Dear Dean Misanthrope
DEAR DEAN MISANTHROPE: I think we agree in the language we are using but disagree completely in substance. We agree that "leadership" is the correct principle, but I hope my use of the term does not remind anyone of a related German word, Fiihrer. I think you know that one of my reasons for recently surrendering the deanship and thus depriving myself of many pleasant associations with you and the other deans in the official administrative family was my profound dissatisfaction with the life of mutual suspicion and recrimination which faculty and administration always insist upon as the normal state of university affairs. I got tired of faculty and administration glaring at each other across the barricades, like Christians hell-bent for the pearly gates but each chewing the leg of the fellow on the rung above. If we are all going to the same place, I think there are better ways of getting there. The administrators must lead, to be sure but not with a halter. It seems to me that it is your extreme view, matched with the extremes of the " academic mind" as found in the faculty, that gives us the eternal Donnybrook Fair in faculty-administration relations. Sincerely yours, PETER PERT Professor of Psychology