IN DEFENSE OF JOHN SEXTON, PART I
I received an e-mail from the NYU “Faculty Democracy” listserv with the provocative subject heading “Pres. Sexton loses grip with Times reporter.” Clicking on the link provided in the message, I was taken to a page on the NYU FASP website (that’s “NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan” for those of you not riveted by these goings-on), on which was embedded a video interview that accompanied the New York Times story “N.Y.U.’s Global Leader Is Tested by Faculty at Home.”
The Times titled the video “Uprising at N.Y.U.” The NYU FASP webmeisters saw fit to add an additional caption: “The New York Times Sits Down With A Confused John Sexton.” Here’s the video. Judge for yourself.
Sure, there are things that Sexton doesn’t want to discuss in the video, but when I watch it, I see one confused person, and it isn’t Sexton. It’s the reporter, Ariel Kaminer, who asks the question, “Do you feel that NYU should be a fundamentally democratic institution, that is to say, should the old academic model of shared governance apply?”
Or maybe it’s just I who am confused. Because I have never thought of a university as a “fundamentally democratic institution,” and I’m not exactly sure what “the old academic model of shared governance” is. I always found the name “Faculty Democracy” to be vaguely amusing.
Chalk it up to my academic upbringing. I attended the oldest university in the United States — you know, the one founded by Puritan guys in Massachusetts back in 1636. Big on hierarchy that lot, and not a democrat to be found among them. (If you want to revisit John Winthrop’s emblematic sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” you can have a look at my Open Ed lecture on Puritanism. That’s the sermon that takes as its text the following proposition: “GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.”)
At my freshman convocation in Harvard Yard, I and my classmates were put in our places by the revered Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Henry Rovosky: “You are here for four years. I am here for life. Harvard is here forever.” That was the veritas I learned. Of course that was back in the day before it became fashionable for professors to suggest that they weren’t really authority figures and that they and their students were somehow on a par with one another. Nuh-uh. Now I love it when I do learn things from my students, but that’s the exception rather than the rule (at least at NYU-NY: it happens much more often at NYUAD). If, however, it weren’t the case that I knew more than my students — both in terms of having actual knowledge and knowing how to get actual knowledge — then I don’t think I should be paid to be a professor.
So the way I learned it was: professors above students, department chairs above professors, deans above department chairs, and the president of the university above them all.
I do believe in “shared governance” to the extent that faculty should be consulted by administrators, but ultimately administrators are paid to make the hard decisions. Some things have to be done by executive decision — sometimes really big things. Because often, getting faculty members to close debates and come to decisions is like herding cats.
And maybe that’s one of the shortcomings of democracy, at least as practiced in the USA: it’s often a ridiculously inefficient form of government, and every now and then I find myself wishing the US had a little bit more executive action and a little less, shall we call it, “debate.” I would dearly love to see a national gun control law and an equal rights amendment, but given the state of American democracy, I don’t see how we get there from here — at least not during my lifetime.
We don’t have NYU Abu Dhabi without John Sexton. We don’t have a GNU. As someone who’s had a little bit of hands-on experience with each of those entities, I’m glad we didn’t leave the call about whether to establish them to my faculty colleagues. We’d still be arguing about it.
And I, for one, am damn glad that both NYU Abu Dhabi and the GNU have come into existence. They’re not perfect; they’re often frustrating. I’ll write about my frustrations a little in the coming days. But I thank John Sexton for creating these opportunities to at least think about reinventing the university — and the humanities — for the twenty-first century.
Consultation? Shared governance? I don’t think it’s merely false pride for me to suggest that I have been consulted and have helped to shape the initiative called NYU Abu Dhabi from pretty nearly the ground floor. As a member of the interdisciplinary Humanities Coordinating Group for NYU Abu Dhabi starting in Fall 2008, I helped to shape the Humanities curriculum. There are things embedded in the first course bulletin that I know for a fact were my ideas to start, then refined by colleagues. Most of my faculty colleagues here can point to ideas that started out as theirs and have become ours. In my experience, NYU Abu Dhabi has been and continues to be a collaborative enterprise shaped primarily by its faculty, both those based here and those visiting from New York.
I firmly believe that NYU Abu Dhabi and the GNU that it makes possible are young institutions in which good ideas take root and ultimately flourish. And that’s because of the talented group of faculty and students — and yes, even administrators — that have come here to work and study together because John Sexton made an executive decision way back when.
