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On the occasion of the presidential transition at Harvard this year, HGSE News is featuring a series of responses by HGSE alumni who are university or college presidents to an essay by HGSE professor Richard Chait about the "great" presidents. The resulting exchange is a provocative and thoughtful conversation on the nature of contemporary leadership. This response was written by Joanne V. Creighton, M.A.T.'65, President, Mount Holyoke College.
I agree with Dick Chait (and George [H.W.] Bush) that the "vision thing" can be a misunderstood component of leadership in this post-heroic age. Beware of the modern college president whose platonic "vision" springs full blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. A better kind of vision is the ability to see and to work with what is there. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of serving as a college president is the vista afforded by the position; from that perspective one is likely to have occasional moments of seeing the college steadily and seeing it whole, to borrow a phrase from Matthew Arnold. These visions from the mount, as it were, provide great surges of adrenaline, for it is to see the college's multifarious complexity, its energy, its excellence, its incipient possibilities. It is to see—despite apparent conflicts and disjunctures—the common ground and common values that bind us together in common purpose. Fundamentally, the president's job is to align the college with its most powerful generating ideas, with its core mission. A president helps the college to be more quintessentially itself. The job involves ritualistic incantation of implicit ideals, goals, and aspirations. ("Mankind needs more often to be reminded than to be informed," says Samuel Johnson.) Like Alexander Haig, the president can say: "I'm in charge"—but with equal credibility. So many others—students, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, the surrounding community—make up the fabric of the college as well as does its accumulated history, customs, policies, and traditions. The college itself, not the transient president, is the source of inspiration, the incarnation of a collective, energizing vision. Yet presidents also see the fragility of the institutions we serve. They are not self sustaining. We cannot take them for granted. They need our undivided attention, our most inspired imagination. And that they exact. There is no vacuum of leadership. We who have these jobs know how privileged we are to be stewards of our inestimable educational legacy. About the Commentary
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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