Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Requiescat in Pace, Ban on Giving Platforms and Honors to People Who Hold Views Contrary to Church Teaching

In a just-published essay at National Catholic Reporter, Father Thomas Reese calls on Catholic colleges and universities to bury the ban on inviting graduation speakers who espouse positions contrary to Catholic teaching (read: the ban on inviting Democratic speakers). As he notes, this ban emanated from the U.S. bishops, and has resulted in a significant diminution of the academic credibility of Catholic institutions of higher learning. It has signaled that "our" moral positions on issues like abortion, women's rights, and same-sex marriage are weak, since we expect to enforce those teachings by coercion and do not expect to persuade the larger culture of their truth by means of respectful conversation or rational argument. We do not, in fact, respect academic freedom when we choose the route of coercion rather than the route of persuasion.*

Score: Daniel, 1, Lions, 0--I Give My Testimony, I Survive

Whew. It's over. I gave my testimony yesterday, and I very definitely felt far less alone than I'd otherwise have felt, due to all of you and your support/light/prayers/vibes/good wishes. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

A Quick Update: Still Waiting to Testify

I know this saga is getting to be a bore, but since I've told you all about it up to now, I don't want to leave hanging any readers who may have an interest in it: I did not get called to testify yesterday. But I'm supposed to be up to testify bright and early this morning. I'll keep all of you posted, and I remain very deeply grateful for your expressions of support in comments here and emails some of you have sent me. It means the world to know I'm not alone as I do battle with principalities and powers. Because that's exactly what's going on in this case, and sometimes the rich and powerful people and institutions who wrap themselves up in Christian banners and spout bible verses aren't necessarily the good guys.

I find the photo of immigrants waiting to be processed at Angel Island on a number of websites (e.g., including this one, The Top 7 Asian American Places of Institutional Interest), but I haven't yet found its original source. If any reader has that information, I'll be grateful for it and will post it. (See Chris Morley's comment in the thread below, providing the original source of the photo.)

Just Logging In . . . With Gratitude, and An Update

Just logging in for a brief time this Tuesday morning, and I wanted to update all of you about the trial. But first, I want to express my heartfelt thanks for the helpful, moving, extraordinary messages of support so many of you have left in the comments thread here after I told you of my obligation to testify at trial. Several readers have also emailed and contacted me by Facebook. 

Walking into the Lions' Den: I Ask for Readers' Help as I Testify in a Case Involving Faculty Rights

Dear Readers,

Why Do Catholic Institutions Need Reform? Margaret Mary Vojtko

Why do the Catholic church and the institutions it sponsors need reform, you ask? Read this story:

Catholics in the News: Cardinal Newman Society Hyperactive after 2012 Elections

And in Catholic news as this Thanksgiving (in America) week ends--a series of consecutive postings  focusing on particular issues, beginning with news about the shadowy but exceptionally well-heeled right-wing Catholic academic watchdog group, the Cardinal Newman Society, about which I've written frequently in the past (click on the label beneath this posting for my previous statements about the Cardinal Newman Society):

Paterno as Pope and His Golden-Parachute Deal: More News about Penn State Nightmare

Howard Fineman on how Paterno and Penn State relentlessly branded the football team as a secular holy order with Paterno as pope:

2012 Elections and Re-Claiming the Moral Center of Catholicism in the Public Square

That incisive moral analysis and strong moral values that so many American Catholics like Margery Eagan exhibit: where are they coming from?  At National Catholic Reporter this week, theologian Richard McBrien offers strong reasons for doubting that the incisive moral analysis or values are trickling down from the top of the church to the bottom.

Frank Rich on Occupy Wall Street and Long-Term Fixes

Frank Rich writes yesterday at New York Magazine about what Occupy Wall Street signifies long-term for American culture and its political process.  Two points strike me:

1. What's messed up in the corporate and financial structures of the U.S. (and the world) goes well beyond Wall Street, and fixing Wall Street is not likely to be a long-term fix for the systemic problems producing our current widespread misery. 

2. And second, the 2012 election will not resolve the problems, no matter who's elected, because our system, as it's now configured, is designed to produce stalemate.  No matter who's elected . . . .  

Bearing Witness: Ongoing Discrimination Against Gay and Lesbian Employees in Catholic Institutions, Ten Takeaway Points

And so what’s the point I wanted to make with that diptych of confessional (as in autobiographical) posts (and here) in the middle of the week, about my dismal experience and Steve’s, as a gay couple, with the Catholic academy?  What’s the bottom line?  What would I hope Catholic leaders and leaders of Catholic institutions might take away, if—miracle of miracles—anyone from that club might happen on this story?

