LET THE RECKONING CONTINUE.

At the time Claudine Gay ascended to the presidency at Harvard, I documented the doubts people who pay closer attention to such things than I have raised.  That post concluded,

Political reliability matters more than those tiresome academic credentials. Mr Randall concludes, "Claudine Gay exemplifies the unquestioned and unquestionable double standards and mediocrity that affirmative action inflicts on American higher education—and, indeed, on the republic as a whole." At the moment, the higher education establishment is likely hailing the newest Defender of the Faith, but the irascible contrarians are noticing.

The irascible contrarians took the poseur down.  Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner draws a sobering lesson.

Gay’s ouster will not turn the tide on the illiberal rot that permeates our universities. Gay is a symptom, not the disease. The Gay affair was significant, however, because it brought a deeper problem into stark relief. Faculty—who are supposedly the academy’s raison d’etre—have become utterly irrelevant. Even worse, there is no credible way that faculty can pull the academy out of its malaise.

Oh, there is, but the faculty have to reclaim their relevance by reclaiming their proper role as stewards of the curriculum.

In three paragraphs Mr Turner summarizes probably a thousand Cold Spring Shops posts on what went wrong.

The irrelevancy of faculty is not limited to Harvard, nor is it a recent phenomenon—it has been growing for many years. The Gay debacle merely highlighted it. In 2011, for example, Benjamin Ginsberg ascribed faculty irrelevancy to the rise of the “administrative university.” [1] That project has continued without interruption, to the point where administrators now outnumber students at some campuses. The rise of the administrative university is a pricey endeavor, sucking up slightly more than $700 billion annually. Roughly half of that bill is covered by federal, state, and local governments.

The enormous revenue streams and the power they represent have dramatically changed the landscape of incentives and disincentives throughout the academic landscape. In the sciences, for example, incentives no longer reward discovery.[2] Rather, rewards flow to “scientific productivity,” assessed by metrics such as numbers of publications, grant dollars, and so forth, all of dubious relevance to scientific discovery. [3]

The incentives for college administrations and their governing boards have likewise changed but for different reasons—they have abandoned an important component of their fiduciary duty. In so doing, colleges are reverting to an older and deleterious conception of trustees’ fiduciary duty. Through the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, college boards and administrations regarded their duty to be solely to the institutions they governed. Faculty irrelevancy was part of this—faculty were regarded primarily as employees of the institution, which meant they could be fired at will. The contemporary term for this was the “hired man” concept of the faculty.

I repeat:  I don't care who gets the credit, as long as it gets done.  There are two sources of the current problem, first, the replacement of much of the tenured faculty with contingent lecturers and instructors, second, the faculty shares the sensibilities of the student affairs types, and went along with the early administrative usurpations accordingly.  Thus we find ourselves at the pass where Claudine Gay is no Drew Faust who is no Henry Rosovsky.

This changed in the early 20^th century when an influential group of prominent professors argued that college trustees and administrations had not only an institutional fiduciary duty but also a unique duty to the public. Colleges were not like any other institution, like a corporation, primarily because colleges conferred public benefits that derived from their faculties’ intellectual and administrative autonomy. Out of this emerged the regime of faculty autonomy, academic self-government, and tenure protection that prevailed through much of the 20^th century. Faculty autonomy was not simply a perquisite for a privileged class of scholars. It was a public good, and failure by trustees to take that public good into account constituted a violation of a public trust.

In recent years, this public fiduciary duty has eroded, so boards are reverting to their traditional focus on institutions rather than the public. Along with this has been a reversion to the “hired man” concept of the faculty, although perhaps it should now be called the “hired diverse and inclusive persons” concept. The result is a university where faculty are essentially compliant tools implementing the political agendas of their administrations and trustees—those “700” signatories being a case in point.

Mr Turner suggests that academicians who honor the previous understanding of the scholarly calling might do better by opting out.

It's possible, though, as another Minding the Campus contributor, Peter Wood (my favorite academic administrator), notes, the one thing Harvard (or almost any other, see, e.g. Bach, P.D.Q., nest of Excessively Earnest People) can't stand is mockery.

By Christmas, more than fifty instances of Gay’s plagiarism had been documented, and the triviality of her scholarly record was manifest. She had been appointed to the presidency of Harvard with the equivalent of a backstage pass. The usual standards were waived.

It was not hard to guess why. Gay was the embodiment of academic wokery. Her career had consisted of nothing but championing the diversity-equity-inclusion movement, and her announced program as president of Harvard was to destroy “white supremacy”—the “second pandemic” as she called it—and to replace this phantom with the reality of hard-core race preferences in every classroom, every committee, every corner of the bureaucracy. As part of this she called for the renaming of buildings and the replacement of art works, if they failed to meet the new DEI ideals.

The Harvard Corporation knew who they were getting when they hired Gay and were loath to turn away from the splendid bonfire of Harvard’s standards and traditions that Gay was building. But as the members of the board jetted off for Christmas to destinations around the world, they discovered that the institution for which they had such burning love was becoming an international joke. A Harvard that turned a blind eye to Hamasian fanaticism and atrocity, that indulged anti-Semitism, and that cosseted a pseudo-scholar and plagiarist to keep the game going was a university auditioning for Olympic-level volcano diving.

Harvard can brush aside many forms of criticism, but it cannot bear to burn up its prestige.

The faculty will have a lot to contribute, or not, to restoring that cultural and social capital. That is, if they want to.