Both Trump And Pisters Make Me Feel Bad
By
Leonard Zwelling
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
This is a famous quote often attributed to Maya Angelou, although Co-Pilot attributes its earliest version to Carl W. Bueher in 1971. He was a leader in the Church of the Latter Day Saints and is quoted in Richard Evans’ Quote Book as having said this first.
No matter. It’s absolutely true and it is absolutely what Donald Trump is learning as he asks for help opening the Strait of Hormuz. Many of our long-time allies have said no to sending ships to the area to help the United States secure safe passage for oil-carrying tankers. Most of this oil is not bound for the U.S., but for India and China. However, the continued danger to shipping has pushed up the price of gas here in America about a dollar a gallon since the start of the war against Iran. We are paying for Trump’s ineptitude and condescension. He seems unable to articulate his war goals, but adept at belittling our allies.
Trump has said this refusal to help on the part of our allies is just what he expected would happen. We help NATO all the time, he said, but when we need help the NATO allies are nowhere to be found. Yet, Article 5 of the NATO charter that says an attack on one member is an attack on all has been invoked only once. That was 9/11 when the United States was attacked. Many of our allies helped us then in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why not now?
That’s easy. Trump has made our former friends feel terrible by insulting them and their people repeatedly over the past ten years. The people that he has insulted remember this. So do their leaders. They are not inclined to help him in any way and Trump is about to find out that the people of the United States are not crazy about the way he is making them feel as gas prices spike because of a war of choice that he had pledged not to wage and which he still has not explained. Why did he attack Iran now? What is the objective evidence that we were in danger? What are the goals of this war and how will he know when he has achieved them? How long will the war and its consequences at the gas pump last? When will it end? And, above everything else, what was the point anyway? When it is over, will the United States be better off than it was before the war? If all the Iranians get are piles of rubble and all we get is a younger ayatollah, how is the United States better off?
Peter Pisters, the current president of the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, has never been accused of making any of the faculty feel good. I believe he has made a lot of the non-faculty staff feel good with tweets and parades. I believe that the non-faculty staff believe that he is a good president. Of course, they would. He made it very clear from day one that no one is more special than anyone else at “One MD Anderson,” thus the staff and the faculty are equals.
Let’s see how this breaks down.
First, the vast majority of the non-faculty staff of MD Anderson generate no revenue for the institution. The exception are the physician-extenders. Most people who work at MD Anderson are overhead. I should know. Once I became a vice president, I too was overhead. I saw no patients, dropped no bills, and after I closed my lab because I had no time to devote to my research or to my lab staff, I generated no grant dollars. Thus, by definition, I had become overhead.
Second, MD Anderson for its entire history has had only two assets—its name and its faculty. And, the faculty made its name. Thus, either the faculty are special or anyone who says they are not are squandering both of the assets. I believe that Pisters has done just that. I also believe that I told Dr. Pisters exactly this during our first breakfast meeting soon after his appointment as president, a meeting he requested. He and Trump are both poor listeners.
Finally, I believe that Dr. Pisters has made a great many faculty feel terrible and scared the hell out of many more with his arbitrary decisions and impulsive dismissal of colleagues for “unprofessional” behavior. He has fired some truly talented faculty members. He has ruined the research careers of others and he has done this while promoting to leadership roles some faculty who were never worthy of the leadership positions he has given them. Most simply didn’t have the credentials for the job he gave them. Of course, neither does Pisters for his job.
All in all, while Pisters may have made the rank-and-file staff feel good, he has made the faculty feel bad and frightened. In doing so he has hurt the institution’s primary asset. The faculty will not forget this any more than the faculty forgot when Dr. DePinho insulted them in a different way by making sure that the faculty present at his first town hall meeting got the message that only he saw the light when it came to solving the cancer problem and that the MD Anderson faculty knew nothing about cancer before he got to Texas. He had come to save the place. He was gone in six years, a record for brevity among MD Anderson presidents.
These gifts that the Board of Regents have given to the faculty of MD Anderson as presidents of late have made a lot of the faculty feel bad. Please faculty, do not forget.