I’m a reluctant administrator. I agreed to serve as “Associate Dean of Humanities” for NYUAD, because I thought that I could make a more effective contribution as an administrator to what struck me when I was appointed three years ago — and still strikes me now — as the most interesting venture in US Higher Education. But I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a faculty member. Last year, I taught a full NYUAD standing faculty course load even as I served as Associate Dean. So I think I manage to balance both perspectives, as do many of my administrative colleagues here at NYUAD, even if they teach less than I do.
There’s a book by Stanley Fish that I find maddening. It’s called Save the World on Your Own Time (2008), and I fundamentally disagree with Fish’s view that it is not one of the goals of a university to produce responsible citizens.
Be that as it may, there’s one chapter that makes me smile and nod whenever I reread it. It’s called “Administrative Interlude,” and here’s a quote:
At the end of my tenure as dean, I spoke to some administrators who had been on the job for a short enough time to be able to still remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they did now. One said that she had come to realize how narcissistic academics are: an academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and self-regarding eye. As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead; as an administrator, you’re trying “to make things happen for other people”; you’re “not advancing your own profile but advancing the institution, and you’re more service oriented.”
A second new administrator reported that he finds faculty members “unbelievably parochial, selfish, and self-indulgent.” They believe that their time is their own even someone else is paying for it. They say things like “I don’t get paid for the summer.” They believe that they deserve everything and that if they are ever denied anything, it could only be because an evil administrator has commited a great injustice. Although they are employees of the university (and in public universities, of the state), they consider themselves independent contractors engaged fitfully in free-lance piecework. They have no idea of how comfortable life they lead.
Neither, said a third administrator recently up from the ranks, do they have tany idea of how a university operates. They seem proud of their parochialism and boast of their inabiltiy to access the many systems that hold the enterprise together. Ignorance of these matters is not a failing, but a badge of honor. Their first response to budget crises is to call for a cut in the administration, although, were the administrators to disappear, they wouldn’t be able to put one foot in front of another.
I note in passing that some of my colleagues who are most vocal in their disapproval for the NYU 2031 Plan, which provides for increased classroom space, are the first to complain when they get a basement classroom. Doesn’t it make a difference, they intone, that I am a senior professor …
Finally, the parochialism that administrator number three mentions above is a serious issue, as far as I’m concerned. In an article that appeared in the Guardian on the vote of no confidence, my colleague Andrew Ross is quoted as saying “Faculty had no say over whether we wanted to be a global university.” I’m not sure that’s true, but in any case, I, for one, am glad we are “global” rather than simply “local” or rather parochially local. Because I’ve been there and done that.
I started my teaching career at a university that was marked by parochialism.
NYU, circa. 1993. That’s the year in which Andrew and I were both hired at an institution languishing among the “also-rans” of US Research 1 universities.
I, for one, don’t miss that NYU at all. And I give John Sexton a lot of credit for the fact that NYU is now on the map of institutions that matter.
Revised: 13 March 2013
To quote Sir Thomas More: “it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Abu Dhabi?
The number of people whom I have come across and who attended Harvard but have had the capacity to resist calling attention to that fact remains at one.
To Anthony: Scofield channeling More channeling Matthew! My soul is in fine shape because I haven’t sold it. (Despite what some colleagues on the Square might think, being Associate Dean for Humanities at NYUAD is not like being Attorney-General for Wales under Henry VIII.) Indeed, it is being strengthened by the hard daily work of engaging in cross-cultural conversations — not the least of which, sad to say, is between NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU in Washington Square.
To Paul: I’m not entirely sure why your comment is relevant to the debate at hand, unless you’re suggesting that the rhetorical strategy that I adopted was fatally flawed and undermined the point I was trying to make, because it was doomed to alienate a large proportion of my audience, yourself apparently included.
I’m not sure that the best way to win faculty support for Sexton, in this week of the Vote of No Confidence, is to quote a passage that voices the profound contempt in which university administrators hold professors. This tends to confirm the general feeling about the NYU administration, not to deny it.
My experience of the opponents and proponents of the NYU 2031 plan is quite the opposite of yours. What I have found is that the strongest proponents of NYU 2031 tend to be faculty who expect a large personal share of the pie, and that the opponents are willing to live with the limitations that an alternative to 2031 would entail.
