In a strange act of self-adulation Feb. 26, the Legislature passed a bill that, without a single voice of dissent, radically changed a state law by paving the way for the very brand of cronyism that the law originally intended to prevent.
Yes, V. Burns Hargis, the man who, before resigning from the Board of Regents, enjoyed flitting around the country with T. Boone on his private jet to watch college football games and who was on the search committee for former President Schmidly, will now be able to proudly call himself the CEO of OSU incorporated.
This commercial cronyism is so blatant that Hargis himself, when asked about the law, was actually quoted in last Friday’s Oklahoman as saying, “The purpose of the law is so that boards don’t hire themselves.” I’m not kidding.
I should be fair and add that Hargis has of course made public statements to the effect that a good president cannot possibly run a university like a business and that he will in fact be a faithful representative for the university in the state legislature.
These admissions are refreshing, although lacking in some minor qualifications.
Good university presidents should not run the university like a business, true enough. But Hargis is not trying to be a good president of a university; he is trying to be a good CEO of a business.
So, for example, the goal of his new-found “Oklahoma Creativity Project,” of which Hargis prophesies OSU to be the “central laboratory,” is to “facilitate the growth of an entrepreneurial economy that will stimulate new careers, companies and industries” and, as one member of the Commerce Department put it, “another way…to encourage and support new and creative ways of thinking about business products, processes and markets.”
As for being the public face of the university in the Legislature, Hargis is right on target once again, although with one qualification. Hargis really will be a faithful representative of OSU to the Legislature — not OSU the university, per se, but rather OSU the business.
In the Stillwater NewsPress, Sen. David Myers, R-Ponca City, said the following about the law allowing Hargis to take office early: “I think it is a good bill for OSU…because we have two large comprehensive universities and running those is equivalent to a CEO running a large corporation…(W)hen you don’t have someone at the helm of a large corporation, it flounders.”
So, Hargis agrees with the Legislature: OSU is a business that is simply in need of a good CEO.
To be fair, there is some urgency for Hargis becoming CEO by March, because he has some pressing university issues to attend to.
The month following his presumed induction, representatives from Halliburton, Chevron, OGE and other investment bankers will be gathering at the 2nd Annual OSU Spears Business School Energy Conference at the Cox Business Center in OKC.
The keynote interview is, of course T. Boone Pickens. The interviewer? OSU CEO V. Burns Hargis.
On the Oklahoma Creativity Project Web site, there is a list of “11 Things you Can Do To Be Creative.” No. 2 on the list reads: “Question a rule (or two) that might need questioning…Don’t be afraid to question some assumptions and ask “why” or “why not”” I happen to think that is great advice.
One suggestion of mine — we question the assumptions that OSU is a business; that Hargis is our CEO; that the faculty are the employees, and the students the raw materials; that thought is a commodity, and that the only valuable thought is that which is marketable and profitable.
Just a thought.
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OSU, like most state-subsidized colleges and universities, is a business designed to rob idealistic young people like you of their money or their parents’ money so that tenured faculty can continue to have lifetime job security while they indoctrinate their students with left-wing ideology and Derrida, and their teaching assistants or non-tenured faculty do all the grunt work for very little pay with no job security. This does not apply, of course, to the sciences, which actually have some value to society. The liberal arts and business however, are better pursued outside of the modern academic setting. You can learn just as much about English by reading on your own time–no need to fork over thousands of dollars so a liberal English professor can hold your hand and help you deconstruct a text that they never had the talent to construct.
Instead of complaining about the racket that is the modern state-subsidized university system in America, just drop out, stop wasting your money on a few tenured aging-hippies, and learn on your own. Get a job, make a little bit of money, and pursue your passion on your own time. Unless of course your degree is vital for your field of work, in which case it is an unfortunate fact that the degree is necessary, sort of like a hunting license if you want to go hunting, or a fishing license. Education is an extortion racket run by a bureaucracy. Not much can be done about this fact until people stop buying into it.
A PhD in the Liberal Arts from OSU is essentially worthless anyway. If someone who receives a PhD in the arts from OSU is lucky, they’ll end up teaching at some community college in the middle of nowhere. If they’re not lucky they won’t find an academic position at all. See, the people with PhDs from the top universities get positions at OSU, then OSU pumps out PhDs who go and teach at community colleges. The leftovers just wasted their money and time to read Derrida for 7 years when they could have been spending 7 years making money and reading and writing actual literature in their spare time.
Don’t blame Hargis because he’s running a business-racket–blame yourself for forking money over to the business-racket when you could have been making money yourself, and contributing to society, and reading Howard Zinn and Chomsky in your spare time.
“you could have been making money yourself, and contributing to society, and reading Howard Zinn and Chomsky in your spare time.”
Being employed by the university guarantees the former, and allows me to do each of the latter. As far as I’m concerned, I’m getting paid to do those things. Extortion? Hardly.
There are other options besides submitting or giving up: we can ofcourse demand change, as the long history of the active student movement in the U.S. has successfully shown.
You cannot run a University like a business because it’s not in business to make money… that is the only real difference.
A university is “in business” to educate, and there is no better way to provide education opportunities than to create an environment that teaches practice as well as theory.
Providing an opportunity for our students to learn, providing the means for our faculty to provide state of the art learning opportunities, and also creating opportunities for our graduates to contribute to OSU and to the State of Oklahoma should be welcomed and should be expected of a University President.
A University is not the same as a business, but it is in business to be successful and it would seem prudent to hire a successful business man to ensure that the business of the University (learning, teaching, educating and providing opportunities for growth and research) would be best conducted by a person with business accumen, rather than someone steeped in buracracy and theory.