Faculty governance

Drezner writes:

The Obama administration has wreaked havoc across the landscape of America's public policy school deandom, wantonly plucking top administrators to staff their foreign policy machine. [Is "deandom" even a word?--ed. Roll with it.]

First James Steinberg, Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, leaves to be Deputy Secretary of State.

Then Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, leaves to become the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.

Over at Harvard, Joseph Nye, the former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, has been rumored to be the next Ambassador to Japan.

I stayed silent when all these deans were poached -- and now they've gotten my guy:

Having recently returned from a fact-finding trip to North Korea, Stephen W. Bosworth, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, will have little time to unpack his bags in Medford before heading back to the region - this time as President Obama's special envoy to North Korea, according to administration officials.

Bosworth, 69, is expected to be named today the top US diplomat to the six-nation talks that have sought for more than five years to persuade the reclusive North Korean regime to give up its nuclear weapons program in return for an end to nearly 60 years of economic isolation.

Willim F. Buckley, Jr. famously said:

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

Hmm. While I'm sympathetic to the idea of randomly selected persons being suitable for a legislative body, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be wise to give them positions like Secretary of State, Policy Planning, or ambassadorship to Japan and North Korea.