The university, it has been said, may possibly be the most internally diverse institution there is. And if universities are indeed dauntingly complex institutional entities, colleges, though smaller and simpler, are not altogether different in kind. If it were not quite so familiar and so very much taken for granted, the sheer multiplicity of activities characteristically pursued under their aegis would probably strike the observer as really quite odd. Those activities range from classroom teaching to the mounting of (sometimes quasi-professional) musical, artistic, and athletic events; from the deployment of security forces (unlike English bobbies, sometimes armed) to the construction, cyclical renovation, and routine maintenance of the large-scale physical plant as well as grounds, roads, and drainage and heating systems; and from the housing and feeding of thousands of students—a task calling for the sort of staff expertise one associates more readily with the hotel and tourist industry—to the running of infirmaries, libraries, theaters, studios, laboratories, and museums, and, beyond that, to the collective pursuit of research endeavors (sometimes of great magnitude). This whole, multiple enterprise calls, of course, for a large and variegated employee base and for overall financial resources large enough to bear comparison, at least in the case of our great research universities, with those at the disposal of the smaller nation-states around the globe.
Compounding that complexity, moreover, is the potential for tension and confusion residing in the bureaucratically ordered presence under one (rather capacious) institutional roof of a myriad of different types of substantive expertise, sometimes extremely technical in nature and often quite opaque or even mysterious, not only to the outside world beyond the academy but also to others within the university or college itself. Upon the institutional leader or president, then, falls the administrative task of recruiting, coordinating, facilitating, and sustaining the activities of a very disparate range of experts and, beyond that, the role of interpreting to some within the institution what others (within the same institution) are doing. The leader also has the role of interpreting (and sometimes symbolizing) the significance of their activities to an often-curious, sometimes-hostile, but usually uninitiated and not infrequently uncomprehending larger public.
Among commentators on American higher education, however, there is not a great deal of agreement about how well or effectively positioned university and college presidents are to discharge such complex and important responsibilities. In recent years, talk about “the shrinking college presidency” has become quite fashionable and, with it, twinges of nostalgia for the halcyon conditions that once made possible the great, commanding presidencies of yesteryear, such as those of Charles Eliot at Harvard, David Starr Jordan at Stanford, William Rainey Harper or, later, Robert Maynard Hutchins at Chicago. Contemporary portrayals of the college presidency can, in fact, be quite dispiriting, depicting it as a modest and essentially limited office, one so narrowly hemmed in by institutional constraints of one sort or another as to be essentially incapable of having any profound or truly enduring impact on the quality and direction of academic life. Classic among such dispiriting portrayals is that painted by Cohen and March in their Leadership and Ambiguity, a book which appeared in 1974 at what was one of the lower points in postwar academic fortunes. In that book they mounted a sustained (if sometimes hyperbolic) argument which, its admitted liveliness notwithstanding, falls well short of carrying conviction. According to that argument, colleges and universities are quintessential exemplars of the class of organizations that can properly be labeled as “organized anarchies.” Such organizations are characterized by problematic or ambiguous goals, unclear procedures, unmeasurable outcomes, and a varying, intermittent, and fluid involvement by participants in the life of the whole. An organization of this sort can hardly be viewed as a “vehicle for solving well-defined problems,” as a structure “within which conflict is resolved through bargaining,” or as one which encompasses sets of procedures by means of which “organizational participants arrive at an interpretation of what they are doing and what they have done while doing it.” Instead, it is to be viewed as “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.” In such an institutional setting, the presidency, they argue, is essentially “a reactive job,” indeed, “an illusion.” The degree of control which the president can exercise over the course of things is but a modest one, “more commonly sporadic and symbolic than significant,” with his or her particular contributions liable to being “swamped by outside events or the diffuse qualities of university decision making.” Institutional performance being largely “an act of God,” Cohen and March conclude arrestingly (and in a much-quoted passage) that the unfortunate president is “a bit like the driver of a skidding automobile. The marginal judgments he makes, his skill and his hands may possibly make some difference to the survival prospects for his riders. As a result, his responsibilities are heavy. But whether he is convicted of manslaughter or receives a medal for heroism is largely out of his control.”
