"Deans Manage Their Departments Like Don Corleone, / Although Their Crimes Are Not as Organized."

"Philologists may quibble, but who can deny / that 'Dean' and 'Don' are just a vowel away?"

A.M. Juster, whose work I've noted here before (and who in prosaic life is the former head of the Social Security Administration) wrote this poem, apparently in April of this year. It's called "Epistle to a Friend Confused about the Ivy League"; as Joseph Bottum (Poems Ancient and Modern) notes, it is in the form of "the elegiac couplet, … a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line." You can read the entire thing here.

I should note that my experience of law school deans at UCLA has not been the same as that which Juster describes, even when I have had substantial differences with them. But I've certainly heard such things before, especially accounting for the poetic license to engage in a certain degree of hyperbole; see, e.g., Jonathan Adler's "A Frightening View of Free Speech and Academic Freedom at Harvard."

Comments

[Dr. Ed 2]

The difference is that the Don does NOT want to fight with people, while the Dean DOES.

Both operate outside the law, but the Don wants to fly below radar while the Dean doesn't care.

[Ridgeway]

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.... That is why academic politics are so bitter."

I did not realize that quote had a name ("Sayre's Law"), but it seemed appropriate.

[Dilan Esper]

Henry Kissinger used to say a truncated version of it-- "academic disputes are so vitriolic precisely because the stakes are so small".

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

This guy sounds like just another disaffected clinger, whining about legitimate (reality-based) education, modern America, and all of this damned progress . . . albeit a far more literate right-winger than is customary these days.

[Joseph Bottum]

Thanks for the mention of Poems Ancient and Modern (https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com), the new Substack newsletter that publishes a poem with introduction every weekday — usually a classic poem from the tradition, but occasionally a new formal poem, as with A.M. Juster's take on the Ivy League.