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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
English professors. At Hampshire College, an institution widely known
for the radical political commitments of its faculty, professors acted quite
responsibly in recommending two humanists for reappointment. But the
president of the college, determined to appease a vociferous group of
multicultural radicals, went out of his way to find a committee that
would dismiss them. Proposals to diversify faculties or, as at Clark
University, to include more materials in classes dealing with multicultural
themes, come from above, not from below. Administrators led the fight
for speech codes at institutions like the University of Wisconsin, a fight
that did not interfere with the climb of one of them to the position of
Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration.
Administrators at the University of Pennsylvania seemed determined to
monitor the speech and conduct of white students, while excusing the
questionable tactics of minority students. At most private four-year liberal
arts colleges, the office of the dean of students has become a partisan of
feminist and minority complaints. By now, most of the dissenters from
the political correctness trend know that they will have little sympathy if
they appeal to those who lead their institutions.
It would be natural to conclude that the role played by academic
administrators in these controversies is a product of a long march
through the institutions, planned well in advance by 1960s radicals. But
this is too simple an explanation for too interesting a phenomenon. It
was once not uncommon to find an occasional intellectual as a college
president, someone with deeply held ideas about how the world in gen–
eral, and the university within it, should be organized. Nowadays college
presidents tend to be professionals who hop from one position
to
an–
other. They are not leftist ideologues determined to transform their uni–
versities through five-year plans into bastions of radical thought and ac–
tion, for they tend to have no particular visions at all, not even radical
ones. If anything, today's college presidents are far more managerial than
the same breed was a couple of decades ago .
In theory, pragmatic managers should try to find compromise posi–
tions between competing factions in the hope of keeping peace. But
while universities are contentious places, a significant number of college
presidents go out of their way
not
to find a balance between the race–
class-gender faction and the traditionalists. The reason for this , I believe,
lies in the theory, not the fact. The nature of what it means to lead a
university has undergone a significant transformation since the days when
college presidents were simultaneously more authoritarian and more in–
teresting. And that change, in turn, is related to new ways in which all
of America's major organizations, including corporations and govern–
ment, think of managerial style and substance.