This sort of analysis doubtless makes for pungent and amusing reading. And it does catch some of the oddities and idiosyncrasies (at once both diverting and deplorable) of the academic institutional experience. But it strikes me as a bit over the top and certainly too clever by half. I don’t find it really responsive to the day-to-day realities of the presidential role or, for that matter, to the administrative role in general, at least as I experienced them at a small, high-quality, freestanding liberal arts college from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. Such sweeping claims for the marginality of the presidential role run afoul, moreover, of a veritable shoal of well-attested accounts to the contrary. Nor, in this connection, should we permit ourselves to be misled by the persistent drumbeat of contemporary concern about the contrast between the heroic stature of the robust presidencies of yesteryear and that of their pallid successors today—unquestionably somewhat diminished figures condemned to threading their cautious way through a minefield of governmental regulation, collegial inhibition, and institutional constraint. The fact is that if and when one makes the effort to compare them with their counterparts abroad, and especially those in continental Europe, North American university and college presidents emerge, in general, as comparatively strong figures, real executives possessed of a substantial measure of power and influence over the immediate operation and ultimate destiny of their institutions.
Of course, given the sheer number of American institutions of higher education (in my day, well over 3,500, great and small), and given the marked differences among them, one has to be cautious about any sweeping generalization purporting to apply to all of them. With the range and variety of the institutions involved, their presidencies are understandably quite various in their nature, reach, and style. They differ from one another for a variety of reasons, ranging from the size, age, and public or private status of the institutions involved, to their particular histories, and to the nature of the role played in their management by the senior administrative officer usually carrying the title of provost. Though in this respect, and at the level of individual institutions, all sorts of differences exist. At our largest universities, the provost tends to be a very consequential and often quite dominant figure whose purview is institution-wide and who, in the discharge of his responsibilities (which are largely analogous to those of a chief operating officer in the corporate world), often possesses a considerable measure of independence from the president to whom he reports in the latter’s capacity of chief executive officer. At our small colleges, however, that tends not to be the case. If at such institutions the office of provost actually exists, and that is frequently not the case, the responsibilities attaching to it tend to be much more confined in scope, with the chief operating officer role falling, in effect, to the president who serves also as chief executive officer.
That was certainly the case at the Williams of my day, the administrative organization of which, conditioned by its own particular history, was somewhat unusual. The responsibilities discharged at many another college by a chief academic officer were, in fact, split between the dean of the faculty and the provost, with the latter also discharging some of the duties that fall elsewhere to a chief financial officer. While the college’s bylaws stipulated that it was the dean of the faculty who should, in the prolonged absence of the president, serve as acting president, in other respects dean and provost were of much the same order of seniority, with the provost also reporting directly to the president and being possessed of his own distinct area of responsibility. Though they have since changed, those responsibilities extended in my administrative days to the framing of the annual college budget, long-range financial planning, and overseeing the library, the Center for Computing, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Bronfman Science Center, audio-visual services, the Office of Admission, the Office of Financial Aid, and Athletics. Recognizing the fact that, among the college’s senior administrative officers, it was the president alone whose purview extended to the full range of collegiate operations, nonacademic as well as academic, and noting that it was traditional at Williams (and one of the sources of its strength) for the deans and provost to be drawn temporarily from the ranks of the faculty to serve terms in administration, more than one of the decennial reaccreditation teams assessing the health of the college have been moved to comment on the president’s involvement in every aspect of the college’s operations and to acknowledge the “strong tradition of presidential leadership at Williams.” Concurring in that judgment, a former trustee with long years of devoted service on the board once told me that, when asked about it, he was accustomed to describing the Williams presidency as a strong one in that the president served also as chairman of the board of trustees, as presiding officer at faculty meetings, and as a visible presence in the community, residing in the fine old President’s House at the very heart of the campus, right opposite West College (1790), our first building and the navel, as it were, of our collegiate universe.
