Love him or hate him, this ex-Harvard president (etc, etc) has a keen eye for “what could possibly go wrong with that?” The entire interview ranges from the current campus controversies regarding “safe-spaces” and “micro-agressions” through boycotts of Israel and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). For Economics in the Rear-View Mirror the following observations are of interest, especially the recent (hey, this is a history blog after all!) stagnation in the institutional morphing of academic disciplines as academic departments.
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…I think American higher education is the envy of the world, but if it has a flaw, it is that it changes and evolves too slowly. That, because of traditions of faculty governance, it has the dynamism, or lack of dynamism, that economists traditionally establish, or attribute, to workers’ collectives. And, you know, why should it be that in the 35 years, in 35 years there was not a single change in the departmental structure of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University? Could one imagine such a thing in 6 almost any other major institution in society? And so I think that this privileging of comfort is a threat to the ability to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing society….
…Median age of the Harvard professoriate – those who are tenured professors – is only slightly younger than I am, and I am 61. And that seems wildly inappropriate. And if you compare it with almost any other human institution – any great law firm, any great management team, any great company, the physicians at any great hospital, even the senior officials of the US government – it looks very old. And then you ask yourself, what is it that’s special about a university? Well, the key job of a faculty member is working with people between the ages of 18 and 25, and the other key responsibility is to have bold new ideas. So you would think, if anything, there probably are arguments for university faculty for being younger than other institutions, not substantially older, and so I think that lifetime security, that tendency towards an aged faculty – you know, Harvard has more professors over the age of 80 than it does under the age of 40 – seems to me to be something that is quite damaging in terms of the ability of universities to keep up….
Source: Conversations with Bill Kristol (transcript). Podcast.