I found this comment on New College of California in a very interesting blog. You can find it here:
In the case of New College, a clique of followers gathered around the school’s president, Peter Gabel. I witnessed this myself when Gabel brought Michael Lerner (among others) to discuss their vacuous “politics of meaning.” I can remember thinking at the time (and I was in my early 20s) that this supposed politics was devoid of any political content. It was feel-good 1960s catharsis.
But people fawned all over Mr. Gabel and presented him as some sort of intellectual, of all things. He brought in a coterie of incompetent buffoons heading sundry “interdisciplinary” programs while these teachers lacked the basic domain knowledge to even begin to make connections within a discipline, let alone across them. But Gabel was smart in knowing they would be loyal to him when things eventually went bad. Others have identified this as Founder’s Syndrome “in which charismatic leaders think they can run complex community service organizations by force of personality, rather than via plans, processes, and rules.”
This is really spot-on. This individual was obviously there at the time and saw Cassidy and his pathetic cronies in action. The comment about the coterie of incompetent buffoons might have been written specifically with Cassidy in mind. Cassidy was an ignoramus with absolutely no knowledge at all of the subjects he was supposed to be teaching. I wonder how many others there were like Cassidy and how many of them are still around in San Francisco?
cassidyslangscam 