Columbia University president Minouche Shafik has reached a moment of crisis after she dispersed pro-Hamas protesters who are terrorizing Jewish students on her campus and they returned. Now, either they go, or she goes. I’m reminded, as is often the case, of a passage from the great baseball writer Bill James, who wrote in 1983 about how Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog (who died on April 15 of this year) asserted his authority when he took over as St. Louis Cardinals manager in 1980 and found himself in conflict with Hall of Fame catcher Ted Simmons:
One of the many wonderful moments in the movie Ragtime occurs just after the terrorist group has seized the library, and Jimmy Cagney, the police chief, has arrived on the scene. A stranger breaks through the crowd and informs Cagney with great urgency that he is the curator of the library, and that it is a priceless collection that must be handled with the utmost of care. Well, says Cagney, why don’t you tell those fellows that? To which the poor man replies, are you trying to be funny? And Cagney replies, my good man, so long as those guys are in there, you are not the cur-a-tor of anything. . . .
Look at the situation as it must have looked to Herzog. You’ve got a highly talented team that isn’t winning. The team doesn’t hustle; it doesn’t execute fundamentals. It doesn’t play very good defense. You’ve got a player who is universally recognized as the leader of that team. He is a public idol. He is on the board of directors of the art museum. He is, reportedly, good buddies with the owner. He is a .300 hitter with power. But, unfortunately, he is a catcher, and he is not a good one. So you sign another catcher, and you tell him that, for the good of the team, he is going to have to move. And he says, “No, I won’t do it. The hell with what’s good for the team.” What are you going to do? . . .
I know what I would do. If I had to trade that man for five cents on the dollar, I’d trade him. . . . De facto authority, that is the message. You either get rid of that [SOB], or you accept the fact that he is running the show and you are not. If Whitey Herzog didn’t have the guts to run Ted Simmons out of St. Louis, he might as well have quit on the spot. Because if he didn’t, from that moment on he was not the man-a-ger of anything.
Simmons (who wasn’t as bad a defensive catcher as everyone thought at the time but was a sub-par fielder who turned 30 in 1980) was traded after the season to the Milwaukee Brewers, where he caught for three more years and helped them win a pennant before becoming a designated hitter. Herzog took the hit by losing the talents of Simmons and a few of the other players on that team (such as Keith Hernandez) in imbalanced trades, but he established his authority, built the kind of team he wanted, and won three National League pennants between 1982 and 1987, including a World Series in 1982 when he beat Simmons and the Brewers.
If Shafik doesn’t show the encamped demonstrators who’s in charge, then she’s not — they are. And from that point on, she is not the pres-i-dent of anything.