When is too much not enough?
Some crazy new diet fad? Some nuclear arms race? A day at the beach?
How about . . . leadership?
I’ve been wrestling to figure out where I am on a couple of presidents. One is The Donald. We all know about him. The other is The Max. No, I’m not still talking about The Donald. He’s a lot of things, but The Max is probably not one of them. The Max I’m talking about is C. L. “Max” Nikias, President of the University of Southern California.
The Donald
Some smart folks I know feel The Donald is worse than the plague. The worst ever. Even worse than that. Incompetent. Stupid. Undisciplined. Narcissistic. A chronic liar. Out of control. Ill. Truly ill. In need of removal from office. Yesterday. If not for impeachable high crimes then for demonstrated Constitutional Amendment 25 disability to soundly function as president (Imagine: The Un, the oddball who controls North Korea and its growing nuclear arsenal, tells the world “The Donald is a doofus.” When The Donald hears this and goes ballistic (pun sadly intended) the question is whether his finger is on his Twitter keyboard (in which case his response will be a silly but harmless “My doofus is great and bigger than your doofus!!!”) or his finger is on the “great” red “nuclear button” (in which case how will The Donald’s temper tantrum manifest itself?).)
But some equally smart folks I know feel The Donald is doing a great job, and would be doing even better if a bunch of sore losers would just accept their defeat, move on and leave The Donald alone. The stock market is up. The economy is up. Jobs are up. And good jobs at that. And U.S. foreign policy is rebounding where it really counts, in the Middle East and not with our NATO allies who never wanted The Donald anyway.
The Max
Then there’s The Max. The Real Max. Max Nikias. He walks on water. Doesn’t he? He said he would raise $6 billion (that’s billion, folks) to put USC on the map. To pass its crosstown rival UCLA, and leave it in the dust. And, in the opinion of many, he’s done it. He did it. The money’s in the bank. At least numbers don’t lie.
But many think a university to be truly great must be about more than the numbers. Must be above the numbers. And that once you look beyond the money, there are just too many lies at USC. Way too many.
First there was USC’s athletic department. To be sure (at least in this writer’s opinion), the punishment imposed on USC by the NCAA exceeded USC’s misdeeds. But that doesn’t excuse the misdeeds. And misdeeds there were.
Now, we learn about Carmen Puliafito, the disgraced former dean of USC’s Keck School of Medicine. (Dare I note the third president addressed in this blog.) In the true Nikias rationale that show me the money excuses just about anything, the university pretended not to know about Puliafito’s outrageous and/or sick behavior. (You pick the adjective.) Why? Because Puliafito was raising significant money for USC’s Keck School of Medicine. As long as he kept doing that, and as long as USC officials could pretend they didn’t know about the bad stuff, the University was willing to accommodate his abuse of drugs and alcohol and his consorting with criminals and prostitutes (younger than his and his wife’s kids no less), both off and on the campus.
When the Los Angeles Times blew the lid off the cover with irrefutable evidence, at least in the court of public opinion, Nikias’ USC first tried stonewalling. When that didn’t work, it claimed it didn’t know until the Times’ story brought the facts to light. When that wouldn’t fly, it claimed that only a few lower level officials knew. Now, begrudgingly, they admit it was known all the way up at the top for a long while and perhaps they had “mishandled” it. Mishandled it? Perhaps? They allowed a man behaving as they knew Puliafito was to continue sticking sharp instruments into patients’ eyes! (No license here, other than his, he’s an eye surgeon, at least for the moment.)
So, finally, Puliafito was expendable and had to go. After all, he was only raising millions, not billions. And so go he has. Quietly (?) into the night. But what about The Max? The athletic department misdeeds were on his watch. So was the handling (or shameful failure to handle) Puliafito. Every dog gets his bite. But two? Of this magnitude?
People are lining up to endorse and support The Max. After all, his numbers are in the billions. Probably the same folks who still endorse and support The Donald. But not everyone is supporting The Max. Some say that for USC to properly and thoroughly make amends, The Max has to go. Probably the same folks who think The Donald has to go.
A Proper Leadership Perspective
For me, doing a good job (without regard to how “good” should be defined), is not always enough. Not if it loses sight of dignity and integrity, what must always be there if we are truly to be great. When it comes to apt leadership, sometimes too much of what we are experiencing today is just not enough.
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