I could be biased. Because I’ve been in higher education all my professional life, maybe it just seems like a microcosm of the world in which we live. Or maybe higher education really does reflect how, in the United States at least, the traditional roles of leader and follower are often reversed. Now leaders frequently follow, and followers frequently lead.
Decades ago, when I, the professor, walked into a classroom, I could assume certain truths. First, that students in the room would be somewhat deferential. Second, that my managers, for example my deans, would leave me largely alone. Would, if I conducted myself properly, give me the leeway to do my job as I saw fit. Third, that the presidents of my institutions would themselves be left alone to lead as they deemed best. That they were free to make decisions without relentless judgment or interference. Finally, I could assume that parents, politicians, and the public generally trusted colleges and universities to carry out their mission with reasonable intelligence and integrity.
Now none of these apply. Or if they apply at all they do so only episodically and unpredictably. I recently retired from teaching in higher education. But by the time I did instead of students calling me “Professor Kellerman” or “Dr. Kellerman,” they called me “Barbara.” Not that I cared, but it reflected a broader pattern in which authority and expertise were being diminished. Further, instead of being left to teach what I deemed necessary and desirable, I felt obliged to be hypervigilant. I made as certain as I reasonably could that my curriculum and even my informal comments would not be judged by someone inside or outside the classroom inadequate, prejudicial, or politically incorrect.
We have long since got to the point where close, careful monitoring of leaders by followers reaches the top. Presidents of colleges and universities are now subject to incessant judgements, containments and criticisms by a large cast of characters most of whom lack both the experience and expertise to judge. Instead of higher education being exempted from our prying, jaundiced eyes, it too is suspect and it too is vulnerable. Notwithstanding an occasional exception, Americans’ trust in higher education has declined for a decade.
This week a headline in the New York Times read, “New Laws Subject Faculty to Increased Surveillance.” The article was about how college professors, who not long ago were essentially free from political interference, were now being “watched by state officials, senior administrators, and the students themselves.”
This week another Times headline read, “Talks on Harvard Deal Veer into Uncertainty After Trump’s Attack.” This piece describes how vulnerable the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, is to the whims, wants, and wishes of the president of the United States. Garber does, of course, have arrows in his quiver and within certain parameters he has resisted the Trump administration. Still, as it pertains to Harvard, he has no choice but somehow to respond to what Trump does and says, which, I should add, can be one thing on one day and another thing on another. For all of Garber’s authority then, Trump trumps him. This does not mean that Garber must do what Trump wants him to do. But it does mean that Trump pushes Garber into a corner who is then forced to figure out how to get out.
Nor is President Trump himself immune to the trend to which I allude. He sells himself as an American strongman. But especially in the United States, and especially in the third decade of the 21st century, seeming to be a powerful leader and being one are not the same thing. American leaders are curiously, astonishingly, vulnerable to their followers. Don’t believe me? Ask Claudine Gay. She was Alan Garber’s immediate presidential predecessor. But her tenure at the top of Harvard’s hierarchy lasted all of six months and two days.