This week’s featured search is a local public individual best known for regularly appearing in regional and national searches for some of the top positions in academe. Based on the places looking at him, I assume that his current job – whatever it is – involves teaching or managing or organizing stuff and things of diverse sizes and shapes in new and exciting ways for varied and sundry arcane and mysterious purposes. This man is working harder looking for a new job than Michael Brown. (Who became, after his recent awkward appearance on The Daily Show, the first individual ever to be officially declared a national disaster area. When asked to respond about whether “resigning amid criticism” from FEMA had a role in creating the shame-spiral in which he currently found himself, Brown reportedly replied, “What’s FEMA?”)
Most recently, Wendler has been attached to a posting at Mississippi State University. Insiders in the search process have heaped compliments on Wendler as a “name” that has “surfaced in the MSU presidential search”. If that isn’t enough, this insider - in an almost obscene display of bootlicking - goes on to applaud Wendler as a “candidate” who “is said” by some to be “in the hunt”. High praise indeed.
Last year, Mr. Wendler unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Louisiana State University. In an often contentious final debate, the board of supervisors came to a closely divided “unanimous recommendation” to hire Sean O'Keefe. Former NASA director O’Keefe backed into the position on a technicality, impressing no one with his “exemplary record of public service.”
However, if Neil Steinberg has taught us anything, it is that most of us, like Wendler, are doomed to fail, miserably, bitterly, and unashamedly. So we, like he, must find our rewards on the road to failure, in the search if not the result. Rewards like sitting in a really nice car.
Wendler beats us to it: “Walter Wendler sunk into the driver's seat of the sleek automotive machine that was the 2006 Pontiac Solstice and admitted it felt good - much more stylish than the Ford Crown Victoria provided to him as a perk of his job.”
They gave him a Crown Vic? Who knew he was a cop?
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