… American university professors (except for the genial, dressed for success business school guys) are often, from the point of view of a school’s corporate/trustee leadership, irritants. They file hilarious plagiarism reports against the chancellor. They blog. They get together and ask their university’s leadership why it’s spending all the school’s money on football. (They’re able to run the numbers to prove this because their ranks include really good economists.)

Two things UD has learned, over the years of this blog, about The Professor Problem:

1. Wise schools let their professors rant. No doubt it eats away at the entrails of some administrators that some professors do not behave the way employees in corporate settings behave. Yet it seldom makes sense to target this restive contingent. Doing so, you may not only be forgetting the protections of tenure; you may also be signalling to the free thinkers who will make up some of your best faculty that they’d better choose a less provincial campus for themselves. An administration which goes after irritant professors long enough ends up creating the University of Nebraska.

2. Even wiser schools realize that it’s precisely the areas of universities with which administrators feel a warm affinity – the business school, the engineering school, the medical school, and of course the athletic department – that tend to produce the really serious institutional embarrassments. Irritant professors merely irritate. Genial guys in suits (UD realizes there are exceptions to this rule) tend to be your money and/or research fraudsters, your alcohol- and sex- and violence- and litigation-challenged… It’s the quiet transportation engineer running a couple of businesses on the side to whom administrators ought to be paying attention, not the noisy old hippie making fun of the president.