Gordon Gee is like one of those guys in an action movie who is in the line-up of expensive, dangerous assassins that the head bad guy calls to rid him of a problem.
The most interesting thing here is that queasy clash between the way Gee and the little cloud of administrative courtiers and compliant trustees he puffs around him wherever he's presently doing his thing will talk the language of "putting X university and its surrounding community on the map", of making a "world-class university"--the conventional language of progress and meritocratic excellence and in some sense wealth; and then at the same time the language of neoliberal scarcity, that we must learn to do as much as we can with much less, which as you say is always completely impersonal, as if this is just the stage of history we are in, that we're a bunch of old people with Baumol's cost disease crippling our gouty civilizational feet and this just the way it is until some creative destroyer comes along and shoots us so that some nimble Zoom University can achieve its efficiency.
Gee gets to be destroyer and preserver at once, and nobody ever calls him on it in a way he has to answer to. He never has to say to Morgantown and West Virginia, "I'm going to impoverish your university because you're an impoverished state; you're not on the map now and you never will be again, so let me just erase the map and then redraw it so it accurately shows your small, diminishing, impoverished reality."
It's that nobody ever calls him on it which is infuriating. And it's also pretty clear (to me at least) that WVU was fleeced -- that Gee's second presidency was riskless for him in a way that should have set off red flags. And I know that crisis PR means absolutely never saying you're sorry but there's a falsity and dishonesty to how the institution is addressing this that is a compromise of what a university is in a way that contributes to the demeaning of all of us.
Freudian slip based on your own area of expertise? Surely the big deal is the elimination of foreign languages, not foreign policy.
fixed, thanks!
Gordon Gee is like one of those guys in an action movie who is in the line-up of expensive, dangerous assassins that the head bad guy calls to rid him of a problem.
The most interesting thing here is that queasy clash between the way Gee and the little cloud of administrative courtiers and compliant trustees he puffs around him wherever he's presently doing his thing will talk the language of "putting X university and its surrounding community on the map", of making a "world-class university"--the conventional language of progress and meritocratic excellence and in some sense wealth; and then at the same time the language of neoliberal scarcity, that we must learn to do as much as we can with much less, which as you say is always completely impersonal, as if this is just the stage of history we are in, that we're a bunch of old people with Baumol's cost disease crippling our gouty civilizational feet and this just the way it is until some creative destroyer comes along and shoots us so that some nimble Zoom University can achieve its efficiency.
Gee gets to be destroyer and preserver at once, and nobody ever calls him on it in a way he has to answer to. He never has to say to Morgantown and West Virginia, "I'm going to impoverish your university because you're an impoverished state; you're not on the map now and you never will be again, so let me just erase the map and then redraw it so it accurately shows your small, diminishing, impoverished reality."
It's that nobody ever calls him on it which is infuriating. And it's also pretty clear (to me at least) that WVU was fleeced -- that Gee's second presidency was riskless for him in a way that should have set off red flags. And I know that crisis PR means absolutely never saying you're sorry but there's a falsity and dishonesty to how the institution is addressing this that is a compromise of what a university is in a way that contributes to the demeaning of all of us.