Two Snapshots of the Future of American Catholicism: Younger Catholics Dealing (or Not) with Injustice to Gay Brothers and Sisters

It's interesting (and very instructive, I think) to read these two articles as a diptych: two side-by-side snapshots of the future of American Catholicism. Michael Sean Winters reports at National Catholic Reporter on a new generation of Catholic theologians in the U.S., who, we're told, want to transcend the polarization of the post-Vatican II church, bring everyone to the table, and craft a Catholicism in which fundamental disagreements about "secular political categories" no longer divide the church into camps.

Bearing Witness: Healing the Tear in the Soul of American Catholicism--A Call for National Dialogue (2)

This post continues the one preceding it:

So here’s what happened.  When I wrote the first edition of the ethics textbook in 1989 and the Catholic lay ministry program that commissioned the work published it, the program director told me he had sent the textbook in draft to various American bishops around the country.  All of whom (or their chancellors), without exception, wrote back to tell him the textbook was a fine, sound foundation for teaching fundamental ethics to Catholic lay ministry students.  The only negative letter, I was told, came from a chancellor in a diocese on the East Coast who had a long history of attacking this particular lay ministry program.

Bearing Witness: Healing the Tear in the Soul of American Catholicism--A Call for National Dialogue (1)

This is a post I find difficult to write.  Part of the reason for the difficulty is that this is a story that can be told from several different angles.  And because I have a tendency to go all over the map with a narrative line, and to try to connect every possible dot, I hesitate to launch into the narrative.

I also intend—as with everything I write on this blog—to tell the gospel truth.  And that means watching every word I write, like a hawk, to be sure it rings with the truth I know I’m called to tell here.  And which is exceedingly slippery, because that’s the nature of truth: it’s elusive.  And we’re self-serving and see only the shining edges we want to see.

Commonweal Breaks Silence on Prop 8 Ruling: Are Judge Walker's Facts Really Facts?

I blogged some days ago (and here) about the continuing silence at the center of American Catholicism—the continuing silence of the opinion mavens of the American Catholic intellectual elite—about Judge Walker’s prop 8 ruling, and what it  portends.  As my frame of analysis, I adopted an historical perspective: I imagined that at some point in the future, people of good will looking back on this moment of American history will seek to understand why some groups rejoiced and why others were silent about a human rights breakthrough now being greeted with justifiable joy by an oppressed group of human beings.

Power, Sociopaths, and Social Intelligence: Dacher Keltner on the Paradox of Power

 

I’m fascinated by the research of psychologist Dacher Keltner re: power, which I’ve recently discovered through Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog.  Keltner notes that a power paradox is at work in many of our social institutions.

On the one hand, psychological research is increasingly demonstrating that most social groups place a premium on social intelligence, when it comes to identifying and rewarding those with the promise to be powerful leaders.  But on the other hand, once many of those identified as leaders assume the reins of power, they begin to behave like sociopaths.  They behave in a way that undercuts their claim to power and negates the social intelligence that placed them in the seat of power in the first place.  Keltner defines the paradox of power as follows: “The skills most important to obtaining power and leading effectively are the very skills that deteriorate once we have power.”

Soul Struggle: Tending One's Own Garden or Speaking Truth to Power?

I’m struggling lately with a spiritual-journey question that seems to recycle itself through my experiences again and again in a karmic way. The best way I know how to formulate this question is as follows: in a world sodden with the effects of sin, is it sometimes better to withdraw, live one’s life with integrity according to one’s best lights? Or is it better to engage?

A huge chunk of my soul has always wanted the first option. But circumstances seem to keep poking me to take the second path—even as I kick against that choice.

The immediate occasion for the renewal of this struggle in my soul is that I recently had the opportunity—or obligation—to write a report about a university at which I worked a few years ago, which is now undergoing reaccreditation. The academic oversight body that accredits the school invites third-party comments prior to its accrediting visits.

I had pretty much decided, some time ago, to wash my hands of the place, after some experiences of brutal injustice with the school. The school’s leader is adroit about using issues of gender and race to triangulate the institution she leads, as well as the public. The triangulation, and her penchant for surrounding herself with corrupt assistants, assures that she remains on top, no matter what comes along to expose her malfeasance.

