Breaking the silence (and, possibly, becoming ever less anonymous) to note that our university president has just been named commissioner of the state board of higher ed.
Very mixed feelings about this. I had only the vaguest notion of what college presidents actually did when I was first hired at Misnomer U.; they were just there, people who spoke briefly at public functions and made innocuous jokes. And then, in my first two years here, I discovered what it was like to work at a school with a spectacularly bad president. The good ones, I think, do so much work that is invisible. You notice it when it isn't there, or when it's done badly.
We had an interim president after that, who did a great deal to pour oil on troubled waters. And then Dr. B. came to us, and he was a bridge over troubled water. I remember that I was skeptical when he first came, since he was a higher ed board insider and we'd had a vexed relationship with them in the past. I should not have been.
It is not an easy job, I'm thinking. You have to be a salesman for your university, and you have to schmooze with people; but you have to have wisdom and intellect and strength of character in ways that don't typically go with the personality types that can do salesmanship and schmoozing. (It is possible that I am a prejudiced introvert.) At any rate, it was our good luck to land a president who united all of those qualities, and who was a wonky, data-driven political scientist to boot.
Good luck in your new position, Dr. B. The state higher ed board's gain is our loss.
Very mixed feelings about this. I had only the vaguest notion of what college presidents actually did when I was first hired at Misnomer U.; they were just there, people who spoke briefly at public functions and made innocuous jokes. And then, in my first two years here, I discovered what it was like to work at a school with a spectacularly bad president. The good ones, I think, do so much work that is invisible. You notice it when it isn't there, or when it's done badly.
We had an interim president after that, who did a great deal to pour oil on troubled waters. And then Dr. B. came to us, and he was a bridge over troubled water. I remember that I was skeptical when he first came, since he was a higher ed board insider and we'd had a vexed relationship with them in the past. I should not have been.
It is not an easy job, I'm thinking. You have to be a salesman for your university, and you have to schmooze with people; but you have to have wisdom and intellect and strength of character in ways that don't typically go with the personality types that can do salesmanship and schmoozing. (It is possible that I am a prejudiced introvert.) At any rate, it was our good luck to land a president who united all of those qualities, and who was a wonky, data-driven political scientist to boot.
Good luck in your new position, Dr. B. The state higher ed board's gain is our loss.
