Guest AuthorI hear John Thrasher is doing a good job as president of Florida State University.
Says FSU trustee Allan Bense: “In general, I will tell you 2014 was a rough year. There were days when I had 50 or 60 emails in my inbox. And I will tell you, you know how many I get today? Zero.”
By that vague standard, of course, FSU’s governing board easily reaches the decision to reward Thrasher with a 90K bonus and 7.2 percent raise. Somewhere in the afterlife Allan Bloom is quoting Aristotle (considered the West’s first academic) and throwing Greek-derived expletives at FSU’s Board of Trustees. Somewhere John Henry Newman weeps. Somewhere Ortega y Gasset pouts.
Sure, Thrasher acquitted himself well when a deranged man caused bloody mayhem at FSU’s Strozier Library. He called a press conference, had the ineffectual Gov. Rick Scott attend, and comforted the university community. His sense of the human dimension during a tense moment for FSU is praiseworthy.
Sure, to use a cliché, the sky has not fallen with Thrasher as FSU’s president. The school is still a well-oiled and percolating machine. The life of the university is still teeming with fresh excitements, from the student union to the National Magnetic Laboratory.
Sure, he gets along well with everyone. For God’s sake, the man was a politician for eons at the highest levels of Florida politics. Add to the equation that it is only human nature that people would gravitate to power, a thing Thrasher has in abundance and wears with confidence and uses with savvy, and he’d doubtless be a popular man.
Sure, FSU’s fundraising totals for its capital campaign are stellar. Naturally, with a national name, a fanatical alumni base, staff dedicated to getting people to give ungodly sums of dough to gratify their egos, $700 million isn’t all that hard to imagine. It would be a sign of major incompetence if this couldn’t be done with the speed and dexterity it’s being accomplished now.
Sure, the faculty has been tamed. Like all “employees” (although the tradition of shared governance makes the faculty something more than a standard employee but this is the era of the corporatization of the university) they care about their paychecks first, their professional success (tenure: publish or perish) second, and university politics, last. Thrasher is taking care of the “pocketbook issue,” in the nonsense argot of U.S. politics.
After conceding all of that, there’s a considerable deficit in the tally of John Thrasher’s administration achievements. To say, Thrasher is being hailed for not falling flat on his face, for essentially being — well, mediocre, is not malicious overstatement. It is the brutal fact of his presidency.
Here’s why Thrasher’s presidency is still awful for FSU: Because Thrasher lacks vision and imagination. Oh, he says he knows what higher education in Florida needs to succeed. He’ll get the money, eventually.
He’ll make some traction getting FSU an invite to the Association of American Universities, a faux Ivy League club for “elite” public universities. Because Thrasher is a good politician. A university president has to be more than a politician, though.
Today’s university president is club man, a Gordon Gee on steroids. But the impending crisis of the university requires a few presidents in the heroic vein: a Charles Eliot Norton, a Robert Hutchins.
University presidents who can reorient the university toward its original mission statement: to cultivate within its students “intellect” (not the dubious “critical thinking” but something beyond analytical rigor — a mind refined by the humanities and free to embrace sensibility as an equal with raw intelligence; a higher discernment), to create the conditions for intelligent culture, and to be a force for democracy.
Usually, this is a shared charge — both faculty and administration doing their best to make a university work. But current trends in higher education make it a peculiarly presidential charge. Some have taken it up with vigor, say, Purdue’s Mitch Daniels. The country needs more.
The late cultural critic Jacque Barzun said the modern university was being vulgarized by cant — cant coming from all corners, but largely from its own body. The great disgrace, said Barzun, is that this could be avoided entirely but laxity makes it persist.
Typical of the politician, Thrasher is slave to his master — the FSU Board of Trustees.
To have a few good men who can tell hard truths to the university, reassert the healthful place of the university in American culture, and push against the trends getting in the way of its democratic mission and leading it inexorably to mediocrity, is crucial.
Anyway, good job, President Thrasher. Good job.
Chris Timmons is a native Floridian, bird-watcher, editorial columnist, and a fellow with the James Madison Institute. He lives in Tampa and his opinions belong to him alone. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