As she does this, she has the active assistance of some powerful and wealthy white men whose interests she serves as a token African-American female leader. Though she depicts herself as a person of conspicuous integrity and strong faith, she uses behind-the-scenes finagling and high-powered lawyers ruthlessly to destroy her perceived enemies. And she gets away with this, over and over, because of her backers and their access to the media, to legislative and judicial bodies, and to the white male leaders of the church that also keeps this ruthless, ethically compromised academic dictator in power.

As I say, I had decided some time ago to wash my hands of this institution and its leader, and to let God deal with her in God’s time and way. But then, as the window for submitting a third-party comment to the school’s accrediting body began to close, and as a number of people whose discernment I respect encouraged me to write a statement, I did so. I produced an extensive, carefully documented report about the school’s lapses of integrity, violations of academic freedom, and leadership challenges.

And I doubt that this report will make any difference at all to the outcome of the accrediting body’s deliberations. In fact, it may well backfire and cause the accreditors to give the school and its leader higher marks than they would have assigned in the absence of my feedback.

And the report will almost certainly cause me grief, when the school’s dictatorial president threatens me yet again (she has done this repeatedly following my time there) with legal action, if I blow the whistle on her. Hence that tug of my soul to the way of silent peace and integrity, tending my own garden . . . . One can only fight so long without seeing much positive effect from the fighting, before one begins to look longingly at a cloister of some kind.

Interestingly enough, though, as I’ve been mulling these questions over and as I wrote my report, word reached me about the outcome of a report I left at the school at which I worked prior to the one about which I’ve just written the third-party comment. This report took five years to see the light of day. And now that it has come to light, it has confirmed my judgment about a horrible situation at that institution which I asked its president to resolve, and which he refused to resolve, despite my pleas and the documentation I produced for him to demonstrate that he needed to act immediately.

Here’s what happened: in 2004, when the then president of the school left it to take another job, she assigned an employee to me to supervise. Why she did that, I don’t know. I suspect a bit of malice in the choice to give this employee to me to supervise. I wonder how much the outgoing president knew about the employee’s financial records, and about why the outgoing president seems to have turned a blind eye to this employee’s blatant misuse of federal funds. This is an employee who should always have been under my supervision, but who was not placed under me until a change of regimes in the school.

When I began to supervise the employee, I was shocked at what I found in her records. She was the overseer of a well-funded (a federally funded) program to assist first-generation African-American college students, to help them make it in college. Her financial records and reports were a tangle, a mess.

As I began to sift through them as the supervisor of this employee, I began to see some shocking patterns of fiscal impropriety: duplicate receipts for the same expenditure; huge receipts for expenditures that were clearly personal and had nothing to do with the program in question; payments to family members who were somehow connected to the program in a large nepotistic network, and so forth.

I documented all of this carefully, and then began to report first to the school’s interim president and then to its new president. I asked them both to act, to call the employee to accountability. I warned them that because this was a federally funded program, the fiscal impropriety of the employee would probably raise questions at the federal level, one day down the road.

And the two presidents completely ignored my reports. The interim president, in fact, permitted the employee to submit the federal grant proposal for a new cycle of funding without my even seeing the proposal. I knew that the reason for the evasion was to prevent my seeing the employee’s salary, which I had every reason to believe was astronomical, certainly far higher than mine as the school’s chief academic officer.

The next president accepted the judgment of the interim president about the employee, and blocked my attempt to move forward with any disciplinary action. The employee, who was an African-American woman, was permitted to ignore my supervision and to claim that I was harassing her as a white male.

And then I left this school to take another job, leaving behind a final, detailed report documenting the fiscal impropriety and insubordination of the employee in question. I produced this final report to protect myself, when the shit inevitably hit the fan, and the employee’s misuse of federal funds became public knowledge. I wanted it to be clear that I was not guilty of malfeasance as a supervisor, or any complicity in this employee’s misuse of federal funds.

And now I hear that, more than five years down the road, the president has finally realized that everything I reported to him about this employee was the gospel truth. She has been fired. The president has just now discovered that her salary on the books was second only to his in the entire institution—and that is the salary that is on the books. In all likelihood, what she was taking home in under-the-counter payments to herself was much larger.

I don’t know if the outcome of this process of whistle-blowing is encouraging or depressing. The employee got away with another five years of graft and nepotistic pay-offs to family members. Because I sought to do the job assigned to me, I was treated as a bigoted white man pursuing a black woman for racist and sexist reasons. The employee and her family members spread the word far and wide that I had documented her fiscal impropriety because my real motive was to take over their grant program and, as one of her family members put it, take their honey pot and make it my own!

