Throughout much of the nineteenth century, an occasionally amusing, but often damaging fiction pervaded American politics: the civic republican theory of leadership. Civic republicans believed power corrupted, absolute power corrupted absolutely, and even a little power raised a faint and unpleasant odor. Therefore, if one pursued power one was, by definition, corrupt and unfit to wield power. Presidents should not seek the office; the office should seek them.
Like much republican thought, it made for attractive theory and annoying practice. Beginning with, oh, the third US presidential election (1796), the campaigns became fraudulent exercises in which the candidates disclaimed any desire for the office while slipping the knife into the backs of one and all who stood in their way. Thankfully, William Jennings Bryan (1896) and then Teddy Roosevelt put an end to this charade.
Except that the feeling didn't fade from American culture. There was a continued love for all things amateur, whether it made sense for those practices to be amateur or not. In sports, for instance, it took golf and tennis until the 1960s to finally make sense and it took the Dream Team, for heavens sake, to bring a symbolic end to the amateur era in Olympic basketball.
But the fiction still lingers with University presidents. Due to an admissions scandal, the University of Illinois has recently accepted the resignations of its president (system president--commands campuses at Springfield and Chicago as well) and the chancellor (in charge only at Urbana). Both men will, in a phrase I love, "return to the faculty."
Really?! The last time the Illinois Chancellor taught an undergrad, s/he was doing "The Hustle." With rare exceptions (Drew Gilpin Faust being one), presidents, chancellors and the like either have not been teachers/scholars for decades or have never filled that role. In fact, some enter administration precisely because they could never have made it as scholars (cough--UGA--cough).
Yet departments (as I have done) go through this fiction of offering them tenured faculty appointments. They are in no way (again, DGF and the like being exceptions) qualified for those appointments, yet we know we have to give them.
Look, university presidents are now corporate chieftains. They are rarely scholars elevated by their peers on the faculty to serve in this high position of responsibility (against their wishes, of course) and eager to return to teaching Math 101. They are professional fundraisers, schmoozers who try desperately, constantly, and sometimes successfully to make money. I appreciate that; I like them very much when they can do that, given that UI has gone from something like 40% state supported to 17% in the last couple of decades. Presidents matter.
But they are not teachers or scholars. And now these two will "return to the faculty" for salaries in the 350-400k range and do what? Teach? Please.
University presidents should no longer be given tenured appointments. If they are scholars, they can be given one when they retire, if everyone agrees. But like 19th century presidential elections, tenured appointment for many of them now is fraud, pure and simple.
They are professional adminstrators. Treat them as such. It's not as if the former president of GM "returned to the factory line" when he was forced out, nor is George W. Bush training fighter pilots for the Air National Guard (not that he could). At a time of extraordinary budget stress, just what will the Illini two do to justify those paychecks?
Comments