The frustrations of collefe and university presidmts r@ect a miis in the idca ofoGadric haahhip.

Not What It? Cracked Up to Be Stephen J. Trachtenberg

As a university president, I have a natural interest in the advertisements in The Chronicle of H i g h Education that sketch the type of individual being sought for the presidency of institutions of higher education. I have a similar interest in the farewell statements issued by university and college presidents upon their departure from oflice. Recently, I have begun to suspect that some deeply linked patterns tie these two genres together.

Advertisements in Thc Chronicle take a fairly uniform tone. The candi- date, in addition to complete administrative, managerial, and academic com- petence and an unimpeachable record of professional advancement, is required to demonstrate such qualities as fairness, initiative, unselfishness, dependabil- ity, respect for others, loyalty, endurance, imagination, tact, diplomacy, and a bright, inquiring mind. Though it cannot be stated outright in the ad, it is also clear that he or she will be expected to demonstrate these qualities to a ser- ies of search and screen committees that include alumni, faculty, trustees, stu- dents, staff, and all other constituencies that make up a modern school. The advertisements in The Chronicle usually omit a requirement that the candidate be able to walk on water, but the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound is strongly implied.

The statements issued by retiring presidents also run to a type, which could be called the poetry of complete exhaustion. Whether the president is leaving a school in the Ivy League or in no league at all, a little college or a major state campus, the underlying tone is often one of regret-not of regret

3 R Atwcll and M. Green (Eds.). Nnu Di&/a Hi&# Edwlion: Arndmic -5 LT M-s, no 36. San Francisco: JMICY-BMI, December 1981.

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for the position being given up but of regret for the wasted years, enormous sacrifices, and abandonment of one’s family that seems to be involved in being a president.

Obviously something is wrong. It is the argument of this chapter that what is wrong reflects a crisis both in the very idea of leadership in contempo- rary America and in the idea of academic leadership. Moreover, this crisis bodes ill for the ability of many colleges and universities to weather the diffi- cult years ahead as we move into the mid 1980s.

The macrocosm is the United States, which in four decades moved from the charismatic Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower period through the vio- lently antiauthoritarian politics of the New Left into our present uneasy time, when narcissistic selfassertion is often held in check only by the fear of eco- nomic disaster. The microcosm is the university, where the style of leadership once represented by Nicholas Murray Butler, Charles William Eliot, or Robert M. Hutchins has given way to the notion of participatory democracy, shared governance, and faculty-administrative collegiality - a notion now deeply embedded in the very way in which presidents are chosen. The situation is one of grave and deepening crisis, as institutions of higher education struggle with rising inflation and declining enrollments, with tenured faculty who have nothing to do and overworked assistant professors who have nowhere to go, with Ph.D.’s who despise public relations and public relations officers who detest Ph.D.’s, with accountants who demand money and professors who de- mand class.

The result, predictably enough, is presidential burnout, which occurs faster and more frequently now than it seemed conceivable when university presidents left for Europe right after commencement, secure in the knowledge that everything would be the same in September.

If university presidents could simply be dispensed with, there would be no problem. If the office could be abolished, future generations would be spared the sight of an embittered, prematurely grey administrator banging the door shut behind him as he staggered back to a family that barely remem- bered. But besides suggesting the high mortality rate that now accompanies the presidential office, all those notices in The Chronicle also indicate that the office is in no danger of being done away with. Indeed, at no other time in the history of American higher education, I believe, has more effort and energy been devoted to discussing the qualities of leadership necessary in this posi- tion. The American Council on Education, the Association of American Col- leges, and other groups swell the mails with bulletins on leadership seminars and with questionnaires, the tabulation of which, it is claimed, will “provide new insights into the role of the president today.” At a humbler nuts-and-bolts level, these same organizations conduct innumerable sessions on academic personnel practices, legal matters, revision of faculty handbooks, and so forth.

It would seem to be a reasonable conclusion, therefore, that university and college. presidencies are not about to be abolished. Indeed, the problems

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that loom ahead for our institutions of higher learning are of such magnitude that the presidential office is, and will continue to be, more important than ever. How, then, are we to tread a reasonable course between the importance of the office in theory and its dysfunctional realities? While I have no magical answer to this question, I would like to point to some problem areas that will have to be resolved if those realities are to be transformed.

ThC Process of Choosing a Awidcnt. In the days before affirmative action, university leaders were often chosen in ways so devious that the Holy Roman Empire looked democratic by comparison. Somewhere between the old boys’ network and the wealthier trustees, the decision turned out to have been made. The rest of us, like a gaggle of serfs, had the right to doff our hats and cheer as the gilded coach swept past. All of that, of course, has changed. Choosing a president - indeed, any high-level administrator - today involves an immense amount of consensus building. Recommendations are made by groups, no one of which generdy has the power to pick a president, but any one or two of which have the power to veto a candidate.

