On the Politics of Non-Politics at the University of Wisconsin

Avoiding “university politics” is under normal circumstances a wise move by non-tenured professors because of how vicious such politics can be. Perhaps if more scholars who take on administrative positions with considerable power were more passionate about learning more in their respective fields of knowledge, the power itself would not be used so much to settle scores (i.e., retaliate). As Jesus says in the Gospels concerning God and money, a person cannot serve two masters. When the president of a university system is a lawyer rather than a scholar holding a doctorate, a passion for acquiring academic knowledge cannot be relied upon to keep the occupant of the high office focused on the essentials rather than on “extracurricular activities.” When the Board of Regents fired Jay Rothman, a lawyer who had been the presiding officer of the University of Wisconsin system (i.e., the main and branch campuses) on March 7, 2026, the fact that he was not oriented as a scholar—he had earned two undergraduate degrees—was arguably part of the reason for the firing, given the salience of politics both in his conduct while in office and his firing.  

The full essay is at "On the Politics of Non-Politics at the University of Wisconsin."

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common. 

The full essay is at "The University of California." 

"Old School" Scholars and the Contemporary American University: Oil and Water

In the 2000s, I had the honor of studying under Patrick Riley, a scholar of historical moral, religious, and political thought. Even though I had had "old-school" professors in the course of my degreed studies at Indiana University and Yale, Riley's approach can be said to be medieval. After four years of auditing his courses and those of many of other professors at Riley's request at a large Midwestern university, I received not a degree nor even many academic credits, but. rather, a hand-written letter in which he let his colleagues know that I could teach graduate-school level political theory. It is no accident that he periodically visited the University of Bologna, which, aside from hosting the huge project of publishing Leibniz's correspondence, was as the first university in Europe, founded in 1066. Back then, I bet letters of recommendation were the principal way in which scholars got hired; a scholar became recognized as one when the scholar he studied under realized that the budding scholar knew enough of the field, which is more than merely doing well in some classes. How technocratic and artificial contemporary universities would seem to ancient and medieval scholars. I think they would be startled at how many pedestrian scholars there are, who relish making narrow distinctions based on technicalities. In contrast, Patrick Riley a product of Harvard, where he continued to work and live even during the many years in which he took weekly flights during the semesters out to a Midwestern university, viewed European intellectual history in the great book tradition and was thus able to see intellectual inheritances well beyond Augustine's in Plato and Aquinas' in Aristotle. Riley traced how the theory of justice as love and benevolence came together from strands of thought in Plato and Augustine in the thought of Leibniz, and how the social contract school of political thought changed in going from Hobbes to Kant. Moreover, I admired Riley's relating of historical theological and moral thought to the political thought. How technocratic or pedestrian so many other twentieth-century scholars were, but not Patrick Riley. 

The full essay is at "Old-School Scholars"