Many people are miffed at the way the University of Wisconsin is handling President Obama’s visit to our campus today. Concerns are not with the visit per se–most of us think the event is something very compelling, a bit of history entering through our gates. The location of the speech in the heart of the […]
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John Silber was not a humble man. In 1996, when he moved up from the presidency of Boston University to the chancellorship, he likened his successor to Joshua and himself to Moses, the only man, according to the Hebrew Bible, who saw God face to face. Today it’s hard to image a college or university […]
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Shirley Tilghman, who has just announced that she will step down as president of Princeton at the end of the academic year, was chosen as the successor to former president Harold Shapiro in part because the powers that be thought it about time that the university had a female in that office. She was the […]
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By any ordinary standard, Teresa Sullivan is the kind of university president conservatives love to hate. In 2010, after the Board of Visitors unanimously elected her the first female president of the University of Virginia, one of her first acts was to endorse and publish the UVA Diversity Council’s statement expressing commitment in–what else?–diversity. Sullivan […]
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“Meet the new boss,” the Chronicle of Higher Education begins its article today (March 12) on the American Council of Education’s latest survey on “The American College President 2012,” and continues: “Same as the old boss.” By “same,” of course, the Chronicle didn’t mean that most college presidents share common religious, political, or cultural views, […]
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Vartan Gregorian once said the way to become a successful college president is simple: stand up, give a speech on “diversity,” then sit down. Richard Levin, president of Yale, is the longest-lasting president of an Ivy League university, and following Gregorian’s sage advice is surely one reason why. Whenever a serious incident occurs at Yale, […]
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New Pew Research Center data show that a large majority of Americans think U.S. colleges and universities offer only fair or poor value for the financial cost -but college presidents strikingly disagree, with a majority of them thinking college offers at least a good value (though college presidents are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the quality of American higher education compared to the […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s recently released annual survey of the salaries of university presidents provides empirical support for the proposition that higher education today appears to be less about achieving lofty goals like disseminating knowledge, building character, promoting virtue and expanding the frontiers of what humans can do than it is about something far more mundane: keeping […]
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Somewhere in America the president of a public university is getting hammered by the chairman of the board of regents. The hammerer—let’s say he owns a chain of automobile dealerships – is arguing that the president must get faculty costs under control – or else. “Admit it, John,” the chairman says to the president. “Your […]
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Tales of the modern-day college president were reported by the Washington Post in a July 12th article, “College Presidents Taste Life Outside Their Offices,” by James Johnson and Daniel de Vise. The president, we were told, is more accessible and easy to talk to, less formal and willing to do things with students unheard of […]
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The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted […]
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As the twelve-year tenure of popular President Timothy Sullivan drew to a close in the Spring of 2005, the search for his successor was well underway. Under the direction of the Rector of the College’s governing Board of Visitors, Susan Magill, a political appointee whose day job was chief of staff for Virginia Senator John […]
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In his brief tenure as president of the University of Colorado, former U.S. Senator and ACTA National Council member Hank Brown – who stepped down this past weekend – managed to leave an indelible mark on CU and higher education generally. Taking the reins in the wake of a number of scandals, Brown established a […]
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Although the mainstream media would have you believe he was a martyr to religious fundamentalists and moral Pecksniffs, Gene Nichol lost his job as president of the College of William and Mary in Virginia for only one reason: he was a lousy administrator who seemed not to be able to get it into his head […]
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Bruce Benson, the wealthy oil and gas executive and conservative Republican activist, was approved Wednesday as president of the University of Colorado in a straight party-line vote of the board of regents. All six Republicans voted for Benson. All three Democrats voted no. (see Controversy In Colorado)
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Bruce Benson, a wealthy Republican businessman, is off to a bad start as the nominee for president of the three-campus University of Colorado system. One objection is that he lacks a Ph.D., which is unusual, but not unheard of. Dwight Eisenhower ruffled few feathers as president of Columbia University before his run for the presidency. […]
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Consider the unbelievable obtuseness of Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts University. Bacow talks endlessly about how he and Tufts revere the principle of free speech. Last spring someone at Tufts apparently induced New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his commencement speech, to congratulate the university for its fierce protection of free expression. Yet that […]
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KC Johnson’s remarkable blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, has generated 90,000 reader comments since it emerged as the most reliable source of information and analysis on the Duke/Nifong non-rape scandal. The following is an excerpt from a November 6 reader comment on Duke’s president Richard Brodhead and the book, “Until Proven Innocent” by Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. […]
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Drew Faust’s inauguration as Harvard President last Friday featured a surprising presence: the Harvard ROTC. The ROTC, which has been banned from the Harvard campus since 1969, formed a closing color guard composed of Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force students. Most wouldn’t have expected Faust to invite the ROTC – and they’d be right […]
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[This piece also appeared in the San Francisco Examiner] Robert (Bob) Dynes is president of the University of California (UC) – and has been in that position since October, 2003. During my tenure as a member of the Board of Regents of UC, I worked with Bob while he was chancellor of the campus at […]
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