By Michael P. Riccards

When I was a young boy at St. Vincent Elementary school in Madison, New Jersey, I encountered a bully boy, Billy, from a public school. He enjoyed bullying me, picking fights and generally making my life miserable. 

Finally I went to my father and asked him to teach me how to protect myself. He bought new boxing gloves and a punching bag and instructed me how to throw a punch or two. 

Weeks later, Billy appeared and began harassing me outside of a borough park on the way from school. This time as he put up his dukes and turned and threw a punch, I returned with a blow at his jaw but ended up on his shoulder.  He collapsed and started to cry. Out of the hedges came his mother, who called me a bully. I always wondered if she was more than a spectator. In any case, Billy vanished from my life.

Now we are faced with a gigantic bully sitting in the august Oval Office. I am startled as a lifetime academic to see how accomplished college administrators, who made their way up the ladder of success, so gingerly have him blackmail the major universities. 

And I am equally surprised that major universities have admitted in public reports that indeed they have had episodes of antisemitism. For example, when the caretaker president of Harvard admitted those findings, I wondered what in the hell was the administration during when this was occurring. They did not know??? 

Harvard of course is really a gigantic money making machine.  At the University of Massachusetts in Boston, I instituted an affirmative action program in which the campus chancellor and the university president lamented that they did not know if their dean, me, could do that, but they would see what the negative reactions were.

Our theatre department had a woman who spent the entire class talking everyday about her ex who was so mean to her.  A colleague in the the social sciences was denied tenure by me, and his appeal  was carefully orchestrated by his friends and the vice president. A mediocre dean at Rutgers once overturned me. Then a few years later a whole cast of sexual allegations exploded over his well worn desk.

The university administrators do not have the fortitude to deal with complaining non-productive faculty and semi-involved board members. So when they are faced with a real challenge they try to buy their way out. When the antagonist is the president, they pledge compliance. Depending his mood, they are successful. Or not. Or both.

Now we even have once-respected university presidents asking Mr. Epstein for dating advice, another foundation head figuring how to put drugs in his wife’s drinks, a royal duke of the nation who acts like a medieval whoremaster. He is an heir to the throne, a good example of why we need republican institutions if only we in republics don’t have such abuses in our own stables.

During a long career in higher education, Michael P. Riccards served as president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, Shepherd College (now Shepherd University) in West Virginia, and Fitchburg State College (now Fitchburg State University) in Massachusetts. He has authored books on public policy, the American political process, the papacy as a leadership problem and the history of the American presidency.

Categories: Jandoli Institute, Michael Riccards, Politics