Moral Leadership: Ethics and the College Presidency

Moral Leadership

Issues in Academic Ethics

Series Editor: Steven M. Cahn

Campus Rules and Moral Community:I n Place of In Loco Parentis by David A. Hoekema, Calvin College UniversiwBusinessPartnerships: An Assessment by Norman E. Bowie, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities A Professor’sDuties: Ethical Issues in College Teaching by Peter J. Markie, University of Missouri-Columbia Neutrality and the Academic Ethic by Robert L. Simon, Hamilton College Ethics of Scientific Research by Kristin Shrader-Frechette, University of South Florida Academic Freedom and Tenure: Ethical Issues by Richard T. De George, University of Kansas Diversity and Community in the Academy: Affmative Action in Faculty Appointments by Celia Wolf-Devine, Stonehill College The Moral Dimensions of Academic Administration by Rudolph H. Weingartner, University of Pittsburgh Free Speech on Campus by Martin P. Golding, Duke University Sexual Harassment as an Ethical Issue in Academic Life by Leslie Pickering Francis, University of Utah Moral Leadership: Ethics and the College Presidency by Paul J. Olscamp, Mayville State University

Moral Leadership Ethics and the College Presidency Paul J. Olscamp

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, I N C .

Lanham Boulder

New York Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 0 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Olscamp, Paul J. Moral Leadership : ethics and the college presidency / Paul J. Olscamp. p. cm. - (Issues in academic ethics) Includes index. ISBN 0-8476-8973-5 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8476-89743 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. College presidents-Professional ethics-United States. 2. Education, Higher-Moral and ethical aspectsunited States. I. Title 11. Series. LB2341 ,057 2003 378.1'11 - 4 ~ 2 1 2002014869 Printed in the United States of America

WMThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 2.39.48-1992.

of Paper for

Contents

ix

Preface Acknowledgments

xiii

Part One 1 Constituencies

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2 University Presidents and Boards of Trustees

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Policy versus Management: Some Examples 17 The Question of Honorary Degrees 22 A Case of Conflict between a President, His Staff, and His Board 24

3 The University President and the Academic Community Kinds of Presidents 31 An Example of Tenuring and Academic Politics 35 Changing Values and Vague Standards 40 An Example of a Transitional Victim 43

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4 The University President and the Governance System An Example of an Internal Conflict with a Faculty Senate 51

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Federal and Governmental Power and Just Resistance 58 V

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5 Universities and the Business World

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Comparisons between the CEO and the University President 65 Charities and the Corporate Conscience: The Case of the United Appeal 74 Trustees, Outside Contracting, and Conflict with a President 80 The President as Moral Symbol: The Case of Lucas University and Big Tobacco 86 The University as Competitor with Private Business: The Pizza War 91

6 Presidential Obligations to Students and the University Family Doing the Right Thing 100 Trustworthiness: The President and Perquisites 103 Trustee Selection: An Important, Weighty Task 106

7 Conclusion

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115

Part -0 8 Congratulations! Now What? Advice for New Presidents Jon C. Straws

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9 Confessions of a Public University Refugee

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John A . DiBiaggio, Steven B. Sample, and Gordon A . Haaland 10 An Honor, to a Degree James 0.Freedman

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11 Creating a Broader Model of Shared Governance

147

Eugene I? Trani 12 Where Are College Presidents’ Voices on Important Public Issues? neodore M . Hesburgh

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Contents

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13 The Dumbing Down of College Presidents Clara M . Lovett

159

Index

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About the Author

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Preface

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e American university is a unique institution in our national life, and the presidency of each university is a unique position. I believe that, for the most part, administrative skills are transferable from one sort of organization to another, but I cannot conceive of any job that could thoroughly prepare anyone for a university presidency. I speak primarily of public university presidencies in this book, since I have been president of three public universities. However, much of what I say is applicable to the private sphere as well because I have been a vice president of two private schools. The university presidency is an incredibly demanding position, although the rewards of service can be great. The demands are not only professional and political but also personal, both physical and psychological. The average length of a public presidency today is slightly less than six years, and presidents are frequently let go rather than retired. It is not a job for the faint of heart or for the individual unsure of his or her principles. This is a book about principles-prudential and moral-as they apply to university presidents. A principle, as opposed to a rule, is basic or fundamental. Hence, stealing as a practice is wrong because, more generally, a chaotic society would result if everyone stole at random. As Kant noted, breaking one’s promise, if practiced universally, would result in the destruction of the very concept of promise keeping and hence of every other moral concept that rests on it, such as contracting, marrying, taking out a mortgage,

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and so forth. The entire structure comes tumbling down. There are no moral principles that are unique to the college presidency, except in the sense that the environment in which a president works is unique in comparison to any other CEO position in the country. Because of this, there is room for an examination of how presidents ought to respond within those circumstances, and of which moral rules and principles come to bear on him or her. A college president must have stamina, iron self-control, a high level of verbal skill, a terrific sense of humor, and a thick hide. Presidents must be conciliators, but they must be willing to stand on principle. They must lead the academy but leave control of the curriculum largely in the hands of the faculty; develop the skills of the high-level executive but earn stature as a scholar, serve the needs of the young and immature but personally demonstrate the solidity and maturity of the adult without seeming to be parental or condescending, retain the trust and confidence of businessmen and politicians while being credible to people who distrust both. Presidents must think quickly on their feet but be judicious. They require prodigious memories. They must be able, over and over again, to satisfy constituencies with real or perceived needs that are frequently diametrically opposed. They must possess great political skills but maintain a reputation of the highest integrity. They cannot be, as Erma Bombeck might say, just chopped liver! In this book, I review several aspects of the modern college presidency, organized primarily around the different constituencies a president might serve, as well as the conflicting needs and obligations generated by these different constituencies. To solve, mediate, or otherwise address these conflicts, presidents must depend on principles, prudential and moral, and sometimes at great cost. To illustrate the problems that can arise in such contexts, I will examine actual cases and discuss the wisdom of the decisions that arose from them. In most cases, these decisions have moral import as well as practical consequences. My overall intent is to provide an overview of the presidency and the sorts of problems that confront a president, together with reasons and justifications that I know have been given for reaching certain critical decisions. In the end, however, the reader will have to decide whether the correct conclusions were reached. A president never works in a vacuum or perhaps I should say, almost never. For one thing, he or she is the employee of a board of trustees or regents, at least in the public system. Only in certain privately owned schools (almost all located in foreign countries) is the president the absolute decision maker, appeals being possible only legally. The relation-

Preface

xi

ships between a president and the board are often complex and entangled, not infrequently involving ethically conflicting viewpoints. Alliances or cliques are formed, special interests attract individual trustees or groups of them to a dangerous interference in management as opposed to policy makmg, or there are simply personality clashes. From time to time, perceived differences in obligations arise between a president and the board, and the failure to settle such differences outside the public forum can be deadly to any administration. Most of the decisions made by university presidents are routine and unexciting-making contracts, planning facilities renovation, accepting guest lists, approving fund-raising presentations, presiding over ceremonies and presentations, and so forth. Because this book uses more controversial contexts to make many of its points, it may be somewhat misleading. Keep in mind that we are concerned with the principles of decision making, particularly decisions having moral import. Those principles are revealed, for better or worse, in times of crisis and confrontation rather than in placid everyday commerce. In the most informative instances, the actions taken to address a situation clearly result from thoughtful consideration, and the examples stem directly from such conscious choice. I would like to thank Professor Steven Cahn and the editorial staff of Rowman & Littlefield for their remarkable patience in the face of innumerable delays in the delivery of the final manuscript. Further, I would like to thank the trustees and regents who have worked with me through the years, particularly Paul Hanson, Ritajean Butterworth, Ark Chin, Shad Hanna, Warren Hall, William Spengler, Frazier Reams, Ann Russell, Richard Newlove, Ellen Connally, John Mahaney, John Laskey, David Bryan, and Tad Perry. I learned more from them than they did from me, but they had the confidence to let me make my mistakes. Above all, the students and faculty of the three universities I have headed have my undying gratitude and affection.

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 8, “Congratulations! Now What? Advice for New Presidents,” by Jon C. Strauss, was originally published in Educational Record (Spring/Summer 1996): 32-41. Reprinted by permission of the American Council of Education. Chapter 9, “Confessions of a Public University Refugee,” by John A. DiBiaggio, Steven B. Sample, and Gordon A. Haaland, originally appeared in Trusteeship (May/June 1996): pp. 6-9. Copyright 1996 Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 10, “An Honor, to a Degree,” by James 0. Freedman, was originally published in Zbe Chronicle of Higher Education (May 24, 2002). Reprinted by permission of the author. Chapter 11, “Creating a Broader Model of Shared Governance,” by Eugene P. Trani, was originally published in 7he Chronicle of Higher Education (January 10, 1997). Reprinted by permission of the author. Chapter 12, “Where Are College Presidents’ Voices on Important Public Issues,” by Theodore M. Hesburgh, originally appeared in Zbe Chronicle of Higher Education (February 2, 2001). Reprinted by permission of the author. xiii

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 13, “The Dumbing Down of College Presidents,” by Clara M. Lovett, was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 5, 2002). It is reprinted by the permission of the author.

Part One

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Constituencies

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residents of colleges and universities in the United States are not elected but appointed, usually after long searches conducted by committees that are normally representative (at least nominally) of the various components of the university community, often aided by professional executive search firms. Legally speaking, university presidents are responsible only to the board of trustees that hires them, it being understood that they will of course fulfill the delegated responsibilities that the board devolves on the president. But this understanding of presidential responsibility is excessively narrow and legalistic, as well as highly misleading. The language of the governing documents of universities in which the president’s responsibilities are outlined is always very broad because those responsibilities are so general that they defy precise description before the fact. This is not to say that none of the responsibilities of the office can be more specifically defined. In the straightforward sense of “managing”the university, the president must facilitate the delivery of support services that enable the education of students to take place, such as providing an excellent faculty and staff, maintaining and improving physical facilities such as classrooms, laboratories, libraries, computing services, and distance learning facilities, and developing a budget and making sure that the university lives within it. Because many (sometimes most) students come from some distance and require university housing, the president must ensure that the housing is adequate, the food nutritious (delicious and satisfymg would be stretching it!), and

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the campus safe. Students spend only about 25 percent of their time in classrooms, so facilities must be provided for extracurricular activities, exercise, and intellectual development, and provisions made for emergency health care and both academic and psychological counseling. The president is responsible, within the policies established by the trustees and with their concurrence, for the organizational structure of the university. The staffs of any university constitute a many-layered, complex set of organizations, and the skills needed are correspondingly diverse, ranging from caretaker to computer analysts and programmers to medical doctors and financial and investment experts, lobbyists, and architects. Generally, staff members are organized into groups doing related work, so that the financial offices (e.g., the bursar, insurance), related business enterprises (bookstore, nontuition income such as housing fees, etc.), accounting, auditing, capital planning and budgeting, nonacademic computing services, maintenance of the financial database for various purposes (state budget presentations, internal distribution of funds), and in general most money management activities are centralized under a vice president for financial affairs or business affairs, who reports to the president. This segment of university operations resembles the world of commercial for-profit enterprise, or part of it, more than any other university undertaking. Indeed, parts of this division must be profitable to survive and improve services, since they have no other source of income such as state funds. Conflicts with private providers of similar services are not uncommon and are quite understandable. In general, the staff working in this division is the most conservative segment in the university community and is often intensely loyal to the school and leads very active social and civic lives. As previously mentioned, only 25 percent of the average student’s time is spent in a classroom or lab. The other three-quarters of his or her college experience is spent in a wide variety of places and activities, and these require more or less supervision, maintenance, instruction, and support. A differently trained sort of staff is required for these functionsa staff with personality characteristics different from those of staff devoted to business and research activities. The functions include, at most universities, most or all of the following: intramural sports, social programming and supervision in the residence halls, support for student government, advising to a large variety of student organizations from drama clubs to language societies to fraternities and sororities, health services, nonacademic counseling, management of student union and student recreation facilities, crisis management and parental liaison, minority affairs, a nonuniversity off-campus housing office, liaison with uni-

Constituencies

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versity and local police, and sometimes advisory functions to student publications, usually in cooperation with a faculty adviser. In some schools, intercollegiate athletics falls in this area of responsibility, although there are several other models for this peculiar and particular institution. This division of university responsibility is usually called Student Affairs, and it too is usually headed by a vice president. An example of a conflict arising between student affairs personnel and the business offices of a university with which I was familiar occurred when the business office argued during a reorganization that all fiscal affairs concerning the residence halls of the university should be turned over to it, leaving only social programming and other similar functions in the hands of the vice president for student affairs. The latter office argued strongly against this transfer on the grounds that it was in closer contact with the students in the halls, both physically and emotionally, and that the students were therefore more comfortable handling payments for housing and other financial matters having to do with housing than they would be in the business affairs offices with people they did not know. The vice president for business affairs prevailed, and the administration received continuing criticism from the students thereafter, on grounds that the procedures were more complicated than they had been before, and the business staff was less sympathetic to the students’ financial needs than the student affairs people had been. These conflicting functions often give rise to conflicts of serious moral significance, sometimes requiring presidents to illustrate and teach the ethical principles embedded in the office they hold. The teaching function of the president with respect to ethical behavior and awareness is not sufficiently emphasized. One example with which I am personally familiar is the reasons students often give to change roommates. If it is a moral principle that discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or nationality is not only illegal but immoral, as I believe it is, then is it permissible to permit a resident in university housing to move out of a room because some feature or habit of a person of different race or nationality offends her? Assuming that it is the policy of the university to maximize opportunities for cultural exchange and experiences with different races, is it a violation of the principle of discrimination for the university to assign roommates just because they are of different races, or should some other method of room assignment be used, such as a lottery? In upholding the principle of nondiscrimination, should the president support the concept of all-black (or all-white) fraternities and sororities, even if the individuals in those places strongly express their wish to live together for a variety of understandable reasons? I have faced controversies over these

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three questions, and I decided that (1) racially based reasons for permitting a person to move to another room in university housing are unacceptable and (2) it is a violation of the nondiscrimination principle to assign room space to individuals simply because they are of different races, even if the experience of racially mixed living is desired at the university. A more neutral method must be chosen, such as a lottery. (3) All-black or all-white or in general racially homogeneous fraternities and sororities are not to be permitted on publicly owned campuses. If groups wish to purchase property off campus for this purpose, that is a private and not a university matter, but it is a practice of which I disapprove if it is possible to have racially integrated housing instead. From the viewpoint of the purposes of a university, academic affairs is obviously the most important administrative and functional division. The operations of this division provide students the opportunity to learn, to do research, to become professionals in a wide variety of fields. Academic affairs are structured almost uniformly in this country, at least at the faculty level, although universities differ in terms of which support services are included under it. For example, the admissions office and the registrar are usually located in academic affairs, but I have known institutions that housed these critical offices in business affairs and even in student affairs. Academic affairs are built for better or for worse (I often think there are better ways) on the historic categories of learning called “disciplines.”Academic departments-English, history, French, Classics, chemistry, physics, philosophy, and so forth-are named for the disciplines they include. This taxonomy has not been varied materially for centuries, except for adding a lot of developing fields and dropping one or two outmoded ones. Many of the newer academic departments resulted from combinations of older ones because of increasing relatedness of ,their research and theory; hence, departments of biochemistry; mathematics and logic; mathematics, logic and computer science; biomedical engineering; genetics and plant science; Romance languages (as compared to German and Russian, for example); and many more. But the overall organizational structure is the same: each department contains faculty trained for undergraduate and graduate programs in the particular discipline or disciplines contained within it. There are many different specialties in each discipline, and it is routine for a department to become known nationally or regionally because of the particular specialties or subspecialties in which its faculty have expertise. Just as the specialties within a discipline share sufficient commonalities to be grouped together in spite of their differences, so cognate relationships dictate the formations of groups of departments in universities re-

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quiring a larger and broader level of administrative support. These groups of departments are usually called “colleges” or “schools.” In the small private college context, one might find a college of arts and sciences, and perhaps one or two professional schools or colleges, such as music or education. As the size and complexity of a university grow, particularly with the addition of graduate and professional programs at the doctoral or comparable levels, more of these collegiate units come into existence. Frequently colleges themselves divide into new collegiate units-arts and sciences into the arts and science, for example, or into arts, mathematics, and engineering, and science, and so forth. Colleges or schools of medicine come to include newer disciplines comprising the health sciences, such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech pathology and audiology. The demands of specialization force the proliferation of departments within a previously existing discipline too. Business colleges, for example, used to treat the entire commercial enterprise as more or less a single field, albeit with varying talents required. Now every college or school of business includes several distinct departments, such as finance, marketing, accounting, information systems, management, personnel management, and several others. If graduate programs and their accompanying research enterprises continue to develop, they too become complex and require special administrative and organizational support. Research and undergraduate teaching, although essentially related at several levels, require greatly different means of support and financing. The development of graduate colleges to help seek research funds externally, meet foundation and governmental accounting requirements, help with publishing research results, maintain standards for membership on the graduate faculty, ensure compliance with safety and accrediting standards, and so on, seems in retrospect almost inevitable, and virtually all modern universities have such a general collegiate unit. All collegiate units (and for that matter departments) require resources to operate and policies to function. The resources vary widely from department to department-physics is more expensive and equipment intensive than philosophy-and, given the axiom that there is never enough money to satisfy every departmental and individual perception of need, competition among departments and collegiate units is inevitable. The reconciliation of these competing demands falls to the office of academic affairs and ultimately to the president and the board. The pressures to raise ever larger amounts of money, pay ever higher salaries, add new positions to growing programs, and ensure that faculty and students have the most up-to-date equipment and learning resources

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are intense and endless. In one university I know, there were two hundred noninteractive computers, no computer learning labs, and only 750,000 volumes in the central library in 1982.Just one decade later there were fifrj-five hundred interactive computers, twenty-one computer labs, and over 2 million volumes in the central library, and the enrollment of the university had not changed! In the same period, faculty salaries had risen about 35 percent, the size of the faculty had not materially changed (although four new doctoral programs had been developed), and tuition had almost doubled. Clearly, hard decisions had to be made about which programs to support at higher levels and which to retain at lower levels of support, and external funding had to be solicited. An example of a continuing conflict resulting from funding pressures on budgets that are never sufficient-a conflict that affects almost every university with a significant intercollegiate athletic program-is the fiscal competition between academic affairs and athletic departments as a result of Title IX legislation requiring equal sports funding for women. This is particularly true of Division 1 programs. For many universities the only way to avoid tapping into nonathletic budgets in order to satisfy the requirements of Title IX is to close some men’s sports and transfer the money to women’s sports or to reduce the men’s program until it spends the same amount as the women’s. Many universities, unable or unwilling to take either of these steps, have instead taken funding from academic or student affairs budgets to solve the problem, a step that causes justified resentment among faculty and staff. After all, academics are the reason the university exists, not sports, which are mostly irrelevant to education. Whether to accept certain kinds of support (e.g., government grants and contracts and designated private gifts) is another area in which matters of moral principle arise from time to time. For example, the government has solicited grants for projects that enhance the pathological effects of certain kinds of gases and bacteria that could be used in biological warfare. Similarly, since the end of World War I1 much of the work in physics and chemistry done on government contract by universities has had the purpose of enhancing the effects of atomic weapons. Given the horrendous consequences of the use of such weaponry, is it morally permissible for universities to accept support for research that makes these effects even worse? The conflict here is usually between the overhead benefits accruing to the university from the grant, which can be sigmfkant indeed, and the nature of the work funded by it. At the least, serious consideration of such matters of conscience must be undertaken before any decision to accept such support is made. Since the president

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and the board of trustees must either approve or reject such support, they are clearly involved in issues of moral principle in such contexts. Whether to accept private gifts is not always a question of such weighty import, but the issues involved can be sensitive and important and sometimes involve moral principles. I was approached by a representative of a wealthy individual who offered millions to construct a building on our campus whose major purpose would be to exhibit the paintings of Adolf Hitler. He was quite serious. Naturally, under any circumstances acceptance of such a proposal would cause mental anguish to a large number of people, and if causing unnecessary pain and suffering is wrong, as I certainly think it to be, then this was a decision of moral principle. And this besides the fact that such a facility, especially on a relatively isolated midwestern campus, was sure to attract large numbers of unsavory and perhaps even dangerous types to the campus, aside from the merely curious and the academically interested. The argument in favor of accepting the gift was simple. Hitler was a person of paramount evil. It is important to understand the forces that drive such individuals so that we can recognize and thwart them before they can cause terrible harm. If we can learn something important about them from studying their artifacts, then we have a moral obligation to do that. The question was settled by appointing a committee with a majority Jewish membership to make recommendations to me. They recommended that the donor give the paintings to Princeton University, which has a significant Holocaust studies institute, and where the paintings would be a part of the entire collection. The process of making these difficult decisions begins at the departmental level. Each unit must make annual budget requests, which are then reviewed at the collegiate level, formed into a university budget at the vice president’s level, and forwarded to the president and the board. A budget is the fiscal embodiment of a stage in an organization’s longrange plan, or it should be. It is not a static document, but one that must be susceptible of change as factors influencing the university’s ability to achieve its goals change. At most public universities, these factors include enrollments; increases in the cost of goods and services consumed in the educational enterprise; tuition and fee rates; state subsidies and revenues; endowment income; local, federal, and state politics; and so forth. Even if these sources are threatened by a rapid change in political or social attitudes, the university must stick to its principles. The temptation to tailor the university’scurriculum to the student and commercial marketplace, to shape the image to the “consumer”market in response to broad

