Links
Archives
Monday, July 03, 2006
|
An Ad for Presidential Practice Incorporated UD recognizes that the often excellent Chronicle of Higher Education is the New York Times of academia (though it’s experiencing serious competition from Inside Higher Education), but its take on the suicide of UC Santa Cruz chancellor Denice Denton is a bit much. Let us do a close reading of the piece, which soothes its academic readers into a false sense of martyrdom. The rhetoric of the first paragraph sketches a straightforward military defeat under an unrelenting barrage: Denice D. Denton came under fire immediately and often during her 16-month tenure as chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, which ended with her apparent suicide late last month when she fell to her death from the roof of a San Francisco building. Yes indeed, your first paragraph should encapsulate your tale, but here the writer has set Denton up on an exposed cliff top, pummeled her with machine gun fire for sixteen months, and watched her fall, able to endure no more. Recall that Denton’s troubles at Santa Cruz were partly of her own making (she had a bad eye for financial symbolism at a time of system-wide corruption), partly farcical (those dumb skits the students put on), and for the most part something she should have been able to anticipate. Compare what she put up with for little more than a year (much of which was spent on various forms of leave -- again, remember that she was, pretty much from the beginning of her appointment, simply not on campus) with, say, Elizabeth Hoffman’s tenure at the University of Colorado. No contest. In addition to the harsh criticism, which came from the typical antagonists of public-university leaders — student activists, employee unions, alumni, state lawmakers — the chancellor was a pariah to some conservative bloggers as well. Laying it on thick here in an effort to build up her martydom, and, by extension, the martyrdom of all college presidents. These are the usual suspects, especially if you’re in a public system. And why should a few bloggers be any sort of icing on the cake? Come now. Ironically, Ms. Denton, 46, an accomplished electrical engineer and champion of women in science who had made diversity in academics a focus of her career, was also harangued recently by student protesters decrying "institutional racism and sexism." This isn’t ironic. The Chronicle, like Chancellor Denton herself, appears to believe that her personal history of activism on behalf of diversity would shield her from the merry pranksters at Santa Cruz. This would only become irony with a group that had a politics. You don‘t get irony with narcissism. The article then rehearses for a paragraph or two Denton’s challenges -- political and financial -- at her new job, and concludes by quoting a university spokesperson: "The atmosphere…was intimidating and disrespectful." Disrespectful it certainly was -- in the manner of student journalists at UD’s university sometimes writing its president’s name not Trachtenberg, but Tractorbutt -- yet this is to be expected, since you’ve taken a job that involves dealing with a certain amount of juvenility. I’d say it was moderately intimidating -- nothing a woman like Denton, as she has been described, couldn’t take. The Chronicle then goes on to list Denton’s various medical conditions, some of which may be linked to depression. This only begs questions about whether she disclosed to university trustees that she was subject to life-threatening depression, whether she was on medication to control for it, etc. And it does no good for the Chronicle next to quote obscure stupid bloggers who wrote cruel things about her suicide. This is as much a fringe phenomenon as the campus pranksters, and it weakens the effort to make her a martyr by, again, laying it on too thick. There’s more detail now of her having bungled various other problems, particularly a dustup over military recruitment on campus. Here the inescapable bottom line is not that the pressure was unacceptable, but that she was unready and/or inept. But as to her mental state: If Ms. Denton was personally shaken by the furor, it was not apparent during a late-January visit she made to The Chronicle. In a freewheeling and upbeat discussion with reporters and editors, she said her response to the outrage over hidden or unreported compensation was "Message received." The article now ends with this: A university president's job is "infinitely more complex today" because of the expectations of "vastly different constituencies," said Ann J. Duffield, a co-founder of the Presidential Practice, a company that provides advice to university presidents. "These have almost become undoable positions." I love this sort of shit. Note where the woman works. She makes her money advising university presidents. Where does that money come from, I wonder? The president’s pocket? What do you expect her to say? “Luckily, most university presidents, with the help of a large staff of assistants, can handle their problems on their own! I look forward to the day when Presidential Practice goes out of business!” |