I have to confess, however, that such, rather abstract, considerations and theories of leadership in general were far from my mind when, at the beginning of July 1985, I walked into the president’s dingy little office in Hopkins Hall and sat down at Phinney Baxter’s huge and rather battered double desk that filled most of the room. At officer cadet school, years earlier, I had heard enough portentous mystification about leadership in general to last a lifetime. There, after all, we had been solemnly graded on the degree to which we possessed the ineffable quality known as OQ (“Officer Quality”). And, in 1985, all I knew about theories pertaining specifically to academic leadership stemmed from an encounter, in a quasi-popular educational journal, with the genre of “self-help” piece that was often the work of a past or present president. And I had not been very impressed by that genre. It was characterized usually by a species of dully obvious didacticism and punctuated altogether too often by irritating lapses into terminal cuteness. Thus, for example, one was apt to be solemnly assured that “the position [of president] is full of paradoxes. Those who enjoy it are not very successful. And those who are successful are not very happy.” Or, again, that “leadership is knowing where to go; management is knowing how to get there.” Or, yet again, that “managers do things right; leaders do the right thing.” The genre was lacking only, it seemed, upbeat exhortations to the effect that when the going gets tough the tough ought really to get going.
If my mind, then, was largely innocent of any real leadership theory, I was also not that well informed about the range of practical differences across the full spectrum of higher educational institutions in the status and positioning of the president. Never having served before on any board of trustees or directors, I was simply unaware of the fact that at institutions of higher education the president did not always (or, indeed, usually) serve also as chairman of the board. And though I knew, having attended faculty meetings at Yale, that it was the dean of Yale College rather than the president of the university who presided at such meetings there, I simply took it for granted that at a freestanding liberal arts college like Williams it was the president who should appropriately play that role. Similarly, I also took it for granted that the president and his family should live in the fine old President’s House and was not unmindful of the symbolic importance of his presence there or of how much that seemed to mean, in those days at least, to loyal alumni who walked into that house as guests. And as for the president’s involvement, in one degree or another, in every aspect of the college’s operations, it was that, I soon discovered, that made the job so very interesting and energizing and that more or less ensured that, for good or ill, there would never be a dull day in the office.
Being, by well-established habit, an inveterate note-taker at meetings, I quickly fell into the practice of keeping such notes in a ledger, organized simply by date and time, with any actions to be taken as an outcome of such meetings highlighted in the margins. Thus, by going over those entries at the end of each week I could easily make sure that such actions had in fact been taken and any promise made faithfully fulfilled. By contemporary standards this was doubtless a fairly primitive system. But it seemed to work quite well for me. I still have those ledgers and, having casually perused them for the first time in more than twenty years, I am struck by the range of things I was attending to on a day-to-day basis. I am struck, too, by the sudden alterations in nature between the focus of one meeting and that of the next, as well as the gradual shift across time in the issues I was characteristically spending a disproportionate amount of time attending to.
Setting to one side the senior administrators who reported directly to me and who were in and out of the office on a regular basis, the range of people coming in to see me was really quite wide and varied. Across time I might well see, and in no predictable sequence, the college marshal, concerned with the ceremonial planning of an upcoming commencement or convocation, followed, say, by a couple of students wanting me to give them a tutorial in medieval political philosophy (we settled upon the lunch hour as one of the few times open and I pledged to provide sandwiches). Or I might see Nikos Psacharopoulos, director of the Williamstown [summer] Theatre Festival (WTF), wanting to talk about the edgy relationship between WTF and the college’s Theatre Department, followed, perhaps, by a senior member of the faculty anxious to share his worries about the deterioration of collegial relations in his particular department. I could also see a resident of the town complaining about the behavior of Williams students who, having secured permission to live off campus in their senior year, were causing trouble in the neighborhood (beer cans on the lawn, etc.), followed, perhaps by Tom (Thomas) Krens, then director of the Williams College Museum of Art, pursuing his dream of creating a vast museum of contemporary art in the abandoned and decaying factory buildings of what had been the Sprague Electric Company in neighboring North Adams. Alternately, I might see Bob (Robert R.) Peck, director of athletics, stopping by to give me an excellent briefing in preparation for the upcoming meeting of presidents of the colleges belonging to the New England Small Colleges Athletic Conference (NESCAC), followed by two women students who, having organized an (evanescent) Croquet Club, wanted to know if they could stage a contest on the invitingly smooth lawn of the President’s House. (Answer: “Yes, of course.”) Or I might see Win (Winthrop M.) Wassenar, director of buildings and grounds, reporting on worrying signs of slope failure above one of the new linking roads at the site of the much-needed faculty housing development that we were laying out (somewhat controversially) on the lower slopes of Pine Cobble Mountain. And so on. The topics up for discussion at the endless succession of meetings of this sort could alternate, somewhat abruptly, between things like the state of race relations on campus to management problems at our Computer Center, or from a final appeal to the president being made by a student whom the faculty-student Discipline Committee had sentenced to expulsion for beating up his girlfriend (sentence upheld) to questions concerning campus lighting and security. They could also alternate from the health of the Williams Mystic Program in Maritime Studies to problems with the irrigation system at the Taconic Golf Club (a college property), or from the Williams-Exeter junior year abroad program at Oxford (a venture very close to my heart) to the antitrust case that a politically motivated Justice Department was pursuing against the Ivy League universities and a group of leading liberal arts colleges, Williams included, or, indeed, from the financial problems of the Village (Williamstown) Ambulance Service to the imperative need to bring to completion the catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Maurice and Charles Prendergast for which the Williams College Museum of Art had become the principal repository. One never quite knew what to expect next.
