“Bill Kirby doesn’t listen,” says one administrator. “When people try to offer counsel to Bill, he uses defensive mechanisms.”

Standing Alone

Even when he consults widely, some worry that Kirby doesn’t listen.

Despite the warning signs along the way and without first building a consensus, Kirby put forward a proposal this year to require students to preregister for their classes.

After having failed to rally support for the initiative, one of his first moves in office, the dean backed down.

Since last May, Kirby had been discussing the implementation of Early Course Selection—a proposal that would require students to choose their courses a semester in advance.

The plan would change shopping period into an add-drop period when students would have to obtain several signatures in order to change their schedules.

From the moment he announced his intentions in the fall, the proposal met with formidable resistance. Concerns over the elimination of the flexibility of shopping period had been voiced by both the Faculty Council and the Undergraduate Council—and led 1,200 students to sign a petition against Kirby’s proposal.

According to Mendelsohn, Kirby was fully aware that the Faculty were unconvinced.

“By the time he brought it to the floor of the Faculty he knew there would be a negative response,” Mendelsohn says. “[But] there [had been] much internal discussion among the council and we were willing to give the dean his head.”

When the issue was finally debated in a meeting of the full Faculty in March, professors spoke vehemently against preregistration and the way Kirby was attempting to push it through.

“This seems like a situation where nobody wants this to happen and we just discuss it like it is inevitable,” Professor of Political Economy Benjamin M. Friedman said at the meeting.

Robinson Professor of Music Robert D. Levin, denounced the proposal as “practically and aesthetically repugnant” and “not serving the needs of education, but the needs of the administration.”

After the meeting, Kirby seemed humbled but not discouraged.

“It was, as diplomats say, a full and frank exchange of views,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.