I have been here since 1983, and my sense is that the University has in important respects sharply declined in the last 10 years or so. Large parts of the faculty are alienated, the staff is demoralized, the administrative infrastructure works less and less well. Expansion and celebrity has been pursued at the cost of a sound academic environment. And at great cost to the students: it is appalling that NYU is one of the top universities in terms of student debt. It is appalling that the majority of our undergraduates are working one job while trying to do a degree, and that a significant fraction are working forty hours a week. There have also been some good things; there have been some very fine faculty hires, and it is a good thing for the undergraduates to have the opportunity to spend some time abroad. But overall, the university has been moving in the wrong direction; and if it does not change direction, the results may be catastrophic.
— Ernie Davis, Professor of Computer Science
Let me just clarify one point; it is perfectly reasonable for a faculty member who stands to gain from NYU 2031 to support it. My point is just that I don’t see the widespread hypocrisy that you are describing.
The Harvard faculty passed a vote of no confidence in Larry Summers, so apparently they don’t entirely buy into the hierarchical model that loomed so large in your Harvard education.
To Ernie: I’ll take your word for it that there’s not as much hypocrisy surrounding opposition to NYU 2031 as I fear. As you’ll see from one of my later posts, I’m ambivalent about the 2031 plan too, though I think that NYU does need more space. But in 100 years, I don’t think it’s the expansion of the campus on which NYU’s reputation will rest. If it has an enhanced reputation, it’ll be because we made the GNU a reality.
So I care a lot more about the GNU than I do about 2031. And I know there’s hypocrisy surrounding the opposition to NYU Abu Dhabi and to the GNU. There’s a lot of ignorance and what can only be called racism too, shocking because it comes from scholars who seem to pride themselves on being “progressive.” Professors that I once respected — one of my earliest blog posts was about Mark Crisipin Miller — feel free to say the most ridiculously uninformed things about Abu Dhabi and the Middle East. I’m planning to post a collection of some of the howlers shortly. Professors who expect their students to do homework should feel obliged to do some homework too before opening their mouths in public or on email.
I’ve only been at NYU since 1993 and at that time many of my students were were working while trying to do a degree. The overall quality of the students was much lower than it is now. I agree that it is regrettable that tuition is so high, financial aid so low, and NYU student debt is so high. But in my two decades, NYU has always been tuition-driven. I was hired just after the first Bush’s recession, when schools like those in the Ivy League were cutting back on hiring because their endowments had shrunk. The joke around NYU was that, since it had no shrinking endowment (having basically no endowment), NYU could keep hiring. And I was hired when faculty members were starting to want to come to NYU to live in the Village, creating a housing crunch. I’ve been told by my departmental colleagues who are or were your contemporaries that when they came to NYU, the Village and New York generally were problems for recruiting, and those who came lived elsewhere (Brooklyn or New Jersey, for example). The faculty hiring that you note has been at least a partial success is a large part of what makes NYU need more space, it seems to me. Should we stop hiring?
Over the long term the lack of endowment is a major problem. The Ivy League schools can give out generous financial aid because they have large endowments. How would you remedy that situation?
What you call “expansion and celebrity” strikes me as something else, as an attempt to build a school that (despite its comparatively limited resources) can begin to have reputation that has a chance of approaching that of a Harvard or Oxford over time. That kind of reputation will attract better students and faculty and also donors, all of which are necessary for the creation of an appropriately sized endowment that one day may allow us to offer NYU students financial aid in the way that the Ivies do. In a study conducted in 2011, NYU’s total endowment (including the School of Medicine: Langone has 28% of the endowment earmarked for it) was found to be the 18th largest in total size, but only 163rd in endowment per student: $75,003 per student. In comparison, Harvard’s endowment per student is $1,304,492 — a staggering difference. Princeton (with its lower overall enrollment) has an even bigger figure: $1,857,040.
To provide even further perspective on how behind NYU is: NYU’s endowment was listed on its operating budget webpages at $2.8 billion. Harvard’s endowment is in excess of $32 billion. Yale: $19 billion. Princeton: $18 billion. Stanford: $16 billion. MIT: a more approachable $9.7 billion (only 3.5 times ours!).