Perusing those ledgers again, I have been struck by several things. First, by how much time I seem to have spent between 1986 and early 1989 in discussion with Tom Krens about the unfolding MASS MoCA project. It reminds me of the extent to which, along with Will Reed who was also very active in the cause, I came to be engaged in the attempt to get it off the ground. Second, this time throughout the full course of my presidency, how constant was the flow of meetings with Hodge Markgraf and Mike Oman about development matters in general and the Third Century Campaign in particular. Such campaigns are akin to icebergs in that two-thirds of the activity they involve goes on below the more visible surface flow of speechmaking, dinner events, and donor solicitations. And if discussions with Tom often took an intriguingly serpentine course, meetings with Hodge and Mike tended to be crisp, practical, well-prepared, and briefer. Third, the fact that so many of the institutional concerns leading people to set up meetings with me were overwhelmingly concrete rather than more abstractly academic in nature. Matters that were often concrete, indeed, in more than a figurative sense. Bricks and mortar, pipes and parking lots, roads, wires, heating tunnels and running tracks, classrooms, museums, auditoria, and laboratories—such were the fustian things, at once both frustrating and rewarding, of a fair amount of day-to-day presidential engagement.
When I became president, more than one friend and acquaintance in the business world expressed surprise that a quintessentially academic type like me would take on (perhaps they really meant could take on but were too polite to put it in that way!) the management of a complex enterprise with more than nine hundred employees, a large physical plant, an endowment that was to move up across my term of office from slightly less than $200 million to $450 million, and an annual operating budget that likewise moved up from around $60 million to close to a $100 million. I was surprised by their surprise. It is true that the day-to-day management of such an enterprise could confront one with intricate and taxing problems. But there was nothing ineffable or truly extraordinary about them. The purely managerial side of my responsibilities, indeed, served often to call to mind some of the tasks I had become accustomed to dealing with in my army days. Most of our administrative and support staff and our hourly employees were decent, conscientious people who were glad to be working for the college and who wanted to do a good job. Sitting at the apex of the managerial pyramid, one could be sure, if one issued the pertinent orders, that something would happen. Perhaps not always quite what one had in mind but something—and, occasionally, more rather than less than one had intended. Here, I found, one had to be careful with buildings and grounds personnel who were prone to taking a “nothing but the best” point of view even where second or even third best would have been more than adequate. During my presidential years, the president of one of the great midwestern publicly funded research universities got into serious trouble over the ridiculously expensive nature of a fence or wall he had had constructed around the (publicly owned) presidential manse. In cost it was, apparently, the moral equivalent of the renowned thousand-dollar toilet seats reputed periodically to be embedded in the more occluded reaches of military budgeting. All he had wanted was a bit of privacy. But his loyal buildings and grounds troops, moved by a commendable desire to please combined, alas, with a lack of peripheral institutional vision, had gone over the top and left him struggling, in the end, with angry taxpayers and a public relations nightmare spawned by a minor issue peripheral to the overall functioning of his university.
