Staff Editorial: An academic endeavor

The possibility that Executive Vice President John Fry might leave Penn to become the president of the University of Vermont is disappointing, to say the least.

That Fry is an asset to this university is almost without question. His efforts to reform the way Penn does business and his transformation of a campus that, six or seven years ago, was notorious for its high crime and which featured none of the high-end stores that we have today, have been highly successful.

His initiatives have often been criticized by members of the West Philadelphia community, but nonetheless, the fact remains that Fry's loss would be a terrible blow to Penn.

Even more troubling than the possibility of Fry's departure is that he would become the president of a university. Historically, a man with no Ph.D., no academic experience and no scholarly background would not even be considered for such a position.

This is not to say that businessmen have no place in running academic institutions. In the chancellorships of large state universities, people with backgrounds like Fry's have excelled. But, unlike university presidents, chancellors are usually responsible for oversight of a large system, not for the operations of a single institution dedicated to the furthering of knowledge.

What's troubling is not that John Fry is certain to fail as a university president -- he may well be a smashing success, as he has been here -- but that it signals the unfortunate end of the academic monopoly over the presidencies of academic institutions.

Colleges are not businesses. Sure, large universities like Penn have substantial business interests and a great deal of economic clout, but they remain fundamentally institutions of learning.

Turning over a school's highest office to a businessman is akin to giving up on a university's primary mission. It is a cynical recognition of the fact that a university president is no longer a key public intellectual or a leader of scholars. Instead, he or she is a CEO, the fundraiser-in-chief.

Raising money and effective, efficient management are certainly essential to a prosperous university. But university presidents such as our own Judith Rodin, a noted psychologist, and Harvard's former leader, Neil Rudenstein, a scholar of Renaissance literature, have shown that substantial fundraising and business competence do not require an MBA.

An academic institution is a nuanced entity; one cannot approach its operations without a recognition of its purpose. That kind of understanding comes only from doing. University presidencies ought to remain the exclusive preserve of the academic.

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