Evidently, Elizabeth Hoffman, former president of the University of Colorado, is unfamiliar with a well-known adage on leadership that goes something like this:
“Anyone can steer the Enterprise when the Klingons aren’t around.”
Last week, in a speech that was originally supposed to be titled “Why I Left the University of Colorado,” Hoffman, attempted to shed any responsibility for her tenure at CU, rolling out a litany of inane excuses.
Let’s start with the most comical: Hoffman blamed her controversial “C-word” deposition – my personal favorite CU fiasco – on Saturday morning fatigue.
And understandably, early-morning depositions are a B-word, especially when a bunch of D-words haul your A-word in for the sole purpose of goading you to “say something dumb.”
Who doesn’t find that annoying?
Yet, only an out-of-touch academic could possible justify the use of the C-word by claiming that Geoffrey Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales,” utilized the word as a term of endearment hundreds of years ago.
Now, Hoffman says it was a “really very dumb thing to say” and that the episode will “haunt” her forever.
Chaucer once wrote: “Yet in oure asshen olde is fyr yreke.” Seriously.
I have no idea what it means, though it sounds smutty. Hoffman, however, probably does … making her C-word excuse merely silly, not “dumb,”and certainly nothing serious enough to obsess over for a lifetime.
Now the question is: Should Hoffman, who not very long ago could have justified the practice of greeting your mom with the C-word, complain about the excesses of free speech?
“The real problem was I had a lot of really tough decisions to make in this perfect storm,” Hoffman went on to explain in her speech to the Denver Forum.
No, the real problem is that the former head of a major university finds the concentrated flow of information annoying.
This “perfect storm” – meaning unruly talk radio hosts, pajama-clad bloggers and scalawag commentators – was simply throwing facts at Hoffman.
And I thought it was all about freedom of expression? Or is that reserved for creative CU professors?
Hoffman singled out a blog called little green footballs (lgf).
Lgf averages around 85,000 daily hits and provides a constant stream of acerbic political posts. Lgf broke the Dan Rather forgery story and reported on Ward Churchill’s charming essay about the culpability of innocent Americans for all the troubles in the world.
“Hoffman is right,” explained Charles Johnson in an e-mail from lgf. “It’s much harder to get away with dirty little secrets like Ward Churchill – who apparently gamed the CU system for years – in the era of the blogosphere, when facts (not rumors) can be instantly reported. If I had simply published rumors, the story would never have caught on like it did.”
As president, Hoffman found time to complain about imaginary McCarthyism – the “state” in state university, you see, only means “state” money – when she should have been thanking the perfect storm for bringing CU’s absurd professor to Colorado’s attention.
“Ten minutes – that’s how fast things happen today,” Hoffman explained. “There was a period there when I was measuring my e-mail in boxes and pounds.”
Welcome to the real world.
Hoffman should realize that her future students at CU’s Graduate School of Public Affairs – the ones text messaging, dissecting public issues on blogs, checking news feeds every few seconds – will need to embrace the “10 minute” cycle if they have any chance of succeeding.
They’ll need Hoffman to step up and accept what this culture demands, instead of acting like a – and I beg all Chaucer- loving English professors forgiveness for the boorish analogy – a villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode, who once unmasked says:
“If it weren’t for those meddling bloggers, I would have gotten away with it!”
David Harsanyi’s column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 303-820-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
