At a few schools, it is certainly possible. Hillsdale and Liberty. Also at some lesser-known colleges, no doubt. (No slight intended, it is probably a badge of honor these days.) And presumably at a smattering of Southern colleges and universities.
But, can a Republican be a president of a major university or university system outside the South? Mark Kennedy’s experience at the University of Colorado suggests that it may not be in the cards. Kennedy served several terms as a Congressman from Minnesota before teaching at George Washington U. and then becoming President of the University of North Dakota. From there, he became President of the University of Colorado in 2019. His hiring was greeted with howls of execration from student leftists who subjected him to a bizarre on-stage inquisition at the beginning of his tenure. That tenure has now come to an end.
I should add that Mark is a friend of mine. He is a moderate Republican, politically, and a moderate person in every respect. But insufficient wokeness is a firing offense in today’s academia. The Federalist reports:
University of Colorado President Mark Kennedy announced earlier this month he would step down after a brief two years on the job culminating in turbulence from student and faculty protest of a president insufficiently leftist for their tastes.
“The Board of Regents and I have entered into discussions about an orderly transition of the presidency and the university in the near future,” Kennedy said in a May 10 statement. “The board has a new makeup this year, which has led to changes in its focus and philosophy.”
That is a polite way of saying that Democrats have now taken over the Board of Regents. They can’t abide a Republican university president.
Last fall, Democrats flipped the nine-member board of regents governing the Colorado university system, putting it in their control for the first time in 41 years. That put Kennedy, a Republican whose resume included three terms representing Minnesota in the House of Representatives before three years as president of the University of North Dakota prior to his tenure in Colorado, on the chopping block under the new board.
I don’t suppose Democrats really need an excuse to get rid of a Republican university president, but for what it is worth, the excuses here were feeble:
This spring, leftist students and faculty looking for an opportunity to attach the racist label on their conservative college president found their remark to propel the expulsion. Never mind that Kennedy, according to the school’s Vice President of Communications Ken McConnellogue, hired the university system’s first chief diversity officer and established a $5 million fund for race-conscious initiatives. Among the initiatives were a program to offer in-state tuition for members of indigenous tribes home in Colorado.
Kennedy also “contributed $1 million in his own funds for a school of medicine scholarship for students in underrepresented communities,” McConnellogue told The Federalist.
He contributed his own money? That was probably just another offense to the liberals, who consider it a virtue to steal your money rather than donating their own.
In March, university faculty voted to censure Kennedy for “his failure of leadership with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
In other words, leftists suspected that Mark wasn’t entirely with their program. As, being sane, I am sure he wasn’t. But still: didn’t he have to do something to justify being fired? This is the best the Democrats could come up with:
“On-campus is declining and online is growing,” Kennedy said in August. “If we don’t get online right…we have a trail of tears in front of us.”
A trail of tears? OMG! How dare President Kennedy demean the experience of the Cherokees, 200 years ago? Mark apologized, but the damage was done.
A minor lesson of this story is the reminder that apologizing never helps. But more fundamentally, it raises the question whether in most states, Republicans are banned, as a practical matter, from running public universities. And the private colleges and universities are even worse. I don’t know how to respond except by cutting funding for public universities, which several states are now attempting, and ceasing all alumni donations to private schools that enforce a left-wing orthodoxy–i.e., the vast majority.
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