Earlier this week I read Bill Chace’s 100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way (Princeton, 2006), a very interesting account of the academic career of an able literary scholar who became a dean at Stanford, and then president at Wesleyan (Conn.) University and Emory. It is a good example of the academic administrator’s autobiography, a rather uncommon genre. It put me in mind of a similar account by my friend Rudy Weingartner: A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education (Hamilton Books, 2007). Rudy is a distinguished philosopher who served as a dean at Northwestern and Pittsburg, though he never served as a university president.

The question that motivates both accounts derives from the puzzlement of those who enter the teaching profession because of their genuine love for scholarship and student contact, and yet find themselves called to the bloodless (my word) work of administration. It brings to mind the old saw about the nature of an assistant dean: “a mouse training to be a rat.” In the “better” universities and colleges there is a strong commitment to the notion that higher administrators ought to be genuine scholar-teachers, and one can see why, since these are the people who should understand both the values and processes that make quality higher education work.

But the downside, as both autobiographers notice, is that there is no training for administration beyond the “mouse training to be a rat” experience. And of course all of us who have long taught in universities know perfectly well that aptitude for scholarship is poorly (if at all) correlated with administrative skill.

What is particularly interesting in the Chace book (but is less apparent in Weingartner’s) is that his self-presentation ceases to be that of a faculty member when he rises to the level of presidency, though he keeps teaching James Joyce throughout his administrative career and has now returned to the faculty. Moreover, Chace seems to be genuinely puzzled by the position the president finds himself in, caught between faculty and trustees, neither of whom fully understands the imperatives of institutional dynamics. Chace has little to say about the fund-raising imperative that in my view has corrupted the role of the university president in this country, since his focus is on how an intellectual reacted to the transition to administration.

I have read most of the books published by recently retired university presidents — more on them on another occasion. But in fact I have read little about the selection of Our Leaders, and nothing that attempts to evaluate them. We know they are not all successful, and mostly they are not noticed beyond their own campuses — though one (Donna Shalala of Miami) won a Presidential Medal of Freedom today. There must be a better way to assess how we are doing — and how we might improve recruitment and selection procedures for higher academic administration.