In the years that I’ve been here, faculty members used to contemplate what it would take to be like Harvard. They came up with some bad ideas, such as: let’s tenure people at the rate that Harvard does (worst thing to emulate about Harvard, people!).
The problem is that NYU was playing catch-up in a game that it entered comparatively late, with no hope of reaching the leaders. And then something happened: we stumbled onto the GNU idea. And that’s a new game. And other schools, like Yale and Stanford for example, are looking over and wanting to play our game. (The game metaphor is regrettable, but I think it gets my point across. Maybe you can help me think of a different one.) Finally, we have a head start. My fear (as I wrote earlier today) is that we’ll squander it.
Finally, on the votes of no-confidence at Harvard and NYU. I’ve been told very recently by more than one senior professor at Harvard that the votes are comparable only on the surface and that the NYU vote is trumped up in a way that the Harvard vote was not. I’m sure that many of my colleagues who were and are in favor of the vote are principled and support the vote in good conscience. Unfortunately, they’re relatively quiet in their views, and the ringleaders — er, spokespeople — who are quoted over and over in the press seem to be adopting NRA-like strategies that employ “any means necessary.” So principle positions quickly turn into statements that seem misleading if not willfully deceitful.
A vote of no confidence should be a last resort. I don’t think it is warranted at NYU. The Sexton administration has done some great things and made some mistakes. For me, the former far outweigh the latter. But as you’ll see if you read my post from this morning, I think there are things that Bobst 12th Floor should learn from those mistakes.
Cyrus, I’m afraid that you may very well be as ignorant of what is happening here on the Square as you claim those who dare question the wisdom of the GNU to be. To be sure, it is deeply disappointing to find a fellow NYU faculty member espousing and even proudly expressing what largely amount to anti-faculty democratic sentiments.
I confess that I would not have written in to your blog were it not for your response to Ernie’s thoughtful and — at least in my own experience of having taught at NYU for the last dozen yrs — very accurate comments.
I was taken aback by both the strange sense of detachment and even arrogance on display in your response. From the weird Harvard resentment-reverence to the internalization of the all-too-familiar GNU talking points (“Well, it’s not a democracy, but it works.” Or works for ME.) to the refusal to see not only the benefits but the potential costs of the current administration’s “grow or die” corporate model not only abroad but here at home as exemplified by NYU 2031 to your lack of information or even curiosity with regard to the so-called housing crunch here in New York, with nearly a 100 apt units standing vacant in the Washington Sq. Village and Silver Towers alone. Most unfortunate of all was your characterization of some members of the faculty who have expressed grave concern about the direction that our university has assumed as “ringleaders” of some kind of rogue rebellion. You singled out Mark Crispin Miller for particular abuse. This I will not let stand, as — whatever one’s position with regard to this week’s FAS “no confidence” vote might be — Mark has done more to promote faculty governance and an honest and hard accounting of ourselves, as a collective body of educators, than I suspect you have or ever will.
You know, Cyrus, I would run through a wall, if I could, to defend your right — or that of any other faculty member’s with whom I might be in disagreement — to have your voice heard. The right for everyone, regardless of viewpoint, to debate, to disagree or agree, to assemble and, yes, to vote. My standard in this is not Harvard; it is the vision of our own university, one that we all have worked so tirelessly to build. Your own idea (and philosophical ideals) with regard to faculty governance cannot be more starkly opposed to my own. That much is obvious. Fortunately, the College of Arts and Science, of which we are both a part, recognized the faculty’s right to express our respective visions. The debates that led to where we are now, with this week’s vote, were conducted civilly and openly. And that can only strengthen our university.
To Dennis: Mark Crisipin Miller saw fit to say this about Abu Dhabi for quotation in the Daily Beast: “You’re not allowed to bring a camera out into the streets. The legal code discriminates against Jews and gay people. What is NYU doing in a place like that?” That statement alone is evidence of shocking, irresponsible ignorance of the situation in Abu Dhabi. So, yes, I singled him out — much to my own chagrin. I’ll simply quote a comment left in response to the piece: “Before Professor Miller criticizes things further, he might want to look at any number of the photographs that I and my students, colleagues, friends, and visiting relatives have taken (with cameras, iphones, ipads, and etc) as we walk around the streets of Abu Dhabi.”
