Avoiding “university politics”
is under normal circumstances a wise move by non-tenured professors because of
how vicious such politics can be. Perhaps if more scholars who take on
administrative positions with considerable power were more passionate
about learning more in their respective fields of knowledge, the power itself would
not be used so much to settle scores (i.e., retaliate). As Jesus says in the
Gospels concerning God and money, a person cannot serve two masters. When the
president of a university system is a lawyer rather than a scholar holding a
doctorate, a passion for acquiring academic knowledge cannot be relied upon to
keep the occupant of the high office focused on the essentials rather than on “extracurricular
activities.” When the Board of Regents fired Jay Rothman, a lawyer who had been
the presiding officer of the University of Wisconsin system (i.e., the main and
branch campuses) on March 7, 2026, the fact that he was not oriented as a
scholar—he had earned two undergraduate degrees—was arguably part of the reason
for the firing, given the salience of politics both in his conduct while in
office and his firing.
Rothman’s informing the press
after the Regents’ vote that his dismissal had “blindsided” him points back to
the salience of politics between him and the board.[1]
So too does the testimony of the two regents who later stated in a committee
hearing at the Wisconsin Senate that Rothman was not caught unaware because “there
were ‘substantial’ reasons for his being fired, and Rothman was aware of them.”[2]
“Rothman lacked urgency to address critical issues like AI, was not fully
aligned with the board, tried to limit public board discussions and open
records, limited board members’ interactions with lawmakers and took credit for
accomplishments that were part of a ‘massive team effort,’ Regent Timothy Nixon
said.”[3]
The implications are that Rothman was lying to retaliate against the board for
having just fired him, and that politics between him and the board had been
salient while he had been in office. Perhaps less obvious from Nixon’s
accusations, from Rothman’s preoccupation with non-academic political brinkmanship,
a lack of focus by Rothman on his scholarship and on how well the tenured
professors are teaching can be inferred. Put another way, the opportunity cost
of playing politics is time that could have been spent doing research,
teaching, and supervising the teaching of the senior faculty members and
department chairpersons.
Soon after I founded the
Management, Spirituality, and Religion academic group in the Academy of Management,
for example, I simply walked away from a fight when the Academy’s president succumbed
to pressure by the New-Age “scholars” of business who wanted to run the group.
At the time, I was teaching and conducting research at Yale soon after having
graduated there so I consciously put learning more, given the opportunities at
Yale, above fighting a political battle to retain my chairmanship. Besides, by
then I had shifted from business to the humanities in academia, and the academic
knowledge in business-academia had by then had questionable legitimacy in my
opinion. As one example of the decadence, the New-Age dominated group at the
Academy of Management hosted meditation sessions in addition to the research-paper
sessions. But I digress.
The University of Wisconsin
had a long history of bad, retaliatory politics. At one point in the twentieth
century, the provost office took control of the classics department because its
chair had been using power of that office to retaliate against faculty not to
his or her liking. Also, the dean of the university’s business school was
caught fabricating the result of the tenure vote of Denis Collins, whose radio
interview had incensed the holder of the banking chair at the school. A decade
after that scandal, I asked President Wiley on “the hill” whether the
university having committed the felony of fraud in a tenure vote was justified.
“Denis was a problem,” Wiley replied. I had known Denis back in graduate
school, and although I found him to be a contrarian (who liked pointing out to
other people years later that I was by then bald), I knew him to be a serious
scholar and hardly a problem.
Not long soon after my brief
conversation with Wiley during his smoking break, a staffer of Rep. Ness, who
chaired the education committee in the Wisconsin Assembly, told me, “Here in
the statehouse, it is an open secret that UW is run like the mob.” That employee
was not at all surprised when I told him that the chairman of the political
science department had just given an interview to the Wisconsin State Journal to
make fun of Patrick Riley, a renowned political theorist who had been educated at
Harvard. In fact, the jealousy and sordid departmental politics had been so bad
that Riley had moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts and commuted by air to UW
weekly during the semesters for many years, and he returned to teaching at
Harvard as soon as his UW pension came through. Sadly, Riley fell down stairs in
his colonial house in Cambridge just eight years after having rejoined his alma
mater, so he was not alive when I was a visiting research scholar at Harvard,
where the faculty, although too “closed shop,” highly valued acquiring academic
knowledge. Riley had once remarked to me that few if any of the faculty in the liberal
arts at Wisconsin could be seen doing research at night in their offices or the
library, and perhaps it was such a pedestrian vantage point that jealousy was
directed at Riley, especially as he “took his carriage back to Cambridge” every
weekend, as per his chairman’s remarks to a journalist. Of course, the “scholars”
at UW would deny how they abuse and extenuate the politics of position when
they could otherwise be invested in acquiring knowledge. By the way, Nietzsche has
an excellent discussion of such “herd animals” who “seek to dominate.” Their
bad politics stem from their inherent weakness. Nietzsche urges the strong to
develop a “pathos of distance” from such vitriolic creatures, and Riley did so
by moving back to Cambridge so he could have some affiliation with Harvard more
than a decade before he retired from Wisconsin.
Amy Bogost, the president of
the Board of Regents at Wisconsin, said after the Rothman firing of the
unanimous decision, “It was not political. It was not retaliatory.”[4]
Her disavowal can be taken as akin to a mob cove-up, however, given Tim Nixon’s
admission that Rothman had limited board members’ interactions with lawmakers
and took credit for accomplishments that were not primarily Rothman’s own. To
claim that individual regents would react neutrally emotionally and vote
impartially to fire Rothman based on his administrative accomplishments is incredulous.
The claim itself, next to Nixon’s explanation of the firing, points to a long-standing
salience of retaliatory politics between Rothman and the board, especially
given the reputation of that university in terms of “university politics.”
