I rarely have kind words for college administrators, much less college presidents, so when a kind word occurs to me, it probably makes sense to write it down before I forget it. And one just did.

I was in the public library this evening looking at the new releases, when I saw Salman Rushdie’s new-ish book, Knife, published in 2024, about the murder attempt on him at a talk he gave in Chautauqua, New York in 2022. The documentary film adaptation of the book, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, is coming out this month.

The book reminded me of the time that I met Rushdie. It was 2003, and I was an adjunct at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). The College had, with great fanfare, invited Rushdie to speak at its Writers Conference, creating a faculty welcoming committee for Rushdie, of which I was a member.

Anyway, the great day came in early April, shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War, as I remember. Rushdie was scheduled to speak in Kendall Hall, the biggest auditorium on campus, which seats some 836 people. Security was tight. Only ticket-holders were allowed in, and each ticket-holder had to go through a metal detector and submit to a pat-down before being allowed into Kendall. The process was painstaking, time-consuming, and invasive, so that it took a good hour to get everyone inside. By the time everyone was seated, there was palpable anger at having to go through all that rigamarole. An hour in line to go through the equivalent of airport security to see a novelist? Come on!

TCNJ’s President at the time was Barbara Gitenstein, known to me only as “the nice lady in admin who signed my contract.” She’s retired now, but writes books, and is the author, among other works, of Portrait of a Presidency and Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry. The latter book somehow seems the more relevant of the two in this context.

Reading the frustration of the crowd, President Gitenstein adopted a forthrightly buck-stops-here/mea culpa posture, apologizing profusely for the inconvenience involved, saying that the security procedures were regrettably necessary to keep everyone safe, and then brightening finally to say that, well, Mr Rushdie was here, and was ready to speak! And wouldn’t we all like to give him a nice Jersey welcome? It was a pretty deft performance.

I don’t remember if we actually gave Rushdie a nice Jersey welcome, or even what that would be. In any case, Rushdie took the stage, gave a witty talk, mangled my question during the Q&A, autographed my copy of Shame, and left without incident.

Almost two decades later, Rushdie was stabbed at Chautauqua precisely because the institution had taken a laid-back approach to security–no metal detectors, no bag checks, no pat-downs, no disgruntled crowds. There were only two police officers in the whole joint, far fewer than the small army President Gitenstein had called up at TCNJ. The attacker ran up to Rushdie in the middle of the introduction at Chautauqua, and nearly stabbed him to death.

So President Gitenstein was right! If only she’d been in charge at Chatauqua. We have to give credit where it’s due. They’re not all bad, college presidents.

I’ll keep you posted on any other pro-admin thoughts that occur to me, assuming any do. But considering that this one took twenty-three years to materialize, don’t hold your breath.