A blog post with some insightful
comments about UVA situation (http://bit.ly/PD6WNv) notes that the folks who
pressured the president to resign favor something they call "strategic
dynamism." The blogger notes that
it's pretty much all about dynamism and not much about strategy. That is, it's about action, not planning.
This had me thinking about Karl Mannheim's ideal types of
conservative thinking (ranging from bureaucratic conservatism to fascism). Mannheim characterizes the latter as “active
and irrational,” noting that at “the very heart of its theory and its practice
lies the apotheosis of direct action, the belief in the decisive deed, in the
significance attributed to the initiative of a leading elite. The essence of politics is to recognize and
grapple with the demands of the hour” (Ideology and Utopia 1936 : 134 http://bit.ly/PD6NJT).
Indeed, it's a real danger in higher education when
administrators and government boards think that "running a college like a
business" means adopting the deference to swashbuckling command and
control oriented decisive simplifiers.
The very fact that they cannot see how many different ways there are to
be "like a business" is what makes them most dangerous.
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