Revolt of the teachers?

Karen Arenson, NYT:

Circumstances vary, but the overthrow of Dr. Summers may have been contagious.

At Case Western, where the prospect of a cumulative three-year deficit of $100 million led to unrest, Lawrence Krauss, a physics and astronomy professor, said that the Harvard episode had shown him how faculty members could take action. “I was emboldened by it,” said Dr. Krauss, who initiated the campaign last February to oust the president, Edward M. Hundert.

The clashes on many of the campuses reflect the increasingly uneasy relationship between those running colleges and those teaching at them, as the institutions grow more complex and the presidents become more like chief executives than stewards of academic life.

A university presidency, once a plum post, has become “a position of extraordinary precariousness,” said Richard P. Chait, a professor of higher education at Harvard. He described the no-confidence votes as signs that faculties and administrators were so much at odds that they were “close to having irreconcilable differences.”