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Restructuring
Indiana University and the University of Richmond will both be losing their presidents soon--and in each case, this is understood to be to the good. U of R president William Cooper will leave his post in June 2007; IU president Adam Herbert will leave his in 2008, when his contract expires. According to news reports, few will be sorry to see either man go.
The issues that are sinking each presidency are at once identical and wholly opposite. Neither president has been able to satisfy the expectations of his administrative colleagues. But Cooper's problem was that he wanted U of R to become nationally recognized for educational excellence while Herbert's problem was, in the eyes of his critics, that he was not doing what needed to be done to secure IU's academic reputation.
Cooper offended his constituents when he delivered an ill-advised comment last fall regarding the quality of the Richmond student body. "The entering quality of our student body needs to be much higher if we are going to transform bright minds into great achievers instead of transforming mush into mush," he said, mortally offending students, parents, faculty, and alumni who did not appreciate the frank suggestion that neither Richmond students nor, apparently, their teachers, can think their way out a paper bag. The larger issue contained within that comment, however, was whether Richmond ought to be setting its sights on a national reputation of the sort Cooper envisioned. Critics insisted that the university would lose its distinctive southern identity if a push were made to make the school more nationally competitive. While the Richmond trustees stood by Cooper, a "Fire Cooper!" website was launched by alumni; Cooper announced last week that he would step down a year and a half from now.
Herbert, for his part, has run aground on an administrative dispute about how much independent authority the leader of the Bloomington campus ought to have. Concerned with his own ability to lead, Herbert is refusing to appoint a new chancellor to the Bloomington campus, arguing that the chancellor post confers too much autonomous power on the leader of that campus and that Bloomington ought to be managed instead by a provost who is more immediately answerable to the president. The Bloomington campus has been without a chancellor since 2003; this fall, Herbert scuppered a bid by Kumble R. Subbaswamy, dean of arts and sciences at Bloomington, for the job. Subbaswamy has since left IU to become provost at the University of Kentucky, and IU-Bloomington has remained, in the words of Rick Newkirk, who edits the Indiana Daily Student, "headless." Concern runs high that IU's administration is crumbling, and that the situation will not be helped by having a "lame duck" president presiding over the state university system for two more years.
Two university presidents have hogtied themselves into resigning by taking controversial stands--the one effectively compromising the management of a flagship campus by refusing to appoint someone to a job he felt should not exist, the other insisting that with better management and stronger leadership, his university could become an even finer place to work and study. Herbert hobbled the Bloomington campus because he did not like its administrative organization; Cooper hobbled himself when he chose offensive words to convey his conviction that Richmond could become even better than it is.
Indiana is better off without a president who can't honor either the structure of the university system or the mechanisms for altering it; Richmond is better off without a president whose vision of excellence is wasted on people who seem ultimately to be threatened by the prospect of improving their institution.
Posted by acta online at January 16, 2006 09:07 AM
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