The college president

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Part of Panorama

Title: The college president
Creator: Watt, W.W.
Language: English
Source: Panorama XIV (5) May 1962
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Fulltext: Every year is a presidential year in American higher education. Statisticians have estimated that the aver age tenure of office for the college or university president in the United States is four years. Whatever significance this may have for the student of government, it is a sober ing fact to those who are di rectly concerned with the im provement, or even the bare survival, of any of the 1,800 institutions that presume to qualify as colleges and universtiies. Educational historians remind us that the rate of turnover has always been no toriously high, that the beard ed prexies of the nineteenth century campus only look as if they reigned forever. I do not know how rapidly, if at all, the rate has been accele rating during the unsettling years since World War II. But obviously the arks of culture are going to have a hard enough time surviving the student inundation of the com ing decade without continually changing Npahs in mid-flood. The current turnover is alarm ing enough. W. W. Watt THE COLLEGE PRESIDENT The alarms have resulted re cently in a number of excur sions into the difficult field of presidential analysis. Ex President Harold Dodds of Princeton has been given a Carnegie grant for a compre hensive survey of the college presidency. Last year Scrib ner’s published A Friend in Power, a novel in which Pro fessor Carlos Baker of Prince ton artfully depicts the deli cate process of winnowing sturdy presidential timber from saplings that will not survive storm and blight. This May 1962 49 year Harper has brought out The American College Pres ident in which Harold W. Stoke — now in his third col lege presidency as the head of Queens—gives his experienced views of what it takes. Dr. Stoke’s book gives the reader the stimulating but frustrating experience of sit ting vicariously on the edge of an academic chair that has de generated into a hot seat. Without lamenting his lot or tooting his own horn, the au thor manages, with a remark able mixture of tact and can dor, to show that the most competent incumbent can only try to make the best of the hardest of all possible jobs. The ideal college president, one infers, must have the strength of Atlas, the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of J. B., the eyes of Argus, and the touch of Midas — and even with all these attributes, too many of his faculty will see him only as Janus. After weaving his way through the maze of exacting qualifica tions, the reader might be for given for echoing the com ment of Dr. Norman Macy, the eminent surgeon on the Board of Trustees of the uni versity “founded” by Carlos Baker: “The only man who could possibly qualify on all those counts died on the Cross nineteen hundred years ago.” It is doubtful if a more con vincing picture of the college president’s many-ringed cir cus will appear soon, and it would be presumptuous for anyone looking from the out side in — or from the under side up — to question its gen eral accuracy. Instead, I pro? pose to discuss some of the implications of one issue that dominates all other s. Dr. Stoke raises it in the first chapter: If I were to make a gen eral observation about the qualifications of college presidents, it would be this: in recent years the factor of educational dis tinction has declined while factors of person ality, management skills, and successful experience in business and adminis tration have increased in importance. This fact re flects the gradual trans formation of the college president from an intel• lectual leader into a man ager, skilled in adminis tration, a broker in per sonal and public relations. The further he goes in the book, the more Dr. Stoke re veals his reluctance to accept this change. When he has put behind him a lively descrip tion of the headaches of house keeping, he comes out strong ly for a president with a mes 50 Panorama sianic faith in education and ideas about making it prevail. But I was left with the un pleasant impression that, un less the trend is sharply re versed, such a paragon will be come rarer as the mechanized years tick by. For a while there will be a president here and there who can occasion ally find a pause for the day’s meditation that is known as the scholar’s hour. But the day is not far off, I assume, when private visions will be entirely replaced by public re lations, when the meditator will yield to the mediator, when — as the jacket blurb promises us — the “Man of Learning” will give way to the “Man of Management.” LeSt we become unduly alarmed, it must be admitted that any two-valued orienta tion distorts the picture. The goals of Learning and Man agement are not so far apart today as the traditional stereo types of Ivory Tower and Mar ket Place still mislead people into assuming. The two worlds have been of immense value to each other. Moreover, the “gradual transformation” dis cussed by Dr. Stoke has been going on for a long time. Er nest Earnest, in his readable history of the American col lege (Academic Procession, Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), reminds us that even the patriarchal presidents of the nineteenth century were not isolated from the hard facts of meet ing payrolls: “President Ar thur Twining Hadley of Yale said that when he called on President Noah Porter (18711876) he usually found him reading Kant; when he called on President Timothy Dwight (1886-1899) he found him reading a balance sheet.” Earnest traces a growing divi sion, beginning about the turn of the century, between the scholarly ideals of the faculty and the pecuniary preoccupa tions of the administrators. By 1930 the alarm bell