HGSE News: Where Have All the Great Presidents Gone? (Or Have They?)

On the occasion of the selection and installation of a new president at Harvard this year, this essay by Professor Richard Chait speaks to some of the questions about what makes a visionary leader—and a visionary institution of higher education. Over the coming months, HGSE News will feature a series of responses from the leaders of U.S. colleges and universities to the ideas articulated in this essay.

Where Have All the Great Presidents Gone? (Or Have They?)

Just as baseball's nostalgia buffs reminisce wistfully about the glory years of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio, so too do many commentators on the university presidency these days invoke their own American heroes. Citing the end of a tradition of visionary leadership, they long for a lineup with the likes of Charles William Eliot, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Robert Maynard Hutchins. (Maybe the problem today is that we have too few leaders who regularly use their middle names.) At a blue-ribbon conference entitled "Past, Present, and Future Leaders of American Higher Education" in Laguna Niguel, California, in the late 1990s, the general consensus was that, at best, this lineage ended with Clark Kerr and Father Hesburgh.

So-does higher education have a leadership crisis? I think not, for five reasons.

"Old-Boy Networks" and Sentimentality
First, the obvious. All of these heroes, both academic and athletic, represent a historically dominant image of leadership, namely, the powerful white male. Just as Hank Aaron will never supplant the Babe as the icon of baseball (despite superior accomplishments), the same limitation probably affects the likes of Johnetta Cole, Nannerl Keohane, Alfredo de Los Santos, or Chang-Lin Tien, to name only a few examples. Indeed, one might speculate that some assumptions about a scarcity of leaders have emerged because the "old-boy network" no longer has such a grip (some would say, stranglehold) on the recruitment process.

Second, memory, especially when colored by sentimentality, can be notoriously unreliable. The era of the giants, we should recall, was also a period of virulent racial discrimination and outright segregation, a time of tacit and explicit religious quotas, and an epoch when "women need not apply" for most leadership slots. Only a quarter century ago, there were few, if any, heroes on the horizon. Indeed, a good many leaders, from Columbia University to Wisconsin-Madison to Kent State, were under siege, barricaded in offices, and stymied by campus disruptions.

The Road Ahead
Third, we have the concomitant of a selective, sweetened memory of the past, namely, an excessively grim view of the present and near-term future. These are hardly the worst of times—not even close. (Remember the spate of literature on retrenchment and the "New Depression in Higher Education" in the 1970s?)

Does the academy face challenges of considerable magnitude? Of course, I am not a Pollyanna on the Charles. Even a sampler of problems can trigger managerial vertigo: demography, technology, affordability, accountability, commercialism, for-profit competition, political correctness, the rollback of affirmative action, unchecked costs, insatiable wants—a long list could be generated in short time.

On the other hand, we should not overlook countless healthy signs. Never has the importance of a college education been more widely recognized, a realization that has generated yet another round of federal student aid, and that will fuel—along with population growth—record enrollments of over 16 million students by 2007.

The economic value of a college diploma continues to climb—college graduates now earn, on average, more than half again as much as peers with a high school diploma. Alumni contributions have soared in recent years. Some 270 institutions have endowments over $65 million. Billion- and multibillion-dollar capital campaigns by preeminent universities, as well as comparatively ambitious efforts by largely regional colleges, have succeeded; the smart money continues to back higher education.

The Qualities of the 21st-Century Leader
Fourth, and perhaps less apparent, a credible case can be made that the "giants" of yesteryear are campus dinosaurs, relics of a bygone era rendered obsolete by a radically altered environment. Many thoughtful scholars argue that leadership now takes far more nuanced forms and entails more substantial constraints.

In Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz contends that, "in a crisis we tend to look for the wrong kind of leadership. We call for someone with answers, decisions, strength, and a map for the future...in short, someone who can make hard problems simple." Instead, Heifetz asserted, we need leaders with far subtler skills to frame issues, fasten attention, and expose conflict. "Habitually seeking solutions from people in authority," he wrote, "is maladaptive."

In a similar vein, Robert Birnbaum, a former college president, cautioned in How Colleges Work: The Cybernetics of Academic Organization and Leadership that "it is a mistake for presidents to enter office with the belief that they will be able to significantly change the institution." Like Heifetz, Birnbaum recommends that presidents illuminate more than decide issues, and do more to direct attention than direct employees.

Taken together, these analyses, and many others, do not exactly constitute a casting call for forceful, dynamic, decisive CEOs with long shadows (and sometimes large egos). To the contrary, the message is that effective leaders today need not, should not, and cannot be visionary "giants." In fact, the very concepts of personal magnetism and heroism may be outdated and even dysfunctional, replaced by softer notions of collaboration, team play, empowerment, organizational culture, and adaptive work.

Is a National Leadership Role Required?
Fifth, to concede that we lack titans does not mean that we lack leadership; the absence of "giants" does not a leadership vacuum make. As a practical matter, precious few colleges or universities, certainly fewer than 50, even offer a platform for national prominence (and within that subset, we intuitively, and sometimes mistakenly, equate institutional reputation with astute leadership).

There are, however, some 3,650 other institutions of higher education whose senior officers, quite literally, are not well-positioned to assert a leadership role nationally. Some do, despite the long odds. The vast majority, though, work quite capably with faculty and staff colleagues on a daily basis to create a better college or university. Just because these men and women labor relatively inconspicuously, academics should not conclude that we are bereft of leaders. One does not have to be a household name within or beyond the profession to be an effective president or provost of an institution.

On the whole issue of visible, visionary leaders, academics should take comfort from Built to Last, Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James Collins and Jerry Porras. The authors compared visionary companies, "the crown jewels-in their industries, widely admired by their peers...the gold medalists," with other less successful, yet stellar, companies, the "silver and bronze medalists." How did these corporations, like 3M, Boeing, and Merck manage to excel without charismatic visionary leaders? The answer, in large part, was that the "gold medalists" created visionary companies, not visionary leaders. The second of the authors' 12 "shattered myths" is the fallacy that "visionary companies require great and charismatic leaders":

A charismatic, visionary leader is absolutely not required for a visionary company and, in fact, can be detrimental to a company's long-term prospects. Some of the most significant CEOs in the history of visionary companies did not fit the model of the high-profile, charismatic leader...(T)hey concentrated more on architecting an enduring institution than on being a great individual leader.

The same phenomenon may apply to the finest private colleges and public universities. Thus, before we decree a dearth of leaders, we should ascertain whether Williams and Wellesley, and Michigan and Virginia have achieved and sustained distinction chiefly through one visionary president after another or through the development and maintenance of a visionary organization with a strong internal culture. I suspect the latter explains more than the former. After all, with an average presidential tenure of seven years, what institution would be well-served, over time, by a bold new vision every sabbatical year?

Personally, I think that we overattribute both failures and successes to a few people at the top of the organizational chart. Rather than conduct another poll (sometimes described at the Laguna Niguel conference as a "beauty contest") about great leaders 20 years from now, I would hope that we examine instead the "best of breed" among various categories of colleges and universities to learn more about what makes these institutions exceptional. Consistent with the study by Collins and Porras, I'll bet on visionary organizations rather than visionary leaders.

About the Essay
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Change Magazine, January-February 1998. Reprinted with permission of The Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. This essay also appeared in the Summer 1998 issue of the HGSE Bulletin.

For More Information
Information on Richard Chait and his research can be found in the Faculty Profiles.

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