Beer at the White House

The latest flap over the Harvard professor and the Cambridge, Mass., cop brings back a lot of memories of my life in the president’s office at the University of Hawaii. As most of you know, I was special assistant to the president and not only his speechwriter and aide-de-camp but also his troubleshooter and later vice president for university relations. Among my thorniest challenges and potential public relations disasters were those faculty members whom I shall charitably call prima donnas. This is what the Gates flap makes me remember.

Prima donnas then came in two types: those who had not yet slithered up the academic ladder to the point they felt they deserved to be and were, therefore, acting out of insecurity; and those who had slithered up the pole and were inclined to want to remind everyone of both their struggle and their achievement and were acting out of security. Both types were achingly sensitive to the least slight and since they were located in an absurdly conformist environment—a university—all they needed to do was claim violation of academic freedom or some injustice and all hell would break loose: faculty senators would call for administrative reviews, indignant letters would be written to the media, and aggrieved professors would stand up in various meetings and preach that the university should be setting the prime example of social and personal justice (particular emphasis on the personal).

All would be taken very seriously and sometimes mediation was called for to settle matters—if two professors had a major disagreement (like over whose office was larger) the president sometimes had to step in. Such is the way of universities where someone once said that the infighting is vicious because there is so little to fight over.

Given this background, I have a different take on the Gates/Harvard matter than our rabble-rousing media. I see it as a clash of cultures. The Harvard prof felt himself poorly treated for a man of his stature—worse, he wasn’t even recognized, no name cachet at all. Horrors. He spoke to the cop as he would complain to his dean, who has long ago figured out how to defuse him. The cop reacted as he would to any potential street criminal he thought was doing B/E.

Both were wrong: Gates for not realizing that professorial tantrums don’t work off campus. The cop for not realizing what it means to be working in Cambridge, Mass, where there a gazillion universities. He’s not in the streets of New York or LA. He’s in the mean streets of the most competitive, snobby higher-education capital of the US.

I once observed one of the English profs in my department start to work himself into a tantrum in the office of English Department secretary. She’d been there forever and was unimpressed. He had been given a parking assignment at an auxiliary lot rather than right next to the building. Horrors—he had to park with us junior faculty who were glad to get any parking at all. She looked at him with the most beautiful of smiles and said, “Why, Professor XXX, parking next to the building is for important people.” He had a choice: try to argue that he was important (very undignified) or just swallow it and walk away muttering (not good but not as bad). He chose the latter. If the cop had been there, he might have cuffed our good prof and what good would that have done?

So, I guess my advice to our prof and his cop—and to our peerless leader Obama—is get over it and use some common sense next time. And if there’s any room on the beer wagon, someone should invite me to the White House where I could bang a few heads together. I got pretty good at it in the president’s office.