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When I think about what it takes to be a college or university leader these days, it makes me want to take to my bed in sympathetic exhaustion. I have this image of Odysseus sailing through the Aegean, replacing the boards of his ship one at a time while trying not to founder. No wonder provosts increasingly don't aspire to their bosses' jobs.
As resources diminish, academic leaders can no longer put off redesigning core functions of the university—fixing the kinds of “design flaws” that Michael Crow finds in the old model of the academy. They need to introduce or bring to scale strategies to increase educational productivity, such as substituting technology for labor and cheap labor (e.g., other students) for expensive, while tracking the results to ensure that the quality of learning is kept constant or improved—strategies such as the ones introduced into the physics curriculum at MIT, as described by Lori Breslow in this issue. They have to push through revisions to fundamental structures at a time when every dollar spent is reallocated from somewhere else.
The old model of the charismatic leader who rules the campus with an iron fist, even if in a velvet glove, simply doesn't work in such an environment. As I said in my last editorial, the problems are too big and complex, the politics too difficult, for any Lone Ranger to impose his or her will on the situation. In leadership, as in crowdsourcing and collaborative science, no person these days can be an island, “entire of itself.”
So what kinds of leaders do we need now? Richard Skinner suggests the answer to that question the most directly in this issue, in his advice to boards about how to choose a new president. But Stephen Ehrmann does as well: His ten recommendations for incorporating technology into the curriculum suggest a more collaborative kind of leadership than the term usually brings to mind. Both Lou Anna Simon and Michael Crow show current presidents of major institutions in action, while the Cross award winners quoted in Listening to Students give us a glimpse of leaders of the future.
So here is what I've picked up from the articles in this issue about the qualities contemporary leaders need to have.
Humility. This may seem an odd choice for the primary quality of a leader, but I think that it's essential these days. I remember my predecessor at AAHE, Russ Edgerton, saying once that he knew he was successful in pulling a group together to think through an issue when he was the dumbest person in the room. (Given Russ's amazing grasp of issues in higher education and prescience about the future, I suspect that to actually achieve that would require him, as John F. Kennedy once said of Thomas Jefferson, to dine alone. But I digress.)
Even the development of the big vision, like the World Grant Ideal that Simon describes in her article or the distributed university in Michael Crow's, seems to me to require a huddle. A leader can be primus inter pares, but the most fatal flaw he or she can have these days is the unwillingness to appoint people better than him or herself. That means that good presidents have egos they can check at the door.
Enthusiasm. At the same time, they need to be deeply committed to the changes they want to see made, since their enthusiasm is the best clue people have as to whether they're being asked to construct a Potemkin village or to do something real. They need to aim, energize, recognize, track, and reward innovation.
Charm. I mean this in the best sense: the capacity to get along with all those other people who are so essential to the institution's success. Leaders have to be good listeners, communicators, and team members with a wide variety of folks, many of whom both inside and outside of the institution will regard them with suspicion, simply by virtue of their positions.
But in order for that charm not to seem the hollow thing it can easily be, the leader must have integrity.
Integrity. In leadership as in life, it's of primary importance that one's word be good. I remember watching my boss at the Virginia coordinating board, Gordon Davies, work with the legislature. During his years as director, he built up a reputation for “speaking truth to power.” That gave him enormous leverage: When legislators didn't know whom to believe, they could always turn to Gordon for the real scoop.
Reputations like that are built up over a long period, twenty years in Gordon's case. So a leader needs to have tenacity.
Tenacity. As Ehrmann points out, not only the development of trust but embedded reform takes time. How long has it taken student learning to replace instructor interest as the primary good in the classroom? How long has it taken us to move from using technology to do the old jobs more expensively to using it to do something new? How long does it take to bring the hiring, training, and socialization of faculty and staff into alignment with new goals or ways of doing business, which Ehrmann says has to happen for technological innovation to stick? That's how long a leader needs to hold the course—for at least a decade, in most cases.
In these days of rapid turnover, such persistence is hard to come by. But a leader who combines humility with an understanding of the fact that (to quote Skinner quoting Robert Penn Warren) “gradualism is all you'll get” might choose to continue the implementation of a predecessor's initiatives rather than starting new ones, as Skinner points out.
Courage. Implicit in my descriptions of the other qualities is a kind of courage that doesn't display itself in heroics but in tenacity in the face of opposition (and, I should add, flexibility and adaptability when better ideas or reasonable cautions come forward) and in integrity when telling the truth is risky. Given the kind of pushback that can be expected in reaction to any fundamental change in the old ways of doing things, as Breslow shows, leadership is no job for the faint-hearted.
If what I've said is true, it seems that leaders these days need to be further up the evolutionary scale than those guys who think their job is simply to run things. But seeing the naturalness with which the Cross Future Leaders demonstrate many of these qualities makes me think that we're raising our successors right—that is, to be better than us.
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