Arjun Appadurai & Sheldon Pollock ask, in the pages of the Guardian-
Who actually runs Columbia University?
The answer is, it is run by its President- currently Claire Shipman a former TV journalist. As established by Columbia University's governing statutes, it is the duty of the president to exercise jurisdiction over all affairs of the university; to call special meetings of the University Senate, faculties, and administration; to report to the Trustees of Columbia on the state and needs of the university annually; and to administer discipline. According to the university charter and statutes, the consent of the president is necessary for any act made by a faculty or administrative board, unless their veto is overridden by two-thirds vote. Additionally, the president is able to grant leaves of absences, give faculty permission to use university laboratories for experiments, and confer academic and honorary degrees on behalf of the board of trustees.
Trustees aren’t academics – and they’re often political wolves in sheep’s clothing.
So are academics. Moreover, academics who teach worthless shit- as Pollock & Appadurai do- are very stupid, senile, or psychotic.
We need reform to save the American university as we know it
American universities- like all institutions of higher education- must change and adapt to the times. If they are being used for an improper purpose- e.g. in order to attack a friendly country- the nuisance must be curbed. They must ignore elderly, ignorant, cunts who teach worthless shite.
Late on Friday evening, the trustees of Columbia University announced that its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was leaving her post.
Columbia should have stuck with Baroness Shafik who had taken tough action against pro-Palestine agitators on campus. I suppose Trump's people are glad to see the back of her because, as an Economist, she would scarcely be likely to say anything nice about Trump's tariffs. Nutters like Appadurai and Pollock don't understand this.
Six days earlier, she had convened an emergency meeting with 75 faculty members after the university had cravenly surrendered to the demands of the Trump administration in the hopes of recovering $400m in federal grants and contracts. The president
who was utterly useless
and her staff called their predicament “heartbreaking” and
herself 'naive' and her communication's advisers useless
sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy remained intact.
She was clearly out of her depth. She had to go.
A transcript of the meeting was leaked. Two days later, the president was “returning to lead” the university’s medical center. She was replaced by a trustee.
A TV journalist. Sadly, Elise Stepanik has her knife into her for some remark she made a couple of years ago. Thus, she may not last long.
For a member of the board of trustees to assume leadership of the university, without even the fig leaf of faculty consultation, has never occurred in the 271-year history of Columbia.
But it is perfectly legal. The Trustees select the President. They are welcome to choose one of their own members.
Unprecedented in its own right, the episode also exposes a deeply worrisome problem of governance in American higher education.
Presidents of Columbia get paid a lot. Are they worth it? Probably not.
This has been building for years, but now the stakes are higher than ever: the very survival of the university as we know it.
The Middle East Department should be scrapped. If you want to praise Hamas, go do it in the streets or an ICE detention center.
American universities, in their recent dealings with the federal government – and with their own trustees – have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of preserving the core values of academic freedom and shared governance.
In the opinion to two elderly cretins. What happened was that University Presidents should have cracked down hard on anti-Semitism and crazy Hamas loving agitators. Still, so long as they damaged Kamala and helped Trump, why should he complain?
This failure has been widely noted, but unasked is who bears responsibility.
Trustees. They can't defy public opinion just to curry favor with senile nutters and Hamas-lovers.
The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees.
Who were asleep at the wheel with the result that Trump gained by the appearance of elite support for crazy terrorist nutjobs.
And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead.
They brought in a tough British economist who had run the LSE. But they didn't stand by her when the nutters started baying for her blood.
Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them.
Columbia has no distinctive strength in South Asian or Middle Eastern studies. Scrap those Departments.
Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors or “members of the corporation”) have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the school president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance.
Columbia has professional administrators. The problem is that they are chickenshit.
Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity.
Not in the case of Columbia. The Trustees are light-weights who show up occasionally. They should have stood behind Baroness Shafik. She could have served as long as her predecessor and ensured the financial health of the Institution.
In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.
The plain fact is that Middle East or South Asian studies have to be scrapped. America is in no mood to indulge crazy nutters running amok on campuses.
Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs,
No. Private clubs charge a membership fee.
which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.)