My colleagues at NYUAD are amazed at the level of ignorance that people on the Square are willing to put on public display and shocked at the eagerness with which the US media has lapped it all up.
Having been at NYU for twenty years and having been offered (in 2011) a number of three-bedroom apartments in Washington Square Village, none of which met our needs, I’m fully aware of the dynamics of the “housing crunch” in Washington Square. I lived in a one-bedroom (converted from a large studio) in 2 Washington Square Village for two years in the late 1990s. NYU has a desperate need for larger apartments to accommodate faculty families. Those kind of apartments do not exist in the original plans for WSV. So how do you suppose one goes about creating larger units? You put smaller units together. And how do you go about getting smaller units next to one another that can be put together? Since Hermione Granger’s talents do not exist in our universe, you have to do some warehousing of apartments so that you can get contiguous units. I see the warehousing of apartments as a far less nefarious practice than you do. I do realize that there’s a pecking order according to which some faculty get better apartment offers than others. I realize that I didn’t get offered units that were as nice those that some others have received. But everyone who comes to NYU — and to other private universities — realizes that negotiating for the best deal you can get is part of the arrangement. Singling out NYU on this score seems disingenuous.
You seem to think I don’t believe in free speech. I actually do. But I also understand that free speech is not an unlimited right. It is constructed within certain social circumstances. The Supreme Court agrees. It’s banal to note that you can’t say whatever you want wherever you want and have that speech be protected. Fire? Crowded theater? So while I do believe that the faculty has the right to voice its dissent, I don’t believe that it necessarily should vote on every issue that confronts the university. Certain matters are the prerogative of the executive function of the institution. That’s true at NYU. That’s true in Washington, DC.
Frankly, what does shock me is the complete lack of civility that has characterized the speech of the loudest critics of Sexton’s administration. They seem to me to be willing to say anything to score points with the media. Miller’s quote is just one example among many.
This is perhaps the most pompous thing I have ever read. First of all, your interest in the university is entirely related to its ranking, as, despite your protestations otherwise, you have essentially no dedication to your students or your teaching. Indeed, I recall when I was a student in a class of yours (while working a full time job) that you responded to approximately 0 of the many emails I sent you and refused to find a time to meet with me for help with my term paper when I couldn’t make your office hours. Thus, I find it rather unsurprising that you don’t think you learn from your NYU-NY students, because even having been a faculty member in residence, you can probably count the conversations you’ve had with your students on one hand. Sexton is about as out-of-touch as you, which is probably why you support his utterly narcissistic plans to turn Manhattan into New York University City and to focus on students across the globe instead of doing something about the student debt in which my colleagues and I are drowning or improving the resources here in New York in a manner that does not involve altering the city’s skyline. So, yes, Professor, I believe the person confused here is you.
To Anon@anon.com: I’m sorry that your experience in my course (and, I take it, at NYU) was unsatisfactory. If I could change that I would. I have, however, kept almost every e-mail I’ve ever received on my NYU account. So if you give me a time frame, I can figure out who you are, and we can have an actual conversation about how to improve life at NYU. The e-mail address you provided, strangely enough, seems not to be working.
PS Ernie and Anon: I’m curious to hear your plans for reducing student debt. Please post them here.
Let’s say we take 2031 off the table; we don’t do it and live with existing facilities. Closing NYU Abu Dhabi and Shanghai won’t help: they cost NYUNY nothing and indeed probably inject funds INTO the system. The salary reductions for administrators for which the NYU chapter of the AAUP calls are merely symbolic. What do you propose to do about the intractable figure of endowment dollars per student: $75,003 — and the real figure is probably much less when the endowment earmarked for the Medical School is taken away. Remember: you can’t spend endowment; you need to live off its investment income. At today’s rates of return, that’s not very much cash available per student. And it’s pretty expensive to run a university. So what are your plans for the university to make up the shortfall if it lowers tuition?
How is this statement (“You’re not allowed to bring a camera out into the streets. The legal code discriminates against Jews and gay people. What is NYU doing in a place like that?”) “evidence of shocking, irresponsible ignorance of the situation in Abu Dhabi.” Because he was wrong about the cameras? I notice how you avoid addressing the issues of gay rights and anti-semitism: I don’t know the facts on the latter, but can you please explain this? http://www.emirates247.com/crime/local/two-men-jailed-for-kissing-in-public-2012-03-28-1.450768
With regard to your basic argument above, it rests entirely on a straw-man logic. To claim that universities should be democratic is not to claim that they should be non-hierarchical. Are NYU professors saying there should be no president of the university? Or no president of the united states?
