John Sexton is normally an incredibly confident orator. As The New York Times put it this weekend, “A former debating champion, he has mastered the gentler rhetorical skill of conveying his thoughts through personal anecdotes. Like the hugs with which he greets even strangers, these stories can disarm opponents, either by setting a jovial tone for a conversation by deftly guiding it away from any minefields or simply by running out the clock.”
But in today’s sit-down video interview with The Grey Lady, Sexton seems uncharacteristically nervous and completely off-putting.
At the 1:18 mark in the video above, Times reporter Ariel Kaminer starts to ask Sexton about his past actions as President. “Looking back on a vote that was designed to unseat you, was there ever a time…” says Kaminer. Sexton then interrupts and asks Kaminer, ”Why do you keep saying that?” When Kaminer asks if the vote is meant for another purpose than to unseat him, Sexton stumbles over his words and says nothing.
He’s next asked if he would have done anything differently. Sexton seems back on his rhetorical game and slips in a neat aphorism: “the process of life is the process of learning.” But after arguing against the process of “rewriting history,” Kaminer cuts him down again and points out that he’s at a major university where history is a very worthwhile subject to be studied.
Maybe it’s the video’s eerie music, or maybe it’s just the low budget b-roll footage of Bobst that’s played in between scenes — but Sexton seems just straight up bizarre. It’s only day one of the no confidence vote and things seem to be a bit out of whack already.
Follow all of NYU Local’s No Confidence Vote coverage here.
gifs please
Sexton says that already in October (2012), at the beginning of the school year, “before any of this conversation started,” he announced that faculty were going to be consulted on things. **Before it started**? 38 resolutions had already been passed by Departments and Schools on the Square (including Stern and Economics) — and a 39th was subsequently passed — to oppose Sexton’s expansion in Greenwich Village plan. Before any of this started?!! Please, whatever ground he’s given has been because we, the faculty, have demanded it. And he’s not given much ground, other than rhetorically.
RK
Weird Sexton, but also an obvious journalistic creation. I’d like to see the complete, unedited interview without the twilight zone music.
I have no opinion either way on Sexton or NYU. Universities are caught in a corporatized system of funding and administrative expansion and metrics. Completely rational if you have a technocratic concept of what is rational. Administrators are just functions of the system, trying to find a viable balance among the different pressures on them.
Faculty are also of course completely dependent on this system, especially “scientists,” who should be called technicians for the agencies that provide the grants and so determine what counts as research and who will “manage” labs. Not much basic or independent research these days.
In the humanities, we now have far less scholarship, far more upscale activist journalism and far more courses that provide entertainment for students–or at least courses in which you have to “think critically” about entertainment.
No horse in this race.
“Listening to the faculty?” Really?
If that were the case, then why did this university administration recommend on that the Faculty Senators Council removed its Shared Governance Resolutions (passed unanimously, May of 2011) from our website in their memo of June 29, 2012?
The fact is that only AFTER the Faculty Senate Council approved its Governance Committee’s reply memo (of August 2012) affirming that the Faculty Senators Council would not remove its Shared Governance Resolutions from the website that President Sexton then began to uttered the words “shared governance”.
A man out of ideas, out of crocodile tears — and out of lines to sell. So, are we right to understand that we are ALL poor fallen creatures and thus, as inherently fallible beings, are invariably absolved from the responsibility to explain our transgressions along the way? No matter what the consequences of the poor decision-making might be — and who suffers from it (in this case, increasingly indebted students and disenfranchised faculty)? If only a university president with a $1.5+ million annual salary had the free will to decide what a departing administrator receives as a parting gift (sorry, “compensation”) upon leaving for an even higher paying corporate position at, say, Citicorp or how much money a university is comfortable taking from the Sheikh and crown prince of Abu Dhabi. If only… So, are there, in fact, any ethical limits to a university president’s “grow or die” global-corporate model? Any limits at all to a board of trustees’ insatiable branding ambitions?
I regret to say that if there’s one thing that Pres. Sexton most certainly is NOT it is a good listener. It’s simply not in his constitution or his temperament. How my colleagues and I wish he was, so that much of what is happening on the Square at present could have been avoided. What Sexton has always been is a good talker … although, as the NYT clip demonstrates, his evangelical powers of persuasion are also failing him now. He appears to be a man out of ideas — and out of lines to sell. In listening to him here, are we right to understand that we are ALL poor fallen creatures and thus, as inherently fallible beings, are invariably absolved from the responsibility to explain our transgressions along the way? No matter what the consequences of the poor decision-making might be — and who suffers from it (in this case, increasingly indebted students and disenfranchised faculty)? If only a university president with a $1.5+ million annual salary had the free will to decide what a departing administrator receives as a parting gift (sorry, “compensation”) upon leaving for an even higher paying corporate position at, say, Citicorp or how much money a university is comfortable taking from the Sheikh and crown prince of Abu Dhabi. If only… So, are there, in fact, any ethical limits to a (non-profit) university administration’s “grow or die” global-corporate model?
There is nothing worse than a reporter with an agenda
Some sketchy editing in the part where he gets “caught” on the ‘vote designed to unseat you’ part. Surprised by the Times on this one.
I would have been equally shocked and unseated by that reporters rudeness, her efforts to assert authority over Sexton, and her one-sided one-goaled questions. That was bizarre on both sides.