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Subject: Weekly Briefing: At Ohio State, the trustees, with no president, are in charge
Courtney Hergesheimer, Columbus D
The college without a president
As president, Kristina M. Johnson (above) oversaw commencement exercises this past weekend at Ohio State University. Then she left.
Johnson had announced her resignation last November, saying she would leave at the end of the academic year. She cited differences with the Board of Trustees.
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Doral Chenoweth, The Columbus Dispatch, USA Today Network
The university without a president
As president, Kristina M. Johnson (above) oversaw commencement exercises this past weekend at Ohio State University. Then she left.
Johnson had announced her resignation last November, saying she would leave at the end of the academic year. She cited differences with the Board of Trustees.
Although a search is underway, no interim leader has been named. The institution is being governed by its trustees, with members of the president’s cabinet reporting to subcommittees of the board.
“I have fought for academic freedom and to protect the university’s right to decide which professors to hire,” Johnson wrote in an essay published in local media in February. “University curricula must not be subject to political forces. Ohio State professors must be allowed to pursue academic research without fear or favor, and ideas must succeed or fail based on academic merit rather than their political appeal.”
That agenda “was no longer in step with what the majority of the trustees wanted,” she wrote.
To the faculty, “it’s as bizarre as it sounds,” said Jill Galvan, an associate professor of English and a member of the AAUP chapter’s executive committee. She told our David Jesse: “We’re in the dark.”
The move to a leaderless university also appears to defy Ohio State’s bylaws, which state that a president must be in charge of the institution and that executive vice presidents report directly to that president.
Experts on the college presidency say they can’t remember a similar governing scheme at any other university. And it comes at a time in higher education when leaders are eyeing the exits, and staying in the post for, on average, under six years.
Discover. Even after Roe v. Wade guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion, in 1973, the practice was never fully integrated into reproductive-health services in the United States. Find out how Planned Parenthood contributed to that, and why it is not doing as much as it could do now. (The New Yorker)
Watch. In The Dropout, a streaming series about 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes’s departure from Stanford to build Theranos, her fraudulent blood-test company with the ultimately very-embarrassed, rich-and-famous board, Amanda Seyfried plays Holmes as a blonde schemer and charmer.(Hulu)
Read. Now Holmes is a mother of two and headed to prison (she was to have reported on April 27, but her lawyers appealed; she’s in San Diego, free as a bird). Was this reporter charmed and duped? (The New York Times)
Learn. True Biz, a novel about a school for the deaf in Ohio, is the latest book by Sara Nović, an adjunct professor of language and culture at Stockton University and a deaf-rights advocate. Lessons in American Sign Language for you, the reader, mark your way through the plot. (Random House)
