[Alumni-chat] What will the BOT do?

[Donald J. Davidson (donald.j.davidson at verizon.net)]

In the nonsense about presidents of colleges, it might be useful to look back at our founder. In 1926, after about six years spent with Antioch students, Arthur Morgan became very dissatisfied with them. He was contemplating discharging half the students and maybe treating the faculty even so. So he went on vacation. 

Here's what Roy Talbert, author of F.D.R.'s Utopian, writes: 

“A note is in order here on the customs and manners of college presidents. It is, in fact, a lonely job. College administrators...are uniformly and profoundly unappreciated by faculty and students, who tend to regard them as superfluous to their several purposes. Morgan’s difficulties at Antioch were not substantially different from those of hundreds of other college heads, then and now. Most of them spend a large part of their time raising money. They are expected to provide the wherewithal for the college’s support, they are are seldom loved when they attempt to stay at home and run the place. There has probably never been a collegiate chief executive officer who did not know the value of an extended vacation or the virtue in occasionally firing a dean. The most important--sometimes the only--loyalty a president must absolutely maintain is that of his board of trustees.”

>From Roy Talbert, FDR’s Utopian: Arthur Morgan of the TVA (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), p. 63.

For those who want a more extended look at the difficulties of the holder of the position circa 1960s and after, see Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed.  (Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 22+. Kerr has a really funny take.