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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

The morning line

While Gold remains the even money favorite to take over as the next big cheese of the Milky Way, others are now in the running. As a public service here are the odds:

4-1 Tom Brady
6-1 Any past or present member of the Board of Trustees
8-1 Carty Finkbeiner
15-1 Dean Nina
20-1 Attila the Hun
25-1 Anyone with MD after their name

Or, you can bet the field at 50-1. The field includes: J. Barlowe, B. Pryor, B. Patrick, the entire faculty of the medical college, several astrologers and anyone past or present who has picked up the president's dry cleaning. My name was just removed from the field list. The bookies said I was a worse bet than the lotto.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom Amstutz?

Anonymous said...

You know who would be good? Sara Lundquist, the very competent, smart, quietly efficient, honest poetry scholar who is currently the chair of the English Department. She is well liked by her colleagues, has more or less united a contentious group of academics, defuses pressure cooker situations with grace, and gets along pretty well with just about anybody, including the administration. I think the university would be a much better place if she or someone like her -- a capable administrator who is also a working humanities scholar -- were named provost. It would be an olive branch to those who feel disenfranchised, and it would be a boon to the budget-watching process the administration has been championing.

So there's my dark horse candidate. But I'm not joking. I'm being very serious. Here is a real solution.

Anonymous said...

6:34, another secret admirer of sara!

Anonymous said...

Naw ... You need a sense of humor and an appreciation for the absurd to be a provost ... and you MUST LIKE GOATS!

Anonymous said...

Alan Goodridge is around !

Anonymous said...

I vote for Sara Lundquist as well. She is intelligent,wise and considerate, qualities seriously lacking in upper administration.

Anonymous said...

From the U. North Texas campus newspaper:

http://www.ntdaily.com/?p=9031#more-9031

Sound familiar? It looks like Haggett will begin her tenure there as "highly regarded" as she did here. Do you think she'll jump to a chancellorship or presidency elsewhere in a year or in two years? How many initiatives will she leave started but not finished? Will she be popular with the students and the faculty for her able leadership?

Three cheers for resume-building! Now: For our next provost, could we have some university-building?

Anonymous said...

Sara Lundquist fan here, too. Unfortunately, I doubt that the qualities we value in her--competence, efficiency, honesty--are the qualities this administration is looking for.

Professor Demeritus said...

Choosing Gold might create more problems than it would solve. They'd have to give him a hefty raise as the appointment would double his responsibilities. This would mean, if I remember the salary structure correctly, that he would earn more than Jacobs. That's just unacceptable!