{"id":1299,"date":"2007-03-30T09:58:15","date_gmt":"2007-03-30T09:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/03\/30\/superheroes-of-academia\/"},"modified":"2007-03-30T09:58:15","modified_gmt":"2007-03-30T09:58:15","slug":"superheroes-of-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/03\/30\/superheroes-of-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"Superheroes of Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad takes up a critical and shamefully neglected question<\/a> about the academy:<\/p>\n

\n

Which superhero would make the best dean at a community college and why?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s not really my genre, but there are some good suggestions, including Batman (“His whimsical dilettante cover would make him non-threatening to members of the establishment but his secret identity allows him to be very effective in thwarting the forces of evil”), the Hulk (“Hulk respect process! RAAR!”), and Wonder Woman (“people tend to respect an authority figure who spends all day in star-spangled panties”).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Batman’s probably a good choice for a Deanship, being a little obsessive and technocratic. You just know that he’d be really organized about scheduling meetings, and keeping things on track. Unless he was the Adam West Batman, of course…<\/p>\n

The Dean Dad’s brother votes for Professor Xavier from the X-Men, because of his ability to control minds. Of course, even without actively wiping the minds of political opponents, telepathy would come in handy, because mind-reading is practically the only way to figure out what some faculty members are really after in meetings.<\/p>\n

I also think there’s some potential for the Green Lantern, for much the same reason that the Green Lantern Theory of foreign relations has become a standard trope on certain liberal blogs. There would be huge advantages to having a Dean with the ability to accomplish anything at all, provided he or she wanted it badly enough.<\/p>\n

Of course, from the faculty perspective, Deans are as likely to be super-villains as super-heroes, which would open a whole new range of possibilities…<\/p>\n

So what superhero comics character do you think is best suited to academic administration?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad takes up a critical and shamefully neglected question about the academy: Which superhero would make the best dean at a community college and why? It’s not really my genre, but there are some good suggestions, including Batman (“His whimsical dilettante cover would make him non-threatening to members of the establishment but his… Continue reading Superheroes of Academia<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}