@Rawley :
“Harvard is a hedge fund masquerading as a school.”
Today only innocents think of our great universities as simply “schools.” They are in fact almost all corporations — but corporations which must balance the demands of incredibly different internal constituencies while maintaining income sources from many varied sources. The President of these universities are best understood as the CEO of unique private corporations, struggling to manage all the above and stay atop powerful internal boards of directors.
Harvard openly boasts: “
The President and Fellows of Harvard College (also called the Harvard Corporation or just the Corporation) is the smaller and more powerful of Harvard University's two governing boards. It refers to itself [accurately] as the oldest [still existing] corporation in the Western Hemisphere.”
When you consider that Harvard operating annual revenues are now over 6.1 billion dollars, it is hardly to be expected that a resigning CEO should be dumped as driftwood to be dried out and burned as a witch at the next political “auto-da-fe.”
Most University Presidents have much more to worry about than satisfying public indignation from one side or another in all the culture wars and political wars going on as another tragic episode in the mutually violent and deadly conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues. For generations no force has been able to meet the demands of both sides, the U.S. is deeply involved on one, and passions are high.
During the Vietnam War we had the same thing, but that war more directly and massively effected both students and the nation as a whole. I remember “sitting-in” at an Ivy League President’s office over war-related policies of our institution and its Pres. & powerful Board members who both supported the war and were presidents of corporations who supported it.
At that time there were one sided cries from rightwing (and liberal) war-supporting politicians about “free speech” and protecting university “autonomy,” but the weight of progressive anti-war forces among faculty & students and the changing of public opinion was too great to resist — at least until half a million U.S. troops withdrew from this French Colonial & anti-communist redux.
This controversy is really over Israel’s extreme — and extremely provoked — devastation of Gaza and where it fits in the long history of Israeli/Arab Palestinian conflict. Looked at another way, it is sort of like asking “Who is really ‘genociding’ who in Gaza?” or “Who wants to drive who out of Israel/Palestine?”
In fact both “right” and “left” have diverse views on this conflict, and it — in my opinion — is terribly inappropriate for American Jews, Muslims, Christians, Dems or Repubs to expect University CEOs to perfectly handle or articulate a line on these matters where they themselves are often incapable or unwilling to maintain a balanced and objective view.
nypost.com
