Retreats

Provost’s Retreat all day today, President’s Retreat all day tomorrow. Busy weekend.

The more I get involved with university policy work, the more fascinating I find it. The lazy response to this sort of thing is to say that university leadership has “power”, and that they exert it in nefarious capitalistic neo-liberal fashion, or whatever. While I can think of a few places (which shall remain nameless) where things do seem to happen that way, that hasn’t been my experience at this particular institution. Perhaps I’m either naive or lucky, but what I see here is people working extremely hard to try to solve actual problems, and the fact is— it’s not always clear how to solve them. It’s been quite fascinating to see how universities work from this side of the fence. Another factor at play here is that I’m highly sympathetic to the mission of this university in particular.

Ian Bogost is dealing with a similar administrative post these days at Georgia Tech, and I think we agree on many of the issues at play. And of course, Bruno Latour’s position at Sciences Po is almost identical to my position at AUC.