But if, even at a private college, one had to keep a weather eye cocked for such inadvertences, the normal routines of management were by no means the most challenging part of my responsibilities. University presidents these days (although usually presidents in the public sector) sometimes refer to themselves, rather grandly, as chief executive officers. I don’t particularly like that nomenclature but it does, I suppose, catch part of the story reflected in the typical collegiate organizational chart. And while it is part of the institutional story that is more or less invisible to students and one that the faculty is but dimly aware of, it is not, of course, to be dismissed as unimportant. Certainly, this executive/managerial function does take up a good deal of the president’s time, even at a small college like Williams. The administrative corps has to be so organized that it functions effectively, so informed about the operation of the college as a whole that in its parts it does not lose sight of the overall mission and objectives of the institution, and so motivated that it wants to discharge its various responsibilities in an efficient, timely, imaginative, humane, and compassionate manner. Good things won’t happen in a collegiate community without a lot of good, dedicated people in those roles, and, at Williams, we were blessed with a lot of such people. But they had to be led, and it was, and is, part of the president’s job so to lead them—setting clear priorities; discouraging bureaucratic end-running around immediate supervisors (very demoralizing for an institution); maintaining the right balance between insufficient delegation and inadequate supervision; keeping the mission of the college as clearly as possible before the eyes of all (without that some administrative functions tend to be seen as ends in themselves—the great bureaucratic sin that I saw a lot of as a young army officer); doing one’s best to exemplify through one’s own actions, commitments, and achievements the very ethos of the place; demanding at least as much of oneself as of others; and pushing things along and keeping things moving, even if (especially when) it feels like wading through molasses. In the absence of this sort of exercise of executive/managerial leadership, the whole is still likely to keep on moving. But, if it does so, it is by some sort of inertial force, sluggishly and not necessarily in one particular direction or determined by any identifiable overall goal. Many colleges (and most, I suspect, at one or another point in their histories) have survived for years in that mode. But it is one that is surely inimical to the quest for institutional greatness. And it was that quest that was my driving force.
Of course, the standard administrative chart by no means tells the whole story; in some ways, indeed, it can be quite misleading. At Williams, for example, as at many colleges, the president not only reports to the board of trustees but also serves as one of its members. Indeed, in my day at least, the president served also as chairman of the board. Again, the standard organizational chart draws no attention to the role and importance of the alumni body or to the roles played by students, parents, the local public, or the public at large as stakeholders in the institution and people who exert considerable influence over the shaping of its destiny. And to the degree to which any such organizational chart suggests that the chairs of academic departments come under the dean of the faculty in the same way as subordinate administrators come under the superiors to whom they report, it clearly smacks of outright fantasy.
That there is, in fact, something almost schizophrenic about the governance system of American colleges and universities has been brought home to me quite forcefully by my recent year of interim service as a museum director. While at a college it is only those in managerial and administrative positions who can really be said to “work for” their superiors (all of them exercising what is ultimately a measure of authority delegated to them by the president), at a museum all employees/staff members, not only those in traditionally “managerial” roles, do so. And that includes the highly (academically) educated people in the curatorial, educational outreach, and publications departments. If it would be easy enough simply to assume that such people must enjoy a status comparable to that enjoyed by faculty members at a college or university, to do so would be quite wrong. Such people are, in fact, no less directly dependent on the director’s authority (or whim!) than are those other employees working, say, in facilities, public relations, or food services. All, indeed, are employed “at will.” At a college, on the other hand, faculty members—and especially so at old first-rate places like Williams—enjoy at least a shadow of the proudly independent governing role that the fellows of Oxbridge colleges (combining responsibilities that at American institutions are divided between the faculty and the trustee governing board) still discharge as full members of the corporate body. In North America that legal, corporate status was appropriated in the eighteenth century by boards of overseers or trustees who succeeded to the role once played by the original founders. But in terms at least of their moral authority in relation to curriculum, faculty appointments, and the general academic mission of the institution, faculties still enjoy something more than the power delegated to them by the president and trustees. No president can afford for a minute to forget that fact. A vote of no confidence by the faculty—sometimes, even, the threat of such a vote—has often constituted the death knell for a president unfortunate enough to have come into direct collision with widespread faculty sentiment.
