Daily Archives: 20 August 2024

Cautious, or…?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Saturday article headlined Harris Was Hamstrung by Caution. Now She’s the Democrats’ Driving Force[] had a couple of examples that don’t bode well for our nation under a Kamala Harris administration.

In her first months as vice president, Kamala Harris’s staff faced a dilemma: when a military officer saluted her as she boarded Air Force Two, should she salute back?

Her Vice President predecessors had routinely returned the salutes. Harris, though, listened to her “national security advisor” Nancy McEldowney, who told her she’d be overstepping her bounds if she returned the salute, so at the first encounter, she did not. And caught flack for the implied disrespect. Rationalizing that, and trying to justify her own poor advice, McEldowney said,

She really wanted to do the right thing and did not want to be out of step either with military protocol or with perceptions of her role as vice president.

If Harris truly had been interested in “doing the right thing,” she could have asked an actual military man, someone like, say, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or even the man in charge of the Presidential—or Vice Presidential—detail that provides personal security and crews for the President’s and Vice President’s transportation. In any event, it’s not that she wasn’t capable of asking actual experts; she just didn’t want to risk rocking the boat from her Number Two position.

Then there’s this.

She also was wary of offering her own policy views and in building out her political infrastructure. Much of her behavior has been driven by a desire not to overshadow President Biden and to demonstrate loyalty to a man she vigorously attacked during the 2020 Democratic primary.

Never mind that a Vice President’s role is to offer his/her own policy views, even to play devil’s advocate, in order to ensure the President is getting a variety of perspectives. See, for instance, then-Vice President Joe Biden’s advice to then-President Barack Obama to not pull the trigger on the operation that got Osama bin Ladin. Biden was the only one in the room offering that advice. Or that a Vice President needs his/her own political infrastructure in order to offer competent and informed advice. Further, a Vice President demonstrates loyalty—to the extent personal loyalty ever is appropriate—by doing his/her best to carry out the President’s decisions once those decisions have been made.

Now that she’s at the top of the Progressive-Democratic Party and unchallenged in any serious way, she’s becoming more aggressive—becoming Party’s driving force.

That she didn’t want to expose herself to differences or differing opinions, keeping her head down even when that was counterproductive, unless and until she was the absolute top dog indicates a dangerous weakness for our nation—for her—as she faces aggressive enemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin, or People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, or Iran’s mullahs; even aggressive friends like France’s President Emmanuel Macron or Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. In those milieus, she’ll be back to her status as not the top dog, but worse than before: having to deal with other top dogs person to person without the excuse that she isn’t herself highest in her hierarchy.

Part of the Problem

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US News & World Report Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Gertler, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, accidentally exposed a significant part of the problem in higher academia management and that management’s failure to provide for an open learning environment for the students (and too many pupils) attending their institutions.

Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory, and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees, and community members.

This is a basic misunderstanding of what the job of a college president is.

The interest of students is to learn how to think critically and how to debate positions—including, as an important pedagogic tool, in favor of those with which they disagree—learn their course material, and learn how to get along with fellow students who have different beliefs. They have no other legitimate interest while attending the college or university.

Faculty members have no interest other than to teach those things to their students and those pupils who deign attend a class. They have no legitimate school governance interest and they have no legitimate political interest once on the school campus. That they’ve gained so much influence in school governance is a failure amply demonstrated by the disruptions and riots at their institutions over the last few years.

“Community members” have no interest in the school’s operation other than that they are paid on time and fully by the school and the students and pupils for services rendered.

The only interests to which a college president need be responsive are the following. Donors, who have an interest in their money being used as they’ve designated. Alternatively, the school’s management team is free to reject a donor’s money if the designated use is antithetical to the school’s education mission.

Alumni, to the extent they recognize that their role is to support the school’s mission and not to try to impose their personal political agenda on the school.

Trustees, who are the senior managers of the institution.

The mission of a college or university to provide an environment conducive to educating all of its students, regardless of their religious belief, and then to provide that education as outlined above.

A president who cannot do those things, or who disagrees with the narrowness of those things has no business being a president of that institution.

Separately, but closely related, Gertler identified an additional major impediment to a college’s/university’s ability to satisfy its mission.

Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members.

Leave aside the enormous charge to students for tuition and living expenses by an institution with an endowment of nearly $51 billion and growing. That endowment, by the way, would pay for 596,470 student-years, or more than 23 years for class cycles of those 20,000 students, longer if we’re doing dynamic scoring on that growing endowment.

The larger problem embodied by Gertler’s statistic are those 20,000 “employees” compared with those 2,500 actual teachers. That’s badly out of whack.