I am being systematically haunted by underqualified university presidents

Wow, can't believe they're already doing a reboot of the Bob Caslen saga. (Plus a few other things on my mind this week.)

A university to which I have ties recently appointed a new school president who, despite a distinguished record of military service, lacked the credentials which are typically prerequisite to even applying for such a position. He was rushed through the hiring process by a board of trustees heavily influenced by the state’s governor. The board gleefully proceeded in making the hire despite students, faculty, and prominent alumni banding together to raise valid concerns — which the board made no pretense of listening to, let alone alleviating — regarding the new president’s academic experience and past public comments.

Since this is a blog loosely inspired by Gamecock athletics, you might think the foregoing passage describes former University of California South Carolina president Robert Caslen. And, technically speaking, it does describe Robert Caslen. But it gives me no pleasure to tell you that it also describes the newly appointed university president in my adopted hometown of Youngstown, Ohio.

Since the week before Thanksgiving, when news broke of the Youngstown State BoT’s intention to hire Congressman Bill Johnson, this has been the main thing going on in my community. Every day brings new revelations about either Johnson’s unfitness for the office or the Board’s brazenness in their single-minded pursuit of making this hire while shutting out all dissenting voices. Maybe there were valid reasons to hire someone with Johnson’s background (Air Force veteran, entrepreneur, and eight-term back-bencher from a district gerrymandered to ensure he never had to break a sweat), but the board’s deliberate efforts to circumvent dialogue with the community did not inspire confidence.

Then came the program cuts. Earlier this month, YSU announced that it would be eliminating five degree programs and “retrenching” in several others. During a contractually mandated Q&A with the academic senate, the school provost made little effort to conceal her exasperation with the faculty’s insistence on viewing YSU as a public service instead of a cutthroat capitalist enterprise.

Deflating as it was, the cuts — and the administration’s indignant, bottom-line-minded defense of the cuts — helped bring the decision to hire Johnson into focus, somewhat. The board is bringing in someone they perceive to be a businessman to run the school like a business. You know, the way Authentic Brands Group came in to run Sports Illustrated like a business. Or the way hordes of private equity firms bought up hospitals to run them like a business.

YSU is one of the biggest remaining employers in the Mahoning Valley, a region of Northeast Ohio that has been devastated by half a century of outsourcing and deindustrialization. One of the implicit bets my family made in moving here is that one of the last remaining tentpoles holding this area up would not suddenly collapse. In a single stroke of nepotism (three of the board members have donated a total of $85,000 to Johnson’s practically unopposed congressional campaigns), everything seems quite a bit more perilous.

In the early days, I used my experience witnessing the Caslen saga to reassure the locals this corrupt house of cards would eventually collapse. Day by day, the pressure would mount, and one day he’d accidentally call it “Ypsilanti State University” or something and the only option left would be to resign in disgrace. Maybe I was right, but every day I grow less and less sure. For one, YSU isn’t under the same kind of media microscope that USC is. For another, we’re five years deeper into this bold new era of cronyism and brazen corruption, and the power of public shame feels far less potent now that it did even in 2019.

Probably, these are not two freak occurrences but a rising trend of weaponizing university presidencies as expressions of brute political force.

R.I.P. to Pitchfork, one of the best blogs to ever do it. 6.3/10.

It was another brutal week in the media world, with the grim reaper darkening the doors of both of Sports Illustrated and the notoriously hard-to-impress music blog Pitchfork. SI has been a rotting husk of its former self for quite some time, but Pitchfork had been motoring along, doing a reasonable job at weathering destabilizing changes to the music and media industries — but undoubtedly waning in its influence as the cost of listening to a new album dropped from almost $20 to almost $0.

In his Pitchfork eulogy on Platformer, Casey Newton places some of the blame for Pitchfork’s declining cultural relevance on Spotify’s algorithmic music recommendations — which are a genuinely helpful tool that I often rely on myself — while also highlighting what we’re losing in the exchange.

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with. 

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism. 

For that, in other words, you needed Pitchfork. And while it may have dimmed in its power over the years, it will always loom large in my mind — as a publication that met its moment with actual, discernible taste, and shared its tastes with the world, right up until the moment that the algorithms flattening our culture washed Pitchfork away, too.

I would add that in this age of (over)abundance, critics might be more needed than they’ve ever been. Yes, I can just listen to everything on my Release Radar, but that also means sifting through a bunch of crap that I don’t like. I enjoy discovering new music, but it seems like a much better arrangement to have people whose job it is to discover new music so that every single person doesn’t have to do it for themselves.

It’s okay to admit we don’t know anything about what it’s like for a defeated incumbent to run for president again

Donald Trump’s 30-point win in the Iowa caucuses is compelling evidence of something that has seemed obvious for quite some time: he is going to win the republican nomination for president, and it’s not going to be very close. If there was anything surprising to me in Tuesday night’s results, it was how quick pundits were to absorb this data point into a narrative about Trump’s stranglehold on the republican party.

I think there’s an equally strong case to be made that the result reveals electoral weakness. If Joe Biden only got 51 percent of the vote against Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, it would rightly be considered an unmitigated disaster. But the reality is that it is not possible to know what to expect from a defeated incumbent on his way to winning renomination by his party. Because hardly anyone has ever tried to do it, and only one person has ever succeeded.

Martin Van Buren lost reelection in 1840 as an anti-slavery Democrat and failed to gain renomination in 1844 before running on the Free Soil ticket in 1848. Millard Fillmore gained the presidency upon the 1850 assassination of Zachary Taylor but failed to secure the nomination of his own party (the Whigs) when he ran for a full term in 1852 (running instead as a Know-Nothing). After losing in a landslide to FDR, Herbert Hoover sought (and failed to gain) the Republican nomination in both 1936 and 1940.

The only defeated former president to succeed in being renominated by his party was Grover Cleveland in 1892, more than 70 years before the modern primary system was born.

So, is it a show of strength for Trump to win the Iowa caucuses by the largest margin history? Or a show of weakness that a group of people who almost certainly voted for him at least once in the past eight years are split 50-50 on whether to vote for him again? In these situations, you normally set expectations by what similarly situated candidates (in recent history) have done previously — which is why Democrats are freaking out about how much worse Biden’s polling is than Obama’s was heading into 2012.

But in Trump’s situation — we’ve basically never seen this before, so I’d hope we could muster enough humility to acknowledge we have no way of knowing what this all means.

Some good things I read this week

The mass layoffs at Sports Illustrated resurfaced this banger from the last days of Proper Deadspin. (As an unintended coda, the pop-up ads that have been inserted during the four intervening years make the post borderline unreadable.)

Another throwback, to the aftermath of the 737 Max crashes on how Taylorism slowly rotted Boeing from the inside out.

A pretty good counterargument by Max Read on the moral necessity of leaving Substack.

Nine new (to me) songs I enjoyed this week

In light of this week’s Pitchfork news, I feel compelled to share my methodology for how I produce these: through a combination of Spotify’s Release Radar, NPR’s New Music Friday, and Pitchfork reviews and Best New Music selections.