Princeton's greatest asset is behind the scenes

When you graduate, as I very much hope and expect you all will, I hope you will listen carefully to the language, both Latin and English, with which your degree is conferred. The dean will present you to the president and to her "fellow trustees." The president will then admit you to the "first" or baccalaureate degree not solely on her own authority, or that of some abstract entity called "Princeton," but once again in the name of the "trustees." It might be a good idea to have some idea who these people are and why they matter. This thought comes to me as I watch a national news story still unfolding, not a front-pager but not buried among the small ads either, concerning the presidency of Boston University. A series of articles has chronicled the curious circumstances surrounding what I must call the "near appointment" of Daniel Goldin, longtime head of NASA, as the president of B.U. Boston University, with its nearly 30,000 students, is one of the largest and most important of American private universities.

In early October, the chairman of the B.U. board of trustees announced the board's unanimous and enthusiastic decision to offer Goldin the presidency, subject only to the tweaking of a few details, including, perhaps, exactly where he would rank among the ten top overpaid university presidents. But within three weeks there were well publicized and obviously well founded rumors that the board of trustees was about to change its mind, or perhaps, indeed, had already changed it, and was now poised to disinvite the candidate whose abilities to walk on water had been so lavishly praised in earlier press releases. Mr. Goldin, for his part, publicly bruited his distaste for coitus interruptus in the appointment process, and said he had hired a lawyer. Before the month was out B.U. and Goldin issued a terse announcement that the wedding was off. All too credible rumor has it that the trustees ponied up $1.8M to assuage the diss of the dissolution.

Bearing in mind that Mr. Goldin's freefall was roughly the distance between carpet and floor, the opulence of the palimony gives new luster to the expression "Goldin parachute." This man is being paid way more for doing absolutely nothing at B.U. than Princeton professors of my generation have been paid for forty years of industrious service. If I were a B.U. student, faculty member, alumnus, or above all a B.U. benefactor, I might have questions about this allocation of resources. Indeed, you need be none of the above to do so.

Much of the comment I have seen focuses on the problematical personality of the retired president, John Silber. Dr. Silber has long been a colorful figure in higher education, and the topic of his role in all this is interesting and relevant; but it is not the central issue. The specific central issue is the behavior of the B.U. board of trustees. The philosophical central issue is boards of trustees in general. Boards of trustees have legal control of virtually all private American colleges and universities, and thousands of other charitable, educational, religious and political organizations as well. Trustees are so called because they have been entrusted with executive power over institutions and their resources. Boards of trustees are usually "self-perpetuating" in whole or in part, and their composition is often complex, even Byzantine. The size of Princeton's board, for example, can vary between 23 and 40, distributed among three quite different categories, with differing terms of service. Trustee governance is on the face of it highly implausible. No MBA would invent such a system, nor would any democrat. But Princeton is neither a business corporation nor a mini-democracy. It is a vast historical charity with a particularly complicated psyche and a dim, nagging spiritual memory.

Few Princeton undergraduates would rank our board of trustees — a group largely invisible to them — among the institution's compelling draws, on a par with the DeNunzio pool, say, or Houseparties Weekend. In fact the board is perhaps our greatest asset: A group of men and women who with rare exception are stunning in their competence, industry and institutional devotion. Think about it. Given the fact that opportunities for trustee mischief or malfeasance are abundant, and for incompetence or fecklessness nearly universal, what is perhaps oddest about the B.U. fiasco is that it is the exception rather than the rule. The ambition of my essay, however, extends a little further than clucking about Boston's trustees and bragging about Princeton's. Great trustees are the necessary but insufficient requirement for a great board of trustees, since an effective board requires an effective central administration with which to works in subtle symbiosis. Oddly enough undergraduates have more say about the composition of Princeton's board than about the appointment of any administrative officer. Each year a member of the graduating class, chosen by a popular if baroque voting mechanism, joins the board. You could be that person. At the very least, you could have an informed, principled opinion about who that person is. Seize the opportunity. John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.