Even though it occupies a good deal of time, then, the more demanding part of the president’s role is not the executive/managerial side of things but the less clearly defined one of playing a finely balanced mediating role among a whole series of constituencies, each possessing in one way or another a measure of power independent of his—trustees, faculty, students, alumni, parents, the local public, and even, beyond the particular locality, the broader American public. The fluctuating views of this last concerning the mission, role, and health of American higher education at large serve, after all, to help shape governmental attitudes and policies and can have a very concrete impact on the financial wellbeing of our universities and colleges and on the ability of students to attend them. Public opinion obviously has its most direct impact on our public institutions of higher education, partially state-funded universities and colleges. But in terms especially of federal support for financial aid and faculty scientific research, it can have a marked impact also on our private institutions, Williams itself not excluded. And any president had and has in some measure to be attuned to such public frequencies. And especially so, given the degree to which the academy at large was in my day coming under attack from the political right. In the mid-1960s our colleges and universities had ridden high in public esteem and enjoyed substantial governmental support at both the state and federal levels. By the mid-1970s, however, in the wake of eye-catching turbulence on our campuses nationwide, they had forfeited much of that esteem. And by my own watch, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, they were under fairly constant attack from the right-wing end of the political spectrum and even from at least one of the governmentally sponsored institutions academics had worked hard to establish. For the National Endowment for the Humanities, now politicized under the leadership first of William J. Bennett (Williams, class of 1965) and then of Lynne Cheney, came to take a very dim and really quite hostile view of the direction they thought American academic culture had taken across the two decades preceding; the picture as they seem to have seen it was clearly a gloomy one of downhill all the way. This I myself saw as a wanton misrepresentation of the pertinent realities, and I was so bothered by that fact that I set out to protect enough time in the summers to write what amounted to a historically conditioned work of rebuttal which I was able somehow to complete and see published in time for our bicentennial under the title Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition (1992).
For the president of a college like Williams, however, while he certainly had to keep his eye on the attitudes prevalent among the public at large, it was the stance of other, more immediate, constituencies that had necessarily to weigh more heavily on his mind. The interests and aspirations of such individual constituencies tend rarely to be unified in themselves. Nor do those interests and aspirations come close to coinciding with one another. At the same time, hardly any of those groups can be totally alienated if the institution is not to drift into crisis and if the president is long to retain his or her job. And all of them have to be at least reasonably content if the college is to prosper. The president, accordingly, has to be capable in some measure of fighting on all fronts simultaneously and redeploying his or her forces rapidly from one front to another as occasion demands.
But, then, if I may be permitted a turn that will take me into the more abstract realms of leadership theory, the military metaphor is probably not the one most congruent with the type of leadership called for when what is involved is the care, feeding, and management of the pertinent array of constituencies. It is true that data collected in the 1980s in the context of the Institutional Leadership Project, reflecting the views that college and university presidents themselves at that time held about leadership, reveal them characteristically to have understood in a highly directive top-down fashion the leadership they themselves were exerting; to them it seems to have been “a one-way process whose function it was to get others to comply with or conform to the leader’s direction.” It is far from clear to me, however, how that understanding of institutional leadership would fully catch even what happens on the executive/managerial side of a college president’s functioning. And it certainly has little bearing on what I have identified as the more challenging aspect of presidential leadership, which calls for the careful balancing and management of multiple (sometimes competing) constituencies. So far as theories of leadership go, over the years since I myself stepped down from my presidential duties, I have come to conclude that the theories that are most pertinent and revelatory are those (casually brushed aside by Cohen and March) that fall at the cultural/symbolic end of the spectrum.
Fair enough, but what exactly do I have in mind? Here my thoughts go back to Jack Sawyer and to the major (if comparatively uncelebrated) contribution I believe him to have made to the revitalization of Williams. I noted earlier that what was involved in that effort was not any single bold initiative or some arrestingly visible exercise of what would readily be recognized as presidential leadership but, rather, a consistent pattern of behavior embedded in his deportment and his day-to-day work throughout the entirety of his presidency. It reflected a dimension of leadership that involves the educational and instructional side of the leader’s role in the building of a necessary, supportive followership. And it is that aspect of leadership that has been studied much in recent years under the rubric of cultural and symbolic leadership.
When, long after I had put administrative office behind me, I began to read the relevant leadership literature under the genial promptings of Al (George R.) Goethals, friend and colleague and a gifted social psychologist who had served on my presidential watch first as acting dean of the faculty and then as provost, I was struck by its pertinence to the constituency aspect of the president’s responsibilities and by the degree to which it made sense of what I myself, comparatively innocent of theory, had felt more or less instinctively moved to do.