The rationalization for this system is that it produces the most effective president possible by ensuring that no bloc on campus will go into immediate destructive opposition to the successful candidate’s leadership. However, the reality tends to be quite different. Too often, the only candidate who can sur- vive such a scrutiny process is the one who is least provocative. No one in- volved in the scrutiny process may have been particularly pleased, but no one was especially offended, either. And several years may well go by before those involved in the scrutiny process awaken to the fact that bland, noncom- mital leadership is not what the times require.

In a world of rising inflation and declining enrollments, even the best of our colleges are finding that they are no longer sheltered from competition. As tuition rates rise, even the modest community college may start to look like a contender in the struggle for warm bodies. Under these circumstances, it seems possible that the procedures now used to select university presidents are completely counterproductive. If so, newer and better ones must be devised. But how can we correct the democratizing excesses of the procedures now in effect without returning to a secretive, authoritarian style that we were right to give up?

The h n d r Made upon the Auidmt. I derive immense pleasure from my work, and I feel that what I do has more meaning and purpose than most of the other jobs in which I might be employed. The fact remains that in my fifth year as a university president - my thirteenth year as a hll-time aca- demic administrator- I have occasional flashes of self-pity. When I recently confided these feelings to my mother, pointing out how hard I work and how little I am appreciated, her response was uncharacteristically unsympathetic: “If what you want is gratitude, get yourself a dog.”

I bow to my mother‘s superior insight, but I still feel that the college or university president may be the one category of chief executive in American

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life who gets the least positive feedback and the largest number of conflicting signals in daily work life. T o begin with, we have to make an absolute distinc- tion between the academic presidency and organizational leadership in indus- try. In academic life, there is no bottom line of the type that can be used to jus- tify ruthless managerial behavior in the business world. Moreover, no busi- nessman has ever had to cope with as large, self-divided, self-righteous, and sometimes baffling a set of constituencies as that represented by a complex university. The university president is not even recognizably a boss. The ten- ure system and the tradition of academic self-governance have seen to that, and their effects are often reinforced now by unionization and by the efforts of student groups who want to know what the university is doing to resolve their agenda.

If the academic chief executive is not like Lee Iaccoca or David Rocke- feller, how is the presidential office to be envisioned? Perhaps as a kind of demented switchboard. Demands pour in from all sides- from full-time teach- ers, enrolled students and alumni, faculty and administrators, tenured faculty and nontenured faculty, secretaries, professional staff, tradesmen, security officers, free spenders and penny pinchers, businessmen and humanists, townies and gownies, liberals and conservatives. The president’s role is some- how to convert these often contradictory, seldom harmonious demands into shared values and common commitments-and to do this in a financial and political context in which a serious error can lead to disaster.

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” College and univer- sity presidents do not complain that the position is a difficult one - they all knew that when they wrote their letters of acceptance. What they complain about is that its difficulty is not understood, not even by members of the politi- cal science department, who wax eloquent on the parliamentary complexities of distant lands and past centuries. All leaders in all societies experience con- tradictory and ambivalent signals from their constituents, and a university president can at least be grateful that his career is not likely to end as the result of his being suspended from a lamppost. It hurts to see so much empathy being taught in the surrounding classrooms and to find that there is so little of it for oneself. This sense of isolation directly contributes to presidential burn- out. There must be some good ways in which it can begin to be overcome. If the individual academic constituencies can only begin to understand the presi- dent’s point of view, they might be able to help the president to do an even bet- ter job on their behalf.

7 7 ~ Articulateness of the Faculty. It seems doubtful that there is an American over the age of eighteen who has not heard the slogan “publish or perish” or who does not know that some people think that that is what a good university is all about. Academicians have been so intensively socialized to make full use of language that they seldom consider the possibility that there are times when articulateness is less than optimal. Again, the president’s per- spective is somewhat different. Whereas most leaders and politicians, as they

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struggle to navigate between the contradictory demands of their constituen- cies, can bank on the fact that there aren’t many Ciceros out there, the college or university president is in the opposite position: Faculty members who have not published for decades will whip out their pens and brandish their mega- phones when given half a chance. Manifestos, petitions, and letters-quite often, letters to the editor of the local newspaper - are par for the course dur- ing an average academic year. Problems that in other organizational contexts would be quietly settled in a back room are publicized to the world at large; give the interested parties half a chance, and the president will see problems explicated, with color photographs, in Time and Newsweek and discussed on Sixty Minutes.

The articulateness of the academic faculty touches on another aspect of the presidential dilemma. In negotiating between the many constituencies that make up the academic community, a college president must eschew the more obvious form of politics-the pitting of bloc against bloc- in favor of enlight- ened consensus. Yet, the president must also be, in terms of tactics if not of strategy, a consummate politician. Once again, this complex balance of quali- ties may not be recognized by our current search and screen procedures.