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political and economic pressures, is very strong, but for sound historic and pedagogic reasons it must be resisted and, again, for reasons of moral principle. If the faculty knows from long and historic experience what the curriculum should be, but current social conditions are causing discontent and consternation within the student body, including demands for immediate “relevance” in what is taught, immediate applicability to the solution of present complex social problems such as poverty, crime, and family dysfunction, should the president support such demands? Some presidents and many faculty did just that during the Vietnam War years. In my opinion this was morally wrong and violated the promises universities had made to teach what was in the published curriculum. Such actions also violated the essential commitment to truth without which a university cannot serve any mission, since it is false that universities can solve complex social problems, and this was known in the 1960s as it is today. In today’s complex university, the need to keep media, legislative staff, funding sources, foundations, and private supporters fully informed is often too large a task, and too technical a job, to be done just by the offices of the president and vice president for academic affairs. More often than not, another administrative division has grown from these needs, namely, the office of university relations. “University relations” has often been characterized as a sort of dumping ground for everything else. At universities I have headed, it has included legislative affairs-lobbying legislators and working with legislative staff, alumni affairs, development (fund-raising), media liaison (public information releases), management of university public broadcasting outlets such as radio and television stations, the university press and general information publications and advertising, and other related operations, all of them having the common feature of maintaining consistent university support through outreach efforts to its various external constituencies. In the area of university development, there are occasional conflicts between the purposes for which the university desires to raise money and the intentions of actual and potential donors. Indeed, the truly successful fund-raiser at the level of the significant private giver is someone who can match the interests of the giver with the needs of the university so that both are satisfied. A classic example, and one with which I am personally familiar, is the case of the conservative businessperson who wishes to counter what she believes to be leftist leanings in the faculty by funding a professorship or program for the teaching of capitalism and the criticism of other competing systems. In the case I knew personally, the result was a chair in “entrepreneurship” that emphasized in content the relationship

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between law and business in the United States as compared to socialist countries and newly developing Third World nations. The donor was satisfied and the university was too, since the content of the course was left entirely up to the business faculty to develop without the donor having right of approval. The temptation to utilize unilateral arbitrary advantage (e.g., if one’s congressperson or graduates happen to be particularly influential) also raises serious questions of moral principle. Private universities, including some with close religious ties, have been particularly susceptible to this temptation. But on a moral scale, does the individual advantage of a particular institution justlfir the unexamined and preferential use of public funds to its advantage over others who might have benefited even more from those funds? Is not the presupposition in the distribution of public funds that (1) the national interest and (2) fairness in the award process should be determinative? I think this is a matter of moral principle, and I believe that the presidents of institutions that violate it are culpable. The defense of, and public articulation of, the purposes of the curriculum is another of the responsibilities of the offices of the president and vice president for academic affairs, not just locally but within the public and legislative arenas as well. It is not simple to explain to the general public and to the legislature why general education is at least as important as preparation for employment, or why tax dollars should support faculty research and performance into arcane fields such as Italian Renaissance literature or baroque music, and not just into fields with more obvious practical and immediate results. Doing so successfully presupposes that the university has an overarching vision of its comprehensive educational effort, into which every piece of the educational program fits like pieces of a picture puzzle. This also presupposes that university leadership can relate this overall plan or concept to our societal needs, not just employment, but for purposes of good citizenry, the protection of legal and moral right, and social progress. Indeed, at bottom, is not the mission of enabling a population to fulfill its potentialities, including especially those for good, a moral matter? It is a national priority that all who have the ability to be educated have the opportunity to do so, since an educated citizenry is better able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. If the hallmark of moral relevance is that people feel deeply about it, that it is a social question and not merely an individual one, and that rules and reasoning are centrally important to the determination of disputes within its provenance, then if we assign praise and blame not simply in the legal sense but as social sanctions within this framework, is not doing the composite activity of educating well a moral obligation? If this is true, and if

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we then accept the principle that increasing authority implies increasing responsibility, presidents bear a great portion of this burden. Complex though these administrative functions might be, they all exist for certain overriding purposes-higher education and research-and the very nature of these has changed so much in fewer than 150 years as to boggle the mind. In less than 5 percent of the U.S. population had any education beyond high school. Virtually all classical, general, theological, and noncommercial education took place in private colleges, which were elitist in terms of faculty and student composition. Thanks to the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1859, most states had begun the process of forming “agricultural and mechanical” colleges, which were to become the great public state universities, but as yet these were small and rural. Teacher preparation was minimal in extent, but the “normal school” tradition was well established, and most teachers proceeded through that route. Professional education as often as not proceeded through private academies and institutes or by apprenticeship, as in accounting and law. The development of regional universities from the normal schools had barely begun, and graduate education was rare. Research was sporadic and usually done on an individual basis because of private curiosity or interest. It was not government funded except on a piecemeal basis in militarily relevant areas, stemming from the necessities of the Civil War. Johns Hopkins University had just begun installing the German model of university research, which is the basis of our modern understanding of that term, but the complex and enormous funding relationships between university research, government, the business world and philanthropic foundations had not yet developed. Today more than half the adult population has some sort of college degree, the large majority of them from public universities. Government is the single largest supporter of university research, business partnerships with universities have created endowed chairs in fields of interest to them by the hundreds, the normal schools have become universities, many with advanced degree programs, and they enroll 21.4 percent of all the college students in the nation. It is the policy of the US. government that everyone with the ability have the opportunity to attend college, and the various tuition assistance and loan programs funded by our taxes make this possible. Most professional education occurs at least in affiliation with universities, and national accrediting agencies ensure compliance with minimal standards. (But they do not ensure high quality.) As the country has changed from a mainly rural to an urban society, so has the source of the students who attend the university. As the modern production and fertilization technologies that are both the glory and the

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bane of agriculture and husbandry have united with economic factors to decimate the number of family farms in the United States, the rural population has become largely urban, with all the inevitable cultural and sociological changes that accompany such movements. With the two world wars came familiarity with the world outside the United States, intercultural mixing, increased awareness of civil rights, and, thanks to the automobile, personal mobility. World War I1 brought the GI Bill, which mushroomed student populations, but it was not just the growing numbers that forced change. These soldiers had seen the world at its worst, and as a nation we were changed forever as a result. Authoritarian structures, government itself, the strictures of church and home, the taboos of a genteel, racist, and elitist society were challenged and either left in the dustbin of history or remodeled to accommodate the modern “sophisticated and worldly generations that arose progressively from the late 1940s through the end of the century. By the year 2000, the only solid comparison one could make between the students of 1900 and those of today was that they belonged to the same species. For example, in 1900 the number of women who had attended college was not statistically sigmficant and, indeed, not even numerically significant. Today, more than 55 percent of the students in our universities are female. The ways in which universities are run were also dramatically affected by the social, economic, and attitudinal changes described above. Before 1900, and for some years thereafter, university presidencies lasting twenty and even thirty years were commonplace. As mentioned earlier, the average in public universities is now less than six years. Because colleges were tiny compared with today’s behemoths, but also because attitudes were so different, presidents were authoritarian figures whose decisions determined the fate of all the employees of the college, as well as the students. The duration of employment of faculty, their individual salaries, the strength of departments, the admission of students and their matriculation and graduation, the disciplining of students and employees, sometimes even the curriculum-all these and more were the sole prerogative of the president and his designees. Tenure as we know it today did not exist, nor did property rights in employment, the right to bargain collectively, the Social Security system, retirement funds, the right to a hearing for grievances, or the right of a student to appeal a grade or suspension for misbehavior. The advice of faculty on technical matters might be sought, but when and for what purpose were an administrative decision. There was no vote of confidence in a president by a faculty. The requirements of state, local, and federal governments on a university or college were very few, and in public schools they were

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largely determined by patronage. The governor, in state systems, appointed board members then as now, but boards were smaller, terms of service were usually quite long, and most decisions could legally be made in private meetings. Virtually all records were written and were held locally rather than in some central location, so control of information was also mostly in the president’s hands. Considered strictly from the president’s viewpoint, it was a darned good job in those days! Authority, respect, real power, and control over all funds-what modern president wouldn’t become dewy-eyed at the very prospect! But as the students of today are different, so is the job. A university president at the beginning of the millennium is not hired by three or four people who don’t have to consult others in their choosing. He (the pronoun “she”would have been inappropriate back then) was not required to govern largely through committee and consensus and did not deny a departmental or collegiate tenure recommendation at risk to his own job. He did not spend upward of 20 percent of his time on external governmental reports and explanations, was not required by law to add administrative positions, did not have to report regularly to a faculty senate, nor go through hearing and appeal procedures for every personnel action. Other administrators, including all vice presidents, were hired by and served at the pleasure of the president. Matters requiring some discretion were decided in private by the president and the board, the public action (if required) simply being moved and voted on in open session. Today it is all different, and the main issues facing the university president must be understood in terms of the complex and competing needs, wants, purposes, and attitudes of the varying constituencies he or she must serve. It is in the cauldron of competing desires and demands from these constituencies, most of which can never be completely met, that the testing of the moral principles of a president takes place. Clearly these issues and the obligations a president must try to fulfill cannot be understood in isolation from an understanding of the constituencies themselves, for it is from the conflicting expectations of the competing groups that the necessity to make such presidential choices arises. In the early days of the twentieth century, for example, there were few conflicts between presidents and senates because there were few university senates, and the president had overwhelming authority. Now such confrontations are common. The same would be true in cases of controversy with the public. In terms of art displayed on campuses that the general public might find pornographic, the normal response from the office of the president in times past would simply have been to cancel the showing. Prior to World War 11, in days when the government provided little

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monetary support for universities, it exercised little influence over such matters as athletics, affirmative action, access for the disabled, and so forth. Now, given the leverage of money, universities have little choice but to respond positively to federal and state governmental demands. If they disagree, confrontation is inevitable. A case concerning this will be examined later on. Finally, because of accumulating court decisions and the rise of faculty unions, presidents cannot make nonconsultative decisions about faculty welfare and benefits. In short, the presidency has become much more open, much more syncretic, and much more difficult. But the job is still doable, and to the satisfaction of most parties involved. The worst of all presidential faults, in my opinion, is indecision-unless, of course, as with Lincoln, it is tactical and intentional! Finally, I have tried to give examples in this chapter that show that a president’s purview extends over the entire institution, not just a part, a department, a division of the internal functions of the university. This breadth of authority makes his or her position and level of responsibility, including moral responsibility, unique.

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Universitv Presidents and Boards of Trustees

POLICY VERSUS MANAGEMENT: SOME EXAMPLES president, as already noted, works for a board of trustees and is di-

A,ectly responsible to them. Technically the board delegates some of

its own responsibilities to the president, and the latter has no powers beyond those that devolve on him or her through the board. The board itself does not report to anyone, and in the public arena, there is no appeal from board decisions other than the courts in case of malfeasance or criminal behavior or legislation. Normally board composition changes by staggered retirement of members and appointment or election of new ones. The operational principles are the same whether one is speaking about a local board with considerable autonomy or about a regential system in which the presidents of several institutions report to a chancellor of the system, who in turn reports to the regents. There are several models, some much more centralized than others. The discussion here assumes a fairly decentralized model in which local boards have considerable decision-making authority over important matters, such as setting tuition rates, hiring and firing the president, granting degrees, granting contracts for construction and employment, tenure and promotion, and so forth. Such a context exists in the state of Ohio, for example, where I have had most of my experience. A board’s responsibilities are normally defined in its charter and bylaws, and in public schools those documents are usually part of the 17

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revised codes, or laws, of the state. Thus, in accepting an appointment as a board member, an individual creates for himself the legal obligation to fulfill his fiduciary obligations as stated in the law. It is in this sense that trustees are responsible to the public. The bylaws of a board are of necessity quite broad. In general, a board establishes the policies of the university, while the implementation of those policies is delegated to others, particularly the president, and through that office to the other administrative and academic areas of the institution. Many major conflicts have arisen between presidents and boards because of the failure to have a clear understanding of where establishing policy ends and implementing it begins. When a board begins to implement its own policies by trying to control and manipulate the internal management and decision-making processes of the university, it cannot help but dilute the authority of the president, confuse and disrupt faculty and staff, and shake the morale of those who thought the responsibility of implementation was theirs. It is not an easy thing to delineate the functions of policy making and those of management or policy implementation in a clear and simple fashion. Partly the reason for this is that the policies the board accepts more often than not come to it through the university governance processes with the recommendation of the president. And if the board does accept a policy, particularly one that emanates from the president, it naturally wants to have approval over the major elements of its implementation. As an example, suppose that a president recommends to the board that the office of dean of students be made into a vice presidency. Let us assume that the current dean will not be a candidate for the new vice presidency. The board would be quite correct in asking that the credentials of the finalist for the position, or even the shortlist, be submitted to them, and of course they should be free to make suggestions to the president after reviewing them. But in my view it would be crossing the policy/implementation line for the board to require that they interview the finalists and that they then choose the person to fill the office. That decision is a management decision and should be made by the president upon recommendation of those involved in the internal and national (assuming there are external candidates) search process. Yet it is easy to see how such a division of responsibilities can become confused. Is the board being too intrusive to ask, let’s say, to have a representative on the search committee? A voting representative who would presumably vote again on the final selection at the board level? A nonvoting representative? How about asking to attend a social event at which the candidates are seen in an informal session? How about

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asking the president to defend his final recommendation in executive session? In public session? Should the board feel free to tell the president informally that he chooses the finalist but he should know that the board likes a different person? I am aware of one case in which the board of a large state university decided to create a vice presidency that would report not to the president but to the board chair. This position was to function as general secretary to the board and as secretary to the university council, a body of administrators, student leaders, and faculty senators that discussed the university’s ongoing business once a week and was chaired by the president. The new vice president was to provide minutes of all meetings held in the president’s office to the board chair, and to report to the chair the substantial contents of discussions at the university council meetings. He was given an office next to the president. The president resigned, stating that as a matter of principle he could not accept such interference in university management and took the appointment as an indication of a lack of confidence in him by the chair. This president felt, and I agree with him, that moral principles were critically involved here. Any president must, as a matter of ethical commitment, place his institution’s well-being above his own and must be devoted as a matter of personal morality to certain traditions of the institution. The president of Notre Dame is committed to the religious as well as curricular missions of that institution, and not merely because of its history. He is committed because of moral belief. In nonsectarian universities, fidelity to the rules of governance, the preservation of trust and integrity in persons and processes, and the acceptance of evidence as opposed to gossip and rumor as the foundation for making decisions have, among beliefs, the stature of moral principles. Betraying any of these and other similar principles is a moral matter because it affects the well-being, happiness, and functioning ability of the members of the university community, and hence of the university’s ability to keep its public promises. There are subtleties at work here. The president must be able to trust the board chair, and vice versa. But the chair must feel fully informed. How is this to be accomplished in such a way that the president does not feel undermined or left without sufficient latitude and trust to do the job? The president must know the chair well but not be too close to hun or her. Intimate friendships between board members and presidents are not a good idea (there are of course exceptions) because presidents all have human failings, and board members, as a rule, want to see the president, and have others see him or her, as an unusually strong and vital individual, not as vulnerable to the slings and errors of an outraged fortune as the average person.

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As a working rule, whenever a new chair was elected to my boards, we would agree that, at a minimum, I would never allow the chair or the board to be put in a position of being embarrassed because they had not been provided information about something controversial. Further, I committed myself to informing the board via a biweekly confidential board publication about administrative decisions, appointments, procedural changes, contracts, interesting visitors, and other items of interest. In return, I expected to be informed about the nature of contacts with the board from university constituencies, particularly faculty and parents. I was not interested in the identities of the contacts, but if the substance was something we should address, I felt I should know that. And I expected to be informed of any meeting in which my performance was to be a topic of discussion. I also insisted on an annual evaluation, written, made by the board. In addition, every four years there was to be a more public and formal evaluation involving a survey of all constituents, which would be broadly published. These evaluations were to prove critically important at certain times of crisis through the years, particularly those annual evaluations in writing by the board. Overall, the success or failure of the board-president relationship depends very heavily on the personalities of the president and the chair. I was always blessed with excellent chairs, men and women who wanted me to succeed, who were committed to the welfare of the institution, and who had no personal ax to grind. Thus it will come as no surprise that I feel one of the president’s fundamental responsibilities is to build the strongest possible relationship of trust with the chair of the board. This involves knowing who is going to become chair well in advance of the actual appointment. For this reason, there should be clear policies about ascension to the position of chair, such as requirements that the trustee have had prior service as head of various board committees. Given such knowledge, the president then has the opportunity to cultivate the new chair long in advance of her appointment and, equally important, vice versa. The president needs to know that the chair is discreet, honest, and prudent. Other than anecdotal reports and personal observation, I know of only one way to ascertain this: to ensure that the candidate has information that the president knows would be interesting to acquaintances of the candidate but should remain confidential, and see whether it reaches them. At one point a very supportive trustee agreed to mention to a POtential chair that I was considering a thorough financial audit of a department that received a significant amount of support from student cash fees. The chair of the department knew that this was not the case and,

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other than myself, only the friendly trustee and the potential chair were informed. In less than twelve hours the departmental chair was informed of the “audit” by another faculty member in his department who happened to be a faculty senator and did not support my administration. This was sufficient for the friendly trustee to seek the advice and experience of other members of the board with regard to the discretion and trustworthiness of the potential chair, and several other instances of “leaked” information came to light, all of them factual. In some cases harm came to individuals as a result of the breaches of confidence. The trustee did not become chair. I thought this was a morally permissible course of action to take, though covert and perhaps misleading, given that the potential chair was given (and took) an opportunity to provide a reasonable public explanation for not succeeding to the position, namely, that other obligations would not permit the additional commitment of time. No visible material or other harm came to the trustee as a result, and the functioning of the board and the administration was protected from what would have been a most difficult situation. Other items to study are the extent to which a trustee takes advantage of the perquisites the university inevitably provides, his behavior with the media, the amount of time the trustee spends on the campus outside of board meetings and what he does with that time, and the nature of his relations with other trustees. If information leaks from the candidate that should remain privileged, if minor infractions are committed (e.g., accepting gifts from the athletic department, claiming dubious expenses), if the trustee improperly involves himself in the politics of the institution, and if his behavior with other trustees is cliquish and secretive, then the president may have to seek some way with the current chair and others to prevent what would otherwise have been an expected election to the chairmanship. The obligation is clear: if there are good reasons not to place your trust in someone when trust is an absolute requirement, then whatever must be done to avoid the situation is incumbent upon the president and other board members, if they are aware of the situation, assuming the actions taken are within the bounds of known ethical norms. Trustee temperament is critical. An erratic or violent-tempered trustee can cause irremediable harm to a university. I am aware of one case in which a trustee not only had these characteristics but also was vengeful and perhaps genuinely imbalanced. No person with these qualities can have sound judgment, and indeed this trustee did not. On one trip with his president to another country, he was intoxicated a good part of the time, loud and grossly insulting to everyone from airline employees to

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hotel personnel and even his hosts. He was of no help whatsoever to the purposes of the trip, and his erratic and flamboyant behavior was a constant source of anxiety to the university’s representatives. It was also true that this trustee’s motive in seeking appointment to the board was to get rid of the president, and this on the basis of a totally false premise, namely, his belief that the president was using the university as a “stepping-stone” to a more prestigious institution, which was false. This presented genuine problems because the trustee was a very well-known public figure and a close friend of the governor who had appointed him. N o direct approach to the governor would have helped, and indirect attempts to influence the trustee through friends of his and other board members had little or no effect. Eventually, the president became convinced that means had to be sought to remove the trustee from the board, but it was not clear how this could be accomplished. Then it was discovered that this particular state had a residency requirement for all public boards, and the trustee lived in another state. Through very indirect means, this fact was brought to the attention of the attorney general, and after some time this official brought it to the attention of the governor. Several members of public boards were affected, and all had to leave their positions, including the trustee. Presidents have obligations to their boards, of course. The obvious ones are to keep the board well-informed about what the president is doing to implement board policies and fulfil his delegated responsibilities, to educate the board about anticipated future difficulties affecting the university, to provide evidence to the board of his continuing good health, or ill health, and to provide opportunities for the board to see visible results of their work and hence gain a feeling of satisfaction from their service. He also has an obligation to listen to the board, and wherever desirable and possible, to satisfy their desires for the institution. To enable the board to formulate sound policies, the president must persuade them that his vision for the future of the university is not only worthy but possible; once they are convinced, the president should find means to use board members in furthering the university’s message to the university community and to the outside world. Few individuals can be more effective with state legislators than a well-informed and enthusiastic trustee.