Your argument is full of this straw-man logic. Here’s another example: “If, however, it weren’t the case that I knew more than my students — both in terms of having actual knowledge and knowing how to get actual knowledge — then I don’t think I should be paid to be a professor.”
Again, what NYU professor is claiming that hierarchy is fundamentally opposed to democracy?
To Anonymous (Part 1):
Yes, he was wrong about the cameras. That’s comparatively trivial. But it’s telling.
I am not expert an on the legal code here. I do know that it embodies some values that are far more conservative than my own. The article that you present, on its own, does not support Miller’s view that “the legal code discriminates against gay people.” The article reports, “The court sentenced them to six months in jail and ordered their deportation after serving their prison terms … the two were charged with committing an indecent act in a public place.” But you’ll remember that one of the more famous recent cases involving foreigners engaging in indecent acts in a public place in the Emirates involved two British tourists on a beach in Dubai — two heterosexual British tourists.
The standards of public decency here ARE different from those in Greenwich Village. But you’ll remember that the kind of acceptance we have there didn’t happen over night. It’s taken years of struggle to overturn anti-sodomy laws in the United States: 214 years, counting back from the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas to the day when the Constitution took effect in 1789. I suspect there’s a lot of homophobia in the Emirates. I know there’s still a lot of homophobia in the United States. Cultural change takes time. And it can’t be forced, and its outcomes can’t necessarily be predicted.
And you know there are illiberal folks in the US who would like the country to adopt more conservative standards of public (and private) decency. Consider this recent declaration from the Family Research Council arguing that the US should make premarital sex illegal: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/frc-no-right-have-sex-outside-marriage-society-should-punish-it
As for anti-Semitism, I haven’t seen a lot of it here and have heard no stories of legal discrimination against Jews. Colleagues filling out labor questionnaires before relocating here were free to write “Jewish” when questioned about religious affiliation. Two of our most senior administrators here are Jewish and that has not prevented them at all from interacting with the leaders of this country. It is true that the UAE does not recognize the state of Israel, but to me that’s different from anti-Semitism. That’s geopolitics. You may disagree.
You may also find this hard to believe, but I am probably more liberal than 90% of Americans. Part of the challenge of being cosmopolitan, though, is learning to deal with the discomfort of interacting with peoples whose values are very different from one’s own. Living in the Emirates is, for someone like me, a daily challenge in that respect. But to refuse the challenge and to avoid difficult but constructive cross-cultural conversations is to abandon the world to the bigots and counter-cosmopolitans.
Every day that I’m here doing my teaching, exposing my students to texts like Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism and helping to build NYU Abu Dhabi is a day well-spent in the service of the promotion of cosmopolitan understanding. We are NOT here to “change” this society. We ARE here to promote greater levels of mutual understanding and respect between our societies. We are here to teach — and to learn.
That’s my answer to Miller’s question “What’s NYU doing in a place like that?”
I’ll address the second part of your comment shortly.
This post is a little dishonest. For the historical record, you joined the NYU faculty under President Jay Oliva at a time when New York City — and NYU — were still mired in economic slumps. Oliva left in 2002 and deserves as much credit as John Sexton for whatever it’s become — as does the general economic upswing of NYC. The difference between the two regimes — and faculty, students, and administrative staff who have seen them both will say this — is that Oliva’s was open while Sexton’s is autocratic and hierarchal.
I dispute the idea that the post is dishonest. What it is, however, is my interpretation of things. I do credit Jay Oliva with getting things started for NYU’s upswing, but I still firmly believe that it is John Sexton who figured out how to make use of the resources that were suddenly becoming available to NYU. As you point out from the chronology, I have seen both “regimes,” and if I were to describe the process by which I was hired — I won’t here, though I’d be happy to describe it to you in private — you would, I think, that NYU frequently gave the impression in 1993 and throughout the 1990s of being amateur hour. I’m sorry if that candor angers any of my present or former colleagues. Many good ideas in the 1990s: very, very poor execution. We were taken advantage of in the 1990s by faculty members who were firmly associated with other schools but drew ridiculous salaries just by lending their names to our operation and showing up periodically. I won’t name names, but you can do the research. On the day that I was hired, C. Duncan Rice, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, asked me if I fully understood what I was getting myself into. I said I did.