So what? The fact is the Trustees were chickenshit and so Columbia has been humiliated. It will go along with what Trump wants because, secretly, that's what it too wants. People merely pretend to care about Hamas and Gaza and so forth. But they don't really.
At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. At private universities, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology;
or not so heavy hitters. That was the problem with the current Board.
the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male)
unlike the last three Presidents
treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities.
They dropped the ball by not backing Baroness Shafik.
Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic.
Academics are stupid. That's why they get paid to teach rather than find themselves in a position where they can pay smart young people to come work for them so as to discover cool new stuff.
None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns.
These two nutters haven't led 'medical rounds'. As for classrooms, a ten year old class monitor can lead one well enough.
None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it.
But their colleagues are shit. Pollock and Appadurai aren't smart. Scrap the useless Departments where they flourished.
None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts.
Experts in stupid shit.
None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere.
These nutters are incapable of debate.
None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists.
They made money. Academics didn't. Money matters. Being a glorified child-minder- not so much.
How, we ask, can people be entrusted with running a university when they have no lived experience with or understanding of its core functions and aims?
They aren't entrusted with running a university. There are paid professionals who do that. The President is well paid but the last one was shit.
What qualifications do such trustees bring to their office beside the capacity and expectation to donate?
A Trustee is not, speaking generally, an office holder.
And what do those qualifications, which pertain to private profit, have to do with the concerns of scholars and scientists and doctors, which pertain to the public good?
Sadly, they pertain to the public bad. That is why some Departments should be axed and some faculty members should be sacked.
Is it any wonder, then, that Columbia’s trustees are prepared to ignore the foundational values that constitute a university – academic freedom and shared governance – in order to reach an accommodation with the federal government?
Why are they not strapping suicide bombs to their vests and attacking synagogues?
The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts.
Such has been the case for centuries. Why are these two elderly nutters getting so agitated about it now? I suppose the answer is that particular University Departments may be axed. But those Departments have already become adversely selective of imbecility.
These facts would be sobering enough as evidence of the longstanding privilege and exclusivity of boards of trustees and their role in bringing bigger political and economic agendas into the heart of academic governance. But there is an even more worrisome issue.
America may be becoming a Capitalist country. Did you know that Mount Rushmore no longer sports the effigy of Vladimir Lenin? Also, Trump has cancelled compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males. What's next? Will the hammer and sickle be removed from the American flag? This is nothing less than Fascism!
Boards are accountable to no one – only to themselves, and to some vague set of norms, often unwritten, about their obligations. Accountability is for faculty, administrators and students.
Unless it isn't. That's the problem. Academics had power without responsibility- the ultimate perquisite of the harlot- though, to be fair, they are in the position of giving beejays at Truck stops to wannabe terrorists.
Given the remarkable absence of any mechanism for assessing, monitoring or auditing their performance, should we be surprised if trustees bring the most intense political agendas into the heart of the institutions they oversee?
Trustees want a quiet life. That's why they failed to back Baroness Shafik and ended up in this mess.
With their powerful connections to local, state, and federal agendas and networks, trustees become conduits for politicians and finance-driven values that affect the core life of academic institutions rather than buffers against these forces. (A Penn trustee was accused by the faculty last year of attempting a “hostile takeover” of the university.)
The rot is spreading. The hostile takeover of universities is the first step in a diabolical plan to turn America into a Capitalist country. There is even talk of changing the name of the Nation's Capital from Leningrad to Washing-machine.
The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to
join Hamas
create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students.
What about hobos- especially transgender hobos of colour?
For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors.
Also we need to build tunnels under ground so as to carry out hit and run attacks on synagogues.
Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.
Which is why we need to make a holy alliance with transgender hobos of colour.
Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability and the checks on their powers.
This will deter the wishy-washy. You could get activist boards who take an axe to wokeism on Campus.
The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity.
These are not fundamental values. They are woke slogans. American Universities must compete with Chinese Universities. There is little point turning their campuses into creches for infantile narcissists.
There are many universities left on the government’s hit lists, and before they lose their souls, their boards of trustees must be held to account.
The wishy-washy must step aside so that true believers purge the Universities of woke nutters.
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