THE QUESTION OF HONORARY DEGREES Sadly, conflicts over moral matters may create ruptures between trustees and presidents, or between trustees themselves, and many of these con-

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flicts arise over requests for favors for others. A classic case is the awarding of honorary degrees. The purposes of honorary degrees are many: the honoring of excellence in different spheres of activity-science, medicine, public service, the arts, and so forth. Interpreted broadly, some categories can justlfy awarding a degree of public service for giving generously to an institution, and I see nothing wrong with this provided that the purpose of the degree is well understood and is public knowledge. But occasionally a trustee, and now and then a president, will try to get such a degree awarded for an unjustified reason. For some years I was pestered by the president of a large state university who was trying to get me to give an honorary degree to a graduate of my institution who had never completed his doctoral degree. The individual was an employee of his school, and the president felt he ought to be able to use the title “Dr.,” which was something the person ardently desired. But that would have been misleading to say the least and the other accomplishments of the individual did not warrant the honor so far as I could see. A former trustee of another university I know was awarded an honorary doctorate, supposedly in return for a multimillion-dollar gift-an old commercial building that was to be demolished. The land would then be sold, producing millions. The degree was awarded after very serious pressure by a senior administrator and a trustee, and against the wishes of the advisory board to the facility that was to be built with the proceeds from the sale of the land. They wanted to wait until the income was actually produced. The sale of the land did not come close to producing the projected revenues, and to this day the facility is still paying off the bonds it had to float to cover the deficit. The president of the school, mindful of the political contacts of the donor and fearful that he might be appointed a trustee, did nothing. Politicians are often recommended for honorary degrees of public service while they are still in office, particularly by private colleges. In my experience this is almost always because the administration or the board (usually the latter) believes that this will increase chances of a benefit to the institution. This is almost always a mistaken belief because politicians have much wider political bases than university communities, and in any event it would be politically harmful to be viewed as having done a favor for an institution in return for an honorary degree. A serving trustee of my acquaintance appointed the president of his university to the board of his corporation, which paid a significant sum in board fees. As it happened, this corporation was in competition with other corporations in the same business for contracts from the university. The trustee’s corporation got the contracts and the businessman received

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an honorary degree. Even though the president as a board member recused himself from the contractual decision, the appearance was negative. Surely there is a moral principle at stake here. The president, as head of the institution, has an obligation to preserve the benefits that a reputation for integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness brings to it. It does not require substantial truth to destroy this reputation; the appearance of disrepute is often sufficient. In most of these cases, but not all, the university’s reputation for integrity was soiled. The cases in which it was not harmed were those in which a direct, private gift, with public knowledge and of significant benefit to the institution, had been given by the awardee. In the other cases, there was a failure of moral courage, sometimes for pecuniary or other interest. To avoid such unethical situations, a clearly objective faculty and staff committee should evaluate recommendations for honorary degrees, the naming of facilities, and so forth. Trustees should overrule the recommendations of such committees only for good reason and in public session. Presidents should not be able to make such recommendations for sitting trustees, and they should not normally accept appointments to boards if the CEO or other senior officers of the corporation are on their boards. If the president sits on other boards of companies that are competing for university contracts, the president should publicly recuse himself from participation in any matters pertaining to the awarding of any contracts concerned, and the selection process used by the university should clearly be completely independent of the president.

A CASE OF CONFLICT BETWEEN A PRESIDENT, HIS STAFF, AND HIS BOARD Occasionally, circumstances over which a president has little or no control, or in which the president simply makes mistakes, can have greatly magnified and negative effects for the institution. The following fictionalized description of an actual situation illustrates what can happen when the volatile elements of friendships gone bad, trustee conflicts of interest, and presidential indecision combine. The cast of characters was as follows: Dr. George Little was president of Kansas Emporia College (there is no such college, but the incidents depicted actually took place). Gloria Dawes had previously worked for Little at a different school, and he had hired her at KEC to be his vice president for development. For eight years, she had done a good job.

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Alice Wagner was a trustee of KEC and chaired the political party of the county in which KEC was located. Her party held power in the state in both the executive and legislative branches. Martin Silk, the husband of Alice Wagner, was hired at Wagner‘s insistence by Gloria Dawes as a fund-raiser for the KEC college foundation. George Little had been the president of Kansas Emporia College (a fictitious institution) for four years when he hired a longtime friend from the West Coast, Gloria Dawes, to be his vice president for university relations. Over the years, she did a good job. During this time, Dawes became a close friend of one of the college’s athletic supporters and minor frnancial donors, Alice Wagner. Wagner was very well connected politically, being the county head of her party. The party defeated state incumbents in both houses and the governor’s race, and she was rewarded when the governor made her a trustee of KEC, a lifelong dream. About a year after joining the board, Wagner married Martin Silk, with whom Gloria Dawes also became friendly. About six months before her marriage to Silk, Trustee Wagner had approached Vice President Dawes about the possibility of Martin Silks joining Dawes as an assistant fund-raiser in the college’s development department. The position, which was about to become vacant because of a retirement, was reported to the chief development officer, who in turn reported to Dawes, who of course reported to President Little. Little had serious reservations about permitting Vice President Dawes to hire Silk. He thought there could be clear conflicts of interest and misuse of authority because of the trusteeemployee relationship inherent in the marriage between Wagner and Silk, and he was experienced enough to know that violation of these practical principles frequently led to violations of moral ones, such as harming others. Little worried that if Dawes gave Silk the position at KEC, he would use his wife’s position as trustee to further his own ambitions and Trustee Wagner would become inappropriately involved in her husbands career. Also, the public perception, Little thought, would unavoidably be that Wagner had used her position as trustee to get her husband, Silk, his job, and that Little had acquiesced. Little thought that Vice President Dawes should run a national search for the position and find other satisfactory candidates. Dawes, however, was committed to the choice of S d k , and Silk had most of the necessary qualifications. Reluctantly, Little told Dawes she could go ahead. About a year later, Little began to notice that Trustee Wagner had formed a negative impression of the person to whom her husband, Martin Silk, reported. Wagner in fact had approached Dawes and tried to get

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her to fire the individual and promote her husband, Silk, into the position. Dawes immediately reported this to President Little, who now felt he had to review the entire situation with the whole board. The rest of the board, in a meeting from which Trustee Wagner was excluded, agreed with Little that Wagner was interfering inappropriately in Dawes’s management of her office, and that this constituted a conflict of interests. Wagner was warned off by the board. Matters continued to be manageable if not pleasant for some time, but suddenly everything deteriorated rapidly. Vice President Dawes called President Little to inform him that she had to discipline Martin Silk for inappropriate professional behavior, namely, using his wife’s name and position as trustee to influence university employees to contribute to a development project. About one month later, Silk submitted his resignation, and Dawes asked the president for his advice. Little told her to accept it immediately. Dawes did this. Silk then tried to withdraw his resignation and asked that he be assigned to a department not under Dawes’s supervision. This request was sent to Little, who notified Silk that he was considering it. He was not inclined to grant the transfer request, even if he accepted the recision of the resignation, because he thought a similar situation was likely to recur no matter where Silk worked. The question became moot, however, when Silk again resigned in writing and then filed sexual harassment charges against Gloria Dawes. Because of his long working relationship with Dawes, Little recused himself from the case and asked university counsel to take it over and as a first step to request the university affirmative action officer to conduct a thorough investigation into the sexual harrassment charges. Daniel Lilly, the affirmative officer, was to contact Little only to interview him as a part of the investigation if he thought that was necessary. Little publicly promised that he would transmit the findings directly to the board chair, unaltered, and that he would implement whatever recommendations were forthcoming, subject only to approval by the board. Lilly interviewed dozens of people at length, including Little on two separate occasions in the presence of counsel, and two months later tendered his report. It exonerated Dawes of sexual harassment and held that the cause of the distressful events had been the breakup of the friendship between Trustee Wagner and Vice President Dawes on the one hand, and Dawes and Wagner’s husband, Silk, on the other, due primarily to Wagner’s and Silk’s reactions to his having been disciplined by Dawes. Little accepted the report verbatim and sent it to the chair of the board and then proceeded to implement the recommendations.

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At this point, an important event occurred. The affirmative action officer, Lilly, had made it a practice in all similar investigations to make a summary of comments gathered from interviewees that did not pertain to the charges he was investigating but in his opinion might be of professional interest to the supervisor concerned. After having submitted his official report, he gave such a summary of unrelated matters to Little. Little was unsure of what to do with this letter. It contained anonymous statements, none of which could be verified, and many of which were to Little’s knowledge untrue. Little thought that it would be immoral public policy to deposit such unrelated and unverifiable accusations in anyone’s publicly accessible personal file, and in his fifteen years as a president he had always discarded anonymous allegations unless they alluded to felonies and/or breaches of university regulations. But in Lilly’s letter, no such allegations were made. He therefore decided to throw the letter away and advised Lilly to do the same with h s copy. Lilly did this but kept his notes of the interviews. The situation had now been leaked to the largest newspaper in the region, which treated it as a major story. In the course of the newspaper’s investigation it subpoenaed the college’s records, which were released. These contained references to the letter discarded by Little. The newspaper, and Silk, now preferred misdemeanor charges against President Little in county court for destroying a public document. The county misdemeanor charge was now heard, and the court ruled that Little and Lilly had violated the state code, a misdemeanor, by destroying the letter Lilly had given to Dawes after tendering his report. The college (not the individual defendants) was fined $3,000 unless the ruling was overturned. KEC appealed. In the meantime, the sexual harassment case had gone forward at the state level and was dismissed. Following this, Silk filed in federal court, claiming the university had discriminated against him on the basis of his gender. Until now, the KEC board had been soundly behind Little, claiming they would rather go to court than pay anythmg to Silk. However, especially after the county court loss and continuing negative publicity, the board began to weaken. Offers to settle were tendered by the plaintiff, at first very high of course, but in the end a settlement was reached. It involved a fairly modest cash payment to the plaintiff, clearing the court records of the misdemeanor decision, no admission of liability by KEC or the individual defendants and a promise not to pursue any actions on this matter in the future and to drop all present actions including pursuit of fees in the county court case. S d k also agreed not to apply for any position at KEC in the future. The matter was closed except for the frnal bursts of publicity.

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What moral lessons can presidents, trustees, and other interested parties learn from these events? Certainly, Little made several key mistakes, some of a tactical nature, and a major error in judgment colored perhaps by a mistaken judgment of fact. Above all, he was aware of Trustee Wagner’s aggressive, controlling ambition and need for power. When Vice President Dawes came to him with the proposal to hire Silk, Little felt caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he knew that Wagner had great influence on his board and he wanted to retain her strong support. On the other, if he denied Silk the job, he knew Wagner would hold that against him. It seemed impossible to avoid a bad situation: either risk Wagner’s enmity or take a chance that Silk would do a good job and Wagner would stay out of management. But Little clearly made the wrong choice. And in light of past experience that had shown him that violation of wellestablished prudential policies and rules often led to offenses in violation of moral principles, he should have known better, For example, he knew very well that antinepotism policies exist because cumulative experience has shown that permitting one spouse to hold a superior position in an organization to the other spouse, who reports to or has authority over him or her, frequently leads to unnecessary suffering for one or the other of the spouses, or more frequently to suffering for others in the context. This is a violation of the basic moral principle that we ought not cause unnecessary human suffering. Since he was well aware of this possibility, he was morally responsible for the outcome of his decision. Two prudential principles, one forbidding conflict of interest and the other requiring that trustee and management functions be separate, were violated as a result of his failure to act, and the violations of these principles in turn led to si@icant harm to several individuals and to the college. The question of degree of moral responsibility hinges on what was reasonably foreseeable at the time of the critical decisions. Because of his close acquaintance with all the parties, Little could have and should have anticipated what happened. The lesson to be learned is that prudential rules and principles are not trivial; they are well-tested guidelines for various sorts of conduct that have served persons and institutions well, and their violation often leads to the violation of even more important principles, namely, moral ones, as happened here. In any event, the need for this sort of thinking by presidents is made clearer by what happened in this instance. The line between approving policy and management is often vague, but Little clearly permitted a situation in which it was likely to be breached, and he should never have agreed to permit Dawes to hire Silk.

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It would have been possible to insist that a search committee consider national candidates for the position and to ensure that the members of that committee were not initially biased toward Wagnerhilk. Alternatively, Little could have met with Wagner and Silk and simply explained he did not approve of the appointment because their relationship could develop into a clear conflict of interest. He could also have discussed the situation with other trustees, two of whom were close to Wagner, and gotten one of them to explain the difficulties to her. Perhaps either course would have antagonized Wagner, but the rest of the board would certainly have supported Little. Little knew he should have taken one of these approaches, as witnessed by his professed reluctance when first approached by Dawes about Silk. But he vacillated and let his long relationship with Gloria Dawes influence his judgment. Then there was the tactical error of the destroyed letter. President Little did see that there was an issue of moral principle involved here, namely, that it was wrong to place unsubstantiated, anonymous, and unprovable accusations in an employee’s file without giving her a chance to defend herself, which is derived from the principle that one ought not do unjustified harm to another. On this point I agree with h: it is an immoral public policy that permits this, and he had never preserved such materials before. He was completely satisfied with the falsity of several of the charges and the irrelevance of the rest to the matter in hand. Affirmative Action Officer Lilly agreed with him. But there were alternatives to destroying the letter that Little should have investigated. He should have sought advice from university counsel prior to destroying the letter but did not. He might have deposited the letter with a private attorney and at least forced the plaintiffs to sue for access, having to override the attorney-client privilege to do so. Little never regretted his decision to destroy the letter because he thought it the right thing to do, but obviously it was not the legally prudent thing to do, and it might have been handled in ways that resulted in less harm for Little and KEC. On occasion, a president may be obliged to oppose his board, even, in the most extreme case, to resign on a matter of principle. Such cases are fairly rare, but they occur, sometimes over academically irrelevant questions. Clearly, if a board attempts to violate the law or even ride roughshod over well-tested university practices and regulations in critical areas such as tenuring and granting promotions, it will be impossible for a president to be effective. No university community would have confidence in a president who did not resist such threats, and a president whose board attempts to do such things can do little other than resign. It

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is critical, though, that there always be a defensible and an important principle at stake in such contexts, if only so that the rest of the university community clearly understands that the president is resigning for the

good of the university. Upholding well-established and effective decisionmaking and governance policies and mechanisms involves such principles. These policies and mechanisms may themselves change through time, but in any decent university or college there are ways and means to accomplish such changes. It is the failure to respect and follow process, and the interference in management affairs, that are the issues of practical and moral consequence here. Such failures can come to involve moral principles if they cause personal or institutional harm, as illustrated here. Where there is a conflict between a prudential and a moral principle, it is important to remember that the moral principle must be supervenient. Immanuel Kant saw this clearly in his formulation of the hypothetical and categorical imperatives. Hypothetical imperatives are contingent on the desire to accomplish some end, for example, to keep one's job. Categorical imperatives are just that, moral commands that entail a duty regardless of consequences. Hypothetical imperatives really aren't principles at all because they are not first or basic; they depend on something else. So do moral rules, but moral principles do not. Principles are basic moral imperatives on which all other moral rules depend. Thus there is no case in my opinion where a president confronted with a choice between obeying a rule of prudence and a moral rule or principle is permitted to choose the former. If a president knows he can keep his job by awarding a contract dishonestly to a trustee who controls a majority vote on his board, and if the president knows that this is immoral, then he must refuse to award the contract and if necessary resign in silence if he knows that to speak out will harm his chances of obtaining another position. For a president who is also a good person, there is no other alternative.

3

The University President and the Academic Community

KINDS OF PRESIDENTS

I

n my experience, there are fundamentally three types of presidentsthe external, the political, and the academic-although they always overlap. The external president focuses primarily on the nonacademic constituencies of the university, such as the legislature, the business community, and the alumni as well as frnancial supporters. Frequently an executive vice president will actually manage the university under this model, and provided that the decision makers of the community understand and accept this arrangement, it can work quite well. In this context, though, the executive vice president will either have to lead academically or appoint a vice president for academic affairs who performs that function. Neither the external nor the political president is usually involved in tenure and promotion decisions, or in faculty hiring. The political president usually focuses on the external constituencies of the university more than the internal ones (but not exclusively) and may not relinquish the practical everyday reins of management control. The political president sees himself presiding over groups in competition for control and governance, scarce resources, standards and contracts, and so forth, and views his role largely as a mediator who subtly influences and guides these groups to compromises. He sees himself as the chief employee, the central agent, of the board of trustees, and therefore as obligated only to them. Unless the board violates some important

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moral or prudential rule or principle, he is not usually confronted with such problems. They arise only in the personal moral sphere and not normally in the institutional context, and he has little trouble making this distinction. He is almost never involved in curricular development or research, and it is quite common for both the external and political presidents not to hold a faculty position and therefore not to be tenured. It is common for these presidents not to hold membership in a faculty senate or, in one university I know, to be the nonvoting ex officio chair of that body. Both are heavily involved in fund-raising and, in public schools, lobbying, even in regential state systems. In the public sphere, political and external presidents are more common in huge state megaversities than anywhere else. The academic president concentrates much more on internal and management matters than external ones, although fund-raising and speaking to public groups are unavoidable for any kind of president. She is always a tenured member of the faculty and frequently teaches a regular academic course and participates in disciplinary research. The academic president is a faculty colleague in good standing with her faculty peers and has earned the rank of full professor. She personally attempts to lay out an academic vision for the institution and encourages the faculty to develop the curriculum in the direction of that vision. The academic president reviews all hiring, tenuring, and promotion decisions, although rarely overturning decisions that have been readily approved at earlier steps in the process. Her primary concern is the academic excellence of the university. She spends much more time visibly on campus than either the political or the external president and sees most of the decisions she must make in terms of whether they do or do not contribute to academic excellence. Thus the academic president does not so much seek compromises between competing groups as seek solutions that most closely approximate or contribute to higher standards of excellence, which she helps define. Of the three types, the academic president is the most vulnerable, both because she does not spend (or have) the time to build external support that the political and external presidents do and because she is usually found in the rough-and-tumble of faculty politics. The turbulence of the confrontations that inevitably result from this sort of president’s personal involvement in such matters as scarce resource allocation, development of higher standards for promotion and tenure, and, in most cases, the elevation of teaching and research over service as criteria of performance excellence can be severe. In what follows, I describe and discuss three incidents that arose from an academic president’s personal involvement in decisions about faculty

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based on a commitment to excellence, as well as the consequences of those decisions. There are relatively few things any president can do for the long-term improvement of his university. Increasing the endowment, improving the physical plant, and establishing high standards of excellence come to mind, of course. In the case of standards of excellence, the oversight of hiring, tenuring, and promoting faculty can hardly be overemphasized. The quality of new, young, and promising faculty ensures the excellence of the teaching and research at a university twenty-five or thirty years after the president has left that position; those faculty no longer young and now tenured will in turn propagate and maintain these high standards. In institutions where such high standards are a well-established tradition, this oversight can be fairly casual because it is a given that any department with an already excellent faculty will not want to hire anyone who does not meet its high standards. For institutions making a transition from one status or role and mission to another-from, say, a state college to an institution offering doctoral degrees-the task will be much more difficult. It is an inherently difficult task in any event because no president can interview every candidate for a faculty position. N o single human being can be so expert in all the fields represented in today’s curriculum as to be capable of recognizing excellence in each of these disparate areas. In the normal context the best a president, dean, or vice president for academic affairs can do at the stage of initial hiring is to gain a general impression of the candidate’s ability to present herself, attend a mandatory public lecture if that is part of the interview process (as it should be for all faculty at the start of their careers), ensure that letters of reference genuinely characterize the candidate, and v e d y the professional evaluations of peers. Although initial hiring of faculty at the start of their career is obviously important, particularly in a context where one is trying to upgrade a department in which expectations of older faculty were not as high when they were hu-ed, it is not the most important decision to be made or to be reviewed by the president. Granting or not granting tenure is. Tenure, as most people know, is not what it once was, and many would argue that it is not what it should be. In its origin, tenure was conceived to protect faculty from arbitrary dismissal because of the expression of unpopular or controversial opinions. In 1940 the American Association of University Professors first enunciated the policy, and it gradually became adopted throughout the world of higher education. At that time there was a genuine need for such protection. Today, a considerable body of case law dealing with the right of free expression and

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protection against arbitrary and capricious action because of contrarian or controversial speech has been decided by the courts, and many would argue that for this reason tenure is no longer needed. But even if it is needed in its original sense, tenure no longer resembles that concept at all. It has become, with the aid of the courts, a system of job protection for individuals and a force against change for academic departments. Once tenure has been awarded, the courts have ruled, faculty members have a vested property right or interest in their position, a right of which they can be deprived only if you prove, publicly, that the individual is incompetent or guilty of moral turpitude. It is exceedingly difficult to do this because by granting tenure in the first place the institution has certified the competency of the applicant, at least at that time, and because the regulations and court decisions circumscribing the administrative options available are narrow and complex. In spite of this, tenured faculty are terminated, more often than the public realizes, either voluntarily or not. But clearly it is much more difficult to achieve change in a departmental faculty, and hence overall in an institution, by replacing tenured faculty rather than nontenured positions. This is why the decision to grant tenure is so important. I know of two instances in which tenured faculty were terminated for reasons of moral relevance, although competence was also an issue in one case. In the first case, a senior professor who was also chair of his department was accused by several female graduate students of sexual harassment. There was convincing evidence that the accusations were true and that there had been several instances of this behavior. Given that sexual harassment is not just inappropriate but immoral, and was also a formal violation of university rules, the individual was asked to resign and was informed that the university was prepared to go to a public hearing and charge him with moral turpitude as well as a university rules infraction. Although initially inclined to resist and go to the public hearing, he ultimately decided to reconsider. He was a very popular chair and teacher and was influential in the local arts community. He was a nationally recognized scholar in his field, and for all these reasons he was a valued faculty member. Only in the face of the accumulated weight of the evidence and the willingness of several women to come forward in spite of considerable pressure from other female students and some faculty of both sexes to drop the matter did he accept the inevitable without having to go to a public hearing. He resigned in return for our agreement that the university would not pursue the matter further and signed agreements with the plaintiffs that they would not pursue either civil or criminal complaints.