However “constructivist” the intellectual inclinations of more recent years, mid-twentieth-century American sociology was persistently inclined to an overeager and exclusive embrace of the characteristically Durkheimian understanding of the social and institutional world as an alien and objective facticity set over against the individual in much the same way as the external reality of the world of nature is set over against the individual. And that sort of understanding tended also to be promoted in the presidential mind by the overwhelmingly concrete nature of so many of the institutional concerns that set the day-to-day agenda for academic leaders. That being so, the counterintuitive Weberian assumption that institutional life is a fragile social construction, the product of human creativity and fraught, therefore, with human meaning, is apt to seem as much at odds with its sheer facticity, otherness, weight, and inertial force as once was the novel Copernican heliocentrism with the ordinary person’s commonsense conviction that it was he who stood immobile at the still point of a ceaselessly turning world. But few, I suspect, who have paused to ponder the fact that even states can fail, or who have been involved in the creation of any sort of start-up enterprise, are likely to harbor doubt about the rectitude of that Weberian intuition. And no one, I also suspect, who has been charged with the stewardship of an existing academic institution, however old and well established, can totally have escaped those moments of crisis, heightened sensibilities, exhausted reflection, or, simply, unexpected epiphany when the sheer fragility of institutions becomes suddenly quite palpable. And such moments are apt to bring with them the startled realization that, their massive concreteness notwithstanding, institutions are in the end nothing other than a frail tissue of human purpose, intentionality, aspiration, and hope, thrust boldly forward in the very teeth of the hostility of time.
In the face of this compelling epiphany, the more instrumental approaches to institutional leadership have little or nothing to offer. On the other hand, it is precisely at such daunting moments of truth that the seemingly hyper-theoretical cultural, symbolic, and broadly interpretative approaches come very much into their own, and sometimes in quite practical ways. They do so, I believe, because they helpfully shift the focus of concern from issues pertaining to the simple exercise of power, with which the more instrumental approaches are primarily concerned, to those more testing challenges that leaders confront as they reach out for the enabling warrants that will justify the actions they are taking and legitimate the changes they may be trying to engineer. And so reach out they must if in the exercise of their powers they are to be effective. For college and university presidents go about their business, not in some sort of unresponsive void, but in a rich context involving multiple groupings fraught with expectations concerning the use to which they should at any moment be putting the not inconsiderable powers at their disposal. Whatever their particular institutional setting, simple power has somehow to be transformed into authority, for the would-be exercise of leadership is shadowed always by the problem of legitimation.
Close attention, therefore, must be devoted to the process that proponents of the cultural and symbolic approach to leadership have sometimes called “the management of meaning.” As we have seen, however, and speaking specifically about educational institutions, Philip Selznick has described that process less portentously as pertaining to the crucial role that the leader plays in defining and proclaiming on a day-in-day-out basis the institution’s role and mission, in nurturing its “embodiment” of an enduring meaning and purpose, in himself (or herself) somehow also embodying that meaning and infusing it into the very organization, structure, and routines of behavior within it, defending the institution’s integrity, and sustaining its core values. Selznick’s emphasis, then, is very much on the educational and instructional nature of the leader’s role, on the way in which the leader (as my late, revered colleague James MacGregor Burns was to put it when discussing what he called “transformative leadership”) “shapes, alters and elevates the motives and values of followers through the vital teaching role of leadership.”
Commentators who have subsequently developed cultural and symbolic approaches have not so much abandoned that instructional perspective on the leadership role as extended it and specified it more precisely. Assuming the socially constructed nature of institutional reality, concerned with the nature of institutional culture, and moved by the insights of interpretative anthropology, they have extended the instructional role to embrace not simply the forthright articulation and defense of enduring institutional values but, beyond that, the exploitation by leaders of myth, ritual, language, legend, symbol, and (perhaps above all) story. All of this to be done in the ongoing attempt to interpret for their followers and to shape, nurture, and develop in them the complex tissue of commonly shared understandings, perceptions, meanings, values, and beliefs which define, in effect, the institutional reality.
