Campus politics
Joe Malchow draws our attention to the important lecture on university governance by Second Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes. (Judge Cabranes is married to my Dartmouth classmate, former Dartmouth trustee and Yale Law School Professor Kate Stith-Cabranes, whose comments we have previously noted here in connection with Dartmouth and other matters.)
The New York Sun provides an editorial salute to Judge Cabranes's lecture. As Joe notes, Judge Cabranes's "point that trustees need to become more activist supervisors is unmistakably relevant at Dartmouth." Joe quotes this passage from the Sun editorial:
If trustees “ever actually turned down a candidate for an academic appointment (say, on the basis of articulable institutional concerns), the university likely would be thrown into turmoil,” the judge writes. He pointedly mentions a former provost of Columbia, Jonathan Cole, who is “apparently under the impression that harsh criticism of outspoken faculty members by outsiders constitutes a threat to academic freedom, even when there is no possible effect within the university.”We have closely followed questions of college governance as they have emerged at Dartmouth over the past three years, starting with my Standard column "Bucking the deans at Dartmouth."Judge Cabranes also offers a view into how universities deal with the Reserve Officers Training Corps. “The usual playbook is this: Trustees are informed by presidents that, for a variety of political or academic reasons, the faculty would find the return of ROTC intolerable and that any action to the contrary by trustees would make the president’s own position within the university untenable.”
Governing boards of universities, the judge writes, do not really govern. They “exercise very little authority other than their power to hire and fire presidents and their power to raise money and prudently manage the university’s endowment — in support of activities over which they have little or no influence.”
