Leadership Lessons
Does the downfall of Harvard's controversial No. 1 prove that college presidents have lost their clout?
When Harvard University hired Lawrence Summers in 2001, the school made no secret of its desire for a bold president who would not only shake things up internally but also reassert the influence of the nation's most prestigious college presidency. The school's governing board seemed to have in mind a transformative leader reminiscent of the great presidents of Harvard's past--men who set the agenda for higher education in the country and often dominated national discussions as revered public intellectuals.
But things didn't quite go according to plan. True, the brilliant yet famously prickly treasury secretary under President Clinton quickly developed plans to expand the campus, reinvigorate the undergraduate curriculum, bridge the gaps between the university's traditionally independent schools of arts and sciences, law, medicine, and business, and improve financial aid. But his 4
Bully pulpit. But beyond Summers's notorious battles, his resignation last week could be viewed as the latest bit of evidence that college presidents no longer dominate higher education the way Harvard's old presidents (or, for that matter, Princeton's Woodrow Wilson, Chicago's Robert Maynard Hutchins, or Berkeley's Clark Kerr) once did. After the Civil War, for instance, Charles Eliot prodded Harvard to become truly national, recruiting students from around the country and scholars from abroad. And from 1933 to 1953, James Conant promoted standardized testing in admissions--the precursor to the SAT--to diversify Harvard's student body, and reshaped the tradition-bound curriculum away from just the classics. But today "presidents aren't functioning as the public intellectuals they were in days gone by," says David Skorton, president of the University of Iowa, who will take over at Cornell in July. Adds S. Frederick Starr, former president of Oberlin: "There are no major voices in higher education. You may say that Summers was a kind of a throwback."
To be sure, Summers faced many problems unique to Harvard, including an unusually entrenched faculty wary of new plans (and, critics would say, resistant to any challenge to its reflexively liberal politics). "Clearly the university community never bought into change,"says Kenneth Shaw, a former chancellor of Syracuse University. But it's also true that college presidents in general now face a broader array of tasks than they once did. While it is easy to lionize past leaders and ignore their faults (after all, Harvard's Eliot called for a specifically female curriculum at women's colleges resembling that of a finishing school), the landscape and scale of higher education have changed dramatically.
Thanks to the demands of building the endowments needed to admit more students, start new programs, and offer financial aid, today fundraising is often cited as one of the top missions of college presidents, making their role increasingly akin to that of corporate CEO or mayor of a large city rather than intellectual leader. That can make staking out public views on big issues all the more difficult for fear of alienating potential donors or university stakeholders. David Ward, head of the American Council on Education, says college presidents may need to act as "patrons" of professors who are public intellectuals rather than taking on that role themselves.
Still, notwithstanding the demands of the job, there are some college presidents in recent years who have championed bold initiatives that have altered the higher ed debate (though they've generally done so without becoming household names). At the University of California, former President Richard Atkinson, a cognitive psychologist by training, was one of the driving forces behind reshaping the SAT to focus less on aptitude and more on academic achievement. And at Amherst College, Anthony Marx is leading a national effort to push for more socioeconomic diversity.
So could a more diplomatic leader have succeeded where Summers didn't? "There were certainly moments when I could have challenged the community more wisely and more respectfully," he said following his resignation. After the interim presidency of Derek Bok (story, Page 28), expect Harvard's next chief to try building consensus first--and only then, perhaps, to push for far-reaching change.
This story appears in the March 6, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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