Still, what I reported turned out to be true, when those with the authority to make a difference finally chose to listen. And I suspect something very similar will happen to the report I have just now written about the school at which I worked previously. The accrediting body will ignore my report and will re-accredit the school, which will pass its accreditation with flying colors.

Meanwhile, I’ll hold onto my report until the day comes when it will be needed to document precisely the problems I’m reporting right now, which will one day come to light and cause the school grief and embarrassment. And meanwhile, I may also leak the report to a few well-selected media sources, watchdog groups, and government agencies, so they can begin breathing down the neck of an accrediting body that hardly ever takes decisive action in the case of malfeasance of the sort I’m reporting to it. And nothing prevents my publishing the report in a condensed form on this blog, either.

And, as the brilliant African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University, noted frequently in her writings, even gardens, as idyllic and restful as they appear, take courage and work—especially when they're the kind of which Bethune dreamed, places in which rich and poor folks, black and white ones, Europeans and Africans and Americans, can sit and talk about building a more humane world. The kind of garden about which Dr. Bethune dreamed is certainly not an escape.

The graphic is South African artist Gerard Sokoto's "Man Tending a Garden," Durban Art Gallery.

Thom Hartmann on the CEO as Sociopath: Applications for Higher Education

Thom Hartmann posted an interesting piece at the Alternet site a few days ago. He suggests that, to be a successful CEO—particularly in the corporate, for-profit sector—one needs to have sociopathic tendencies.

Hartmann is a trained psychotherapist as well as a journalist. In this piece, he argues that to make decisions on an ongoing basis that ruin the lives of other human beings, and to be willing to reap rewards for doing that as a “leader,” one has to have sociopathic tendencies. How otherwise to put your head on the pillow at night (and take the big paycheck to the bank), without ever wondering about the lives of those you destroy?

The heart of Hartmann’s argument:

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths -- people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I think Thom Hartmann is onto something. As I’ve noted in previous postings, I’ve found this pattern of academic-leader-as-sociopathic-CEO on the rise in institutions of higher learning, and I believe that it’s a pattern that ought to concern everyone in American society, due to the trend-setting influence of higher education in our culture.

As university boards of trustees are dominated more and more by those with ties to the corporate world (corporate attorneys, business leaders, church leaders who run big church corporations, etc.), boards of trustees look more and more for presidents who think like CEOs, who act like CEOs, who proudly profess to be CEOs rather than academic leaders. And the consequences for the institutions such CEO-presidents lead could not be more dismal.

Academic inquiry and academic excellence suffer in these institutions, because faculty are exploited and know they’re exploited. Some academic CEO-presidents gleefully undermine faculty governance and faculty rights, ignore due process in firing faculty, threaten faculty members with reprisal if faculty ask critical questions: they reduce faculty to the level of dispensable workers-cum-things in a labor pool without the protections from workplace harassment long afforded to academics to enable them to engage in serious thought and serious research.

This approach to academic life undermines academic excellence in the grossest way possible, by making faculty frightened to think, speak, publish, and teach. In institutions governed by fear, where a ruthless CEO-president can fire at will (and there are such institutions of higher learning out there), faculty become so intimidated that they will not open their mouths even when academic integrity is at stake.

I have seen a case like this first-hand, and it has been sobering to watch. The president-CEO whose behavior I’ve observed closely, since I have had to work closely with her, actually calls herself a CEO—and proudly so. Her pattern, by now a well-established one, is to go into a relatively stable academic institution and immediately produce such chaos that the institution starts to malfunction, and then falls on financial hard times.

The chaos results from a pathological tendency of this leader to imagine that even those she has placed in positions of trust, and needs to trust in order to keep her institution functioning, are conspiring against her. When she begins to distrust a member of her own team, she actually targets that person and begins actively subverting his or her work, to lay a foundation for firing him or her with allegations that the team member did not work hard enough or competently enough.

The economic hard times this president-CEO induces through her deliberate creation of institutional chaos then become an excuse to fire more faculty at will—targeted faculty whom the president suspects of being enemies—without due process or strong proof of financial exigency. This, in turn, leads to negative media attention and negative scrutiny from accrediting bodies and academic watchdog agencies, who censure the schools led by this president. And the negative media attention and censuring by academic bodies in turn causes further attrition of funding to the school from donors who would otherwise support the school’s mission, but become concerned that its current leader is undermining the mission.

