[Marxism] A Captain of Erudtion

[Louis Proyect]

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/52700.html

Luther Spoehr: Review of Stephen Joel Trachtenberg's Big Man on 
Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education 
(Touchstone Books, 2008).

Source: Providence Sunday Journal (7-20-08)

Surely, Stephen Trachtenberg was a successful university president. 
Under his stewardship—for 11 years at the University of Hartford, 
then nearly 20 years at George Washington University—endowments and 
enrollments, programs and prestige, all grew. A career administrator 
(with law and public administration degrees, but no Ph.D.) who 
unabashedly describes himself as "admittedly quirky," he asserts that 
he has "not [been] completely socialized" by academe and now wants to 
share his "outsider-insider perspective" on it.

"I left university administration to step up to the faculty," 
Trachtenberg says, "and enjoy the restoration of my First Amendment 
rights," to "speak out" on American higher education and the 
"Sisyphean" job facing the university president. However, judging by 
the bluntness of his letters and speeches, quoted liberally and at 
length here, his executive status didn't inhibit him any more than it 
did his friend and mentor, Boston University's John Silber.

Trachtenberg touches upon his dealings with all university 
constituencies: "faculty engagements" (his life would have been 
easier if tenure didn't exist and mandatory retirement did), 
"schmoozing for dollars" ("money is the biggest challenge facing the 
modern university president"), "virtues of college athletics," and so 
on. Each chapter contains brief subchapters, rich in pointed 
anecdotes. He repeats favorite lines: his lament that faculty "want a 
lion dealing with the world and a lamb addressing them" appears more 
than once, perhaps a measure of how heartfelt it is.

Although his gruffly avuncular style is often engaging, sometimes 
he's overbearing. When a student journalist describes the president's 
office as "lavish," Trachtenberg retorts, "I am curious at your 
strange text, which seems to have been crafted from whole cloth. Let 
me put it another way. What the heck are you talking about?"

Only somebody who must always prove himself the smartest boy in the 
room habitually talks that way to people less powerful and 
well-positioned than himself. And when that somebody's compensation 
(according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's database) is over 
$700,000 per year, his condescending explanations about how market 
forces determine wages for food workers or adjunct instructors make 
him sound more like a Gilded Age mogul than an educator.

Then again, that's why his book usefully, but not always 
intentionally, reveals the way the grunion are running in 
contemporary higher education. Trachtenberg, despite his occasional 
murmurs about "liberal education," isn't an educator. Asked to 
describe his job, the first parallel that comes to his mind is being 
mayor of a city. Sometimes the inconsistencies of his own 
pronouncements escape him. He decries how the ever-increasing 
emphasis on research shortchanges undergraduates, then rejoices that 
his successor will be able to emphasize research at GW even more.

This is hardly a new trend—Thorstein Veblen sardonically labeled 
college presidents "Captains of Erudition" nearly a century ago. But 
it is accelerating. Despite his colorful persona, Trachtenberg is 
every bit a conventional creature of this zeitgeist, a Captain of 
Erudition, not a molder of minds.