Daniel Diermeier on Why Universities Are Their Own Worst Enemies

If you've ever been in a battle like that, it's personal, you're being attacked as sexist, racist, whatever it is, it's painful. And so people don't do it. And so the typical experience for a university president like mine is you go, you know, you have a kind of contentious debate where only one psych is speaking, and then you go into the elevator and your faculty member says, I I totally agree with you that you did a great job. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk.

One of the jobs I have to say that I would least like to have these days is to lead a major American university. It just feels like you're in the center of every political firestorm and structurally everyone on her campus is likely to hate you. But that makes it all the more interesting when some leaders of these institutions actually have clear political principles and a vision for where to lead their institutions. I'm very lucky to be at a university that has such a leader, but there's interesting ones around the country as well, and I'm hoping to have a few of them on the podcast over the coming months and years.

The first one up is Daniel Deermeyer. Daniel is the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, in fact only the ninth Chancellor in its existence. I guess people tend to hold these posts for a long time. He was previously the provost at the University of Chicago.

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