So if openness means running the university the way it was run in the 1990s, then I’m not for it. I live in the 21st century; I don’t want to go back to the Wild West. Again, I’m just being candid, and what I’m saying is my interpretation of what I witnessed in Washington Square during that decade.
What a post! The world owes Cyrus R. K. Patell a huge debt for providing his readers such insight into the administrative mind in “Who’s Confused?” Everyone concerned with higher education ought to read it and post it as widely as possible. I have already linked it to my blog here: http://burthurts.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-post-i-cant-wait-to-read-part-2.html And I have reactivated my Facebook account just to post a link to it as well. Patell’sblog post is a great follow up to the confusing NY Times article on NYU at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/nyregion/nyu-gives-lavish-parting-gifts-to-some-star-officials.html
You might think that the role of the university is to produce informed citizens who will participate in our liberal democracy. You might think that faculty, the people who do research and actually teach students the intellectual and technical latest developments in their chosen majors, would be at the center of the university. You might think that the role of university administrators would be to support faculty. Think again! An administrator himself, Associate Dean Cyrus R. K. Patell has certainly disabused us of any such naïve notions in his column. Patell is not at all confusing. Faculty, he says, are not citizens in a university. Why? Because the university is not a democracy. But not to worry! For democracy isn’t a good thing either, according to Patell. Why can’t Obama just dictate? Forget about that circuit court decision ruling that Obamas recess appointments were unconstitutional. Forget about the Republicans in the 111th and 112th U.S Congress being the most obstructionist in the history of the United States. No, “debate” in Congress is just a waste of time. Too bad we aren’t living in Abu dabi, I guess. Well, at least we can take solace in the fact that the university is an authoritarian, top down structure. And academic freedom? How dumb to think faculty should have it! Cyrus Patell knows it so stupid that it isn’t even worth mentioning. Why would any administrator write such a candid and revealing a blog post like Patell’s? Apparently, he just can’t stop himself. Citing with great approval a passage written by Stanley Fish, reveals with almost blinding clarity the absolute contempt in which university administrators hold faculty. Here it is:
At the end of my tenure as dean, I spoke to some administrators who had been on the job for a short enough time to be able to still remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they did now. One said that she had come to realize how narcissistic academics are: an academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and self-regarding eye. As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead; as an administrator, you’re trying “to make things happen for other people”; you’re “not advancing your own profile but advancing the institution, and you’re more service oriented.”
Ah, yes, the days when I was just another narcissistic faculty member, the days before I could “make things happen for other people.” The “other people” who administrators obviously do not include faculty. No, “advancing the institution,” means working to help administrators leave NYU with huge retirement packages, packages so huge that the NY Times ran a story about it. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/nyregion/nyu-gives-lavish-parting-gifts-to-some-star-officials.html The NY Times interview Patell spends his blog attacking . You might very well think that Patell is a time-server, a lackey, a sycophant, a failed academic who didn’t publish enough to be promoted to full professor, a courtier who, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, makes love to his employment. You might very well think that. Patell should be congratulated for showing us the contempt in which self-servicing university administrators so richly deserve to be held.
By the way, my grandfather went to Harvard, like Patell. I scanned and posted the letter admitting him and his twin brother the then Dean of Harvard, no doubt “revered,” wrote to my great-grandmother. Also, regarding the Puritans Patell mentions: My mother is a direct descendant of Governor Winslow.
You sir are drinking the the kool aid. 2031 isn’t about classroom space or faculty housing. NYU owns buildings that are currently empty and unused. NYU owns housing that currently is empty and unused. If classroom space and/ or housing is needed they can simply use what they’ve already got rather than under taking this financially risky endeavor of 20 years of construction at a wopping price tag of $6 billion dollars. The faculty and neighbors of NYU are sick of Sexton’s blatant disegard for the history and much treasured green spaces in the Village.
As for the Miller’s comment about NYU Abu Dhabi? I say hear, hear!!! Kudos to you and to the academics who aren’t in it to simply line their pockets with student debt in countries that have suspect track records dealing with human rights.