I’ve become convinced that this person’s behavior does, indeed, have a very strong sociopathic basis. She seems tragically incapable of viewing the other human beings around her, including members of her own academic team, as human. She treats people as objects—dispensable objects to be moved around at her whim on any given day, and when she has grown tired of those objects or suspicious of them, to be discarded like used tissue, with nary a thought about the consequences of such treatment for their human lives.

To behave that way, and to do so over and over again, even when the consequences for oneself are painful (e.g., negative media attention, complaints to academic watchdog bodies, lawsuits), one has to be sick, I’ve concluded. One has to be incapable of learning to change one's dysfunctional patterns, even when those patterns cause one increasing pain. This is a very specific kind of soul-sickness, a soul-sickness rooted in a remarkable capacity of a CEO to view other human beings as less human than herself, as, in fact, dispensable objects.

The corporate world rewards such sociopathic behavior in its CEOs by paying them big bucks. Sadly, the academic world has begun to do the same, as it makes dollar signs rather than academic integrity its bottom line—as its governing boards do this, that is.

In the case I’m discussing above, though the CEO-president in question has now replicated the pattern I’m describing at each institution she leads, her governing boards have stood behind her. Her ruthless, inhumane treatment of her employees is justified as good economic stewardship, necessary hard-nosed pragmatic decision making to keep an institution economically viable.

When this approach to academic leadership is allowed to go unchallenged in our society, and when it’s allowed to become prevalent throughout higher education, we’re in trouble as a society. Higher education is not, in the final analysis, about making big bucks. It should not be about that goal, at least.

It should be about producing leaders who have sound values necessary to keep democracy alive. We fund all institutions of higher learning, both public and private, lavishly because of the social contract colleges and universities have made with our culture, to use those funds to produce strong, ethically grounded leaders with the skill to build democratic institutions for the next generation.

When we allow sociopaths to run our universities, and to justify their sociopathic behavior by claiming that they are simply being good CEOs, we’re headed for big trouble as a society. Academic leaders who betray core democratic values in how they run a university teach an unhappy lesson about values to the students of their university.

As I've noted in previous postings about this topic, before it loses its soul definitively, American higher education would be well advised to re-examine the philosophy of some of the prophetic founding figures of values-oriented, transformative higher education, including Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University. In her "Spiritual Autobiography," Dr. Bethune notes the foundational significance of institutions of higher learning in imparting the values necessary for democracy to thrive, as she concludes, “In this atomic age, when one small materialistic possession has wrought fear among peoples of the world, I am convinced that leadership must strive hard to show the value of these spiritual tools which are as real as anything we touch or feel, and far more powerful."

Overpaid CEOs and Higher Education: Continued Need for Critique

I posted a few days ago about the astonishing claim of CNBC commentator Mark Haines that we can’t expect Wall Street companies to be well run by CEOs making less than $250,000 annually (here).

Haines is still at it, still defending the power and privilege of the vastly overcompensated big man and big woman on top. Yesterday he told co-anchor Erin Burnett that the public’s interest in regulating CEO pay is “getting scary” (here).

Scary for whom, I wonder? For the big men and women at the top who have tried to convince us that they deserve more—grossly more—because they work harder than the rest of us, and have sharper leadership skills? Haines is clearly frightened of the possibility that “ordinary” workers—all the rest of us, who don’t receive the obscene salaries and benefits of CEOs—might discover that we work just as hard as or even harder than those who claim to deserve more for their work, and that we have skills to lead as sharp as those who have been paid an arm and a leg to lead us to the edge of a cliff.

Last week, in fact, in an exchange with Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman of California, Haines asked, “What do the people on Main Street know about running a financial system?"

As I’ve noted repeatedly, my entrée point into discussions of overcompensated CEOs is my experience in academic life, where the adoption of a corporate leadership model has resulted in a trend to gross overcompensation of university presidents and CFOs, as faculty salaries remain flat or fall. This trend has been radically destructive of important values essential to the mission of universities.

The corporatizing trend in university leadership rewards big men and big women at the top who all too often lack any real understanding of what academic life is all about, and any profound commitment to academic excellence and collegial pursuit of the truth. Increasingly, the leadership structures of many universities is top-heavy and top-down, as the corporate model is imposed on academic life.

