In a Times Op-Ed, Stanley Fish argues that Bruce Benson’s appointment as President of the University of Colorado is, well, stupid.  Benson has an impressive personal resume, “oilman, Republican activist, failed candidate for governor, co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s (now ended) campaign, successful fund raiser, donor to the university, former chairman of the Metropolitan State College Denver Board and chair of a blue-ribbon panel on higher education.”  But nowhere in that resume is there anything suggesting a background to prepare him to be a University President.

Obviously he has a strong interest in education, but his highest degree is a B.A., and he has never been a member of a faculty or engaged in research or published papers in a learned journal. In short, he is in no way an academic, and yet he is about to become the president of an academic institution, and not any old institution, but a state university ranked 11th among public universities and 34th among universities overall.

Yet Benson was the only candidate to emerge from the search.  Despite a 40-4 vote against him by the faculty, he got the job.

The argument in Benson’s favor is that the skills he brings to the job from his prior experience will serve him well in this position; “academic credentials are not that necessary because management skills, like those Benson is presumed to have, are transferable from activity to activity. Someone who can manage an oil company will be able to manage the enterprise of a university.”

My first question is what is the job of a University President.  If it’s fundraising, promoting and elevating the image of the school and herding cats, then there doesn’t seem to be any need for an academic background to perform the job well.  Indeed, one may well question whether a President too involved or sensitive to academic concerns might divide his loyalty between the hard reality of management and the soft and fuzzy concerns of scholarship.

But my experience with successful managers is that they, and their supporters, often overstate the applicability of their management skills under a flawed assumption.  If Joe is a successful manager at X, he must therefore be competent at managing Y, with Y being an entirely different industry.  It may be that Joe is a brilliant manager, and that his competencies do extent to Y.  But it may also be that Joe was lucky at successfully managing X, and that he lacks the assumptive managerial competencies.

This would suggest that it’s a very individual decision, when considering whether a person without academic background has the skills to be a University President.  Of course, we don’t really like individualized decisions, and much prefer broad generic rules that we can apply across the board.

What makes this issue interesting is that the faculty, scholars all (just ask them), beloved of empirical studies and defiant in their academic independence, fall back to intuitive arguments (just like the rest of us poor schnooks) when it comes to their own problems.  In dismissing the rationale for hiring Benson, Fish responds:

The reasoning, however, is specious. It is no doubt true that an experienced executive will quickly learn the ropes of an industry new to him. The product may be different, but the tasks will be basically the same: assess market share, learn the routes of distribution, fine-tune the relationship between inventory and demand, increase efficiency perhaps by downsizing the workforce.

But in the academy there is no product except knowledge, and that may take decades to develop, if it develops at all. The concept of market share is inapposite; efficiency is not a goal; and there is no inventory to put on the shelves. Instead the norms are endless deliberations, explorations that may go nowhere, problems that only five people in the world even understand, lifetime employment that is not taken away even when nothing is achieved, expensively labor-intensive practices and no bottom line. What is an outsider to make of that?

Maybe an outsider will be capable of understanding the investment in knowledge, or the product of education.  But to call the reasoning “specious” jumps the gun.  It just isn’t all the hard to comprehend the internal self-image of academia, where decades of deep thought will ultimately produce brilliance, or maybe not.  But University is where the opportunity for such thought must happen, or it will happen nowhere.

On the other hand, maybe the Academy has other purposes to serve as well, and the elevation of scholarship to the exclusion of education presents an issue that the faculty can’t see.  We all have a tendency to be blind to things we would rather not see.

Whether Bruce Benson is the right guy for the job is an individual question.  I haven’t a clue.  But the notion of bringing in a President who might challenge the faculty to do their job better, more effectively and even recognize that it’s not all about them, might create a healthier tension in academia.  Vigorous discussion, and even dispute (something that doesn’t happen often in the collegial halls of the University) almost invariably result in better decisions than consensus for its own sake.  Why not try it?

On the other hand, if the faculty believes that bringing in a fellow who can’t spell University to run one will mean the death of scholarship, then where’s the proof?  The same “common sense” answers that scholars rightly ridicule don’t become stronger when they come out of their mouths.

The trend in academia toward insular scholarship, and away from education, is a problem.  The cost of an education is too high for many consumers, and parents and students suffer to achieve a degree.  At the same time, they are treated as the flotsam of the academic process, a necessary evil to finance more important work.  Scholars feel dirty wasting their time teaching, when they could be thinking and writing, proving their worth in the greater academic community.  Their disconnect of scholarship and education is a product of their self-indulgence, supported by their “management” that understands and agrees that teaching is the “toilet cleaning” of higher ed.  Something that has to be done, but nobody wants to do it.

Maybe a Bruce Benson can remind the scholars that the University doesn’t exist solely for their pleasure.  Maybe a Bruce Benson can be an advocate for the forgotten and neglected students.  Maybe an outsider will see that the mission has gone off course, and return it to a path that serves all the interested parties in the University.  That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, even though the faculty will hate it.