I am no Foucault nor was meant to be. If I give my impressions of power structures in academia they will be like, let us say, the impressions of an ant vis à vis an orange.
When I first came to Italy I was soon told about the university barons: old professors who held all the power, each with his own fiefdom in the university. Perhaps they were already disappearing then, as the universities were being forcibly democratized in the aftermath of the sixties. Some cities, Florence, Bologna, were proudly leftist, and the professors were said to be of the people.
It was certainly in a different city (I won’t disclose whether it was farther north or farther south) that I got to witness some of the worldly splendor of power in academia. The Professor in the Department hosting our symposium invited us to dinner at his house. House? Well, … palazzo … statues in the garden among the sculpted monkey-puzzle trees, dark oak wall paneling and wainscoting in the hall. Entering the hallway, a somewhat too large, but still discreet crucifix half-hiding in a nook. A dining room that proclaimed the glories of an earlier century. Candles lined the center, as if marching up to the head of the table, where the Professor held forth. Seating was choreographed with a nod to male/female alternation but rather more by social precedence. I could still see the Professor but far enough off to fail, though not with great regret, to hear his conversation. Staff dressed in black, with long white gloves, moved discreetly behind my shoulders, reached in, added and removed food, corrected my placement of the cutlery.
I cannot hide a twinge of nostalgia. In Italy, in philosophy conferences, we were greeted by the mayor or representatives of the provincial government, declared cultural events in the city calendar, invited to special viewings and concerts. Since contrasts should be sharp, cut to Los Angeles, to a dinner with the USC University Trustees.
It was also in the mid seventies when USC recruited new philosophy faculty. As I came early for my interview my friend Sid, who taught at Northridge, took me for a drive through Hollywood; we stopped on, I think, Mulholland Drive to see the Hollywood sign. 
It was around then that Dory Previn was singing Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign: “You know the hollywood sign/ That stands in the hollywood hills/ I don’t think the Christ of the Andes/ Ever blessed so many ills/”.
The chairman, Martin, recently retired in the East but already very Californian (white Mercedes convertible, “We are going to have the greatest philosophy department west of the Mississippi”) showed me where I would have my office. That would be in Mudd Hall, below the clock tower where they had filmed The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The space was shared with the library, and with the office of John Hospers, philosopher of art, 1972 Libertarian candidate for Presidency of the USA
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That year the university had three new special appointments and we were invited to the Trustees annual dinner, at a Ventura country club. As it happens each of us still betrayed our recent immigrant status with noticeable European accents. We were asked to give small presentations in the pre-dinner schedule; my neighbor explained how he had developed a program to turn biowaste into fuel. I’m no longer sure what I explained, but at the reception a guest approached me with a grateful look: “I had never understood so well what a tautology is”. Then the Trustees each spoke. The first was tall, slim, handsome man with an educated way of speaking, an industrialist — he did not prepare us properly for the spectacle of his colleagues on the Board. There was a woman from Texas, of a certain age, cosmetically fortified, acting very girlish toward the other Board members, detailing how many millions she had raised for the endowment. The next applauded her, saying “That’s the game, we all know it: get, give, or get out!”. And the last one had great fun complimenting the academic speakers, imitating our accents with movie-Gestapo German “We haff ways to make you teach!” Getting serious he commented on the special power Trustees had to fire deans. Our own dean, whom I had come to admire for his sang-froid and good sense, sat beside me, wincing.
This dean, and our department, were quite wonderful. Bit by bit I began to understand that there was a gradual diminishing of civilized attitudes between this base at faculty level, and the higher reaches of administration, Provost and President, on the way to Board of Trustees. The reckoning arrived in 1979 when the Los Angeles Times revealed that the President, Jack Hubbard, and the Provost, had traveled to Iran to present an honorary doctorate to the Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah (just deposed that year). 
The not -unconnected aftermath was the one million dollars endowment of the Pahlavi Shay of Iran Chair in Petroleum Engineering. Journalistic outrage noted that even President Roosevelt, paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, had had to travel to USC in 1935 to receive his honorary doctorate. The news developed quickly. The Provost went into the hospital with a suspected heart attack and could not be reached for comments. President Hubbard had apparently already announced his plan to retire, some time beforehand, and was ready to do so now.
A colleague raised the salient puzzle, not touched on at all by the newspapers. Why would the Shah, the King of Kings, of the House of Pahlavi, Light of the Aryans, Emperor of the Peacock Throne, have wanted an honorary doctorate? Had his wife perhaps reproached him, who did he think he was, if he didn’t have a university degree?
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