The Pmblem of Measurctncnt. Presidents are resentful because they are unappreciated, but lack of appreciation may reflect the dificulty of measuring what they do, given the fact that they are required to oversee and synthesize the work of administrators who are already moving at rarefied organizational levels. The sufficiently hard-pressed provost can serve as chief academic of- ficer of an isntitution. The vice-president for finance can carry out many of the business responsibilities of the executive. Thus, if we inquire into the areas of functioning that are peculiarly the province of the institution’s chief executive, we may feel that we are grasping at sand. The president should have courage, the power to persuade, and highly developed skills of communication; the president should be able to apply these qualities to contexts that shift and change from day to day and from week to week. The turf on which these skills must be exercised is the whole school; that which is unexpected, critical, and potentially dangerous is what calls him into action. The president may be bad- ly needed, but what the president actually does is hard to define and therefore difficult to measure. That which cannot be measured is also difficult to appre- ciate. Those who work hard without appreciation are especially susceptible to burnout.

Looking over the preceding paragraphs, I see that I have posed more questions than I have provided answers. Occasionally, I seem to be suggesting that we ought to have a Be Kind to College and University Presidents Week in this country or just that the reader should shed a tear in honor of my personal sufferings. I hope, therefore, that the reader will recall the critical background that forms the context for this discussion. Academic chief executives do not burn out like a light bulb. That is, one cannot rush to the cupboard for a replacement. The replacement process takes years, in which the president’s

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dysfunction can worsen and the school suffer as a result. If, in addition, there is a serious fiscal or other crisis, the suffering that results can extend far beyond the president’s office. In really serious situations, the effects can include the loss of jobs, including the jobs of tenured faculty members.

Perhaps the best way in which I can make my point is through some personal observations. All the problems that I have discussed up to this point in the abstract have a real daily impact on my own life. Take, for example, the process of choosing a president. I went through it myself to receive my appointment, and I can remember when a member of the search committee observed, after my selection, that the committee had one great regret. They started out hoping to find someone who looked like John Lindsay, and they had come up with someone who looked more like Abe Beame. Even if the observation had a humorous component - I sincerely hope that it did - it also helped to highlight the general atmosphere of unreality in which the search procedure frequently takes place. In a similar vein, I was quite struck by the fact that before I came to Hartford, the faculty seemed terribly concerned about my academic background and about my position on a variety of mat- ters having to do with teaching, research, learning, and scholarship. After my inauguration, however, I was struck by how unpopular I could become by continuing to address these very issues.

Or, take the demands that are made upon me and the degree to which those demands are understood by those whom I seek to represent. When I am working as hard as I possibly can, I occasionally feel as if I should pinch myself to make certain that I actually exist. Students, I find, barely understand the need for a dean, much less something as esoteric as a president. Most faculty members feel that presidents are about as necessary to a university as a man- ager is to a baseball team. Parents and alumni seem to find the president‘s office mainly useful as an address for letters of complaint and announce- ments to the effect that not another dime will be forthcoming until the office has a new occupant.

Concerning the articulateness of the faculty, I have little to add to my earlier remarks, other than to say that I await-not without trepidation-the comments of faculty members who read this chapter.

Where the problem of measurement is concerned, I can do no better than to point out that people whom I meet for the first time-at cocktail par- ties or in airplanes-do not respond to the information that I am a university president as they would to news that I was an engineer or an electrician. Usu- ally, they half close their eyes, their glance mixing pity and contempt with a certain amount of envy and regard. At first, they aren’t certain what to say to me. However, as the conversation continues, they come to feel confident that they can instruct me on the smallest details of my professional life. Inevitably, it turns out that they hold me responsible for the fact that their kids’ grades are down and that tuition is going up. (It makes one want to index grades to the C.P.I.) I am also used to being told how lucky I am to have those long summer

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vacations, after the school snaps shut following commencement and as it lies dormant until Labor Day.

After having this experience quite a number of times, I developed a strategy whereby I begin with a statement like this: “I manage a conglomerate. We have a couple hundred acres over in Hartford. It includes hotel facilities, restaurant facilities, athletic facilities, plus theatres, bookstores, sundry shops, parking lots, and a post office.” Casually, I add that uon the side” we also offer educational services to about 10,000 students each year. By then, thank God, they are taking me seriously.

No, I don’t think that I am about to burn out, but I do think that we have a serious national problem. As psychologists pointed out long ago, no salary is high enough and no perquisite is sufficiently attractive to reward a human being for systematic frustration. Like a rat in a behavioral experiment, the dysfunctional president goes slowly nuts, and the view from the top becomes as bleak as the view from the bottom. If we insist on retaining the presidential office, it is the responsibility of everyone to try to make it work. It must be loved wisely and well.

StGphm J. Trachtcnberg har been presidmt ofthe University of Hartford since 1977. He came to Connecticut a& etght years as professor, dean, and vice-prehient at Boston Universisity.