University Governance Quotes

A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.

I think, my own personal view is there should be higher and higher levels of autonomy; government should not interfere in setting up colleges, in running colleges. The market, the society will decide which is a good university, which is not a good university, rather than government mandating.

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.

The fact that I'm a Tory who hasn't worked at a university - at least, not since I taught at Cambridge in 1990 - doesn't disqualify me from serving on the board of the OfS.

No student who shall be expelled from a university by a decision of the university senate which was ratified or prompted by the agent of the government, or who shall have left the institution in order to escape expulsion, shall be received in any other university... .

I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.

No teacher should be allowed on the faculty of any American university unless he is a Christian.

I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.

One of the major jobs of the Harvard president is to choose the deans. I've had the opportunity to choose a considerable number of deans already, so I've learned a lot in the process in doing it.

I'm prepared to fight as hard as I can against unions entering the University on behalf of our students.

We conclude that, simultaneously with the organization of the colleges, there should be at Santa Cruz an organization by disciplines, whose units would have a voice in appointments and promotions, in course of programs, and in the allocation of funds for research.

I'd require that every university, public or private, be governed by the constitutional standards regarding freedom of expression and due process. There is no reason for treating adult college students any differently in the university setting than in the outside world.

I believe being president of a private institution is a remarkable experience, but at Ohio State, it's a calling.

Each university should have a Young Scholars' Committee. I became the chairman of this Committee, and immediately it was permitted to have this plan officially adopted.

You have great athletic directors, you let them run it; you keep yourself informed, but I'm not the athletic director. I'm the president of the university.

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.

After forty years in the lab, I was asked in 1991 to become president of The Rockefeller University. Unlike a working scientist, being president for seven years provided an opportunity to interact with scientists in many different fields and broadened my scope of the natural sciences.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

Some of the beauty of a university is that every professor is given a lot of autonomy over what he or she does. That's also what makes it very hard for even a very forward-thinking president to change courses.

That if any public reader in either our Universities, or any head or master of a College, or any other person respectively in either of them, shall affix any new sense to any Article, or shall publicly read, determine, or hold any public disputation, or suffer any such to be held either way, in either the Universities or Colleges respectively; or if any divine in the Universities shall preach or print any thing either way, other than is already established in convocation with our royal assent; he, or they the offenders, shall be liable to our displeasure, and the Church's censure in our commission ecclesiastical, as well as any other: and we will see there shall be due execution upon them.

In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.

Many university presidents assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy.

Fraternities have dominated campuses, defied authorities and rebuffed efforts at suppression for nearly 200 years. But in that time we have ended slavery, given women the vote and put men on the moon. Of course we can get rid of fraternities. College presidents, administrators and trustees just have to muster the will to do it. As for the rest of us, we need to keep pressure on them to do so, and keep counting the bodies until they act.