the highest paid faculty member. There are no perqs because the only responsibility of the president is to make sure that the rules are followed. The position does not come with any actual power other than retaliatory remedy when rules are broken.
What we have now is that senior administrators in higher-ed are its undisputed lords and masters. If we want to stop the corruption (ideological and otherwise) that is rampant in that tier of higher-ed, then take away the power they accrued over the past 100 years and make them administrators only. It's sort of like eliminating government corruption - if you want to eliminate it, then get the government out of the economy. So long as they have that power, they will abuse it.
People like to complain about excessively ideological faculty, and there are a bunch of them, but structurally administrative bloat is the bigger problem with higher ed in my view. I could see presidents stepping back to a reduced role at an institution like a small liberal arts college or engineering school. When it comes to big sprawling universities, though, and perhaps especially symbolically influential schools like the Ivies, there's market demand for ecumenical public intellectual types to give speeches about "the life of the mind" and so forth. They become quasi-celebrities in some sense and I'm not sure there's a way around that.
I guess it depends on the context as to which is a bigger problem. In the context of economics, which ultimately ends up as the cost to students, administrative bloat, is a bigger problem. In the context of academics, excessively ideological faculty is a bigger problem.
In the ideal world represented by my original post, there would not be any quasi-celebrity presidents. There would only be boring administrative work that people do as a service commitment to their institution. The market demand for those "life of the mind" speeches would simply be met by the faculty of academic institutions. Higher-ed should strictly be a place of work, not hobnobbing, glad-handing, and cocktail parties.
I am aware there is zero chance that of any this will happen.
Yeah, a lot of my job at Columbia was selling the sizzle as if there were always a steak, which could really go either way. Real scholarship tends to be so incremental and in the fine print that there's not much of a mass audience for the substance rather than what it all might connote in terms of one having high income potential and hobnobbing with fancy people. I've worked enough graduation ceremonies to come to believe the fancy piece of paper and ability to name drop is the single biggest driver of elite higher ed.
A good example of what you're talking about is the college admissions scandal a few years ago. The parents who paid big bribes to fixers who provided fake athletic scholarships and fake SAT scores for their children weren't trying to buy education. Education depends much more on the student than on the college. Instead, they were buying prestige.
In a lot of instances it is more the fancy piece of paper proving somebody "got in" than any knowledge or skills that actually opens doors, so I can't totally blame those affluent parents for wanting to give their kids that extra unfair leg up. Glad they were prosecuted, but I can see where they were coming from.
I have very mixed feelings about PrezBo. A very talented person and certainly an iconic figure in Columbia history, but over his first decade he had a dramatically different record in terms of freedom of discourse on campus. Maybe some of it was the lingering influence of the core curriculum, but Columbia actually ranked well ahead of a lot of other prestigious schools in terms of intellectual diversity before plummeting to the very bottom of the barrel. Bollinger raised a ton of money and presumably the Manhattanville campus will break even over time (much as I suspect it might have been a mistake), but was almost entirely MIA in terms of fostering space for criques of intersectionality, #MeToo, etc. I don't know if he didn't feel like he had any room to maneuver as a Caucasian male, or is really a true believer in the fashionable ideologies of the past ten years, but he could have done so much more to preserve the intellectual atmosphere on campus. I expect the humiliations of the past few years will ultimately define his legacy.
So I was at Columbia during the final years of PrezBo, and the campus discourse was already pretty bad by the time I arrived in 2015, but early in my college days, I remember that there was some level of open discourse. I was a staunch democrat back then, and during orientation, I had an enlightening discussion with my peers about political correctness, and at the end of the week, we were hanging out with a group of people on my floor, and one of the guys leapt up and announced, "Time to go watch the GOP primaries—I'm rooting for Ted Cruz!" The guy was from Alaska and I remember being SO SHOCKED that there was a Republican on my floor.
It was definitely quite liberal, but there certainly was open discourse in 2015—I cannot *imagine* a Republican today announcing such a thing on campus—and then when Trump got elected, things very quickly and radically shifted towards the sort of intolerance that we're seeing today. PrezBo is a First Amendment scholar and taught a free speech course on campus. One of my friends took it and said it was excellent. My sense is that he just gave in and decided to stop fighting. He was even heckled by some leftists during my graduation for allowing "fascism" on campus. I think he was always quite reasonable but unfortunately gave in to the mob.