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The second case was very sad. It involved a relatively young faculty member who at one time was a fine teacher and whose scholarly career was developing very nicely. His early years at the university gave no inclination that he had any addiction problems, but two or three years after he was tenured and appointed associate professor, it became progressively clear that he was an alcoholic, and in a short time his illness began to affect his teaching, research reputation, and behavior on campus very negatively. Every possible effort to help was extended, for alcoholism is fairly common on our campuses and is widely understood in a nonjudgmental sense as the disease, and not the moral weakness, that it is. It is also the law that no one can be dismissed for being an alcoholic; the grounds for dismissal must be that the alcoholic person cannot perform contractual functions. The university intervened and three times bore the costs of placing him in rehabilitation facilities, bearing the cost of replacement faculty. Through the good offices of faculty who are recovering alcoholics who volunteered to help on a confidential basis, he was given every private assistance possible. But when he again resumed his drinking and clearly began to decline in both physical and mental capacity, he was dismissed from the faculty, an act that he accepted without complaint. He died shortly thereafter at the age of forty-one. In this case, the morally relevant foundation for his dismissal was that the university could no longer trust him to fulfidl its promises of quality instruction. The cases that follow are somewhat more complex. AN EXAMPLE OF TENURING AND ACADEMIC POLITICS Betty Smythe was a young assistant professor in the department of ethnic studies. She also taught frequently in the women’s studies program. She had come to the faculty without her doctoral degree but had completed it during her second year. In her sixth year, she applied for tenure. She did not have much choice, for the university’s policy followed the AAUP guidelines stipulating that if a faculty member has not earned tenure after six years, then the seventh year must be a terminal contract. Dr. Smythe’s academic record was acceptable but not outstanding. Her student evaluations of teaching were generally good, although spotty in places. She had taught a fairly broad range of courses but had not gained membership on the graduate faculty, which required a continuing and current record of scholarship, and the number and quality

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of her publications were questionable. She had recently contracted for the publication of a book, but an examination of the manuscript revealed that it was almost verbatim her doctoral dissertation, which was not about a particularly difficult or complex topic. No scholarly articles had been developed on the basis of the dissertation, and no evidence was presented of a serious work in progress. Smythe was strongly supported by peers at other institutions, but upon examination these individuals all had some special relationship to her, which provided reason to question their objectivity. For example, her dissertation adviser wrote a laudatory review of her book manuscript, and as I have mentioned, the book was actually the dissertation, almost verbatim. Dr. Smythe was strongly supported by her colleagues, at least publicly. Her female colleagues in particular were vociferous in her defense, and consequently the discussion surrounding the case was immediately personalized and politicized. To complicate matters further, the board of trustees at this time had a member who was a former faculty member, highly political in every way, and was a direct conduit of information that should have been confidential from discussions with other board members to faculty critical of the administration. Thus it was impossible to examine the case of Dr. Smythe in the careful and objective way these matters should always be handled. Dr. Smythe’sdepartmental tenure and promotion committee had voted to support her application, but the vote was not unanimous. The collegiate tenure and promotion committee had also voted to support her, but the vote again was not unanimous. The dean of the college did not support the collegiate committee and argued that Smythe should be denied tenure because of an insufficient scholarly record. The vice president supported the dean, and the president decided to deny Smythe tenure on the basis of the vice president’s and dean’s recommendations. The president had also been visited by a senior member of the departmental tenure and promotion committee who told him he regretted his affirmative vote and did not support Smythe. But he felt extremely pressured by female faculty who had made Smythe a cause celebre. From other sources, reliable ones, it had also come to the president’s private attention that Smythe had an alcohol problem and at least occasionally used cocaine. It should be noted that a faculty member cannot be dismissed for alcoholism, only for inadequate performance, which may or may not be related to that condition. The president consulted with the dean, the vice president, and the chair of the board before the public meeting, and they decided it would be unfair to Smythe to mention the informal contact with the senior faculty member who regretted his vote. The evidence

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of alcohol and cocaine use should also be concealed because in the former case incompetence because of the problem had not been alleged, and she had never been charged with a drug offense. But several people including board members knew of these facts, although not from the president or other administrators, and it seems impossible for this knowledge not to have influenced their opinions. Because of the fairly widespread knowledge of the substance abuse problem, and also because Dr. Smythe had, willingly or unwillingly, become a symbol for causes having no essential connection to the facts of her tenure application, the president felt there was some justice to the claim that she could not receive a totally fair and objective hearing through the normal processes. The question was, What to do about this? The trustee mentioned earlier now took up the Smythe case as a cause. Smythe was encouraged by the trustee and several faculty to demand a public hearing of her case before the board, and she did this. The president had no objection to the hearing but was concerned lest it become a spectacle used as a stage for women’s issues at the university in general. And that is what happened. It was claimed that had she been male, her scholarly record would have been adjudged sufficient; that the tenure and promotion committees had been biased because both of them were preponderantly male, and that otherwise the committee votes would have been unanimous; that the dean was biased and opposed to both ethnic and women’s studies programs; and that the president supported the dean because if he had not, the truth of the dean’s critics’ accusations would have been more obvious. The vice president, a woman, was accused of being a “yes person” for the president. Even certain outstanding female scholars on the faculty came to Smythe’s defense, one of them openly arguing that the symbolism of the Smythe case for women on the campus was of such weight that this factor alone should determine that Smythe be given tenure. The trustee involved openly supported this view. The president felt that the central issues were these: On the basis of the record over the last six years, how did Smythe’s qualifications compare to others who had been granted tenure, without regard to gender? Had the process by which Smythe had been evaluated differed in any material way from others evaluated for tenure in that year or any other year, again without regard to gender? If, as had been found, her scholarly work was lacking, were there mitigating factors, such as unusual university service or unusual excellence in teaching, that might have had a bearing on this?

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Was there any evidence that those charged with evaluating her work had been biased in any way against her for nonacademic reasons? Had appropriate external evaluations of her work been sought? Aside from these essential questions, the peculiar circumstances of the case had raised these further issues: If some particular case, for whatever reasons, comes to have serious symbolic implications for the sense of well-being of an important group on campus, should that fact have a bearing on a tenure or promotion decision? What would be the foreseeable impact in terms of campus wellbeing if tenure decisions were, from time to time, visibly influenced by factors other than academic ones? Is it possible to systematize (i.e., govern practice by rule) the consideration of nonacademic factors, assuming they were to be permitted in such a context? If Dr. Smythe were given tenure for reasons in addition to, or instead of, academic ones, would this serve her own true self-interest in the long run? Finally, but perhaps most importantly, what were the moral implications of the case for both individuals and the institution? The president gave these matters serious thought and after appropriate consultation stated his answers to these questions at the public hearing. It seemed clear to him that in those areas where it was possible to make comparisons, no one in the modern history of the university who had comparable qualifications to Smythe had been granted tenure at the university, nor, so far as could be discovered, at comparable institutions. An examination of these comparisons when gender was included as a variable revealed no bias. The process by which Smythe had been evaluated was identical to that of her recently tenured colleagues, and it was similar in all relevant respects to the tenuring process in other departments and at other similar universities; again, when gender was considered, no bias was found. These examinations were conducted by appropriately qualified faculty, including representatives from other universities. Smythe did not have an unusual level of university service, nor an unusual teaching load, which might have partially explained her inadequate research and publication record. In fact, over the year prior to her

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evaluation, she had been given a lighter than average teaching load, and no service assignments, in order to free her to do more research. There was no evidence of any bias against her for nonacademic reasons on the part of those evaluating her work, although the department chair had spoken of his concern about the alcohol problem with her. He had supported her application for tenure, and according to him Dr. Smythe had promised to seek help for her alcoholism. External evaluations of Dr. Smythe’s work had been sought, and additional ones were solicited by the vice president’s office when it was discovered that the initial evaluators had special relationships with her. These additional evaluators were chosen by experts in Smythe’s field both within and without the university. They did not evaluate her work highly. On the basis of these findings, the president had no trouble recommending to the board that Dr. Smythe not receive tenure. However, her case raised issues that far outweighed the Smythe case alone and the president felt these should be addressed as well. The entire campus community was discussing the issue of whether the symbolic importance of the Smythe decision for women ought to be a factor in the case, and a surprising number of faculty, men and women, thought that it should influence the outcome. The president and the board did not agree with this opinion, and their disagreement was based on three factors. First, the symbolic factors were irrelevant from an academic viewpoint, and a decision to grant tenure was primarily, but not entirely, based on academic factors. They noted cases in which, for example, the applicant simply could not get along with any other members of the department and was a constant source of friction. There is no policy in any handbook of which I am aware that addresses this issue, yet such material facts certainly play a role. But in the present instance such other concerns were not material. And it would not be possible to formulate any policy that purported to allow symbolic issues to be counted that did not result in arbitrary and capricious behavior, the very antithesis of what fair and objective evaluation is supposed to be. Second, if the symbolism of the decision were allowed to carry the day, the foreseeable impact on any university campus would be devastating, for no one would have any confidence in a process of selection that, by common knowledge, could be manipulated by political and sectarian maneuvering. Since it would be impossible to institutionalize such practices with any consistency, they would by definition be arbitrary and capricious, and thence random. A fundamental principle of morality is that justice must be equitable, and by definition randomness is the

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opposite of equitability. A president who allowed factors that created such random conditions would therefore be violating the basic moral principle of justice and would a fortiori be committing immoral acts. Third, it is foreseeable that such institutional behavior would result in chaos and/or authoritarian administration, and it certainly would cause pain and suffering to individuals. It would also obviously leave any university wide open to legal suit. The moral issues involved here were clear. First, there was the principle that every individual has the right to be treated justly and fairly, and with due regard to her personal dignity. Smythe had been so treated. Indeed, extraordinary efforts had been exerted to ensure that this was visibly so. Second, the moral obligation to preserve a process of integrity with respect to the distribution of justice within the institution was material. That is, if rewarding excellence through granting tenure is not merely a matter of prudence but of justice, then the processes through which this is accomplished must be such as to preserve the trust of the faculty and others in their fairness and thoroughness. Extraordinary efforts were taken to ensure that was the case. Third, given that the negative decision with respect to Smythe inevitably caused her some distress, the president felt that he had an obligation to “go the extra mile” to comfort and advise her. He did this to the best of his ability. This last point is not, strictly speaking, a matter of moral principle, falling as it does under the first principle given above, but it is a subsidiary obligation.

CHANGING VALUES AND VAGUE STANDARDS The second tenure case involved a classic conflict over the operational meaning of standards for tenure and promotion. In most faculty handbooks at most universities, the language governing the process by which tenure is granted is fairly standard. In general, most universities stipulate three areas of performance in which acceptable standards must be met in order for a candidate to stand for tenure: teaching, research, and service. I have never seen a handbook in which the three types of service were explicitly ranked in order of importance, nor have I ever seen more detailed delineation of the expectations with respect to quality or level of service, except that in some policies with respect to tenure, it is stated that in general, promotion to the rank of associate professor is anticipated at the time of tenuring. Also, it is not uncommon for language to be used indicating that tenure and promotion to associate professor ought not to be given unless the quality of performance gives reason to

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believe that the faculty person will be able to achieve the rank of full professor in the future. Because of the breadth of academic disciplines, however, it is hard to be more specific about performance in documents intended to be used by the entire university. In spite of the absence of more specific language, there is an unwritten ranking of the three areas of service, depending on the type of college or university being considered. At smaller liberal arts colleges, teaching at a high level of excellence and repute is essential. Service to the college is also expected and is valued highly in the process although not anything like teaching excellence. Whether there is a research and publication expectation at such an institution often depends on the individual understandings reached at the time of hiring with the new faculty. For example, the new faculty member might have a lighter teaching load than normal but in return understands that he or she will be judged, when the time comes, on the basis of research performance at a much higher level of expectation than others with whom no such expectations have been established. Such arrangements are quite common in transitional schools-those evolving from regional state colleges to universities, for example. At major research institutions, it is understood from the time of hiring that research and publication or their equivalents (i.e., performance, exhibition of works, etc.) are the sine qua non for gaining tenure. Teaching skill is appreciated, but an “acceptable”level is sufficient provided that research and publication occur at a high level. Service ranks as a distant third in the triumvirate of evaluation areas, and at many research universities younger faculty are discouraged from serious service commitments such as membership on the faculty senate until after they have achieved tenure so they will have more time to devote to research and the improvement of teaching. None of this is to say that teaching is unimportant at these flagship institutions. A faculty person probably would not achieve tenure even with a fairly high level of research performance if his teaching was very poor, particularly since in recent times there has been a resurgence of emphasis on undergraduate education and teaching at the expense of research. But even today, it would be unlikely in the extreme for an excellent teacher to achieve tenure with a very poor research and publication record. These variant practices between research universities and small liberal arts schools have long been the norm, and they are well understood and accepted in their respective environments. But there is a large set of institutions between these two types of school where the picture is not so clear. This third kind of university generally developed from the old

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“normal school” and state college traditions, which concentrated almost exclusively on the preparation of teachers for the lower grades at the turn of the century, plus a basic liberal arts education in the colleges. As college-age populations expanded and the demand for broader educational experiences rose, and with the passage of GI legislation after World War 11, the majority of the normal schools became four-year colleges, often by first becoming colleges of education with a curriculum somewhat broader than the normal school, and then, beginning in the late 1920s and continuing until the present, colleges of arts and science. For the last thirty-five years or so, there has been a progressive trend throughout the country for these colleges to develop graduate programs, first at the master’s and certificate levels and then often doctoral work, and this has been followed by efforts to rec1asslf;l these middle-level institutions as universities. These sorts of institutions constitute the majority of universities in the United States today, and they enroll more than 20 percent of all the undergraduate students in the country. Since more than four hundred of them belong to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), I shall refer to them as AASCU institutions. At this third sort of institution, expectations for tenure and promotion are often not as clear as they are at the other two.For one thing, it is still true that older faculty from the “college” days remain, who were hired with a very different set of performance expectations but now serve at senior levels within the infrastructure, including positions such as chair of tenure and promotion committees. Frequently they are now asked to judge their new colleagues by standards that they themselves would not have met. There is resentment by both parties in such a context. Often the institution as a whole does not have a clear role and mission statement, and the limitations on and purposes of research efforts and development of graduate programs are not very clear. Furthermore, almost all of the younger faculty standing for tenure or promotion received their advanced degrees from research universities. The doctoral degree almost always qualifies the holder to do research in the discipline of the degree. These faculty are not being trained to teach in an atmosphere that does not also require them to do research. Inevitably, the pressures in such an environment are to become more like the research institutions that trained the faculty in the first place. Even where the university has done a fairly good job of distinguishing selective disciplines in which it wishes to establish a “niche” reputation, it is very hard to dampen the aspirations of other departments that might not receive the same level of resources. The net effect is that the “new university” aspires to become a research

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university, and this overall effort creates and/or emphasizes the fractures between older faculty, teaching-oriented faculty, research faculty, graduate schools, and undergraduate programs. The frequent victim at AASCU universities is the young faculty person standing for tenure who is not sure that the expectations of his or her department are supported, or even understood, by collegiate and central administrative decision makers who may have developed in much earlier and different times.

AN EXAMPLE OF A TRANSITIONAL VICTIM Dr. Sally Morse (a fictitious name) found herself standing for tenure and promotion to associate professor in just such a context. Her department was targeted by her university as a “niche” discipline-a discipline or set of disciplines in a single department that the university wished to develop into a major player in the state’s research environment. There were reasonable hopes that a consistently excellent national and even international reputation would evolve from the work of the younger faculty. Expectations, and rewards, were higher for this department than for all others in the university except for the few other “niche” programs in which a similar investment of resources was being made. The hopes for Morse’s university so far as ranking as a nationally important university was concerned seemed to rest on the development of these niche programs more than anything else. Dr. Morse’s department had undertaken a broad variety of steps to enhance the department’s quality: heavily recruiting graduate students from schools that already excelled in their fields and enhancing enrollment requirements for their undergraduate programs. They had raised private endowments and provided scholarships for National Merit Scholars to study with them, and they had combined faculty “lines”(i.e., money for new positions to create endowed chairs for “stars” with already established national and international reputations). Morse submitted her application in her sixth year as a faculty member. Her teaching evaluations were excellent. This is significant because of the way in which teaching returns inform evaluators after a sufficient number of returns for all courses taught at all levels have been received. The evaluations do not give a lot of information at the middle levels of competence: they identify your “superstar” teachers and the ill-prepared and boring instructors. Dr. Morse was a superstar teacher. Morse’s service record was barely adequate, but the department informed the collegiate-level tenure and promotion committee that this was because the department discouraged her service activities and encouraged

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research in its place. Dr. Morse’s research and publication record was clearly good enough to have earned her tenure in almost all of the university departments not designated as “niche”departments. But it was average in comparison to the records of similar applicants from other “niche’programs. In a split vote within her department (I believe it was 6-4 with one abstention), she was recommended for tenure and promotion. Included within her fie was a letter from the chair noting that Morse’s research protocol was proceeding on schedule, and that the majority of the published work expected from her project could not be expected until her work was complete. It was also noted that Morse had not attracted sigrvficant outside funding from either government or private sources. On the basis of the departmental split vote, and including the letter about Morse’s grant funding record, teaching evaluations, and service component, the collegiate-level tenure and promotion committee voted 5 4 to deny her tenure and promotion. The committee noted that h s decision was particularly difficult for them, because in most other departments her record would have qualified her for tenure and promotion. They also noted the systematic vagueness in the university’s standards of excellence with respect to the three evaluative criteria (teaching, research, and service). In effect, they said, there were no qualitative criteria other than those used by the individual peers and outside evaluators who were expert in Morse’s field of study to help the university committee decide that an individual, call him or her “A,”had work that was either more excellent or less excellent than another applicant “ B because no standards for excellence within the individual categories to be evaluated (teaching, research, and service) were part of the handbook guidelines. Only where such measurable mformation as scores of student evaluations for teaching was available could intracategorical comparisons be identified. But such information was almost impossible to find in the area of research, other than counting the number of publications, which tells one little about the quality of the work, just that peers who referee the publishing journals think it worth presenting. In Morse’s case, she had few refereed publications, although the ones she had were in journals of high repute. The dean of the college recommended that Morse be given tenure but that promotion to associate professor be withheld pending further publication of her research. In his recommendation, the dean noted the split vote of the collegiate committee and their comments on the vagueness of the evaluative criteria. He stated that if “niche” programs were to have higher standards, then the departmental policies should say that and define them; they should be approved by the collegiate and central administrations, the faculty senate, and the trustees.

