College presidents can be dangerous

About Northern State University, where I  taught for 20 years, a former long-time academic dean said, "Northern is a darned good school.  We had a couple dud presidents…"   He didn't name them.  But I think I can.  Although I won't at this time.  I will recount some things about them, however.

First, I note that when I left journalism to become a college professor, college presidents served as the lead scholars at the institutions.  They established themselves as accomplished scholars who were successful at transmitting their special knowledge to students and in orchestrating the faculty in that process.  During my first year teaching I daily encountered my college president walking across campus as he was coming from a history class he taught and I was on my way to teach a freshman composition course.  He often stopped me to chat about campus matters and how things were going with my teaching.

During that time colleges were entering what they called a period of "retrenchment."  They were finding it difficult to operate with tuition and their endowments.  To keep going, they would have to raise student tuition to a prohibitive level or find a way to increase their endowments.  While college presidents always had to deal with funding, it was not their major function.  Their first priority was knowledge, its acquisition, and its transmission.The time of retrenchment changed that, and college presidents found that fund-raising, financial management, and its related manipulation of faculty and programs, became their full-time function.  College boards of trustees concentrated on people connected to the corporate world when searching for new presidents and dismissed scholarly accomplishment and academic stature as essential credentials.  They wanted people who knew and could court other people with sources of money.  When the search committees released the resumes of candidates for a college presidency, they emphasized their fundraising and associations with money sources.

In my early years as a professor, faculty meetings with the college president involved reports and discussions on the status of academic programs and the progress of students.  During my later years, the meetings were largely taken up with reports on fundraising activities.  Professors understood that their jobs were dependent on the revenues their institution managed to raise, but their actual jobs were to teach subject matter, not become servants to the sources of the money, which many presidents saw as the function of their colleges.

One of those presidents was a Donald Trump type.  He lied constantly.  Many of his lies had no point.  The faculty decided he lied about everything so he wouldn't have to keep track of the truth.  He also engaged in mass firings of his staff so that he could replace them with his sycophants.   His tactic for getting rid of senior administrators was to call meetings for which targeted people were never notified, and then cite their absences as evidence that they weren't doing their jobs.  When one dean was out-of-town on college business, he called the president to get his concurrence on an administrative matter.  The president refused to take his call.

That president believed that image was all that counted and needed no substance to back it up.  He once told a faculty meeting that the college was "what it appeared to be."  A senior history professor responded, "And we appear to be liars."

The faculty, however, continued to do their jobs.  But a decade of the man's reign left the college damaged in terms of its reputation and its academic function.  

His replacement was a man that the faculty welcomed.  He had a style of speaking that seemed thoughtful and eloquent when he addressed the campus community as a candidate.  But when he took over as president what had promised to be a bright light for the campus turned out to be quite a dim bulb.  Northern was founded as a teacher's college and teacher education was one of its strong curricula.  Shortly after the man became president, the college lost accreditation of its teacher education program.  A professor from my department was on the teacher accreditation review committee and warned that some things needed attention and correction according to the standards on which the college was to be examined.  His concerns were dismissed and subsequently the college was discredited. The college was thrown into a some years of turmoil as it made a desperate effort to regain its accreditation.  Students graduating in education did not find a welcoming job market.  And teachers with degrees from Northern did not find a welcoming climate in which to work.  Finally, the regents became informed about the man's deleterious effect on the college and gave him an opportunity to resign,  which he took.

What saved the college from disrepute was the fact that the faculty did their jobs in presenting strong coursework and maintaining high standards of academic performance from the students.  Those facts were of essential importance when in the college's effort to become reaccredited, which was successful.  The college disassociated itself from the performance of those dud presidents.  That's why the former dean can say it's a darned good school.