About a month ago, I posted this on Bluesky:
As of today, despite a faculty vote of no confidence, [gift link] the President of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, is still in office, showing that it’s a much safer bet to call the cops on students protesting than it is to stand up to Elise Stefanik in a congressional hearing.
The title of this post is from a fight between Jeff and Beau Bridges’ characters in the Fabulous Baker Boys, and man it took me a long time to remember it. (I thought it was from a fight between Peter Krause and Michael C. Hall’s characters in Six Feet Under, which would make sense because the dynamic was similar.) In the Fabulous Baker Boys, Jeff’s character is the talented one in a family piano duo, while Beau is the family man who keeps the wheels on the act but, in his brother’s telling, he’d need sheet music for chopsticks. Anyway, the Baker Boys are a long way from the President of Columbia, but the dynamic remains: the people who become presidents of any university, not to mention an Ivy, are going to be people who have been kissing ass so long that they’ve started to like it. And, the asses that they kiss are donors and trustees, not students and faculty.
People were pissed, and rightly so, when Pudding Boots Heel Lifts put Ben Sasse in charge of the University of Florida so he could ruin the joint, but in my view the average college president is someone who has just learned to give enough lip service to placate the faculty as they gut the liberal arts and do the bidding of big donors. In other words, they’re like Ben Sasse in that they are gross opportunists and mainly politicians, but their mask fits better.
It’s a bit ironic that a lot of the asses presidents have to kiss might have been students in the 60’s and engaged in protests. But there’s almost no patience with college protests today. I’m amazed at how little it takes to call in the cops to bang heads. I’m sure there were idiotic things said and stupid things done during the Columbia protests, and I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with a lot of the rhetoric. But it sure seems that a lot of campuses were able to get through the protests without having cops haul off the protesters and then tell stupid cop lies painting a bog-standard Kryptonite bicycle lock as a tool of professional agitators.
Like Linda Katehi, the UC Davis Chancellor who had students pepper sprayed, Columbia President Shafik realized that her best move to preserve the endowment was to do what the right wingers wanted, and so she did it. (Note that Katehi wasn’t brought down because of the pepper spray incident — she apparently liked to tell fibs and also tried to hide that she paid UC money to have contractors remove negative comments about her on websites.)
One more Fabulous Baker Boys parallel: not only do most faculty view the president in the same way that Jeff Bridges’ character viewed Beau’s (as a hack), it’s also true that the perspective of Beau’s character applies to faculty. From the point of view of administrators, faculty, for the most part, are completely ignorant of how the university should run, and most of them have none of the practical skills required by good administrators.