had been sounded loud and often. But we can’t solve our prob lems with the consolations qf history or by giving in, how ever reluctantly, to what we presume to be inevitable. The time has certainly come when we must assert the predomi nance of some values over others. One rule should be deeply engraved on the col lective conscience of the cam pus: Whatever else he is, the man (or woman) chosen to head a college or univer sity should be an educational leader; and whatever his other cares may be, he should con tinue as long as he remains in office to give top priority to the duties of educational (Continued on page 77) May 1962 51 THE COLLEGE ... leadership. I do not, of course, mean an educationist: the professional student of education who exalts methods above content, talks about life-adjustment to a life he has not studied in depth, and speaks and reads a strange language call ed Pedagese that is unintel ligible to the average layman. Nor do I go along with the loose usage referring to every teacher, at least from the thirteenth grade up, as an educator. The campuses are full of specialists, many of them productive scholars, who have neither the inclination nor the capacity to take a wide-angle view of the cur riculum. By an educational leader I mean an excellent teacher with enough class room experience on the un dergraduate level to give him a first-hand insight into the problems of the professor; a man, moreover, who has ev olved a firm but flexible phi losophy of education and can express it articulately to both scholar and layman. Grad uate teaching is not essential, but the acceptable candidate should present evidence of genuine understanding of the work of the research scholar, preferably in the form of so lid publication. If he has also had experience in educational (Continued from page 51) administration — as dean, de partment head, or director of a significant program of stu dies — so much the better. The goodly company of deans who have been kicked up stairs to become distinguish ed presidents takes some of the edge off the quip that a dean is a mouse in training to be a rat. But it must not be forgotten that many a dean is an unsuccessful teacher who has blossomed into new dignity through some special talent as a disciplinarian, a clerk, or an errand boy. The reasons for insisting on an educational leader are in such plain sight that they are often, like Poe’s purloin ed letter, completely overlook ed. Every reputable institu tion of higher learning, at least beyond the junior col lege level, is established for two interrelated purposes: to expound knowledge through teaching and expand it through scholarship and re search. The teachers and scholars on the campus are more di rectly and consistently con cerned with pursuing these aims than any other group. Neither fraternities nor foot ball, nor luxurious dormito ries nor palatial union build ings, nor the touching of May 1962 77 alumni, nor the sweet uses of publicity can so enchance the long-term reputation of a col lege as a live faculty that in sists on high standards and gives full value in classroom, library and laboratory. To help in building and maintaining such a faculty, the president must thorough ly understand the facts of aca demic life. For example: Conscientious teaching is one of the most demanding of all occupations; the kind of thinking that goes into it can not be obtained merely by putting a slogan on the wall. Considering demands of “keeping up with the field,” class preparation, paper gra ding, committee work and student counseling (both sche duled)— the college teacher with a twelve-hour class con tact load may be doing a fair day’s (and night’s) work; but no time-study man can find a perfect formula for mea suring his input and output. Significant research re quires solid blocks of unin terrupted time, the sort that can be supplied only by free summers and occasional leaves; research cannot al ways promise or achieve “re sults,” and much of it is not “practical” — at least in the fuzzily restricted use of such terms in the market place. Criticism is not the cor 78 rosive griping of the man who will not “play with the team” but the constant self inspection without which no educational institution can progress. Academic freedom is not a subversive shibboleth of the American Association of Uni versity Professors but an atmosohere without which the honest pursuit of the truth is impossible. The instructor on the low est rung of the academic lad der is not the president’s em ployee, but his fellow scholar and teacher; the instructor has a clear right to reason why and to express his react ions to the president’s policies and practices openly, not in the safe confines of a compa ny suggestion box. No workable educational policy can spring fully armed from the head of the institu tions and be passed down through channels by execu tive fiat; it must be hammer ed out in the give-and-take of free discussion. In short, the qualifications of the ideal president consist not? only of aptitudes, but of attitudes. In every first-rate college educator the attitudes are so built-in that he cannot choose but remain a friend of the faculty if he becomes a friend in power. By this I do not mean a president Panorama whose entire energies are de voted to appeasing the teach ing staff; I mean a college educator who unmistakably puts teaching and scholarship first in importance. In his final chapter, Dr. Stoke argues convincingly that the college president must have a philosophy of education and discusses its uses in some detail. Certain ly the possession of a sound philosophy will enable the bu siest housekeeper to find rea sonable solutions to many ot the educational dilemmas of the campus. But I am still left with the impression that, beyond this, the modern pres ident can function as an edu cator only in occasional