Unhappy presidents are pretty much all alike.
(To mess with Tolstoy’s famous opening lines from Anna Karenina.)
UD means that in her blogging experience (she’s been following universities for years) successful college and university presidents are successful in all sorts of ways — they’re amiable and upright and quietly persistent in their policies; they’re wild and crazy and adorable and no one can say no to them because the president loves the school so much, works so hard, and has such charm; they’re a bit robotic and businesslike, but no one can argue with their results; they’re absurd and corrupt and care only about the sports teams, but in these things they mirror their constituency, so they get on like gangbusters, etc, etc.
Unhappy presidents, like the just-booted president of Montgomery College here in ‘thesda, tend to share the following characteristics:
1. Personal greed. They abuse their university-issued credit card. They use university funds for their dog’s amazing living quarters, for massive limos to take them from their just-redecorated offices to their compulsive shopping sprees, for first-class airline tickets or, hell, private jets, etc.
2. Paranoia. The just-booted Montgomery College president is rumored to have placed listening devices in various rooms, and to have ordered employees not to talk to the trustees. He dismissed a faculty report detailing his absences from the job, his over-spending, and his mental instability as a pack of “vicious” lies, the very intemperance of his language confirming the report’s claims about his lack of personal control.
3. Grandiosity. Bad presidents cannot handle their ascension to the pinnacle of university management. Throw a few hundred thousand at them and give them a big office with a view and they become the Sun King.
4. Substance Abuse. Not all, but remarkably many, failed presidents deal with their emotional unreadiness for ascension by sucking at the tit of Jack Daniels.
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The faculty of Montgomery College did everything right. They took a deep breath, compiled a report detailing the president’s activities, did a no-confidence vote, talked to the press, and waited for the trustees to do the right thing.
September 4th, 2009 at 7:43AM
It is good to see a board of trustees that did not double down on their problem child.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:46PM
There’s a good deal of evidence, some of it systematic social research, suggesting that Tolstoy was wrong. Also, it is a truth universally acknowledged that there are a whole lot of single men in possession of good fortunes who appear to be in no great hurry to get married. Generalization is not what novelists are good at.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:47PM
Mr Punch: Agreed.
September 5th, 2009 at 10:12AM
[…] things are hotting up at another local university, Howard. Montgomery removed its non-functional president swiftly, and with little bloodshed, but Howard’s problem isn’t confined to one person. […]