Politics for Ugly People?

This morning, I went to a faculty forum for a candidate for the provost position at my state university in Kentucky. For readers unfamiliar with universities, the provost is the no. 2 position behind the university president. In general, the provost of a state university is more concerned with the nuts and bolts of administration while presidents deal more with state agencies, fund-raising, and public ceremony.

Like a university president, the provost's job is fundamentally political. Jay Leno exaggerated when he said that politics was show business for ugly people. Politicians like Mitt Romney and Kay Bailey Hutchinson may not be actor good-looking, but they are very pretty people in the vapid, blow-dried, way that Americans demand. That's not the case with academic administrators who tend to be pretty average if not a little pallid looking from spending so much time indoors. Academic administration is politics for people who aren't pretty enough to be politicians.

Today's finalist was Dr. Karla Hughes, the Dean of Human Ecology at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. The way that academics at low level universities like Morehead State call everybody "Dr." is extremely annoying and ridiculous. I always feel like I should say "defibrillator, stat" whenever anyone calls me Dr. Caric. But Karla Hughes was not annoying at all. In fact, her responses showed a lot of press secretary (Ari Fleischer comes to mind) skills in demonstrating that she knew several sides of every question without committing herself to any particular answers in advance. University people had reason to be impressed. Hughes projected a sense of being flexible in supporting projects that looked promising without carrying a huge agenda of her own. It's nothing too exciting, but that's a good approach given that Morehead State is relatively small, underfinanced state university serving the impoverished area of Eastern Kentucky. Reasonable administrators will support projects from the most talented people they have on board.