Stanley Fish of the NYTimes Think Again blog has some interesting things to say about the appointment of Bruce Benson, oil magnate and Republican activist, to be president of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The appointment raised eyebrows and protests from the faculty and students. Partly the issue is that Benson has never sought a degree higher than a BA, though he has been active in higher education in an advisory capacity before. Partly this issue is that Benson is conservative, and anyone who has spent about 4 seconds in Boulder realizes it is hardly Republican country. (We all remember Ward Churchill right?)
Fish summarizes the issue nicely:
Bruce Benson is an oilman, Republican activist, failed candidate for governor, co-chairman of Mitt Romney's (now ended) campaign, successful fund raiser, donor to the university, former chairman of the Metropolitan State College Denver Board and chair of a blue-ribbon panel on higher education. Obviously he has a strong interest in education, but his highest degree is a B.A., and he has never been a member of a faculty or engaged in research or published papers in a learned journal. In short, he is no way an academic, and yet he is about become the president of an academic institution, and not any old institution, but a state university ranked 11th among public universities and 34th among universities overall.
Not surprisingly, the announcement a short while ago that he was the only candidate being put forward by the 17-person search committee drew protests from faculty, students and some alumni. The faculty assembly voted 40-4 against him. A group called ProgressNow gathered signatures for an "oppose Benson" petition. The House Majority leader, Democrat Alice Madden, said that when she heard the news, she though it was a "really bad" joke; she added that "he will be the least educated president ever considered in modern history."
I think that Fish goes on to make some really legitimate points.
First, while politics probably should not be a huge consideration for faculty appointments, it needs to be a consideration in selecting university presidents. The president's job is to raise money, soothe egos, and make sure the school runs right. In doing so, particularly for state universities, the president will be expected to hobnob with state legislators. These are political capacities in which who your friends are does tend to matter.
On this ground, Benson might actually be a good fit for Boulder, although this depends on whether you view the following issue is a problem: Boulder receives so little money from the state (I think like 7% at the moment) that it isn't really a state college anymore. This is partly because of outspoken liberals like Ward Churchill making the state legislators fear that they had another Berkeley on their doorstep. It is also because Boulder has a reputation as a party school where the students attend less for education and more for quick access to ski areas. Further, to compensate for the already limited funding from the state, Boulder has sought to attract students from out-of-state who pay higher tuition. This complicates the issue because it gives Coloradans the impression that CU is a school for out-of-state rich kids: actual Coloradans go to CSU. (I might add that last impression is sort of nonsense. I went to high school in Colorado, and my graduating class more or less evenly divided between CU and CSU.)
Given the school's financial problems, your point of view largely determines whether you think Benson is a good idea. A good argument could be made that Benson will make nice with the legislature and end some of CU's financial difficulties. On the other hand, any money he could get will no doubt have strings attached -- and conservative strings at that. Many people in the CU community no doubt feel that in rejecting Benson and state money they are holding back a tide of conservatism that would eventual overwhelm their school.
Fisk alludes to this at the end of his piece:
Nevertheless, the appointment does make a kind of sense in Colorado, where the percentage of state funding of the university's operations has fallen to 7 (in what sense, exactly, is this a state university?), and further cuts are feared. It is the hope that Benson, well connected as he is, may be able to shake money out of trees that have become increasingly bare. By supporting and pushing Benson, the powers that be in the state are saying, We've taken your funding away and now you'll have to hire one of us if you want to have a chance to get some of it back; and, in the bargain, you'd better be careful to run your affairs in the manner we approve and dictate.
It's the classic pincer move: first we starve you and then we revive you, but on our terms, and one of them is Bruce Benson.
The other issue in Benson's appointment is whether you believe it is necessary for someone to have a graduate degree and a career in higher education to run a university. On this issue, I tend to go with the negative.
I haven't known many university presidents, but I have known several department chairs from the departments where I have studied. From their performance, I have observed that being a good department chair requires patience, a calm deportment, a sense of justice, and a commitment to the education and research goals of the institution. These are all things you often see in the various faculty members of the institution. But being a department chair also requires guile and the ability to perform bureaucratic jujitsu if you want to get anything done. It requires dealing with difficult people who spend most of their time pissed off at you. I have not found these abilities to be common in faculty members.
So I could see how it might be desirable to pick someone who was not a career educator but who possessed these skills, provided that they still had a deep commitment to the educational mission of the university.