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The university-level tenure and promotion committee overturned the dean’s recommendation, agreeing with the collegiate committee, but once again by a split vote, and with the same reservations expressed by the dean. The recommendations then came to the vice president for academic affairs, the Senate Committee on Faculty Welfare and Grievances having already announced that regardless of the final outcome, the issues raised by the case justified a senate investigation. Theoretically, the vice president should make his or her recommendation to the president based on an objective evaluation independent of the president, since if there is an appeal it always goes to the chief executive of the institution. In fact, when recommendations were positive from the vice president, it was almost a certainty that the president would support them, save in those rare instances where extra scrutiny was warranted because of heavily split opinion early in the process. In this case, however, it seemed that university-wide issues of major importance having to do with role and mission, the place and function of niche programs, and the use of different criteria of excellence by different academic units, as well as the absence of criteria of excellence within the published handbook criteria for tenure and promotion, made it imperative for the chief academic officer and the president to have a common understanding of these issues and their relevance before she made her recommendation in the particular case of Morse. We began by agreeing on certain factual and general principles essential to the university. (1) We agreed that the university’s resources would not now or in the foreseeable future permit the achievement of the highest levels of excellence in research in every department on campus. (2) We agreed that the role and mission of the university entailed the achievement of research excellence in selected fields, with the approval of the board of trustees and the state board of regents if this entailed the development of new degree programs. (3) We agreed that (1) and ( 2 ) implied that the university’s resources should be distributed differentially and according to the expectations laid down for each department and college. (4) We agreed that if (l),(21, and (3) were given, then, costs per unit being otherwise equal, the higher the funding and resource levels, the higher the faculty performance levels we could justifiably expect. (5) If performance levels were to vary by resource allocation and department or program, then all faculty in those programs had a right to know what would define the higher performance levels expected of them, how much time they had to meet the higher levels, and how it would be determined whether they had met these higher standards.

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Having agreed on these for the most part essentially normative principles, we now had to face certain matters of fact, both about the institution and about the Morse case itself. The principle of the differential distribution of resources had been practiced for many years but was nowhere enunciated as university policy. The “niche” programs, all of them granting the doctoral degree, which now received higher funding than the norm, had, with but two notable exceptions, initially been identified for additional support after they had already achieved levels of renown at the university. In the two notable exceptions, the programs had raised millions of dollars from private sources before having supplementary funds allocated by the institution. Enforcement of higher standards for promotion and tenure in these programs had evolved within the departments from the ground up, as it were, and not by use of funding pressure through administrative channels. But in no case, so far as we were aware, had these higher standards of excellence been articulated in departmental or collegiate handbooks or in other policy documents, and certainly they had not been approved centrally or by the board. Although it was assumed that the higher standards had been communicated initially to all new hires in the concerned departments, and that thereafter they had been regularly counseled by their senior peers, there was no evidence save the anecdotal to confirm this. This was true in the Morse case as well, although she had been told to ignore service for the most part and to concentrate on her research. Nor was there any place where an exception in expectations for promotion and tenure standards from the university handbook had been noted. This was what had concerned the tenure and promotion committees so keenly, as well as the absence of criteria defining “excellence” as opposed to acceptable or satisfactory performance. It was clear that the expectations of Morse were much higher than the average for tenure and promotion applicants for the university as a whole. It was also clear that the higher criteria she had to meet were nowhere clearly defined in university policy; there were split votes on whether she had met the undefined higher criteria; and there was general agreement that if she were being considered according to general handbook criteria, she would have been granted tenure and promotion. Given her record to date, it was reasonably foreseeable that Dr. Morse would continue to develop in her research, as well as in other professional categories. It seemed equally clear that confusion about the higher standards for “niche” departments might also have victimized her through no fault of her own, and that the general faculty were upset by the vagueness of the situation as well. Were Morse to be denied tenure,

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the university at best would be viewed as having done a clumsy job of evaluation, and at worst would be seen as having acted unjustly to a wellqualified person. Its essential processes would be brought under serious doubt. Dr. Sally Morse was given tenure and promoted. She is today one of the most widely respected and well-known teachers and scholars at the university, and her work is internationally respected. The policies and procedures manuals were and are being revised to correct the deficiencies noted by the committees. This work is still in progress, having proven much more difficult than was anticipated. The moral principles at issue here are similar to those in the Smythe case. Clearly we had an obligation to treat Morse honestly, fairly, and with dignity. We also had an obligation to ensure that the process by which she was given or denied tenure was fair and was worthy of respect and trust on the part of the university’s constituencies. The first principle concerns the rightness or wrongness of actions, the second the distribution of justice. It was virtually impossible to demonstrate the fairness of the process of distribution in this case, for the reasons given above. In such a case, it was felt that treating the individual honestly, fairly, and with dignity should supervene on the broader obligation to distribute justice fairly. Not ensuring this would bring both principles into disrepute and might cause irreparable institutional harm and harm to other individuals in the future. This was not as difficult a decision as it might seem, given the promising nature of Morse’s research efforts to date. There was, however, another moral principle operative here, which was the commitment the university had made about the quality of its teaching to parents and students. The university is a doctorate-granting one, but not a major research university. Although graduate work and research were important and becoming more so as the institution matured, it had a fundamental commitment of principle to unusual excellence in teaching and had advertised that fact widely. Morse was a superstar teacher, and even in a niche department the school could not afford to lose such a fine instructor without violating its promises to students and their parents. The university kept that commitment.

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The University President and the Governance System

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n the previous three chapters, I outlined circumstances that were particular to individuals but involved contexts having implications for the entire university. In this chapter I want to discuss structural and political problems that also have such ramifications, but on a much larger scale. First we will consider the relationships between a president and the faculty senate, the major internal governance structure in most universities, certainly for such matters as curriculum, faculty welfare, and liaison with the central administration. Second we will look at a case arising from a faculty report on salaries for female faculty and subsequent involvement with the federal government. The main issue here is what a university administration ought to do if convinced that it is being unfairly and unjustifiably accused by a much more powerful entity such as the government, including threat of withdrawal of federal funds and prosecution. I am not sure which issues typically or at least historically result in the greatest number of presidential dismissals or forced resignations, but of the several presidents I have known who have met this fate, there is no doubt about what brought most of them down. Conflicts between presidents and faculty senates over issues of governance and control are deadly for presidents. The governance of a university is complex and subtle. It depends as much on unwritten custom and tradition as it does on written and codified policies and regulations. Trust and a belief in the integrity of the representatives of the various segments of the university

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community are essential and very fragile. When the leadership of one important constituency sets out to undermine the trust the members of that constituency have in one or more of the other components of the whole, the entire university faces a crisis. In most universities, faculty members are vested with a great deal of authority and control over academic matters. This would normally include approval of the curriculum; oversight of libraries, academic computing, and other learning resources; participation in the hiring of all faculty, chairs, deans, and the academic vice president as well as the president; significant involvement in the tenuring and promoting process; and management of faculty welfare and grievance issues. In addition, faculty by custom (and in some places by right) stated in policy serve in an advisory capacity on virtually every significant university committee. All committees and governance bodies such as the faculty senate are, technically speaking, advisory, and even the president of the university only has such authority as is vested in him or her by the board of trustees. But the advice of committees, and of the senate, is ignored by a president at her peril, particularly on sensitive matters. The most sensitive matters are personnel issues and questions of collegiality. A controversy that erupts around both of these questions at the same time can be very destructive. Universities are not democracies in the sense that all matters of concern are settled by vote. But the exact line between the authority of a body such as a faculty senate and a president is often hard to state with precision, and usually past practice has as much or more influence than written policy. Collegiality is a concept that seems easy to define but is constantly being put to the test in practice. Essentially, the theory is that the major segments of the university, and particularly the faculty and the administration, are equals charged with different responsibilities who must work together in a spirit of trust and cooperation in order to serve the students and facilitate teaching and research. And in practice, it works in this way most of the time. Few administrations, and no long-lived ones, would try to wrest control of the curriculum from the faculty. After all, faculty are trained in the various disciplines from which the curriculum is derived, and the administration, although it usually includes experts from the faculty, has neither the comprehensive knowledge of the range of academic disciplines nor the working experience required to be on the cutting edge of new knowledge, which characterizes a good faculty. The same is true of the tenure and promotion process. If a candidate’s peers unanimously support him or her, together with independent experts, then deans and vice presidents seldom question their judgment. It

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is only when there are split votes, or some other reason to question peer support, that administration becomes involved in the process, or should become involved. The involvement of faculty in nonacademic areas is more difficult to characterize. At Oxford University in England, until recently, faculty served even on sewer inspection committees, but most American academics do not seem to feel that this level of involvement is essential to their stature. Certainly, however, faculty here would expect to serve on working committees dealing with such matters as academic and administrative data processing, capital planning, hiring for most vice presidential positions, and other similar tasks. And in all such cases, their participation is not only wise but welcomed. Difficulties only arise when faculty advisers either think their advice is being ignored or believe the administration is not fulfilling its responsibilities adequately, or when for whatever reason they believe their authority and responsibility either are, or ought to be, wider and more decisive than they are in fact and in policy. Of course, in any particular case the faculty advising bodies may be absolutely correct, and the administration in question unworthy of their support.

AN EXAMPLE OF AN INTERNAL CONFLICT WITH A FACULTY SENATE Some years ago, President Downs of Masters University (the institution is fictitious, but the incident is real and accurately depicted) decided that the university required a new digital telephone system as a part of upgrading the university data processing capacity. The chair of the computing sciences department, whom I shall call Dr. Stanley Bell, had a certain expertise in this area, not just because of his computing background but because he had had close affiliations with people in the telephone business. He volunteered to help design the new system, and his help was welcomed. Downs agreed to pay him a consulting fee for his advice. A system was chosen and installed, and it seemed to work well. In the meantime, the university had been searching for a person to head up the new operation. The advertisement for a new manager was, because of bad legal advice, stated in the broadest rather than the most specific terms, and the ad content did not exclude the past manager, Mary Wills, from being a candidate for the new job. Wills applied but was denied the job because she did not have the qualifications. Wills appealed, claiming that she met the qualifications as expressed in the advertisement and that

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her past experience would be sufficient provided the university gave her training in the new system. However, her immediate supervisor decided against her. Wills then sued the university. She was a close friend of Bell’s, who now tried to get the supervisor dismissed and have his friend given the position. Downs did everything in his power to placate Bell, even arranging an appearance before a board of trustees committee where he aired Wills’s concerns. But when the supervisor and the vice president were not fired, and the board was unpersuaded of his charges, Bell remained bitter, angry, and vociferous. While this was going on, income from the new system turned out to be insufficient in its first semester of operation to pay down the loans taken out to install it, because of a poor marketing plan. Downs therefore put his executive assistant, Dr. Gordon Aims, in charge of marketing the system. Aims was also in charge of legislative affairs for the school, and he not only marketed the telephones successfully but also succeeded in obtaining a large grant from the state to help defray the first-year deficit. President Downs thought that all was well. The system was finally operating in a fiscally sound manner, computing was rapidly being upgraded in the residence halls, and the controversy seemed to be dying down. But Downs did not understand the depth of Dr. Bell’s antipathy toward the entire administration because his advice on personnel was rejected. Not long afterward, Bell was elected president of the faculty senate. In his first address to that body he continued his attack on the Downs administration, accusing it of wasting taxpayer money (the $1 million grant Aims had acquired) because of the allegedly incompetent supervisor who had developed the failed marketing plan. He widened his accusations to include a “bill of particulars,”which was a list of broad scope, including everything from a claim that the university had the worst studentteacher ratio in the state to accusations that it abused graduate assistants by paying them less than the other state universities paid. Downs knew these accusations to be unfounded, and a vice president put the actual data before the senate in reply. But an atmosphere of nervous distrust was developing among the faculty, some of whom admired Bell. Bell’s campaign continued throughout the following fall semester. During that term, Downs decided to settle the suit of the former telephone system manager, Mary Wills, out of court. The amount was not comparatively large and was supposed to be confidential. But Bell made sure that the terms of the settlement were known widely, and he used the

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case against Downs, whom he was targeting more and more on a personal level. Near the end of the term, Downs decided to replace the vice president for advancement, who had received an offer from another university, with Dr. Aims, his executive assistant. One reason for choosing Aims was that the board of trustees was very high on him and had wanted him to hold a vice presidency for a long time. Furthermore, legislative affairs would now be included in the division of advancement, and A i m s had excelled in this area for many years. Because the vice presidency for advancement was not an academic position, it did not require faculty representation on the search committee, and since the Aims promotion was internal, no formal external search was required. Downs felt that holding such a search would be hypocritical, given that Aims was eminently qualified and both Downs and the board favored his appointment. Written university policy favored promotion from within whenever possible. Dr. Downs decided simply to recommend that A i m s be given the job, and the board wholeheartedly supported this. At the next meeting of the faculty senate, without excusing himself from the chair, Dr. Bell damned the administration and then moved a motion of no confidence in the president. This motion had not been placed on the agenda in advance, and Bell had not consulted with many people about it. Most of those he had consulted, almost all of them his known supporters, had strongly advised him against doing this, on the basis that there were no facts supporting his position. Pandemonium reigned at the meeting. Finally, the motion was tabled by a wide margin. Downs had no warning that anything like this was in the offing and in fact was out of town. He found out about it when reached by a reporter. The motion was headline material in all the regional newspapers the next day and appeared on the Associated Press wire. Downs returned to the university the next day and decided to treat the situation in a low-key manner until the dust had settled somewhat. The next meeting of the senate, unless a special meeting was called, was a month away. Events, however, forced a special meeting before that. Bell called Downs and asked to see him privately. A meeting was arranged at the president’s residence, with the vice president for academic affairs in attendance at President Downs’s request. Apparently there had been little support forthcoming during the week for Bell’s motion. He now said that his intention had not been to force the president’s resignation but to bring to the attention of the campus community in a forceful way his “bill of particulars.”He said he would withdraw the motion if Downs would agree to hold a press conference with h m and agree to address the concerns on his list.

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But President Downs had had enough. He noted that in academic life, everyone understood that the no-confidence motion was the strongest weapon in the faculty’s arsenal, and everyone knew its purpose: to get rid of the president. Its purpose was not simply to bring everyone’s attention to some set of concerns. The motion assumed by its very nature that the president was unable or unwilling to meet the faculty’s concerns and therefore should be forced from his position. If he agreed to Bell’s proposed press conference, Downs said, he would be giving credence to his bill of particulars, not one of which was true, and he would be implicitly agreeing that Dr. Bell had acted responsibly, if overdramatically, in bringing these concerns into a larger forum by means of the no-confidence motion. Downs then informed Bell that he had come to the conclusion that he could not work with Dr. Bell or his vice president, and therefore he would not attend any press conference. He said he had discussed this with all members of the board and had obtained their support. Therefore, Downs said, he would not interact with the senate through Bell and the vice president for the rest of Bell’s term in office. N o requests from him would be received, and no business conducted with his office. The vice presidents had been instructed to work only with the chairs of the senate committees, but in no case to deal with the senate executive offices. In short, Bell had been cut out of the lines of communication. The next morning, Dr. Bell and his vice president announced their resignations from office. A petition for a special meeting of the senate was prepared, and the meeting was established for one week later. The agenda was to include two items: an in-camera Committee of the Whole meeting to discuss the entire set of circumstances surrounding the motion of no confidence, and then a vote to select an interim president of the faculty senate. At the meeting, Downs reviewed the entire history of the administration’s interactions with Dr. Bell, from the day he was hired and paid a large consulting fee to advise the administration about the new telephone system to the present. There was considerable surprise among the senators at the news of the fee, about which they had not been informed. He discussed each of the items on the bill of particulars. One of these claimed that the university was in poor financial condition because of Downs’s mismanagement. Downs had arranged for an external audit, and one of the most respected and trusted members of the board, himself a financial analyst, spoke at Downs’s request and noted that the university was in the best financial condition in its history. At the end of his presentation, Downs asked that the motion of no confidence be taken from the table and presented

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for vote. But the senate did not wish to do this. Instead, they tabled the motion permanently. A respected former president of the senate was nominated as interim president and was unanimously elected. The campus returned to a semblance of normalcy. It is difficult to analyze exactly what took place here, and what if any moral import it has for presidents and senates in general. It is tempting to dismiss the case as an instance of one embittered person causing a fuss. It is interesting that even after the A i m s appointment, the immediate catalyst for the no-confidence motion, Bell never tried to have his appointment annulled but rather concentrated all his efforts on Downs. Many of Bell’s concerns might be characterized as procedural-the absence of a formal search for the advancement position, the technical errors in the advertisement for the telephone director’s position, the management failures in the initial marketing plan for the new telephone system-but he himself violated all the senate rules of procedure by personally moving no confidence when it was not on the agenda, and without vacating the chair. Certainly his behavior after the fact in attempting to damage Downs through secret press campaigns seems excessive and even obsessive. One thing, however, seems true: he displaced the motive of helping to serve the welfare of the university (if that ever was his motive) with the personal vendetta to impeach Downs and cause his resignation or dismissal. And it seems that although his public reasons for doing this were couched in the bill of particulars, there was an almost careless disregard for the accuracy of these charges, since none of them turned out to be true, and the quantitative facts showing them to be false were easily available to anyone. N o one else stepped forward to support Bell. The consequences of his actions, and of Downs’s, are much clearer. They can be divided into short- and long-term consequences. The noconfidence motion, and Downs’s subsequent refusal to do business with Bell and the vice president of the senate, had a seriously disruptive impact on the university’s ability to conduct its business efficiently for more than three semesters. Support for the faculty senate among the general faculty was negatively affected, and this in turn was a factor in bringing about a subsequent union election that interrupted progress at the school for yet another year and a half. Downs’s refusal to work with Bell and his vice president was, in my opinion, a calculated decision with foreseeable consequences. Downs knew that Bell could not continue as head of the senate if the vice presidents and the president would not communicate with him. Was he justified in forcing Bell out? I think he was. Even if his own motives were now tinged by a resentment of Bell, as was no doubt the case, it is hard to see

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how he could have believed that the university would be better off if Bell remained in office. On the basis of his past behavior, there was no reason to believe that a sensible and nonvindictive mode of cooperation would develop if he remained, and every reason to think that he would simply continue to try to bring the administration down. Given the boards approval of the Downs administration and the general belief that he had been effective, this would have resulted in more harm than good. Are there any issues of moral principle here? I believe there are. Frequently presidents and other administrators seek compromise and accommodation when they know that these are not only impossible but unwise or even wrong. To have given credence to Bell’s “list of particulars” when each and every one was in fact a false accusation simply in a vain effort to placate him and avoid the distaste of a confrontation in front of the senate and the media would have been morally wrong, in my view, because intentionally false accusations are wrong, and so is accommodating them. I say “intentionally”false because Downs knew this to be true from other sources, and because Bell continued to try to destroy Downs by secretly accusing him of personal moral failures with the print media. Again, these accusations were without foundation but they continued to stir up suspicion and distrust for another six months. In fact, Bell’s entire crusade gives good grounds for the claim that he was morally reprehensible, and it was important for Downs to take a stand against him once that became apparent. It is important for administrators and especially presidents to take responsibility for their failures, but it is even more important for them to stand for what is true and against the false, even to their detriment, and that is a matter of moral principle. A second moral principle enmeshed in the disputes concerned institutional well-being. The university, and by implication its officers, have moral obligations to the school’s constituencies that rest on promises, both implicit and explicit. Keeping these promises is a matter of moral principle. Bell’s actions unjustly disturbed the normal functioning of the university’s governance and threw it into chaos, disrupting everything from the curriculum approval processes to the trust between the faculty and the administration, thus adversely impacting the university’s educational effectiveness. The president had clear responsibilities stemming from his obligations to deliver on the school’s promises to combat these negative forces as quickly and effectively as he could, and that is what he tried to do, but he did not do it as well as might have been done. In my opinion he should have issued a white paper showing how the moral obligations of the presidency required him to lay to rest these false charges immediately, so that the community could once again begin to fulfill its

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promises to the students and academic community. Then he might have stated each of the charges and provided the accurate information, and set up a telephone number where interested parties could confirm these statements for themselves anonymously. Where appropriate (as in the charge of financial difficulties for example), he might have invited outside authorities such as the state auditor to examine the books. Finally, he should have stated that as far as he was concerned, this closed the matter and he would leave whatever steps might remain to be taken up to the senate and the board of trustees. What lessons of general practical use can other institutions learn from this? I believe that there are several. First, Downs’s appointment of Aims to the vice presidency for advancement had not been preceded by sufficient publicity and consultation. Aims was widely respected, and it is highly probable that a base of support among the general faculty could have been built before the official appointment. They did support him strongly after he took the position, and strongly disagreed with Bell. Had Downs formed an informal advisory committee of respected senior faculty to consult on the matter, Bell would probably not have been able to claim that the appointment was arbitrary. Second, it is clear that personnel policies must enunciate clearly and forcefully just what the senate’s prerogatives in hiring various administrators are, and just what authority the president and the board have. The policies of the university must clearly say exactly for what positions and in what sorts of searches senate participation must be sought, and in what circumstances it need not be sought. There was no precedent in the history of the university, and no existing policy, that supported Downs’s decision to refuse to work with either the president of the senate or the vice president. I do not know whether Bell’s decision to resign with the vice president was motivated by a belief that this would bring Downs under additional serious faculty criticism, but it did not, and no one raised the point that, in effect, Downs’s unilateral action had overturned a legitimate senate election of its own officers. Nor did any other constituency pursue this question. But had that happened, Downs might have been in serious trouble. Downs was well aware of this danger when he refused to work with the senate leadership, and he did consider in the aftermath of the resignations and new senate elections of senior officers the desirability of raising the issue with the board of trustees to see whether guidelines might be worked out and established in the university’s or the boards bylaws to be used in the event of any future similar situations. But he did not do this because he sensed that the faculty community simply wanted to put the entire affair

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behind it. I believe that the consideration of such a policy might be a good idea for any university. At the very least, a confidential legal opinion should be sought by the president as to what liabilities (if any) are attached to such an action and, in general, what legal options are available to the administration in the event that working with a faculty senate becomes nonviable for any reason.

