The Grooves of Academe
Sunday, October 14, 2007
How could one office be so wrong? Certain positions lend themselves to disaster, but the American university presidency has had an especially abysmal run these past few years, and their cringe-inflicting antics seem to have been entirely avoidable.
In the beginning was Larry Summers. Good old Larry: here was credible dude. Not a Bolshevik, but a Clinton Democrat. Not dragging his wooly head through the mixed-up files of continental Theory, but engaged with science, if only in its “social” variety. He seemed auspiciously poised not to be chased out of Cambridge by pitchfork-wielding rioters.
But, er, well, yes. So much for that. As he gave a talk on the reasons for gender disparity in the sciences at an economics conference and offered as one hypothesis the “innate” capabilities of men and women, perhaps he spied with his little eye MIT Professor Nancy Hopkins bolting for the loo. (She said that if she hadn’t left, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”) I imagine that at this point he could hardly have suppressed the melancholy thought that something had gone terribly wrong.
It was all over but the groveling. For treading rhetorically where he oughtn’t to have, plus a slew of other misdemeanors, he was appointed ex-president of the world’s greatest university.
When a man gets flicked off of his perch, especially one situated on top of the second biggest pile of non-government, non-corporate money in the world (besides the Vatican), people take notice. Duke University president Richard Brodhead certainly did. Crystal Mangum accused three Duke Lacrosse players of rape in March 2006, there was a feeling that this was the final battle between pasty-faced privilege and les damnés de la terre. It was a beautifully mixed goulash of race, class, and sex, and the Duke community inhaled it by the bucketful. The charges had some problems, however. Mangum did not mention a rape until she was confronted with the possibility of being sent to a mental health center, at which point she told a story in which the number of rapists was at times twenty, five, four, and two before she settled on three. The other stripper in attendance described her story as “a crock.” Yet negative DNA tests and alibis did nothing to halt the unhinged prosecutor Mike Nifong.
Meanwhile, student activists blanketed the campus with fliers labeled “Wanted” over the pictures of the lacrosse players. They banged pots, chanted, and carried banners, one of which read pithily, “Castrate.” Eighty-eight Duke professors took out an ad in the daily student paper alleging, ever-so-gently, that the accused were guilty as hell.
Perhaps Brodhead reasoned that facts were for munchkins, whereas he had a narrative to tell. He suspended the accused, fired the coach, cancelled the lacrosse season, and created a “campus culture committee” stuffed with plenty of professors from the Crazy Eighty-Eight. On March 28, less than two weeks after the rape did not take place, one of the team’s captains, David Evans, met with Brodhead to apologize for the stripper party, while driving home the fact that the accused were innocent. “Brodhead’s eyes filled with tears,” write Stuart Taylor Jr. and K. C. Johnson in Until Proven Innocent, a recently published book on the case. Duke’s president “said that the captains should think of how difficult it had been for him.”
“Here, [the students’ lawyer thought], is a comfortable university president wallowing in self-pity in front of four students who are in grave danger of being falsely indicted on charges of gang rape, punishable by decades in prison,” they write. While Brodhead emphasized the presumption of innocence, according to Taylor and Johnson, he also refused to see evidence offered to him by the players’ lawyers and family.
Towards the end of their book, Taylor and Johnson attempt to link the Summers treatment to Brodhead’s deferential stance towards the (still largely unremorseful) campus radicals. And the link seems fairly strong: the lacrosse party occurred almost exactly a month after Summers resigned. But in this case, Brodhead was too good of a learner. Trying to navigate the previous debacle, he created some debacles of his own, though not without managing to appreciate what a tragedy it was for him.
Then what happened? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His trip to New York this month with a stop to speak at Columbia, was met with considerable protest. “A travesty,” said Condi Rice. Mitt Romney ran an ad about it. “The Evil Has Landed,” said the Daily News. Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president, said some things about free speech when Columbia’s decision to host became controversial, yet ultimately he decided that he should kick him around a bit during the introduction.
Yet Bollinger, clever Columbia’s top banana, utterly flubbed his Friar’s roast of the beige-jacketed Holocaust-denier. It’s a tough job, making Ahmadinejad look good, but they’re equal to it, our university presidents! An Iranian ex-pat living with his boyfriend in London told Newsweek that he didn’t like the way Bollinger dressed down Ahmadinejad as it was “insulting all Iranians.” Various dissident bloggers in Iran agreed with that assessment. In his ham-handed attempt to tell it like it is (and in extreme variation from Brodhead’s equivocation), Bollinger put Ahmadinejad’s victims squarely behind the bearded man.
I understand that these pages don’t exactly have pull in offices of college government, but, in light of these presidential problems, here is some analysis anyways. The problem with our university presidents is too much learning. Or, rather, the wrong kind of learning and applied too quickly. Summers violates a left-wing belief and gets fired; Brodhead kowtows to left-wing belief and makes the academy seem incapable of judging simple facts; Bollinger tries to speak matter-of-factly and manages to buoy up Ahmadinejad’s low approval rating in his country. The intelligent can be phenomenally unwise, and this principle may be operating here. (One would never accuse America’s president of too much learning.) But another striking quality of these university presidents is their vanity. Engaged in constant self-regard, they are therefore excessively self-conscious. Perhaps this is just a consequence of the job: whereas the general has his tanks and the CEO his cash, the elite university administrator has only prestige to lust after—and prestige is so intangible that its pursuit is inevitably fraught with anxiety. “Do they see me as the innovator I am? What about that critical paragraph in the Times article? When they pause by my oil painting in the library, what will they think?” These questions must be a constant presence in a university president’s mind. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, and it can also be disastrous for the school. One can never predict the next crisis, but I hope President Wright will not enter into it trying to be the anti-Bollinger. n
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