My ur-theory for a lot of what went wrong with center-left establishmentarian institutions over the past 15 years is that, after Obama's surprisingly comfortable reelection, the so-called smart money presumed there was a long-term and likely permanent Democratic majority in terms of electing the President and thus controlling the Supreme Court. That presumption spawned a ton of arrogance and dangerously eroded "the guardrails of democracy" with the expectation that political compromise with 'flyover country' would no longer be necessary. There was still a degree of residual condescending noblesse oblige in that, as of the beginning of 2016, but the double punch of Brexit and Trump fundamentally stunned the technocratic powers that be and drove them to seek a restoration of their hegemony at any cost, and the intellectual environment at Columbia degraded badly as a result. It would have taken tremendous courage for any Ivy League leader to stand against that tide, let alone a white heterosexual man in Manhattan, and at the end of the day Bollinger simply didn't have what it took.
In all fairness. I think that you only get to use "deft" in the same sentence as University president if you acknowledge kicking cans down the road in the job description. Like you, my qualifications in that regard are relatively austere, but in both 0f our cases they could do a lot worse. My #1 goal, fwiw, would be making life miserable for the next schmuck
"You could probably do better, but you’ve already done worse."
Dude this is crazy, I had no idea we use the same pickup lines.
As an alumni who hasn't given them a dime since they brought Angela Davis on board, you have my vote.
And so a movement begins...!
As an alumni, you either failed to learn usage or you have multiple personalities.
Saying you’ll do it for 80k feels like a misstep, as it can only mean you’re endowed with generational wealth. Add this to your white male problem and it looks bleak, much as I hate to be a buzz kill.
You may be underestimating how shamelessly I'd stretch that expense account at V&T...
NY style? Thin & crispy crust?
Yes! V&T is one of my favorite pizzerias in the city, and easily the best within convenient walking distance of Columbia. Unfortunately, though Columbia used to cater basically every student event I'd have to cover by ordering pizzas, they'd almost always cheap out and order from a rather awful hospital cafeteria nearby. I always found that endlessly frustrating, but then again maybe I was eating enough pizza at that time in my life already.
I had no idea things were that bad at Columbia. Hospital pizza, good god. You must do whatever it takes to save them from themselves!!
Day 1 executive order, V&T only! I could probably resign in good conscience at that point.
I’m an alum too - Law School, class of ‘01. While I understand it, it’s hard for me to take the anger at the student protestors and their professors to heart. I met too many of them while I was there.
I’ve spent time on plenty of college campuses in my life, but I’ve never met as many goofballs as I did in Columbia’s undergrad population - students and professors. They’re not serious people and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Would totally second this nomination.
My immediate thought was Jeff Sachs -- he has the credentials, the connections, and he doesn't mind pissing off powerful people -- but then I remembered his very vocal position on Gaza...
I saw Jeff Sachs give a big speech about ten years ago and honestly he struck me at the time as a jejune justifier of the generic technocratic status quo. I've been impressed with his relative outspokenness since but have to wonder just where he was over the preceding few decades.
Getting credentials and making connections.
Just remember, Exile: "You're Good Enough, You're Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like You."
As an aside, hospital pizza? In NYC? As was asked of McCarthy, we must ask of Columbia, have you no sense of decency?
With each box of hospital pizza I would grumble and shake my fist at Low Library and then come to my senses and grab a couple of slices anyway. (If I was greedy about it I could even get a free breakfast out of the deal...)
After 20 years in academia, I have come to a very different understanding of a university president's role. Here, I speak of what should be, not what actually is.
The primary function of a university is education (which includes research). As an administrator, a president's job is to administer - that's it. A president should not "do" anything. Their only job should be to administer. All decisions about personnel, priorities, etc. should be handled by the appropriate stakeholders. Funding should come from tuition and fees; research money requests should originate from faculty/researchers and should only come from private sources. Research teams should be allowed to capitalize their work - if you create silly putty, but it fails as a synthetic rubber, yet goes on to earn gobs of money as a toy, then that money can be used to fund further research.
A university president should be elected from the ranks of the institution and serve a 5-year term. No president should make more money than the highest paid faculty member. There are no perqs because the only responsibility of the president is to make sure that the rules are followed. The position does not come with any actual power other than retaliatory remedy when rules are broken.
What we have now is that senior administrators in higher-ed are its undisputed lords and masters. If we want to stop the corruption (ideological and otherwise) that is rampant in that tier of higher-ed, then take away the power they accrued over the past 100 years and make them administrators only. It's sort of like eliminating government corruption - if you want to eliminate it, then get the government out of the economy. So long as they have that power, they will abuse it.
People like to complain about excessively ideological faculty, and there are a bunch of them, but structurally administrative bloat is the bigger problem with higher ed in my view. I could see presidents stepping back to a reduced role at an institution like a small liberal arts college or engineering school. When it comes to big sprawling universities, though, and perhaps especially symbolically influential schools like the Ivies, there's market demand for ecumenical public intellectual types to give speeches about "the life of the mind" and so forth. They become quasi-celebrities in some sense and I'm not sure there's a way around that.
I guess it depends on the context as to which is a bigger problem. In the context of economics, which ultimately ends up as the cost to students, administrative bloat, is a bigger problem. In the context of academics, excessively ideological faculty is a bigger problem.
