Beyond legitimately taking
credit and assuming blame for a myriad of things, a university president ought
first of all to be an academic scholar, which comes with the credential of a
doctorate in a field or school of knowledge. Rather than a specific body, or
school, of knowledge subject to research (and thus growth) being directly applicable
to the position, I contend that the process, which includes being enculturated in
academia as a scholar, of getting a doctorate is valuable and thus should be requisite
to a candidate being selected to lead a college or university. In short, a
university president is not just a manager. It would be expedient, in line with
committing the “sin of omission,” to have a corporate executive, or, even more
expedient, a lawyer, run a university. The governing board of Northwestern
University in Illinois committed this “sin” in hiring Michael Schill, a law
instructor, as president of that university. Just three years after assuming the
position in September, 2022, he abruptly resigned. A memo to that board upon
his resignation announcement could read: “Memo to the Board: Yale Law School
trains lawyers, not university presidents.”
Even though Schill attended two
elite universities, Princeton and Yale, his two respective degrees were “first
degrees”—one in liberal arts and the other in law. Hence he did not have a
doctorate, which is a terminal (rather than first) degree in a school of
knowledge. For the confused, the JD degree is the same as the LLB (bachelors in
the letters of law) degree whereas the LLM is the masters degree in law and the
JSD is the associated doctoral degree, for which both the LLB/JD and LLM are prerequisites.
Plain and simply, a year (up to two) of survey lecture courses and a year (up
to two) of survey courses mark an entrance into the knowledge rather than years
of advanced seminar study—not to mention the absence of comprehensive exams
(not the Bar exam, which is vocational rather than a university requirement for
a degree) and a dissertation—the latter two being essential in a doctoral degree.
Besides being qualitatively different than survey courses and some seminar-electives,
the process of getting a doctorate, which is on top of having a bachelors and a
masters degree, “socializes” a student into academic culture, which students in
a first degree in a professional school or that of the arts and sciences do not
get. Both in assisting in teaching and research, doctoral students are absorbed
into a university not just as students and part-time apprentice-employees, but
also as budding scholars themselves. Internalizing the values of academia and
its unique culture also happens by osmosis.
As a scholar myself, it is
difficult for me to put myself in the place of a lawyer to grasp how one leading
a university would perceive and react to political protests on campus. Although
Schill studied public policy at Princeton, he was apparently not up to managing
the university’s response to “the freeze of hundreds of millions of dollars in
federal funding” to Northwestern by the Trump Administration, for that was a
significant factor in his decision to resign.[1]
A scholar having successfully gone through the process of earning a doctorate
would—other things equal—have a better notion of how the role of student at a
college or university is unique to education; students holding protests on campus
against Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, which includes
genocide and maybe even a holocaust, should be seen as evincing academic
freedom of ideas, rather than just as citizens (and foreign students) being
engaged in the constitutional right of political protest. In short, student
protests can be viewed as learning experiences, such that university
administrations could see to it that faculty who are favorably inclined speak
as much to educate as to advocate at protests on campus. A lawyer is not likely
to view a political protest on campus as a temporary “practical classroom
experience.”
Schill’s lack of scholarly
credentials (and related academic maturating experience) also bear on another
reason behind his resignation. In July 2023, Northwestern fired football coach
Pat Fitzgerald “amid a hazing scandal that led to lawsuits across multiple
sports with allegations including sexual abuse by teammates as well as racist
comments by coaches and race-based assaults.”[2]
At least some of that atrocious behavior occurred under Schill’s watch. As a
lawyer, he would naturally have been most concerned about the lawsuits that
sprang up like tulips in spring. It should come as no surprise at all that Northwestern
hired a law firm to do a review of the scandal, and, furthermore, that the report
by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison was “largely positive” for
Northwestern, with a lawyerly subordinate clause noting that investigators
found room for improvement in preventing hazing.[3]
Most importantly, and hardly accidental, having room for improvement does not acknowledge
any negligence or liability. All of us have room for improvement; this is the human
condition.
Attempting to obviate lawsuit
payouts by means of carefully crafting wording is very different indeed from
how a scholar would look at the situation and react (with hired lawyers to take
care of the legalese). That students were being harmed, in some cases
severely and whether by coaches or fellow students, has academic importance
not just in terms of the impacts on academic study, but also in terms of the wider
picture of students being in the care of universities other than in the sense
of being subordinate or just as customers.
This can be seen in the live-in
directors of on-campus dorms in which young-adult students live, having almost
a parental role in terms of disciplining bad behavior. A dorm contract is not just
a lease, and the occupants are not just tenants. The “something more” is what I’m
getting at here, and this is familiar to people who have gone through doctoral
programs in which students become scholars in the midst of academic culture. Once
I applied to be a dorm director at a university; I was naïve enough to think
that my MBA would be sufficient; the university wanted candidates who had a
masters in education (counseling). That was before I became a scholar and could
thus realize how a university is so much more in a distinctly academic sense,
and thus as something more organizationally than just having business elements.
Both such elements, and legal elements, are not primary, so hiring lawyers (or
business executives) to head universities is not wise, and universities are
presumably ultimately about knowledge as wisdom, rather than about training in
skills.
