B'Bye Mr. President

So, David Hardesty has decided to retire from WVU, effective Sept. 20, 2007, as the longest serving president in the institution's history (though falling short of Concord University's Jerry Beasley, who has served as that institution's president since 1985). I was graduating just as Neil Bucklew was leaving and Hardesty was taking office.

There was some controversy at the time of his hiring. After all, Hardesty had no real academic administrative experience coming from the world of corporate and tax law. Hardesty was no doubt intelligent, (WVU, Oxford, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law) but many felt he would not be able to handle the political eddies of higher education or the unique details of university governance.

That was a miscalculation. First of all, WVU, being the flagship institution, for good or ill sets the agenda for higher education in West Virginia more than any other body including, the largely clueless Legislature.

Secondly, the fears were based on a misunderstanding of the role of a modern major university president; namely, the fear that someone occupying that seat must be able to handle the intricacies of academic development, faculty management, etc. Nonsense. When you operate at the level of WVU president, you can hire people to handle the nuts and bolts of everyday and academic operations. While small college and university presidents must be more skilled in the ways of academia, a major university president has but two duties that s/he must shoulder for themselves; raising money and maintaining and enlarging institutional prestige.

By that standard, Hardesty has been a success. Research funding has doubled and enrollment, powered by out-of-state bargain hunters and PROMISE scholarship fueled WV students has increased by 5,000, or about 20%. Plus, he hired the right football coach and got lucky in having a GREAT basketball coach fall into his lap. Partnerships with NASA, the FBI and the biometrics industry have also given WVU a luster of the high tech world.

In fact, his only great PR plunder was his insistence on “Free Speech Zones” that would have limited campus protests to specific, isolated areas. Perhaps President Hardesty forgot that it is in the nature of a university to be a free speech zone in its entirety.

So what does this say for the next WVU president? I would not be surprised if a former or soon- to-be former politician makes a bid for the seat. After all who has more experience in the schmoozing and fundraising skills so necessary for the job? There might be as big a scramble for this vacated position as when Bob Byrd finally calls it quits (sit down, John Raese).