The importance attached in this and other versions of the cultural/symbolic/interpretative approach to the role played by stories should not escape our attention. This specific emphasis has been helpfully intensified of more recent years by Howard Gardner in a stimulating book entitled Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (1995). Arguing that “the arena in which leadership necessarily occurs” is that of “human minds,” he claims that leaders make their impact in that arena not so much by the straightforward or static message or themes they attempt to convey as by the stories or narratives of an institutional drama unfolding in dynamic fashion across time. Such narratives, he goes on to argue, constitute “a uniquely powerful currency in human relationships.” That is especially true of the most deeply rooted of the stories that leaders tend to relate, those that “concern issues of personal and group identity,” narratives that, by helping “individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed, . . . constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal.”
I can’t help fretting, of course, that all of this may well strike even a reader interested in the “nature, range, and variety” of the presidential role as unhelpfully abstract and altogether too “academic.” But against any such conclusion I feel bound to lean. And not least of all because I find that it has helped me make sense, in retrospect, of my own actions and inclinations as president. Whatever their pertinence or lack of pertinence to the leadership issue at large, both the cultural/symbolic/interpretative approach in general and Gardner’s take on it in particular speak powerfully (and, I think, profoundly) to the leadership challenge confronting those who are called upon to preside over such quintessential communities of the word as institutions of higher education. And for more than one reason. Colleges and universities, especially if they have had a long, continuous history and (like Williams) still enjoy a humane intimacy of scale, are not only communities of the word—though that they certainly are—but they are also fine exemplars of what Robert Bellah and others have dubbed “communities of memory.” Such communities are those which, in an attempt to prevent the erosion of tradition and the consignment of their past to oblivion, persist in telling and retelling their “constitutive narrative,” recalling to mind “the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the community’s very meaning and identity.” “The stories that make up a tradition,” Bellah and his colleagues maintain,
contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such character. But the stories are not all exemplary, not all about successes and achievements. A genuine community of memory will also tell stories of shared suffering that sometimes creates deeper identities than success. . . . And if the community is completely honest, it will remember not only suffering received but suffering inflicted—dangerous memories, for they call the community to alter ancient evils. The communities of memory that tie us to the past also turn us to the future as communities of hope. They carry a context of memory that can allow us to connect our aspirations for ourselves and those closest to us with the aspirations of a larger whole and see our own efforts as being, in part, contributions to a common good.
Such insights about “communities of memory” in general are surely pertinent to what can constitute some of the greatest challenges college and university presidents can be called upon to face—those generated by the pressures and complex interplay of multiple constituencies, each comprised not of organizational subordinates but of a congeries of independent (sometimes entrepreneurial) figures, well or poorly informed, loosely or tightly organized, and betraying a whole range of disparate understandings of the nature, purpose, and destiny of the institution in question. If the college is simply to maintain its health, all of those constituencies have to be at least reasonably satisfied. And if, somehow, it is truly to thrive, the energies, loyalties, and commitments of all of them have to be marshaled in such a way that the whole collegiate enterprise can move forward confidently and with broadly shared conviction and in an assured and (if at all possible) agreed upon direction. Marshaled also, and accordingly (here Bellah’s intuition comes into play), in a manner congruent with the hallowed legacy from the past, the acknowledged strength of the present, and the celebratory hopes for the future. And central to a presidential response to that energizing challenge is the framing, relating, and, if at all possible, the unambiguous personal embodiment of an institutional story that builds upon (even while it alters or extends) the traditional institutional saga, that fits the circumstances of the given historical moment, and that makes sense to the majority of constituents, however disparate they may be. Hence the mantra which, I now note, put in an appearance in many of my statements or speeches directed towards one or another segment of the greater Williams community. It was inspired by Edmund Burke’s grand vision of society as a partnership in matters of such complexity, nobility, and enduring import that its end “cannot be obtained in many generations.” So that, of necessity, “it becomes a [quasi-mystical] partnership” not only “between those who are living,” but “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” And what was that mantra? Nothing other than this: “Pride in the past, confidence in the present, faith in the future.” For mine, to borrow Albert Hirschman’s phrase, was an ineluctable “bias for hope.” And it was my abiding conviction that if we were to have faith in the promise of the future we were called upon, not only to have confidence in the integrity of the present, but also some measure of pride in the nobilities and achievements of the past.