The analogy that I would make is that of scientists versus science journalists, i.e. do we expect all science journalists to have a scientific degree? I don't think we should. I have met several science journalists, and I do not think that their commitment to the scientific enterprise is less because they didn't spend ten years in the lab. Likewise, science journalists possess a skill set that scientists often lack: the ability to effectively communicate in layman's terms. If we were to exclude science journalists who didn't have a scientific background, we might feel better at the superior accolades of the remainder but the writing would suffer in the end.
Now I don't know whether Benson is committed the educational mission of the university. He might very well not be, or his commitment might look very different than what I would expect or want. But I won't accept the argument that not having a PhD should always be prohibitive to being a university president.
Let me clarify though. I do agree with Fisk when he notes that running a business and a university are two very different operations. Those who argue that all business people have the skills necessary to run a university don't know much about teaching:
Their argument (which I heard at dinner last week when I was in Boulder) is that academic credentials are not that necessary because management skills, like those Benson is presumed to have, are transferable from activity to activity. Someone who can manage an oil company will be able to manage the enterprise of a university.
The reasoning, however, is specious. It is no doubt true that an experienced executive will quickly learn the ropes of an industry new to him. The product may be different, but the tasks will be basically the same: assess market share, learn the routes of distribution, fine-tune the relationship between inventory and demand, increase efficiency perhaps by downsizing the workforce.
But in the academy there is no product except knowledge, and that may take decades to develop, if it develops at all. The concept of market share is inapposite; efficiency is not a goal; and there is no inventory to put on the shelves. Instead the norms are endless deliberations, explorations that may go nowhere, problems that only five people in the world even understand, lifetime employment that is not taken away even when nothing is achieved, expensively labor-intensive practices and no bottom line. What is an outsider to make of that?
Not much, because he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don't learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don't have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all.
Benson is not embedded in the practices of the academy, and no crash course will yield the tacit knowledge that would make him a knowledgeable and informed steward of the university's fortunes. Of course, this liability might be finessed if he leaves the academic side of things to the chancellors of the system's campuses, as he has suggested he will, but it seems somewhat odd to hire a CEO and then hope that he will stay away from the store.
Fisk argues that Benson may be an effective administrator, but that he lacks educational experience. This is probably a fair assessment.
These two issues -- the issue of politics and the issue of credentials -- always get intertwined in university presidential nominations. You can't get people to divorce their political assessment of a candidate from whether they think they are qualified. Think about it this way: if Benson was a hardcore Democrat with the same qualifications, do you think nearly as many eyebrows would have been raised about his nomination? I sort of doubt it.
I don't know how many of my readers attend or have attended CU, but I would be very interested in hearing your assessment of the situation.
(Disclosure: My father is a lecturer at CU at the moment. I have not asked his opinion on the Benson appointment.)
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As a fundraiser at a major university, I have to chime in.
One, one of the major jobs for a university president is to raise funds. No ifs, ands or buts. A poor fundraiser is a poor university president.
Two, the percentage of public funding for public universities is shrinking all across the country. Getting a President to shake more money out of the legislature is a pipe dream--they're there more to STOP hemorhaging of public funds.
Three, being able to manage the internal politicking of faculty is also vital. It's helpful if you've at least worked within the system to get a sense of the dynamics, though it's not strictly necessary. But it's a minefield for the incoming President even when they've been faculty.
As a member of the faculty at CU, I have strong misgivings about a seemingly uni-dimensional President for the university.
Not understanding the needs of the people who work for you or the students who attend the University can be a huge drawback to cooperation and achievement. Bruce Benson curtailed the tenure process at CU Denver. This shows that he believes that higher education is a business and can be controlled from the top down. Clearly he has never herded cats before. We'll see if he is up to the task. We really have no choice, do we.
This is utterly ridiculous. How is this right-wing corporate asshole going to understand even the slightest bit about how a university works? What a joke. Just watch as the reputation of CU plummets. It would not suprise me in the slightest if the best faculty seek and obtain positions at other institutions, leaving only the marginal faculty behind.
As a grad student at CU, I guess I'm spending too long in the lab - I had only the vaguest idea that there was a new appointment to president. This would also seem to directly affect me very little, as Psych. & Neurosci have a policy of not hiring their own.
I also doubt that the reputation of CU will be affected one way or another by a single person, no matter who he is.
As for the more political aspect, I think the mountains themselves have soaked up enough leftist propaganda that Boulder would remain liberal even we were all replaced with robotic republicans.