"The Decider" my new school president

[Dragonbreathp9d]

My favorite professor and hands down the smartest person I have ever met has sent this out to a few of my fellow students about some changes at the College of Santa Fe. I'm fuckin pissed.


(originally sent by Spencer Neale)
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10:09pm Today
Hey what's up everybody. As you may or may not know, Stuart C. Kirk has been appointed from interim to now official president without any sort of approval by faculty or students. Please read this following document by professor Richard Bank about the appointment and how they FIRED JANICE ZOLLER to save money and gave her 1 DAY TO CLEAN OUT HER OFFICE.

I don't think this guy is good for CSF at all. Please read this and respond if you have any ideas about what we can do about this:

STEALTH PRESIDENT

George W. Bush was an oil executive. Dick Cheney was an oil executive. Stuart Kirk, CSF’s new president, was an oil executive. An unfair comparison? Probably. But I do believe that success in the oil industry--arguably the most exploitive industry the world has ever seen--requires a certain cast of mind, a certain set of principles (some would say no principles), that permits one to overlook or devalue profound human and ecological costs in the ruthless pursuit of the bottom line.

While we have nothing at CSF to compare to an illegal and immoral war, we have witnessed an absolute disregard in word and deed of at least one fundamental tenet of academic life: shared governance. When asked in May to describe the differences between academic and corporate management, President Kirk could not think of any. When asked directly to articulate his understanding of shared governance, his reply went something like this: “I listen to everyone involved, and then decide.” He is, in someone’s vaguely familiar words, “the Decider.” Does this mean that President Kirk believes he has the authority, for example, to eliminate those frivolous critical studies courses in Moving Image Arts, or to change a student’s grade to placate a potential donor, or to fire a pesky professor or two? We have a clue, I think, in his decision to fire Janice Zoller--technically, to eliminate the Service Learning Coordinator position which Janice has held for many years.

Janice is a graduate of the College, a prominent member of the local Alumni Association, the first ever woman to win the Brother Benildus award (the College’s highest academic honor), an adjunct professor in Psychology (who co-taught Feminist Theory with me one semester), a member of the work crew that remodeled L’Heureux Hall, home to the Social Science Department. But most of all, she is the architect and advocate of the Service Learning program at CSF, and the face of the College among the non-profit service community in Santa Fe. Her firing will no doubt diminish that community’s perception of the College’s commitment to public service. Her departure will also have adverse effects on academic programs throughout the College, as she has found and facilitated many a student placement for practicum and internship credit. She was to have coordinated the required service component built into the redesigned Humanities major--approved by the Curriculum Committee on the assumption that CSF had a service learning program. Janice was once described to me by our last President as one of the few people at CSF who could not be replaced. He used the metaphor of “connective tissue” as a way of describing the manner in which Janice created cooperation among multiple constituencies, both on and off campus.

Given all this, and believe me I have only scratched the surface, why was Janice given just one day to clean out her desk? Despite profuse promises of transparency at the hastily organized pre-coronation meetings in June, no one I have talked to, including Janice, seems to know. Perhaps President Kirk is sending a message: if Janice can be fired, nobody is safe. Or maybe he listened to the advice of someone pursuing their own, private agenda. (I cannot believe anyone who cares deeply for the College would make such a recommendation.) Of course, such a scenario would not speak well to President Kirk’s judgment of character. My own view is that the new President saw “Janice” and “Service Learning” as nothing more than $50k on a sheet of paper that needed to be sacrificed to serve the bottom line, with not a thought given to the devastating personal impact on one of the College's most faithful.

But the real assault on shared governance is evidenced simply by the appointment of President Kirk. When Mark Lombardi resigned in early Spring, the Board of Trustees announced to us, and presumably to the world of bankers and donors, that the plan was to appoint an interim president and conduct a national search for a permanent replacement. No one should have been surprised by that announcement: this is the right and proper way for a college to proceed when a sitting president resigns, as no doubt the bankers and donors who deal with colleges are well aware. After all, the average tenure of a college president is something like five years. By the middle of May the first part of this plan had been realized, but a month later we were told that Interim President Kirk, who had solemnly pledged to the College community in May that he was not interested in a permanent appointment, was now not only interested, but was to be appointed as President. Stuart Kirk was to become CSF’s first Stealth President, flying in under the radar, as almost all the College’s faculty and students were gone for the Summer.

One apparent reason for this sudden change of course was the unexpected resignation of Jerry Brisson, Vice President for Finance and Administration. But we must be careful here not to confuse cause with effect. While I have not had an opportunity to talk with Jerry directly, I suspect something like this: Jerry got wind of the Board’s plan to make Kirk’s appointment permanent, and because he did not sign up to work in corporate America, he took off early for retirement in the Panamanian hills.

In an email to the campus community, Kathleen Chase, Chair of the Board, said in part the following: “Please know that our intent throughout this transition was to conduct a national search and take time to appoint the next president with full participation of the campus community. That said, however, the dynamic and landscape at CSF is changing daily and the Board feels now more than ever we must fortify the institution with a permanent president.”

Consider the following: John says to Sarah, “Please know that my intent throughout was to marry you, as I had promised last month and we had planned. That said, the dynamic and landscape of my world is changing daily--her name is Jill--and I feel now more than ever that I must call off the wedding.” Are we then to imagine that John is a fine upstanding man worthy of our trust? Or are we more likely to regard him as fickle at best or, in the alternative, a lying, cheating scoundrel? Would you lend or give money to this man?

We were told in June, a few days before the official word of President Kirk’s appointment, in vague and general terms--worthy of the transparency of which we were also assured-- that bankers and donors were hesitant to provide funds to CSF in the absence of stable leadership. But if I were a banker or a donor, I would be deeply suspicious of such a precipitous change in direction, especially one that flies in the face of the well-known and sacred principle of shared governance. I would wonder, as one faculty member did at the June forum, whether the College was in serious financial trouble that the Board feared might come to light in a national search process, and that could only be covered up by appointing a former member of the Board as President. I would wonder about the academic and institutional integrity of a school hiring a Stealth President, and about the possible adverse reaction of returning faculty and students in the Fall. And I would wonder about the accreditation team’s assessment of a “Decider” as President.

So what is really going on here? I think we have a Board that just does not have the energy or the commitment to go through another presidential search--after all, the last one was tumultuous and divisive, and only two short years ago. But that requires a Board, and a President, for whom the selection process is a mere formality, and who therefore fundamentally misunderstand the principle of shared governance. The bottom line is that CSF needs a president. We got a guy who can do it, who is willing to do it (after some arm twisting, I suspect), so why not? But as John Dewey, the great American philosopher of democracy and education, and especially of the intimate connection between the two, reminds us: process is often everything. If we were to follow the Board’s lead on the academic side, we could just charge students four years of tuition and fees and hand them a diploma. The process (as the Board and our new President are telling us) is a mere formality. Forget about reading books, writing papers, going to class. Money = Diploma: that’s the bottom line. Shared governance at the most basic level is about protecting against this sort of reductionist, bottom line thinking. The metaphorical trains may run on time at CSF for awhile, but only at the cost of democracy and genuine education. And, I fear, a train wreck is inevitable.