lulls between the battles of bureau cracy : All this is particularly galling to a man who has always thought of himself as primarily concerned with education and who thought that by becoming a presi dent he would be even more influential. He can still make noises like an educa tor — after all, the president can create captive audiences but for reasons which will be seen to be fundamental ly sound, he had better re sign himself to a prepared fate. I cannot believe that any true educational leader, in cluding Dr. Stoke, will resign himself to such a fate. He will continue to preach his gospel — by speaking on care fully selected occasions, by writing of every sort from pa tient letters for impatient alumni to books as informative as The American College President (a superior form of noise-making). An educational leader who is not a clear and convincing speaker and writer is a con tradiction in terms. The bu siest president must not be too busy to think his way through to a broad picture of the ins titution he wants to shape — what the late Chancellor Capen of Buffalo once called “the grand plan” — and he must present it in the clearest possible focus to the members of the “college family.” He must also, of course — espe cially in his special role as middleman between trustees and faculty — reflect as accu rately as possible the views of others. But he must ne ver dodge his duty as a crea tor by pretending that he is only a reflector. Nor must he limit himself to leadership within his own college family. Now; that, thanks largely to Russian science, education has become a national emergency, the country is crying for educa MAY 1962 79 tional leadership. This must come from the clear voices of those most able to make themselves heard above the cacophony of all the self-ap pointed experts who have been sputtering since the first sputnik. An occasional college professor or an retired admir al— an Arthur Bestor or a Hyman Rickover — may still get a wide hearing. But the college president, even the ex president, is in a better posi tion to make the front pages: he remains in Dixon Wecter’s phrase, “one of the few ora cles still held in considerable popular respect by our irre verent civilization.” This is one of the strongest argu ments against the common proposal that the president should be a business execu tive and the dean an educa tor; the newspaper seldom listen to deans, the American public has an awesome inter est in the number-one boy. The president’s role as a propagandist must not be con fused with the routine bro chures and handouts of public relations. It is even further removed from that of a large number of advertising men in industry: their job is often to persuade the consumer that he desperately wants what he obviously doesn’t need (a new car every year — lower, wider, finnier and more ex pensive); his duty is always to persuade the American peo ple that they desperately need what most of them really don’t want (and the total cost of a year at the best colleges is still lower than that of a middle-priced car). For the American people in general don’t want higher education. They want training, or skills, or “more science” for embryo nic rocketeers, or short cuts to literacy, or degrees, or higher paying first jobs, or four happy years as pre-weds, or fraternities and sororities, or the best seats in the alum ni cheering section, or the sta tus of the old school tie — but, as Ruskin saTd back in 1867, there is still “little de sire for the thing itself.” Of course, the educational leader should also be an effi cient (but not officious) man ager, a skilled diplomatic fencer (but not a fence-sit ter), an organizer (but not an “organization man”). He should be a money-getter without succumbing to chro nic mendicancy. He should possess all the ethical virtues of the Boy Scout list from trustworthiness to reverence. He should also have a charm ing life who is not only above suspicion, but skilled in human relations beyond the fondest dreams of Cal(Continued on page 92) Panorama THE COLLEGE . . . (Continued from page 80) purnia: But above all, he must be an educational lead er. If he cannot, because of his other responsibilities, something’s got to give. The solution of “a Damon-and-Pythias relationship to some trusted provost, dean of fa culty, or assistant” is, accor ding to Dr. Stoke, “rare and fortuitous.” He insists that “the real solution of the prob lem must wait upon more fundamental institutional evo lution.” But can we afford to wait that long? Will Dr. Dodd’s study point to a quick er way out? The college pres ident cannot, like Pooh-bah, continue to function much longer as Lord High Every thing Else. There were no H-bombs in Titipu. INDIAN WORDS . . . (Continued from page 57) mangus) and the cheetah (from the Hindi chita). A vast army of English words has also been admitted into the Indian languages. Spoken Telegu, for instance, is estimated to contain no less than 3,000. This enrichment of vocabulary and literature has, therefore, been a two-way traffic. ELECTRONIC . . . (Continued from page 82) successful until then to make so much money in other fields of its activity that the citi zen will be able to mail his corrspondence, which will be electronically sorted, for a postage of still no more than twenty pfennigs. “They tell me Boobleigh has a childlike faith in his wife.” “Yes, it’s wonderful. Why, he even goes so far as to take her word for it when she says there is plenty of gas in their car” — Judge. ♦ * * Husband (to wife, over phone) : Good news, dear. I’m pretty well played out, tramping all over town, but I’ve found an apartment at last. Wife (ecstatically): Oh, Horace, you darling! Do hurry home and tell me all about it. “There’s no great hurry. We don’t move in until 1982. The present tenants have a two years’ lease.” — Life. 92 Pang
pages: 49-51,77-80,92