[Marxism] Another scumbag college president

[Louis Proyect]

http://nymag.com/news/features/54685/
Bob Kerrey's Ivory-Tower War

The New School president lost his lower leg in Vietnam, fought countless 
battles in the Senate, even ran for president. But nothing prepared him 
for the insurrection he now faces.

One could argue that Bob Kerrey had experienced far worse in his life 
than the eloquent earfuls he got on the morning of December 16. But the 
meeting, convened by the former senator on short notice in the New 
School’s Tishman auditorium, still could not have been easy. Just days 
before, 94 percent of the full-time faculty had given Kerrey a vote of 
no confidence. About ten students, all with duct tape over their mouths, 
had plunked themselves down in the second row and refused to leave. (Two 
days later, an even larger group would occupy a dining hall for more 
than 30 hours.) The proceedings themselves were mostly civilized, with 
faculty standing patiently in the aisles and waiting their turns at the 
microphones, but there were over 200 of them, and few on his side. Arien 
Mack, editor of Social Research, told Kerrey he was destroying the 
university to which she’d dedicated her life; Robert Polito, director of 
the writing program, told him the fall semester was “the most 
institutionally difficult, troubling, and simply worst” that many of his 
colleagues had ever experienced. When the Town Hall concluded, the 
philosopher Richard Bernstein took the microphone. “There’s been much 
discussion today about what a no-confidence vote means, Bob,” he told 
Kerrey. “I’ll tell you what it means. It means the most important thing 
it can mean at a university. It means you’ve lost the trust of your 
faculty.”

Weeks later, as I sit down with Kerrey to discuss this vote, he repeats 
to me, with heartfelt sincerity, what he told his faculty: Yes, he 
recognizes there are problems with his leadership, particularly his 
habit of tearing through provosts like popcorn, and he’s working on 
them. But he also sounds annoyed—and suspicious of, rather than 
chastened by, the near unanimity of the vote. “There’s tremendous peer 
pressure,” he says. “It’s impossible not to have significant minorities 
of the faculty saying, ‘All in all, it hasn’t been bad—pay’s gone up, we 
got tenure, there’s more of us, we’ve got a faculty senate, we’ve got a 
student senate, he answers our e-mail … ’ ”

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