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Saturday, March 04, 2006
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There’s such lavish irony... ...abounding in John Tierney’s column in today’s New York Times that UD -- a lover of irony -- doesn’t know where to start. Tierney’s main point is that universities like Harvard are tanking because they lack strong presidents: “Authority is so diffuse that no one's accountable. Lawrence Summers was ostensibly in charge of Harvard, but he had little power to fire or hire anyone.” Without that authority, you get the mutinous politically correct ninnies who did Summers in. We need “to give university presidents the hiring and firing authority that most executives have.” This is remarkable stuff coming from a columnist at a newspaper still reeling from the damage Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd did by hiring and retaining (despite pleas from reporters who knew he was a fabulist) Jayson Blair -- not to mention Rick Bragg, another of their favorites forced to quit because it turned out he was too special to write his own articles, fobbing them off on stringers and then signing his name to them. Tierney goes on to say: If newspapers were run like [universities], by committees of tenured journalists unconcerned with circulation and ad revenue, we wouldn't spend much time trying to improve the weather map or the news summaries or movie listings. We'd all be too busy writing 27-part series to be submitted for peer review by the Pulitzer board. Um, journalists at newspapers like the New York Times are much more like tenured professors than drudges entering movie times onto lists. At the bottom of Tierney’s piece, there’s a little note: "Maureen Dowd is on book leave." That’s a sabbatical -- same thing professors get. For that matter, many mid and high-profile New York Times writers are also professors - they teach part or full-time at universities. Many former New York Times writers go on to become professors. The reason these back and forths work so smoothly is that the two groups - professors and journalists - are very similar sorts of people, socially and intellectually. Universities like Harvard are swamps of inactivity, Tierney suggests, because complacent lazy tenured faculty don’t want anything to change, and insufficiently powerful presidents are afraid to change anything, knowing that the faculty will simply rise up and toss them out. "You get ahead by massaging the system as it is, not attempting so-called radical reform by dumping academic dolts." Reading Tierney‘s descriptions of swamps and dolts, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Harvard University is the number one ranked university in the United States and in the world, and that, more broadly, American universities dominate all lists of the world's best universities. Tierney ends by quoting someone saying that “The Achilles heel of academics is their status anxiety.” I wonder how much percentage there is in status anxiety for a Harvard professor whose status is firmly and overwhelmingly number one. I suspect most Harvard professors are bright enough to figure out that there are better uses for their time than worrying about where they rank on rankings where they rank number one. |