Friday, August 28, 2015

"I'd Like a President Who Pretends to Value My Bullshit, Please"

  
When faculty and staff assembled to state their preferences regarding the new president, multiple faculty showed why faculty should be allowed far less access to selecting the new president than staff should be permitted.
                 
For the third time in my stay at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996], the faculty assembled to state their priorities in a search for a new president.  Staff and perhaps even some trustees, administrators, and students sat among the faculty.  The faculty embarrassed themselves relatively and absolutely—as I should have expected.  Students and staff tend to be punished for self-regarding behavior, so we get less preening and whining from staff and students than from faculty, who appear to revel in their brittle, feeble, self-pitying solipsism.
      
As in previous presidential searches, faculty snouts instantly and insistently dived toward the trough:  How might the new president represent or otherwise benefit me or mine?
         

Unabashedly self-interested, self-seeking, and self-serving, faculty debased themselves and abased their departments or schools via special bleating pleading.  Sad but not surprising, this misconduct amounted to an argument that faculty should play a minimal role in selecting the president.  Too many faculty are incapable of considering interests other than their own.
        
[I am informed that a less public if not private meeting of "campus leaders" with those in charge of the search featured no or almost no individual aggrandizement and teemed with thinking institutionally.  Maybe some faculty should be admitted to search processes.]
       
When faculty stated their priorities for the search of a president, those with low self-esteem begged for a president who would profess to esteem their pitiful selves.  Although some faculty managed to speak to institutional interests and to values shared by students, staff, and faculty, too many faculty could not get beyond their immediate, individual wants.  How interesting that staff who spoke focused on institutional interests and shared concerns.  How telling that multiple early volunteers among the faculty could find neither institutional interests nor common concerns to camouflage their egoism.
       
Some faculty did get to a point beyond their own anxieties about their status and stores.  Was it an irony that two philosophers concerned themselves with realism rather than symbolism?  The two philosophers went concrete.  They noted that raising money, managing expenses, and otherwise preserving the solvency of the university constituted a priority.  A member of the professional schools opined that a president with an affinity for evidence and a willingness to adapt to realities no matter how unwelcome would be positive.  That is, these three faculty spoke to needs.  They suggested that keeping the doors of Puget Sound open and paying faculty and staff might be necessary outcomes for which or by which to search.  By contrast, the faculty who wanted their status reaffirmed and their low self-esteem remedied served up word salads regarding less important matters, such as how the new president might stanch hemorrhaging departments.  ["If fans don't come out to the ball park, you can't stop them."  Yogi Berra]
                            
The philosophers did not channel the words of bygone nabobs:  “The new president should be an intellectual leader.  That is my highest priority!”  Perhaps the philosophers had enough confidence in their intellects/intellectualism that they did not feel they must preen.  Maybe, as philosophers, they realized that pretenses to intellectualism do not fool incoming undergraduate, although of course Puget Sound faculty might believe such traveshamockeries. 
       
 Is there a way to get the philosophers and not the philosophasters into the search?  I fear not.
          
Let's play safe.  Keep the faculty in the dark.  Faculty, like mushrooms, do best in the dark.
            
              

1 comment:

Anonymous said...


Gee, it's too bad no one warned the declining department that gutting their offerings would gut their enrollments. Certainly the new president should come from that declining department, "the fuel of the humanities". Other than the current and preceding president, has Puget Sound had a president with a PhD in English?