03-24-2023, 05:07 AM
The monster is money. You may think a college is about teaching, service and research. It is, but the bread-and-butter stuff is courting donors, finagling money to pay for amenities in hopes they will attract paying customers (i. e. students), leveraging partnerships with other schools to reduce costs, shaping curricula to serve industry and hopefully get money from them to do so, etc.
These are jobs that don’t belong to faculty, but are, rightly or wrongly, viewed as essential.
I guarantee you that MTL thinks he has done real good because he was in charge when Stanford got the $1.1 billion Doerr gift, when it is obvious to all that what it mainly does is help profs in the fields of sustainability at other institutions get some leverage when it comes to negotiating their pay.
Fundamentally, colleges would need to ditch a romantic view of themselves as dynamic enterprises capable of being big players in societal change, at least on the level of their city/state. Adopt more of a middle school mentality—here to serve an important group and prepare them for their next stage in life—and the need for administrators drops down quite a bit. But very few dare to think small.
These are jobs that don’t belong to faculty, but are, rightly or wrongly, viewed as essential.
I guarantee you that MTL thinks he has done real good because he was in charge when Stanford got the $1.1 billion Doerr gift, when it is obvious to all that what it mainly does is help profs in the fields of sustainability at other institutions get some leverage when it comes to negotiating their pay.
Fundamentally, colleges would need to ditch a romantic view of themselves as dynamic enterprises capable of being big players in societal change, at least on the level of their city/state. Adopt more of a middle school mentality—here to serve an important group and prepare them for their next stage in life—and the need for administrators drops down quite a bit. But very few dare to think small.