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Friday, October 06, 2006
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More Stream o' Consc. Justin Pope, higher ed reporter, introduces President Trachtenberg with some more put-down-of-other-Ivy-League locales lameness... Something about Princeton and boozing... Soon-to-be-ex President Trachtenberg begins by saying that during his presidency he held his tongue, but now that he's almost free, here it goes. "Working with the faculty was my greatest challenge over the decades at GW. And while many of them are lovely people..." Lovely people. You know major shit's gonna hit. "Faculty have a substantial weight in the governance of the institution," but they don't know anything about governance, for one thing, and for another the faculty senate is dominated forever by people profoundly phobic about change of any kind. "Tenured faculty are actually managers who should see themselves as part of the university's mission... But most know little or nothing about university administration... Worse, far too many don't appear too interested in knowing more than they do [cue UD!]... I got a blank stare... a glazed look... impenetrable surfaces come over their eyes..." when he tried to talk to them -- us --about governance... Hm. I wonder what we're thinking when we look at him that way. I can't speak for others, but I find my thoughts drifting to the enormous salary and benefits many university presidents earn. I find myself thinking that it seems a reasonable exchange that faculty get paid somewhat modestly, but on the other hand are left alone to think about higher things and to have a relatively unburdened affective life; in particular, not getting themselves into the lifelong irritable states that university deans and presidents get themselves into. Trachtenberg suggests making all new faculty take university governance courses. But I don't want to learn university governance. Trachtenberg says that as part of what he wonderfully calls the "tenurati," I'm actually a "manager" relative to the institution. The hell I am. I see myself as part of the university's mission in that I teach as well as I can at the university, and I try to contribute, through what I write, to knowledge in general and to the university's well-being in particular. |