This assures that the voices most needed to chart a sound course for a university's future—the voices of those who actually do the hard work of teaching and mentoring students, the voices of faculty—are not heard. There are strong parallels between what is happening as markets crash, and the situation of many colleges and universities today, which are increasingly unable to fulfill their mission to shape leaders for our democratic society, because they have adopted the outlook and structures of the corporate world, and in the process have betrayed core values of the academy.

Not much will change in academic life until we are as thoroughgoing in our analysis of the shortcomings of the CEO-president as we are with our present scrutiny of the shortcomings of the Wall Street executives who have brought us to the brink of economic collapse.

CEOs, Meritocracy, and Values in Higher Education: The Witness of Mary McLeod Bethune

CNBC telejournalist Mark Haines made an interesting comment yesterday about the big men and women on top of the corporate world, and what they think they are owed for being on top (here). In an interview with Rep. Charlie Rangel, Haines stated,

But you can’t really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall Street companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don’t make more than $250,000.

As I have noted, this myth of “pay-for-performance meritocracy” has also invaded American higher education, with disastrous results (here). As in corporate culture, increasingly in American higher education, there is the presupposition that the big woman or man on top deserves big bucks because she/he merits them—works harder, achieves more, is more ruthless about decision-making than anyone beneath her or him. This presupposition enters American higher education through governing boards, which are dominated by those imbued with the mentality of corporate culture.

As my numerous postings about this problem have noted (see, e.g., here), the adoption of a corporate model of pay-for-performance meritocracy in university leadership has assured that universities today are sometimes run by ruthless, power-hungry, egotists who do not understand or value academic life. When those academic big women or big men on top lead church-owned universities, they often sell out the core values of the faith-based university as they apply their business model to education. Their attitudes towards co-workers, their respect for the human rights of their employees, their commitment to collaboration, to mission, to empowering others: these often shockingly contradict the core values of the institutions they claim to serve, and of the social principles of the churches that own these universities.

The imposition of a top-down meritocratic model of management in universities—a model totally unsuited to the mission of a university—threatens academic freedom, since the control techniques employed by corporate managers prioritize conformity to the imperatives of the big woman or man on top, rather than pursuit of the truth. The top-down meritocratic management model is also inimical to collegiality, to the formation of communities of free, shared discourse of colleagues seeking the truth together. By their very existence, such collegial communities of discourse—which are the lifeblood of academic life—are a threat to the big woman or man on top who is intent on controlling others, in order to dominate and stay on top.

The damning faults of the grotesque hybrid created by the union of a corporate business model and the ideals of higher education are becoming increasingly apparent in this period of economic downturn, when many universities are reporting major losses in their endowments. Reports about the effects of this downturn on universities are everywhere: faculty workloads are increasing; salaries are being frozen and tenure put on hold; faculty are receiving imperatives from on high to teach ever-increasing numbers of students with ever dwindling resources.

And as these challenges to the pursuit of academic excellence face teachers in many universities—serious, fundamental challenges—the salaries of top administrators lincluding presidents and CFOs do not diminish, but in many cases, are even being augmented (see, e.g., here).

Something is wrong with this picture. Seriously wrong. As I think about Mark Haines’ absurd claim that you can’t really expect Wall Street companies to be well run by those who don’t make more than $250,000, I renew my call to President Obama and others with the ability to make constructive changes in American higher education to look critically at the negative effects of the top-down, meritocratic business model of leadership in American higher education.

As I note in my open letter to President Obama on the occasion of his public forum at Bethune-Cookman University last September (see, e.g., here), prophetic leaders of higher education such as the founder of that university, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, point the way to a viable future for American higher education by emphasizing the values on which higher education is based. In her “Spiritual Autobiography” Dr. Bethune notes, “In this atomic age, when one small materialistic possession has wrought fear among peoples of the world, I am convinced that leadership must strive hard to show the value of these spiritual tools which are as real as anything we touch or feel, and far more powerful.”

Dr. Bethune constantly insisted that higher education is foundational for American democracy, precisely because of its emphasis on values. She noted that universities play a premier role in assuring the success of democracy by imparting to students the values essential to a culture of civic virtue. And she recognized that those values have to be lived first and foremost by leaders in higher education, by faculty and presidents and CFOs and boards of trustees.

Pay-for-performance meritocracy betrays core values of academic life and undermines civic virtue. In this period when the excesses of corporate CEOs are being carefully considered by the public at large and when the bogus claims to meritocracy of the corporate elite are being exposed, it is high time for a similar reappraisal of the meritocratic claims of the CEOs of American higher education.