When you have been president of Harvard, as Derek Bok has been, or dean of Harvard College, as Harry Lewis has been, you ought to have some ideas about how to fix higher education.
But according to Robert Kagan himself a former president of Yale, neither Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges nor Harry R. Lewis in Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education has a clue what to do about the “imperial faculty.”
They wield their statistics and show how much trouble colleges are in. And they understand it is a problem of leadership.
Both Harry Lewis and Derek Bok have entered a devastating judgment on contemporary university leadership — more devastating, and more self-incriminating, than they appear to know.
But neither of them are really willing to tackle the real problem, an education system taken over by its producers.
As things stand now, no president appears capable of taming the imperial faculty; almost none is willing to try; and no one else from inside the world of the universities or infected by its self-serving culture is likely to stand up and say “enough,” or to be followed by anyone if he does. Salvation, if it is to come at all, will have to come from without.
But this is hardly surprising. When people have the power to control their terms of employment they abuse that power damnably. The only thing that gets the powerful to reform is the threat of disaster, the moment when Attila the Hun gallops over the horizon.
That moment seems as yet a long way off.
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