Best bet for a successful presidency?
Do universities need presidents?
At $300,000 to $500,000 each, plus house and car for a middling institution (and often much more at grander schools), they’re the resource equivalent of a dozen or two adjuncts or at least several senior professors.
Leadership on many fronts is what the campus head is supposed to provide — most of all in raising money. Why, then, the heavily staffed development offices at the schools that regularly snare big gifts? Once the target has been softened up, couldn’t a provost or dean or chairman of trustees move in to clinch the deal?
Wise and productive orchestration of the institution’s many components — that’s what the effective chief provides, isn’t it? There’s the administration, the faculty, the students, the alumni, the trustees, the non-academic staff, the nearby community, and, for public institutions, the governor and the legislature.
Each of these may have its own divisions. There’s the male-female division of the faculty; the adjuncts and the tenured. The humanities feel financially deprived in comparison to the sciences. The legislature writhes under budget pressures and wonders why out-of-state students are getting bargain rates.
Harmony does not flourish among these divergent groups. Faculty often feel disdain for the administration; alumni fret that their beloved institution is doing something important very wrong; students are generally sullen, and non-academic staff are grossly underpaid, feel oppressed, and sometimes go out on strike — an event sure to bring the TV trucks rolling in.
Since any of these groups can wreck a university presidency (ask Larry Summers), the wisest course for the head person is to avoid arousing any of them by yielding as little as possible and maintaining the status quo in shares of money, office space, honors, and any other matters that can precipitate an explosion.
Though doing nothing is the wisest course, the ambitious president need not settle for oblivion. With a nimble speech writer (there are plenty of them on the market now as newspapers slash their staffs), the hunkered-down president can safely take on the off-campus role of academic statesman.
Topics abound, and none is ever exhausted, because the ingredients can be endlessly mixed and matched: The university and the new economics of the post-industrial age in an era of globalization; learning and the digital revolution; whither academe in a period of change; poverty, productivity and the ivory tower, etc., etc.
The university presidency is obsolete, a holdover from long-gone times, like the British monarchy. The best that can be said for both of them is that, though expensive, they’re entertaining.
Photo by Photobucket.com user Allegra