In the ideal world represented by my original post, there would not be any quasi-celebrity presidents. There would only be boring administrative work that people do as a service commitment to their institution. The market demand for those "life of the mind" speeches would simply be met by the faculty of academic institutions. Higher-ed should strictly be a place of work, not hobnobbing, glad-handing, and cocktail parties.
I am aware there is zero chance that of any this will happen.
Yeah, a lot of my job at Columbia was selling the sizzle as if there were always a steak, which could really go either way. Real scholarship tends to be so incremental and in the fine print that there's not much of a mass audience for the substance rather than what it all might connote in terms of one having high income potential and hobnobbing with fancy people. I've worked enough graduation ceremonies to come to believe the fancy piece of paper and ability to name drop is the single biggest driver of elite higher ed.
A good example of what you're talking about is the college admissions scandal a few years ago. The parents who paid big bribes to fixers who provided fake athletic scholarships and fake SAT scores for their children weren't trying to buy education. Education depends much more on the student than on the college. Instead, they were buying prestige.
In a lot of instances it is more the fancy piece of paper proving somebody "got in" than any knowledge or skills that actually opens doors, so I can't totally blame those affluent parents for wanting to give their kids that extra unfair leg up. Glad they were prosecuted, but I can see where they were coming from.
PrezBo was the last great Columbia dynasty. 100% supporting this. Let's get the ball rolling.
I have very mixed feelings about PrezBo. A very talented person and certainly an iconic figure in Columbia history, but over his first decade he had a dramatically different record in terms of freedom of discourse on campus. Maybe some of it was the lingering influence of the core curriculum, but Columbia actually ranked well ahead of a lot of other prestigious schools in terms of intellectual diversity before plummeting to the very bottom of the barrel. Bollinger raised a ton of money and presumably the Manhattanville campus will break even over time (much as I suspect it might have been a mistake), but was almost entirely MIA in terms of fostering space for criques of intersectionality, #MeToo, etc. I don't know if he didn't feel like he had any room to maneuver as a Caucasian male, or is really a true believer in the fashionable ideologies of the past ten years, but he could have done so much more to preserve the intellectual atmosphere on campus. I expect the humiliations of the past few years will ultimately define his legacy.
So I was at Columbia during the final years of PrezBo, and the campus discourse was already pretty bad by the time I arrived in 2015, but early in my college days, I remember that there was some level of open discourse. I was a staunch democrat back then, and during orientation, I had an enlightening discussion with my peers about political correctness, and at the end of the week, we were hanging out with a group of people on my floor, and one of the guys leapt up and announced, "Time to go watch the GOP primaries—I'm rooting for Ted Cruz!" The guy was from Alaska and I remember being SO SHOCKED that there was a Republican on my floor.
It was definitely quite liberal, but there certainly was open discourse in 2015—I cannot *imagine* a Republican today announcing such a thing on campus—and then when Trump got elected, things very quickly and radically shifted towards the sort of intolerance that we're seeing today. PrezBo is a First Amendment scholar and taught a free speech course on campus. One of my friends took it and said it was excellent. My sense is that he just gave in and decided to stop fighting. He was even heckled by some leftists during my graduation for allowing "fascism" on campus. I think he was always quite reasonable but unfortunately gave in to the mob.
My ur-theory for a lot of what went wrong with center-left establishmentarian institutions over the past 15 years is that, after Obama's surprisingly comfortable reelection, the so-called smart money presumed there was a long-term and likely permanent Democratic majority in terms of electing the President and thus controlling the Supreme Court. That presumption spawned a ton of arrogance and dangerously eroded "the guardrails of democracy" with the expectation that political compromise with 'flyover country' would no longer be necessary. There was still a degree of residual condescending noblesse oblige in that, as of the beginning of 2016, but the double punch of Brexit and Trump fundamentally stunned the technocratic powers that be and drove them to seek a restoration of their hegemony at any cost, and the intellectual environment at Columbia degraded badly as a result. It would have taken tremendous courage for any Ivy League leader to stand against that tide, let alone a white heterosexual man in Manhattan, and at the end of the day Bollinger simply didn't have what it took.
I am not sure that Columbia would know what to do with your midwestern sensibility!
Live and learn, for one!
In all fairness. I think that you only get to use "deft" in the same sentence as University president if you acknowledge kicking cans down the road in the job description. Like you, my qualifications in that regard are relatively austere, but in both 0f our cases they could do a lot worse. My #1 goal, fwiw, would be making life miserable for the next schmuck
I liked Franken's Stuart Smalley movie
I've only seen Youtube clips, need to track that down!
"it's"
You have my support, and all that it entails, which is exactly nothing useful in this regard. But at least its sincere.