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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
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Trustees These Days! Here's a response - to a recent closely reasoned, scathing Faculty Senate attack on the University of Iowa's dysfunctional trustees (background) - from the president of the trustees: "[The Senate report is] so full of half-truths, untruths and innuendoes that I wouldn't know where to begin in answering it, so I won't." The report was written by the president of the Faculty Senate, a law professor whose whole joy in life is the close analysis of half-truths, untruths, innuendoes, truth-claims, and other complex assertions... There's an instructive difference here between trustees, who tend to be corporate anti-intellectual types, and professors, typically individualists who like to think. Of course, trustees almost always win against professors (there are striking exceptions to this at places like American University and, years ago, Adelphi University), but it's nice on occasion to see faculty get their way, as they have at Iowa. And to see expressed, very clearly, a certain trustee attitude toward professors, and toward serious reasoning. |