Who's the boss?

A university president clashes with an entrenched, frustrated faculty. The faculty scream for his head. The president decides to step down after five years. Quick, which college am I talking about? IU or Harvard?\nAfter Harvard President Larry Summers' resignation, the role of the embattled university president took another fateful step, and his fall seemed to mirror the fall of IU's own Adam Herbert. To be fair, differences abound between the two examples. Harvard is an inordinately well-endowed private university that many consider the flagship of American universities, while IU is a huge state school that rarely gets national limelight and that has various budget problems Harvard has rarely faced. \nYet, the fight among ideologies, between a university helmed by the faculty and a university helmed by an iconoclastic president, represents a fundamental crisis in the life of American universities. At Harvard, some say that Summers was the wrong man for the job, unable to manage the faculty. But this criticism forces the question, "Who is the right man for the job?" \nShould the president defer to the faculty at all times? How much "respect" does the president deserve? Conversely, how much does the \nfaculty deserve? How does policy divide among the trustees, the president and the faculty? To claim simply that backward, reactionary professors forced Summers out at Harvard or that Summers was incompetent and deserved his fate ignores the complexities of these questions. \nFor years, professors have felt the squeeze, with the freewheeling intellectual heyday long past and university boards demanding control of their research and curriculum. Herbert and Summers both found themselves called in to universities in transition and became agents of change, as well as lightning rods for criticism. Rarely are professors ever called "conservative," but here, they wanted to resist the changes that years of inexorable evolution have wrought. \nIt stands to reason that professors should have control over the fate of the university. After all, when you look at attending a university, Ivy League or Big Ten, you care more about having great faculty than having a great president. Yet, the organizations that choose the presidents, that decide the direction of the university, like the Harvard Corporation or the IU board of trustees, have largely marginalized the faculty input.\nIt's important not to view these two conflicts as simply coincidental, arguments about a chancellor job search and sexism. Such clashes between faculty and presidents are manifestations of a larger problem, an uncertainty with the direction of higher education. The club atmosphere that once flourished in universities has given way to the university as efficient corporation, and the professor has become just another employee. \nI don't mean to be an apologist for the rash, irresponsible behavior of faculty here, but the erasure of faculty from decision-making is dangerous. If the entire goal of a university is the pursuit of knowledge, how can we succeed when the pursuers are pissed off? The faculties at IU and Harvard chose the wrong target in their presidents, but their concerns are real. Herbert and Summers are not the first casualties of the brewing conflict, and odds are, they probably won't be the last.