FEDERAL AND GOVERNMENTAL POWER AND JUST RESISTANCE Prior to World War 11, the federal government had very little involvement with higher education, other than through such exemplary legislation as the Morrill Land Grant Act, which enabled the creation of the major state mechanical and agricultural colleges. With the advent of World War 11, the country suddenly found itself in dire need of many of the services provided by universities, from medicine to physics, from aeronautical engineering to mass calculation. A massive infusion of federal tax dollars began to flow into the university system, and it became even more significant with the GI Bill passed near the end of the war, which enabled millions of young men to attend college. A period of near normalcy returned in the early 1950s, but when the Soviet Union launched the first earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, a national defense panic set in, and the National Science Foundation began to funnel millions of new federal dollars into science and related programs throughout the land. The resulting enrichment of college campuses and expansion of their research missions soon became institutionalized, and the federal influence was here to stay. With the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, pressures to use the federal government’s financial leverage as a tool to enforce civil rights legislation became irresistible. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ushered in the new era of attaching financial penalties to institutions for noncompliance with federal government regulations. In our own time, this practice has been extended to cover almost every aspect of university life, from women’s intercollegiate athletic budgeting to affirmative action programs. I think that for the most part, these increasing regulatory requirements have had salutary consequences. Certainly universities should be in the vanguard of institutional leadership when it comes to such moral issues as defending civil rights and opposing discrimination o n the basis of race, religion, or national origin. But sadly, even in my lifetime that has not always been so. Who can forget George Corley Wallace, governor of

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Alabama, standing in the doorway at the University of Alabama in an attempt to prevent two students from enrolling because they were black? Or the resistance at Mississippi when James Meredith attempted to enter there? And there were many other shameful incidents in which people of color, women, and other special classes were prevented from exercising their legal rights as taxpaying citizens, and their moral right to enjoy the same benefits of our society as anyone else. Today this struggle continues, with discrimination against other classes, such as homosexuals and lesbians, now the focus. But not all regulatory pressure has been so noble. An incredible federal bureaucracy has grown up to ensure compliance, and this engine has purposes more self-serving than the noble goals of the entitlement acts. The first of these is survival and the preservation of jobs within the bureaucracy. As the number of overt and obvious cases of discrimination has declined, agencies such as Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice, each with its own regulatory arms to write and administer regulations for the same laws, have searched for targets at ever lower levels and with ever more particular demands to justify their existence. I know this may sound curmudgeonly and perhaps mean-spirited, but it is not intended that way. I have watched for more than four decades as universities have fretted about how they can justlfy the addtion of large numbers of nonfaculty staff in required response to federal regulatory demands. I have personally struggled through faculty senate and trustee meetings trying to explain why I had no choice but to reallocate funds from academic affairs to administrative positions because of changes in federal regulations. The alternative was to risk denial of federal funds and heavy financial penalties for noncompliance. In modern American higher education, this is dangerous indeed. Virtually all student financial aid is federal, and some 60-70 percent of students in public universities receive aid. Hospitals, research institutes, think tanks, and individual faculty research grants are all at risk, a total nationally of billions of dollars. Some years ago at Bowling Green State University I received a visit from representatives of the U.S. Department of Labor. They were there not because they had received any complaint about the university, but because we had been randomly selected for an audit of universities in our region of the country. An investigation by these people of some weeks' duration came up with very little, except that they wished us to institute a systematic study of all classified staff positions with a view to putting in place a series of classifications based on job descriptions,

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entering minimum salaries, maximum salaries for each position, seniority, and accrued benefits. I was reluctant to do this for two reasons. First, the classified employees at BGSU had a great deal of autonomy with respect to distribution of wages and benefits, and they had just voted to accept increased responsibility for the distribution of salary increases each year. No other university in Ohio, and very few (if any) in the nation, had given classified staff such authority and autonomy. They were not unionized. Second, the administration and the Classified Staff Council had just concluded an agreement by which there would be no maximum salaries for job classifications because such maximums simply forced false changes in descriptions of job responsibilities when a longtime employee reached the ceiling. I had witnessed the introduction of a sirmlar system at a major private university where I had held senior administrative responsibility and could see no benefit from it, and a lot of turmoil. There was very little staff turnover at Bowling Green, and very high morale. The two bureaucrats from the Department of Labor in Chicago understood this but had no interest in it. I reluctantly agreed to do the study that would lead to the new classification scheme, but only because of the threat of loss of federal funds if I did not, and they did make this threat overtly. We believed at the time that it would cost the university hundreds of thousands of dollars in unbudgeted funds to complete this effort. Fate then sadly intervened. The director of affirmative action, who was charged with supervising the effort, became ill and died. I was under the impression that his successor was briefed on the workload he was inheriting, including the classified staff study. But in this I was mistaken, and as time had passed my attention had turned to other things. Four years passed. Then a committee of the faculty senate tendered a report alleging systematic salary discrimination against women at the university. I was incredulous because this question had been reviewed every year, and an examination of the report by an expert all-faculty task force assembled for the purpose found serious errors in the methodology used by the senate committee. When corrected for these errors, the data showed no evidence of discrimination. The faculty senate committee would not accept the findings of the task force, and we seemed to be at impasse. By now the issue had become politicized, and to no one’s great surprise, the senate committee report was anonymously mailed to the Department of Labor, Chicago Office, and the same two representatives of that office arrived on campus once again. This time, the labor people were upset because the classified staff study had not been done and implemented. I admitted that it seemed to

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have fallen between the cracks but also pointed out that the interval had proven my point-that there had been no staff complaints about salary policy or implementation, which remained in the quite competent hands of the Classified Staff Council, a body of representatives elected by staff members themselves. Annual reviews of salary distributions to detect discrimination had revealed none. Since neither the staff nor any other university constituency was upset (not to mention the board of trustees), I saw no reason why the federal government should be, and I did my best to urge the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fur it” viewpoint on them, to no avail. I agreed to institute the study again. But now the federal forces had turned their attention to the faculty senate committee report claiming discrimination in salaries for women. They met with the committee and the task force that found fault with the methodology used. After a cursory review, the federal people agreed with the faculty senate report and instructed us to correct the problem. We declined, arguing that the report was flawed and that the task force members were clearly more qualified in every way to make this judgment than either the Labor Department representatives or the faculty senate committee. The Labor Department people now overtly threatened us with sanctions if we did not do as they had ordered. I instituted yet another review of both reports, this time by an outside statistical expert, and she sided emphatically with the task force viewpoint. I informed the Labor Department representatives that we refused to comply and that we intended to go to court if forced to do so. During all this time, there had been no complaints from individual female faculty that they felt treated unfairly in the matter of salaries. In my twelve years as president of BGSU, a handful of cases had been brought to the attention of the vice president for academic affairs by deans, and she had addressed them all, without exception, to the satisfaction of the complainants. Almost all these cases had arisen from unfunded promotions when funds were scarce. This was the major reason that I did not believe there was salary discrimination at the university. A second reason for my refusal to comply with the Labor Department was its insistence that rank not be one of the variables used in the regression analysis that they wanted us to use to prove their claim that there was salary discrimination. I am not a statistician, but it seemed obvious to me, and to every member of the task force as well as the outside statistical expert, that rank has clear implications for salary, since promotion in rank almost always carries an increase in salary. It also has implications concerning time on the faculty, which in turn carries direct consequences for

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salary. All the task force members and the outside evaluator agreed that rank should be included. Finally, I felt that the particular officials from the Department of Labor who had been involved with us from the beginning of the classified staff matter years earlier (the same people now involved in the salary discrimination case) were biased against the university administration and intended to use the university as an example of the consequences of resisting federal government pressure. I believe our failure to complete and implement a classified staff wage system that would satisfy them had annoyed the representatives personally, and we would be made to pay for this. I may have been wrong about this, but I don’t think I was. The intransigence of their position in the face of the professional opinions of the best experts we could find, the peremptory tone of their communications with us, and their constant references throughout the salary discrimination matter to the earlier and essentially unrelated classified staff study that we had not completed as constituting evidence of our “bad faith reinforced my belief that we could not get a fair hearing from the particular individuals working on our case. For all these reasons we sought to have jurisdiction removed to the administrative court level in Washington, D.C., and I also thought it important at this stage to inform our congressman about the issues and my belief that we were not getting a fair hearing. In this case, it seems to me, it was important for the president and the university community to take a principled stand against the massive but impersonal forces of officialdom. We had done nothing improper, either by inadvertently failing to institute the classified system or by discriminating in salary policy against women. It is true that we did not think the system worthwhde to begin with, or at least I did not, and neither did the people most directly affected by it. And keep in mind that the institution of such a system was not something required either by law or by Department of Labor regulations. Since there were no allegations of improper or illegal salary distribution among the classified staff, the insistence on the part of the two government officials that we comply with their instructions seemed arbitrary and capricious. In the case of women’s salaries, after the most careful examination we could find no evidence of discrimination, although there was serious disagreement over the methodology used to determine whether there was or was not. The best I could do was to side with those experts who found the faculty senate report flawed, which I also thought proper since the senate report was prepared by people much less qualified in the sort of statistical analysis required.

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To give in to the Department of Labor, it seemed to me, was to permit the university community to believe that we had knowingly discriminated against female faculty for more than twenty years, and so far as I could see this was absolutely false. Annual reviews had always resulted in corrective action if any salary inequities were revealed. Not only would this have been devastating to the confidence the community must have in its administration if it is to function properly, it would also seriously impact our ability to hire and retain quality female faculty. It would also have divided the community along gender lines even more than the ongoing debate and politicization of the issues already had. At a minimum, I felt we had to fight the Labor Department people to the end of the process and protest our innocence publicly and forcefully. Had we given in to the government, it would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring salaries to the levels they stipulated, and this would have cost some people their jobs, delayed improvements to the instructional program that were badly needed, and damaged several professional reputations. In these circumstances I also thought that the individuals accusing us should be forced to justlfy their accusations or otherwise be held to account. It is not merely the duty of presidents to provide the vision and leadership necessary to sustain a university on the cutting edge of research and teaching. It is also their responsibility to defend their institution against unjust accusations, even if the opposition has the power to do great harm to the institution. In this case, just two individuals, only one of them knowledgeable in statistics, defied more than a dozen experts in an effort to get their way, and for questionable motives. I’m sure the government statistician would not mind my mentioning his name, since he is after all a government employee. It is Fink. Furthermore, there is a principle of institutional difference operative here. There is no requirement either in law or regulation that all universities accomplish their goals in the same way. At BGSU, the various segments of the university had unusual autonomy and authority over their own affairs. That was one reason that these constituencies had eschewed organizing for purposes of collective bargaining through the years while many other Ohio universities had not, especially in the nonacademic areas. BGSU had the lowest turnover rate in all areas of nonacademic staff, by far, of any Ohio university. I believed that this overall milieu contributed to the satisfaction of our entire community, including especially the degree of personal care and concern staff showed for students, the loyalty they had to the institution, and the excellent relations that we enjoyed with the surrounding town. By attempting to force us into its mold, the Department of Labor threatened all of this,and unfairly.

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What specific moral principles are involved in this? Several very, very important ones. First, there is the principle that unless there are overriding reasons to intervene, reasons themselves based on the most superior moral principles in the hierarchy of moral principles, then free people should be allowed to exercise their free will, especially about matters that primarily concern them and not others. This is true whether the “matters” concerned are morally relevant or not, but it is especially important if the matters are morally relevant. In the case of the classified staff, what was at issue was whether the staff would retain their relatively high degree of autonomy over the distribution of wages and benefits. In the eyes of everyone concerned, these were certainly morally relevant factors: they were about the well-being of the group, not just the individual; they concerned both fairness and distributive justice; everyone had fundamental intellectual as well as emotional concerns about them; and the satisfaction of the needs of the groups involved did not harm the interests of others. There were no regulations, laws, or moral principles requiring the introduction of a classified staff system as required by the Labor Department, and no laws saying that universities had to operate in a uniform system to accomplish their administrative ends. History had shown that the ends of justice were no better served by such a system than by the one at BGSU. Second, there is the principle that the use of coercion or force with no justlfying reason is morally wrong and should be resisted. Wars have been fought over this principle, and revolutions won and lost. The issues at BGSU may have been relatively small on a global or even regional scale, but the principle was the same. The government in the person of the two bureaucrats from the Department of Labor attempted by use of threats to withdraw funds to force the university to do two things, neither of which was justified by fact or need. I believe there was a moral obligation to resist. Third, there was the principle of promise keeping, of which the obligation to tell the truth is a subsidiary rule. By giving in to the threat to withdraw funds when we believed we were entirely in the right, we would have in effect endorsed a set of claims against the university-that we discriminated against women and that we were being less than fair to classified staff-which were entirely false. I thought then, and think now, that it is the president’s duty to lead in such situations. Survival might be the partner of compromise, but a clear conscience helps in the morning mirror. These events took place ten years ago. One of the two bureaucrats from the Department of Labor has retired, and the case is still open.

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COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE CEO AND THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT

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he university presidency is a very public and visible position, which has both positive and negative aspects, both personal and public. So is the position of chairman or chief executive officer of a large corporation. In several places in this book I provide examples of contexts in which the choices the president made conflicted with a CEO’s opinion. In this section we (1) examine some of the differences between the offices and duties of a chief executive officer of a publicly held company in the world of commerce and those of a university president in the public sphere and (2) study the morally relevant consequences of those differences. A typical CEO of a publicly held company at the turn of the twentyfirst century, like her counterpart in a public university, operates in a pressure-cooker environment. She has to balance the operating and production needs of her corporation against the unrelenting demand to produce a profit for the shareholders. Usually she has demands for increased wages and benefits from a union or unions, and at the same time she must preserve a public image for the corporation as a good place for skilled workers to seek employment. She must constantly seek to improve worker average productivity measured on both quantitative and qualitative scales, and at the same time lower costs of production of

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the material and logistical systems essential to the production of what she supplies to the market, while maintaining or improving market share and product quality. The president and the corporate board must constantly balance product cost, price, and market demand not only for their own product but for the overall market. Nowhere is this more visible than in the automotive industry. Increasingly, health care issues, quality of life, .and worker satisfaction have become management matters, particularly in industries where the workforce is aging. The federal government continues its efforts to pass on costs of its always growing body of laws and regulations to corporations. Apart from safety, those regulations usually concern worker health care and quality of life issues (watch what happens with respect to retirement fund legislation and regulation as a result of Enron) and environmental matters, although Social Security is always just over the horizon. Increasingly, demands to alter company policy, frequently to the detriment of earnings, are made by international environmental, political, and domestic human rights groups. For example, Starbucks changed its pricing policy domestically to respond to demands from human rights groups that coffee workers in South America be better paid. As a direct result of this “fair trade” change, the price of a cup of coffee at my university rose by 15 percent. The world of international banking is under pressure to “forgive”loans made to poor countries and pass the losses on to the shareholders and taxpayers in the developed world, which of course can mean lower income and profits for them. Essentially the same pressures are operative in the services sector, although there are obvious differences between, say, a software consulting company or a brokerage firm and a manufacturing conglomerate. The services industries in many ways have an easier time of it than the manufacturing sphere, though in a crossover company such as Microsoft, you wouldn’t be able to tell from all the litigation of the last few years. I use the term “crossover company” to characterize a corporation that both produces a product and provides consulting, maintenance, and other services dependent on the existence of a manufactured product. The recent experiences of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm exclude accounting companies from my list. What are the moral obligations of chief executive officers in the corporate world and how do they differ, if at all, from those of university presidents? There are clear similarities. A CEO has a clear moral obligation to keep the promises she has made on behalf of the company. Thus contracts must be fulfilled, workers’ health and safety must be protected,

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policies must be openly and honestly explained to shareholders, and where the public interest is involved to the general polity as well, and business practices must treat individuals fairly and justly. When the general polity is affected by a company’s policies or products, or even when the consequences are confined to some segment of the population, the moral obligations of management in general and the CEO in particular may extend beyond the more narrow focus the CEO has to the shareholders. The environments in which corporate entities exist, particularly manufacturing, mining, and other industries that have the potential to destroy or harm their surroundings, must be preserved and protected, and this is a moral obligation because it concerns the health and well-being not only of people who are not shareholders or employees of the company, but residents of the area, their children, and perhaps others living hundreds or even thousands of miles away. When INCO (the International Nickel Company of Canada) built the superstack at Copper Cliff, Ontario, it was in response to decades of governmental insistence that the company stop polluting the atmosphere and countryside with the emissions of three smaller stacks, averaging five hundred feet in height. The superstack is, I believe, fourteen hundred feet high. Infrared satellite photos published in National Geographic magazine show that pollution from the superstack goes all the way to the Azores, and it has been identified as the single largest source of pollution in North America, despite the use of scrubbers and other control devices. In the strict sense, public universities in the United States have no shareholders and hence no duties resting on an implicit promise to try to produce a profit. But they do have moral obligations to communities of interest such as faculty, students, staff, parents, and the communities in which they exist. Because they are tax supported, they are accountable to state legislatures and ultimately to the taxpaying public, among others. Fundamentally, those obligations rest on the same principles from which the obligations of corporate CEOs spring: the obligation to keep promises, the obligation not to cause unnecessary human pain and suffering, the obligation to contribute to the general well-being, the moral necessity to treat each individual fairly and equitably and to do good and avoid doing evil to the extent this is possible. The differences, it seems to me, rest on questions about the nature and extent of the particular communities served by the different enterprises of education and profit making, the question of the differing hierarchies of value in the two spheres of endeavor, and the perplexing question of what if any obligations the two enterprises have to groups and individuals not directly associated with

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their endeavors and purposes. Then there is the vastly interesting and controversial nest of moral questions arising from the interrelationships between corporations and public universities, which in a book like this must take paramount place. It is fairly easy to argue that INCO may have ethical obligations to the residents of the Azores because of a threat, assuming there is one, to their health emanating from INCO production processes. By parity of reasoning, do universities have similar moral obligations to the world population because of their research in areas such as atomic science and biological toxins? There is, so far as I am aware, little (though there is some) historical foundation for the claim that the public has ever been directly threatened from the processes involved in nuclear and biological research on our campuses, although there could be indirect danger if some of the materials used in that research were stolen by knowledgeable people bent on destruction. For example, I presume that in state universities with veterinary medicine programs, the effect of anthrax on domestic farm animals is a part of some curricula, and the study of anthrax itself might be a part of the program. Although much of the basic theoretical, and some experimental, research concerning terrifically destructive materials has been done on university campuses (e.g., the famous, or mfamous, first atomic chain reaction produced under Enrico Fermi’s supervision beneath the University of Chicago’s football stadium; what on earth might have happened had they not been able to control it?), that argument would seem ineffective against current American universities. So the question is, Are universities responsible for the uses to which others might put their research? On the basis of the principle that “ought” implies “can,” I think they are not, but with serious qualifications. It is not possible for university administrations, in the last analysis the board and president, to predict or control all the possible actions of others about research emanating in knowledge, which is, after all, public. But we would be naive in the extreme (indeed immoral, given the sophistication that we may reliably attribute to university administrative and board members) if we accepted the overall exemption of responsibility for misuse of university-based research on the simpleminded grounds that we can’t help what people do with our discoveries. Well, if we know there is a serious potential for misuse, of course we can. There are all sorts of ways to protect the public interest from the misuse of knowledge and products dependent on it. Universities are not exempt from the general obligation to protect the public interest, and indeed they have the moral obligation to act in support of that interest, assuming it is in itself morally worthy. Scotty Campbell,

