Higher Ed’s Governance Problem - Commentary

Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College (MN) and a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes:

There are 64 squares on a chessboard. Sixty-four is the atomic number of gadolinium, a rare earth element named for the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin. It is apparently the maximum “item stack size” (whatever that means) in the game Minecraft, which, I am told, is popular. It appears in the title of a bouncy Paul McCartney song on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sixty-four is also the number of members on the Board of Trustees of my alma mater, Cornell University. That, put simply, is ridiculous. Most private nonprofit college and university boards do in truth have fewer members than a professional football team, but they tend to be much larger than boards for other kinds of organizations.