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once head of the U.S. Civil Service and dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, asked me in a conversation about the foundations of morality, “If there is no public morality, how can there be a private one, given that it only takes two people to make a ‘public,’ and that morality primarily concerns the interaction of human beings?” He was absolutely right. INCO produces and sells metals, primanly nickel. Other things being equal, they have no obligation to sell it to you if you cannot pay for it. By the way, if you are wondering why I have used INCO as a corporate example, it’s because I grew up under the effluent from those stacks in Sudbury, Ontario. Universities produce two things, although the word “produce” is misleading in the extreme. New knowledge and educated people are the “products” of university efforts. But universities cannot control the quality of their graduates, except within very broad limits, and they cannot guarantee their future performance. Even the quality of the instructional faculty varies across a wide and not very predictable spectrum. Educators are not very sure about exactly what is happening when someone is being educated. (See the work of Alexander Astin and others.) Yet a large number of people think that universities have an obligation to provide higher education at no cost to those who cannot afford it. Should public schools simply say “no,”as corporations do to “customers” who cannot pay? Or are universities organizations with broader social purposes than corporations, whose tax support implies a public duty private corporations do not have? The strongest argument against the view that universities should provide education on a tuition-free basis is that tax revenues provide much less than half the funds necessary to run our universities. If there were full funding, which has never been the case, then I would argue that we do have an obligation to provide tuition-free instruction, at least to those who cannot afford it, and at least to the best qualified applicants up to the funding limits of the state. Furthermore, because of public support and because it is a moral principle that if knowledge can ease the suffering of mankind then it must be shared-a subsidiary rule of the principle that we ought not cause unnecessary human death, pain, or suffering-then taxsupported research in chemistry, medicine, and so forth should be shared at no cost with the rest of the taxpaying public and hence with the world. This is an important difference between educational institutions and corporations. I would argue, for example, that a bank does not have charitable obligations to its borrowers because the loan is a contract to which both parties have freely assented, and if one of the parties signed

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knowing they could not fulfill the terms of the contract, then that is an immoral act on their part, not incurring any obligation to the other party. Even if the second party signed the loan agreement in good faith and for reasons not apparent at the time defaulted on it, that does not forgive the obligation to repay. It may be that there are supervenient moral rules that would entail an overriding of this view. But if all we know is that bank A signed an agreement to loan country B x billions of dollars, and country B signed the agreement knowingly and willingly, then an obligation is created requiring B to pay A the billions plus such interest as the contract may require. B’s defaulting on the contract does not remove B’s obligation, nor does it create any obligation on any third party (e.g., the U.S. government, the World Bank, etc.) to assume B’s debt or to “forgive”it, unless such arrangements were a part of the original agreements. Similarly, I would argue that corporations per se have no prima facie moral obligation to provide, say, free treatment for AIDS in poor countries. It is an interesting question whether corporations, apart from their management and shareholders, can have moral as opposed to legal obligations at all. But that is another book. The governments of the countries of registry of the corporations holding patents on the knowledge and production processes of these drugs may have a collective responsibility to help, as determined by the views of the elected representatives of the national population, but the obligations of the CEO and boards of the companies are limited by contract to those who own the company-the shareholders. A contract, after all, is a promise, albeit one that is legally enforceable. In return for the purchase price of the shares, the company has assured the stockholders that they will share in defined ways in the earnings. Prima facie, they, and they alone, are entitled to the profits from the company’s operations, assuming other obligations such as taxes, debt, and so on have been met. The shareholders might themselves vote to forgo a portion of their profits in order to perform a charitable act toward others, but that is their decision to make, and, again prima facie, it is not morally obligatory that they do so. A government might also decide that in the overriding national interest, a company with a patent or patents on such an important drug should be nationalized, or that it should be forced to sell itself or the patents to a governmental agency charged to distribute the drug at low cost and taxpayer expense. There is nothing morally wrong about this, provided the holders of the patent(s) and the shareholders are fairly compensated for their loss.

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Manufacturers have an obligation to ensure that their products will perform as advertised. Surely universities could only take on a very limited liability that its graduates would perform up to some standard in a very limited area, perhaps their major or the area of their graduate specialization, and in most higher education circles that is a radical, and feared, idea. One moral problem for university presidents is that almost no one discusses this topic; on the contrary, we all pretend at least on graduation day that our students are ready and able to conquer the world. One question of interest concerns a university’s obligations under sponsored research contracts. Suppose, for example, that a public university’s medical school accepts several million dollars from a large drug manufacturer to do research that, it is hoped, will find the magic bullet for AIDS. And suppose the contract stipulates that such discoveries as might be made under the terms of the grant are the property of the drug company and may not be shared with anyone else until the company has secured a patent on them. Should public, tax-supported universities accept such contracts?Suppose a cure for AIDS was so discovered, and that it was surprisingly cheap to manufacture. Nonetheless, given the market for such a drug, the company holding the patent could charge exorbitant prices while the university could do nothing to make it available to those dying from AIDS. Should such possibilities be a moral problem for presidents? I think that there are serious moral principles at stake here, and that presidents have a direct connection to them. I do not, for example, believe that universities should accept exclusive research contracts for such important drugs as might treat AIDS unless the contracts provide for a sharing of the production at reduced cost for those who cannot afford it. The principle that we ought to do everything possible to alleviate human death, pain, and suffering surely overrides the obligation to provide a profit and certainly an exorbitant one, and not much philosophical argument would be needed to demonstrate this. Governments routinely control, even prohibit, the dissemination of technical inventions and knowledge that could be used contrary to the nation’s interests. Should universities censor the new knowledge that can be published if it could be likewise used against the wider polis of which we are a part? Conflicts about this topic are routine between our government and graduate schools, particularly where proprietary and financial benefits are to be had. In a public university I believe that the public has the right to know the results of research at its institutions, and I know no way to apply “selective censorship” at the institutional level. The question is a difficult one, however. What are the obligations

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of public universities when the nation is at war, for example? Assuming the war is just, surely we are obligated to help, and doing so may necessitate the concealment of research results and projects from the public. If you admit the principle, there is no way to limit its application unless some mechanisms for exceptions are made, and this is difficult. On the other hand, a corporation, even if a “public”one, has a public limited to the number of its shareholders, and therefore its obligation to disclose may seem to be no more broad than that it holds patents on certain material and has so informed its board. Once more, however, exceptions must be made for the public good in times of overriding necessity, provided adequate compensation is offered to shareholders and owners. In a possible world where warfare had been obliterated, surely it would be immoral to allow the manufacture and sale of weapons. But it is actually possible now to stop manufacturing and selling cigarettes, the most prolific naturally grown killer of humans in the world, and to manage all the short-term undesirable economic and social consequences of so doing, at least in this country. As one concrete example to consider here, do corporate CEOs of tobacco companies have that obligation?If (1) we know that cigarettes kill and cause numerous debilitating health problems, ( 2 ) there is no overriding reason to produce them other than profit, (3) the profits can be derived from other sources that do not kill, and finally ( 4 ) the workers currently employed in the tobacco industry can be retrained and reemployed at no cost or long-term dislocation to them, then does not the moral principle that we ought not cause unnecessary human death, pain, and suffering entail that it is immoral to produce, distribute, and sell cigarettes? Given certain admittedly controversial other premises, I think it does. These other premises concern the nature of addiction and whether it is reasonable to expect that persons addicted to a substance can by an act of will free themselves from it and whether individuals have a right to choose to harm themselves. Many people have quit smoking (I’m one of them) and have freed themselves from dependency on other substances too. But a larger number of smokers seem unable (unwilling?) to stop, even though they say that they understand the health risks. If an individual wishes to produce cigarettes for himself, that is one thing. His self-ownership may imply that he has at least a moral right, though not an obligation, to smoke, although no good Kantian would let that pass. But the case against cigarettes based on the general well-being seems pretty strong to me, and the case against exporting tobacco products to poor countries where their effects are not well understood seems even stronger.

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What, in the instant case, might a university president’s moral obligations be? First, if we ought not contribute to causing unnecessary human death, pain, and suffering, then surely we ought not profit from the proceeds thereof. Universities therefore ought not accept donations from tobacco companies, and since we know what and why cigarettes do what they do, and if active and not just passive action is required by moral principle, as I think it is, then we ought to teach people about the risks they take if they smoke, and we ought to do our best to encourage them to quit. We also know that secondhand smoke causes health problems. I was very proud that Bowling Green became the first university in Ohio to forbid smoking in any of our buildings, residences included, during my presidency there. There are literally thousands of different connections between universities and the world of commerce, and the vast majority of them are mutually beneficial. Coop programs bring the students hands-on experience in the practical world in which they will have to compete while giving various companies the opportunity to watch them in action and evaluate them as prospective future employees. Companies support faculty research in return for patent rights or lease agreements on the results, and endow chairs in return for promised training for management and shareholders. Well-known and admired executives head fund drives that raise millions, sometimes billions, of dollars for university purposes, and in the most selfless cases, for the arts and humanities and not just for corporate benefit through engineering, science, and so forth. CEOs serve universities as free consultants, as trustees, as representatives to their industries and negotiators with a wide variety of interest groups, including state and federal governments. They are essential to the higher educational enterprise. Chairs of corporate boards and chief executive officers do not achieve their positions because they are wallflowers, however, nor because they have no expectations in return for the generosity of their companies. Presidents of universities understand this very well, which is one reason why they are normally pro-business and very sensitive to competing with business as tax-exempt organizations. The following discussion illustrates cases in which these interests clashed for psychological, political, and symbolic reasons. The lessons to be learned are of these three types. There is a school of thought (with which I strongly disagree) that perceptions are even more important than reality. But there is no denying that perceptions are important, especially in the absence of a contemporaneous opportunity to discover whether the perception and the reality coincide. Someone about to be lynched for a crime he did not commit

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certainly must have an acute interest in the “evidence.”Caesar was not only interested in what Mrs. Caesar did but in what Rome thought she did. This distinction is important in all three cases that follow.

CHARITIES AND THE CORPORATE CONSCIENCE: THE CASE OF THE UNITED APPEAL Early in one of my presidencies I was visited by the head of the regional United Appeal office in the company of a leading corporate executive. This was standard operating procedure but carried additional significance because I was new to the job. I had received such visits many times in another presidency. Usually they were formalities, thanking the president for the support the institution had given to the cause in the past, expressing the hope that this would continue in the future, and asking the president to provide a leadership gift as an example. But in this case, the presentation was much more aggressive. I was told that the level of contributions from the faculty and staff had been disappointing, even though it was higher than that of a neighboring university and a lot higher than the average corporate gift. I was expected to do something about this. The chief executive officer accompanying the head of the regional United Appeal office then informed me that the proper procedure (i.e., the one used at his company by him, which happened to be a bank holding company) was that I should inform the faculty and staff what their gifts should be, in percentage terms, and then follow up to see that they made the appropriate contributions. I was expected to provide appropriate leadership by making the largest gift, since I was the highest paid. This new level of giving would then become the benchmark for the future. Assigned percentage increases based on the cost price index and an estimate of the increased need for charitable support for the region would become the new targets for the university each year. The visiting CEO then informed me that failure to move according to these instructions would be dimly viewed by the corporate community, which supported the university generously. As it happened, I had been warned about the aggressive nature of this particular man and the great influence he had in the state, as well as the quite significant and important public accomplishments he had shepherded. Accordingly, I had done some homework before his arrival. I discovered that our university community contributed more on a per capita basis than any other corporation in the region, and more

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in total than any other business in that region of the state. Furthermore, our community received many fewer of these dollars in charitable support in return than did other communities surrounding us. I also learned that regional corporate support for the university was less than our contributions to the United Appeal on an average annual basis, and that a larger sister institution located in a nearby larger urban area received more corporate support by far than we did, even though their contribution to the United Appeal was less than ours. I pointed out these facts to the visiting CEO, who was not pleased. I also said that although I would certainly send out the usual letter noting the good work of the United Appeal and expressing the hope that faculty and staff would support the fund drive as they had in the past, I could not suggest an amount they should give and would not follow up individually to see that each person had given. I noted that it was my practice to treat such information as confidential. I did my best to explain in a noncondescending way the differences in the university community as compared to a corporate one, and the different view a faculty took of a president as compared to an employee view of his company CEO. I realized that I was taking a risk here, not just to my own position but potentially to the capital campaign the university was planning in the near future. Should my guest choose to use his considerable influence with other CEOs to suggest that it was a bad idea to support the university just now, at least until it had a more cooperative president, both I and the institution could be harmed. But I felt that this was the best I could do, not so much because I found the corporate approach suggested by my visitor offensive but because of the nature of universities. They were not places where the faculty worked for the management as factory workers worked for the owners of a company, or its shareholders. Rather, as I tried to explain, faculty stood to the administration of a university more as the medical staff of a hospital stood to the administration of such an institution-as a group of professionals who provided their services for a salary at a common location for convenience, the administration providing essential support services for them to continue to provide these services. I was not aware, I said, of any professional organization that pursued the practices my visitor was suggesting, which were apparently widespread in the industrial and commercial worlds. I further noted that although faculty were professionals, they were underpaid and badly so. In fact, many hourly workers in routine jobs at nearby factories earned more on an annual basis than these professionals with ten or twelve years of study behind them.

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As it happened, we were planning to launch a multimillion-dollar capital campaign in the near future, and as a part of that effort we would be soliciting gifts from faculty. As president, I would be expected to make a signifkant gift to that campaign and would therefore not be making such a gift to the United Appeal. Finally, I noted that many faculty had favorite charities of their own, as do I. Many individuals preferred to give their major donations to those private charities rather than to the United Appeal. As an umbrella organization, it might include organizations that individuals would not normally choose to support and, because of the very nature of the United Appeal, could not achieve the impact for a single donor that he or she could achieve with a more focused gift to a single charity. We ought also to remember, I concluded, that the university itself was a charitable organization and was so categorized by the Internal Revenue Service. I mentioned this last point because my visitor had also suggested that I might wish to ask the university foundation, whose legal charter required it to support the university’s educational efforts, to make a cash glft to the United Appeal. Within two hours after my visitor’s departure, I received an anxious call from the chair of my board, who was a wealthy and admired corporate executive. The CEO had called him and angrily denounced my refusal to “get with the program,” as he had put it in their conversation. I reviewed what I had said to the man with my chair, who in the end suggested I agree to meet with the CEO and the UA executive again to try to mend fences. I agreed but said I felt I owed no one an apology, and that what I had said was true where factual in content, and carefully phrased where a matter of opinion. I did meet with the gentlemen in question again, but nothing came of the meeting. The university increased its giving to the United Appeal, without serious prodding from me, and retained its position as the highest organizational donor in the region. Corporate giving to the university rose significantly over the next few years, the endowment rose by a factor of forty-five times and the capital campaign met its targets. In one subsequent year I gave a leadership gift to the UA to serve as an example should anyone wish to follow it. It seemed to me that my corporate visitor believed that the symbolic function of the head of a large organization included leadership in corporate giving, and he also believed without question that the only practical way to help the less fortunate in our communities was through the United Appeal, which was precisely why the UA had been developed in the first place. By refusing to give a leadership gift and declining to follow the proven practices he had used in the past to increase corporate gifts to the UA, I am sure he thought that I was being negligent in my du-

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ties, since the effect of my actions, in his eyes, could only be to raise less money for the UA and therefore provide less relief to the poor, sick, and abused. In his world, part of the reason he was highly compensated was so that he might give a significant part of his salary back in a public and symbolic way, helping his company from a public relations viewpoint while doing good at the same time. And if the more fortunate do not have a moral obligation to help the impoverished and the neglected among us, then what moral obligations do we have? Certainly, he seems to have a point. Other things being equal, I would have to agree with his assessment. But they never are equal, to the dismay of economists, and I wonder what the visiting CEO thought when the university set a giving record to the United Appeal in the year of his failed procedural exhortations. Doubtless, I deserved no credit in his eyes. But in that opinion he would be mistaken, at least insofar as this: had I done what he asked, it would virtually have guaranteed a downturn, not an increase, in contributions. My aggressive guest had no understanding at all of the culture of a university, which is the most important thing to know about such institutions for certain purposes, including fund-raising. His lack of knowledge, if I had permitted it to be instantiated in the methods for raising funds he proposed, would have engendered immediate and deep resentment of me and rejection of any requests I might make now or in the future. In fact, it would probably have made my presidency ineffective and shortly caused me to resign. And in any event the UA would not have received its money. Faculties of universities are extraordinarily diverse, on the average highly intelligent individualists in the extreme and therefore highly opinionated, and above all jealous of their professional prerogatives and resentful of interference in their lives from sources they consider illinformed about their work. With some exceptions, such as colleges of business and a few other professional colleges, they have long nurtured suspicions about the corporate world because of attacks on the tenure system from that quarter, and because they feel with some justification that they are viewed as impractical idealists, as enshrined in the phrase “ivory tower,” or as unnecessary appendices (e.g., philosophers) to a modern curriculum. The approach suggested by my visiting CEO friend was tailor-made to invoke all of these fears and resentments, and I knew it. Approaching the subject of the UA appeal in this manner was never, in my mind, an option. Had the CEO but thought it through, of course I wanted the drive to succeed and to surpass the previous accomplishments. Why would he ever think differently? It was not only in the university’s interests but in those of the community at large and my own,

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from a professional viewpoint. Certainly it would be immoral for the president of a university (or for anyone) to impede efforts to aid those less fortunate. One lesson to be learned here is that the symbolism of the presidency must sometimes be used very subtly, not as a bludgeon. The latter sort of method is sometimes needed, but different communities and constituencies are just that-different-and the means must be tailored to the particular circumstances. A second lesson is that the president of a university has educational responsibilities about his institution to external communities and individuals and not just within it. The CEO was an aggressive, very successful man, impatient with people who did not have his “can-do” attitude, but he was intelligent and realized that different tactics are required in different battles to win the war. The problem was, no one had ever carefully explained to him what the unique characteristics of the battlefield called a “university”were, as opposed to the contexts in which he normally was successful. He was an imposing personality and doubtless many were afraid to disagree with his opinions. I later learned that an acquaintance had tried to tell him that what worked in a business would not work in the university context, but his comments had been brushed aside. The effort should not have been abandoned, the more so since he was appointed a trustee of another university and tried to force the president there to do the same thing he had tried to get me to do. Finally, the case proves the importance of regional, and in many cases national, coordination of fund-raising projects. The CEO did not know that we were planning a serious fund-raising campaign that would obviously entail our asking other firms in the region and the nation to contribute. This fact impinged on my ability to increase faculty and administrative giving to the UA, since they too would be solicited for our own campaign. What of the moral principles involved here, and the president’s obligations under them? There are certain very clear ones that apply. The university collectively has moral obligations to the community that supports it, not merely to its employees and students, and the president is the person charged by the trustees with fulfilling those obligations, even if the word “moral”doesn’t appear in his or her contract. The moral principle of charity toward the less fortunate, for example, applies not just to individuals but to institutions, for institutions are collections of individuals. It is in virtue of his actual as well as symbolic head of this collection of individuals that the president is morally obligated to do what can be done to exempllfy this principle in practice. The CEO was morally quite

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correct in seeking additional support for the less fortunate in our midst, as was I in seeking the same goal. As a corollary, I had the negative duty of avoiding harm to the effort to aid the needy, and this principle obliged me to be truthful with the CEO, aside from the general obligation to tell the truth. I knew that to follow his advice was to do harm to the needy, although he did not. Third, although this is not a separate principle, I had the positive duty of taking the most effective steps I knew to accomplish our mutual goal, given its goodness. I did this within the parameters of what I knew about university cultures. Since I am by training a philosopher, perhaps I might be forgiven if I make a remark or two here about practical reasoning, since it applies to the above case as well as to many that follow. Since before Aristotle, most ethical theorists have understood that statements of fact do not imply normative or moral judgments. That is, from a set of premises describing facts or circumstances, no conclusions containing terms such as “ought,” “should,”and “must”follow. This case is a good example of that. Even if the visiting CEO and I agreed on all the factual matters surrounding the question, it would not be logically implied that I ought or ought not do anything. To reach that sort of conclusion, the premises to the argument would have to contain general normative judgments of principle themselves, perhaps such as, “Whenever there is an opportunity to aid the poor and suffering, we ought to do so.” But even if factual statements do not imply moral judgments in the strict logical sense, they are nonetheless absolutely critical to moral reasoning. I have just given one illustration of why: Mr. CEO and I would certainly have agreed to do things my way if both of us had the same knowledge of the facts about university cultures. Further, in general, when two parties to a dispute examine their respective cases carefully, it almost always turns out to be the case that they have factual disagreements that explain their opposing viewpoints. Conversely, most arguments, including moral ones, are settled when everyone comes to agree about the nonmoral facts of the case. Finally, it is important to recall that the point of moral or practical reasoning is not only to prove the truth or falsity of a conclusion. Rather, the point is to cause someone to do or not to do something, that is, to take action. Ethics, as Aristotle saw, is a practical discipline, not a purely theoretical one. The same considerations apply here: The CEO tried to persuade me to do something, and although I agreed with his goal, I disagreed with him about critically relevant facts, to wit, the nature of university cultures. If he was to learn something from the case, it should be this: to accomplish mutually desired goals, one must agree with those

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whose support is needed about the facts dictating a successful method. And this is surely a lesson I and all university presidents must learn in dealing outside our cultures as well.

TRUSTEES, OUTSIDE CONTRACTING, AND CONFLICT WITH A PRESIDENT The situation described above involved conflict based on disagreement about fact between a president and an external highly placed executive. But there are also lessons to be learned from situations that arise when there is conflict among the members of a board and external parties, particularly when a president allows himself to be pulled into the conflict or is drawn in regardless of his or her intentions. Such a situation came about when President Owens of Edward State University (again, the name is fictitious although the events actually occurred) and his board decided to develop a research park on land owned by the campus. To accomplish this, it was necessary to get state permission through legislative action after obtaining board approval. The effort was particularly gratlfying because it involved the successful cooperation of local, state, and university groups in providing joint funding for the project. It was the first time such cooperation had been achieved in the history of his university. To achieve this end, great care was taken in defining the purposes of the park before the fact. N o polluting industries were to be permitted, wherever possible the tenants of the park should be local residents, and the products of research in the park should, if possible, benefit the state and local economies. For its part, the university was primarily interested in two things: apprentice training opportunities for students in real-time work situations, and research and consulting opportunities for graduate students and faculty. Together, these requirements constituted the tests a proposed occupant of the park would have to meet before being considered. There was no problem with the first two occupants, a financial processing center and an Environmental Protection Agency laboratory testing facility. They were nonpolluting, employed local residents, and provided learning opportunities for students and, in the case of the testing center, research opportunities for faculty and graduate students. Then a third proposal was made. The university had a small hospitality management program and operated two floors of its student union building as a hotel, which the students in the program used as a training center. But the operation was small and always underbudgeted, and the

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building was old and ill suited to this purpose. This,coupled with the fact that the small town in which Owens’s university is located did not have adequate hotel service, and the fact that the park was located near an interstate highway, led Owens and the park advisory board to solicit interest from hotel chains to develop proposals to build a hotel in the park. Prior to presentation of any specific proposal to the board of trustees, it had been understood that the hotel would be fairly modest in scale but would have a full-service restaurant, full-sized swimming pool and exercise areas, and adequate meeting facilities for small conventions of up to 250 people. The trustees at Edward State are gubernatorial appointees and serve for terms of seven years. The boards have seven members, and a member retires and another is appointed each year. Trustees cannot succeed themselves. During the period in which the park was developed, control of both the legislature and the executive had changed hands, and a majority of Owens’s board had now been appointed by a governor not in power when the initial tenants for the park were approved. Furthermore, the new appointees were more politically partisan for the most part than those appointed by the previous two governors, one from each political party, who had tended to appoint relatively nonpolitical businesspeople. The majority of the appointees now, however, were individuals who had served the governor’s political party well in various capacities and saw their appointments as a reward for that service. When possible, and completely legal, they tended to award contracts and appointments to people who, they believed, shared their political principles and would work for their party to stay in power. To the best of Owens’s knowledge, they had always acted strictly within the confiies of the law. When the bids from various sources came before the board of trustees for consideration, after review and recommendation by the university administration and a professional external consultant, two were thought to be better than the others. One of these was contingent on the owner’s group obtaining adequate financing. The other had the financing but was headed by a former trustee of the university and his partner. The former trustee was widely known to be a member of the opposition political party. There were immediate “in-house” accusations from more recent appointees that the former trustee, who had been instrumental in helping achieve the funding consortium that made the park possible, was benefiting from insider knowledge. But the administration had carefully ensured that exactly the same package of information had been given to all presenters, and the management of this process had been contracted out to an independent consultant. As it happened, the former trustee had

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been an excellent servant of the university and was a highly respected member of the community. He and his family had long been supporters of the school, and when the accusations of the new appointees to the board became known an immediate and very negative reaction to them erupted. Owens shared in this reaction and made no secret of his views. This division caused the board to split into factions, and the project was shelved indefinitely. The other immediate consequences of this factionalism of the board were soon visible. Votes on contracts and appointments more often occurred along predictable party lines. Efforts were made to ensure that the governor’s future appointees were as politicized in viewpoint as those who had caused the split. The board now was seen to caucus along political fracture lines and not as a group entirely devoted to the welfare of the institution. Control of the decision-making process began to take precedence over the quality of the decisions made. The president became an object of suspicion to the majority faction, for he had not been hired by them and had, as is the case with many presidents, not registered to vote in primary elections, knowing that he had to work with whatever party might be in power. Hence his political affiliation was unknown. The majority faction began to meet without the president and to evaluate him without benefit of advice from the minority membership, and with no formal process. Gradually, the relationship of trust and confidence that must exist between presidents and their boards unraveled, and Owens began to be a candidate for other presidencies. This became known through the open records statutes of some states in which he was a candidate, which in turn gave further ammunition to the majority faction, some of whom now openly expressed the opinion that it was time for Dr. Owens to move on. Finally Owens resigned, having accepted an offer from another university. So far as I am aware, no hotel facility has been constructed in the university’s park, and nothing else has been built there either. The director of the hospitality management program has left for other fields of endeavor, and the program has further shrunk in size. One of the formerly inadequate hotels in the town has refurbished itself, adding facilities that could manage meetings of up to 250 people and a restaurant that is adequate but not competitive with similar facilities in the two major cities nearby. The immediate question here is, What exactly happened? Before we can attempt an answer, we must break this complex situation down into its simplest parts, ascertain the interests served and intended to be

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served, and determine whether harm was done, to whom it was done, and whether it could have been avoided. It seems clear that there was broad approval for both the concept of the park and for managing its development jointly as a project funded from local, state, and university resources. There was originally no confusion over the purposes of the park and whose interests were involved. The city’s interests were to be served by the employment of and subsequent taxation of city residents. The state’s interests were to be served by development of new technology and its transfer into the commercial sector, and also by the additional revenue generated over the long run. The university’s interests were to be served by income achieved from leasing property in the park, by providing educational opportunities for undergraduate students, and by providing research opportunities and income potential for faculty and graduate students. The university was also to benefit on a percentage basis from patents developed in the properties it leased. From the beginning, finance and actuarial science, hotel management, and environmental projects had been discussed as possible tenants of the park, as had certain chemical and photo-chemical technology transfer projects contingent on getting federal support. The first two projects in the park-the financial center and the EPA laboratories-were constructed with the unanimous approval of the university board of trustees. The later appointees who halted the hotel project, and who have not succeeded in developing other projects to date, had not yet been appointed by the governor. Relations between President Owens and the board of trustees up until the presentation of the hotel proposals were, so far as is known, quite good. Upon completion of the first two projects, local residents were hired, students had learning opportunities, and faculty and graduate students were doing research through the EPA facility. Contacts had been made with the state’s federal politicians and their support secured for federal tax dollars to be used to construct a technology transfer facility that would be leased to the faculty corporation involved in the chemical and photo-chemical work. The catalyst for the problems that developed seems to be the proposal to develop a hotel that was presented by a former trustee, let’s call him Mr. X, and his colleague. His project was not rejected because it was flawed. The fact that Mr. X the individual was a developer for the project was the real issue. Mr. X was known to be a member of the party out of power. Either there were misunderstandings about the source of the information X used to develop his proposal, or there was a belief that X had insider information that helped him make a better proposal than his competition, or these accusations were the “straw man” being used to

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avoid giving X the approval to move ahead. Had the other proposal been satisfactory, I am presuming it would have been adopted, and the bidder in that case did get the financing he needed. Efforts were made to learn everything about the method used to advertise the park boards’ requests for proposals for the hotel, but at no point were any improprieties discovered. The reaction to the accusations against X had the following immediate consequences: Friction developed between X and his many community supporters on the one hand, and the board, on the other. The board itself became divided along the lines of the opposition to X, which were, by and large, between the older appointees and the new, more highly partisan board members. Because Owens was a friend of X, he developed a negative attitude toward the newer board members. This attitude was reciprocated, and the split widened further with new appointees to the board whose views on the subject settled along political lines. Owens began to look for another job. As the fight for political control of the board deepened, concern for the long-range welfare of the university became affected. Projects were postponed, the board began to interfere in management of the university as opposed to being concerned with policy, and the development of the park ground to a halt. Because there has been no further development of the park, none of the interests for which it was developed have been further served. Moral principles were clearly a factor here. Trustees have a duty, legal and moral, not to act contrary to the interests of the institutions they serve, nor against the public for whose educational welfare they are responsible. It seems clear that the hotel proposal put forward by X and his associates was at least acceptable and, in the eyes of some competent professionals, quite good. Had it been constructed, there is no reason to believe that it would not have served the interests of the various parties to the development of the park. Furthermore, since significant efforts to frnd evidence that X had improperly benefited from insider information to put his proposal together failed completely, then the accusation to the contrary had no foundation, and it could not or should not have been used as a reason to impede the project. But in the absence of other good reasons not to proceed, the lingering suspicions created by the un-

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founded accusations were the unspoken barrier to progress. The moral rule that other things being equal, trustees ought to act so as to benefit the institution and its constituencies, a subsidiary principle of the general rule that one ought to do good and avoid harm, was clearly violated here, and not for any good reason. The president had to decide what his obligations were in the light of his knowledge of this fact, and in the awareness that his future ability to benefit the college would be affected by his decision. He chose to stand with Mr. X, whom he believed to have been harmed unjustly, and lost the support of the majority of his board; in effect he was forced to leave. I doubt that we could ever be logically, if not psychologically, satisfied with a characterization of the individual motivations of those involved, and perhaps they could not either. What is clear is that if the trustee motives were to serve the best interests of the university and the public, this is not apparent from their overt actions. At best, they failed if that was their intention. Speculatively, at worst they acted from more narrow personal and political interests, and in disregard of the legitimate interests of the university and the public. If that is the case, their actions might even have constituted a violation of their fiduciary obligation and were certainly in violation of their moral obligation to serve well and honestly. There is no evidence that President Owens did anything but attempt to serve the defined and well-known interests of those to whom his service was pledged. In a practical sense, what lessons can we derive from this case that might be of help to others in the future? One that comes to mind immediately is that Owens should not have taken an aggressive and public stand in favor of X and his proposal. X was an experienced and savvy political figure who was quite capable of taking care of his own reputation. It would have been appropriate for Owens, if asked, to have expressed his gratitude for Xs past support of the institution, and to say that he considered X a personal friend. Owens did and should have stated in the open forum of the board's meetings on the subject that objectivity had been ensured in the bidding process by the hiring of an outside bid manager. But that is about all he should have done in the public forum. That he chose to become much more visibly active in Xs defense alienated the new faction on his board. And Owens may have violated another moral principle by doing this. His primary obligation was to the university, not to X, especially given that X needed no help. Certainly Owens's stance hurt everyone, including himself. He may have been morally negligent in his duty to the university by unnecessarily antagonizing his board.

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Second, Owens should have taken steps early on in the process of estrangement between him and his board to meet with them in private, perhaps with a facilitator, and work through the developing problems in the relationship. This would have been possible because under state law, personnel matters and real estate purchases could be discussed in executive session. Perhaps this would not have saved the day, but at a minimum his board would have had to recognize that he exercised genuine leadership in trying to address matters in this way. Third, the bid process should have been reopened as soon as the stalemate over Xs bid became obvious. Remember that there was never any disagreement over the park concept. In light of this, and in light of the many and diverse interests the addition of the hotel complex could have served, this should at least have been explored. There were also university options that were not investigated seriously, for example, issuing bonds backed by the good faith and credit of the state, building the complex, and then at an appropriate time selling it to a private purchaser. The state would have had to agree to this, but since it had already demonstrated a commitment to the concept, and since the party then in power was the party of the university board’s majority, the chances for success seemed high. When the original bid process was undertaken, the hiring of an external manager for the process should have been well publicized; had this been done, it would have been much more difficult to justlfy suspicion that X had “the inside track,” which was false.

THE PRESIDENT AS MORAL SYMBOL: THE CASE OF LUCAS UNIVERSITY AND BIG TOBACCO In the first case considered in this chapter, the matter of the United Appeal, we looked at an example of how a disagreement of fact, in this case over the appropriate means to achieve a mutually desired end, caused a rupture in the relationship between a president and a chief executive officer and chairman of an important commercial company. Because of the very high profile of the CEO and his other good works in the community, the rupture in the relationship with him also prejudiced several of his fellow CEOs to take a dim view of the president and the university he heads. It took some time to correct this situation with the larger business community, and it never was completely corrected with the particular individual with whom the problem began. Because of the original misunderstanding of fact, the board of trustees of the university had to work

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hard to explain and c l a m the situation with other CEOs. As the discussion widened, some received the impression that the president might be in difficulties with his board, which led to further uneasiness at the institution. Fortunately, all turned out well, but for a while, what mattered was the perception by other business leaders that the president was uncooperative and difficult. In this case, I will consider an example in which a president who was himself serving in a corporate capacity-being a member of the board of a tobacco company-became an unwitting symbol for those who believe the use of tobacco is extremely dangerous. Let us call the president Dr. Harmon and his institution Lucas University. Lucas derived a significant income from investments in tobacco companies from stocks bequeathed to the university decades ago. In fact, almost 20 percent of the annual earnings of the college endowment funds came from dividends paid by these stocks. In the days when the stocks were given to the school, there was little speculation and no hard research connecting the use of tobacco products with diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease, nor was it widely thought that nicotine was an addictive drug. During World War I1 the companies that issued these stocks gave cigarettes to all American combat soldiers, and they were widely praised for doing so. Their charitable contributions, civic good works, and interest in education were appreciated, and they were the backbone of the local and state economy where the university is located. In fact, the president of the university was only the most recent head of the school to sit on the board of one of the largest tobacco corporations in the state. All of his predecessors had occupied the same board seat before him. Lucas University has one of the most widely respected hospitals in the region, and for the last decade one of the largest research projects at the hospital concerned tobacco and health. The tobacco company resisted the hospital when it announced that a senior scientist had won a major grant to conduct this research, and it quietly offered to create an institute to examine the beneficial aspects of tobacco use and fund it at an even higher level than the grant, if the hospital would not accept the other grant. The hospital refused. As the tobacco research progressed, it became clear that the results of the research would cause harm to the tobacco industry and would probably be used in several of the ever more numerous legal actions being brought against the company by victims of smoking-related illnesses. Individual members of the company board approached President Harmon and expressed their opinion that he ought to fmd ways to help the company or resign from the board. Pressures to

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resign from the board also ironically came from those on exactly the other side of the issue. Faculty and student groups openly criticized Harmon for sitting on what they called the “death board when he also purported to represent forces that adamantly opposed tobacco use on the grounds that it caused death. They insisted that he either resign as president or sever all affiliations between the university and the tobacco company. This included selling all the university’s stock in the company and resigning from its board. President Harmon was a strong and principled man. He argued that he should remain on the company’s board for a variety of reasons. First, he was doing his best to get the company diversified into a broad range of other businesses that had nothing to do with tobacco and to reduce its holdings in tobacco concerns gradually, with the ultimate intention of ridding itself of any connection with the industry. Second, he agreed that the university foundation should sell its tobacco stocks but that it should do this slowly, and only when an equally good investment opportunity for the funds released by the sale of tobacco stocks presented itself. To do otherwise, Harmon argued, would deprive students of financial aid and force them to leave the university, cripple the medical school’s research endeavors, including research into the harmful effects of tobacco use, and force the college to cut back on academic support for equipment and capital projects. If tobacco was evil, Harmon was fond of saying, at least we should use some of its profits for good until its inevitable demise. To make his position more attractive, Harmon announced that his considerable fees for serving on the board, plus the very significant amount of stock he had received through the years, would immediately be given to the university foundation and then sold, and the proceeds used to enhance the unrestricted fund in the endowment. Reaction to Harmon’s position was mixed and very forceful. Thoughtful people saw what he was trying to do, even if they thought his efforts to make a tobacco company stop doing what it did to make money were naive. Harmon had his voting record reproduced for the entire eight years of his board membership, and it showed that he had never once supported the company’s efforts to expand its tobacco business, including the export of cigarettes to Third World countries, a fantastically profitable enterprise. He had also tried to encourage every reasonable effort to diverslfy into nontobacco sidelines. But his was largely a quixotic adventure. The most widely held view of why Harmon should resign from the board concerned his role as a symbol. It was argued that the president

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was the visible embodiment of the university, its human representation to all of its publics. Just as it would be destructive of the university and not just Harmon as an individual if he were to commit some outrageous act of moral turpitude, so it sullied the institutional reputation for him to serve on the tobacco board, the more so since the university had a very strong medical program. Consider the case at American University a few years ago when its president was arrested for making obscene telephone calls to a woman whose husband turned out to be a sheriff. Or the more recent case of the president of a small private college who, it turns out, had been having an affair with his daughter-in-law for almost twenty years. Although Harmon had done nothing comparably immoral, how, it was asked, could he on the one hand represent an institution that had as a large part of its purpose the preservation of life, and at the same time represent a corporation that sold a product known to cause death? How could he argue on the one hand that the faculty and administration had a duty to search for the truth and behave as exemplars for the students and public at large, and on the other hand seem to say that it was permissible to make money from the enterprises of death and even represent them in his person? The positions, in the eyes of most people, were irreconcilable. Eventually, the argument about the symbolic function of the presidency convinced Harmon that his position could not be sustained, and he resigned from the board of the tobacco company, while at the same time carrying through on his promise to give his accumulated fees and stocks to the university foundation. As instructed, the foundation immediately sold them and placed the proceeds in the unrestricted fund of the foundation. Harmon continued to have doubts about whether in yielding to the symbolic argument he had chosen the better of the two options, but there is no doubt he did the popular thing. Did he do the right thing? It is exceedingly hard to say, in my opinion. There is no doubt that Harmon himself was a good man and acted as a concerned moral agent. He saw very clearly the complexities of the situation, and he made sure by his own hand that he gained no personal benefit from his service on the tobacco board and that the college, which was engaged in research contrary to tobacco interests but in the service of life rather than death, did benefit from it. He knew very well that his singular stand on the board was not going to change its policies in any material way in the short run, but he understood that there was a symbolic content to his stand for the other board members too. The problem was that his primary responsibility was to the college, and the symbolism of his board membership was far more public in that capacity than the

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symbolism of his stand to the tobacco board, which met in private and revealed little of its doings to the public. His action in resigning from the tobacco board was noted nationally and applauded widely. It was quietly accompanied by the withdrawal of the tobacco company’s financial support from the university. The foundation quietly began to sell its tobacco stocks and replace them with shares in companies at best doing work of moral worth and at worst not involved in morally controversial business activities. The reasonably foreseeable consequences of Harmon’s action were much as he had foreseen. But what moral principles were involved, and is the decision clearly the right one to make? It seems to me that at least the following moral principles were involved: 1. One ought not cause human death, pain, or suffering. And, as a derivative rule, one ought to resist such actions wherever possible. 2. A president is morally obligated to keep the promises made in the university’s name to its constituents, particularly to its primary com-

munity: its students, faculty, and employees. These include financial support, quality instruction and research, and a safe and healthy environment. 3. Wherever possible, one must value persons over property if one must choose. The problem is an inherent conflict between (1) and (2). It is not possible to resist the causing of human death, pain, and suffering through smoking tobacco, on the one hand, and provide the financial, instructional, and healthy environment at Lucas University demanded by (21, on the other, because satisfying (2) at Lucas required the use of profits from tobacco, which is a violation of (1). The conflict requires some principle of supervenience, which I believe is provided at least prima facie by (3). The profits from tobacco are an asset, or property. Confronted with a choice between the well-being of persons and the accumulation of property, (3) requires the choice of persons. Admittedly, this is a simplistic presentation of the case. If in the long run a small number of persons are harmed by a choice but a large number realize overwhelming benefits through the use of, say, gambling revenue, then some would argue that choosing gambling is permissible, even though we know that a percentage of gamblers will become addicts. But here, especially if combined with the symbolic role and concomitant expectations of the president, I think Harmon made the right

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choice. As a practical matter, his university may profit more from this choice than it would have by staying with the tobacco industry.

THE UNIVERSITY AS COMPETITOR WITH PRIVATE BUSINESS: THE PIZZA WAR Public universities in particular have an obligation, a moral obligation, to avoid competing with small private businesses whenever possible. If the needs of the faculty and student body can be met from private sources in the community at comparable cost to charges that the university would have to impose for the same services, if access to the private services is not particularly difficult, and if the university’s competition would seriously impact the private enterprise’s ability to profit and expand, then there is no good reason for the university to enter the field in the first place. The university, after all, is largely a tax-exempt operation except in those areas where it does compete in the world of private business, while the private business is not. Even if the university does pay taxes in those areas, it still benefits from economies of scale in the nontaxable parts of its operation, while the private business, at least if it is small, does not. For the university to compete with small business under the conditions given here would therefore be causing unnecessary harm and potential suffering to the proprietors, and that is why it would be immoral. Such a case occurred in Bowling Green, Ohio, several years ago when the university food service decided to open a pizza parlor in the bookstore. I did not pay much attention to the matter at first because we already sold such items as personal care and cosmetic supplies as well as clothing in the bookstore and served pizza on the daily menu in all of our commons areas. Thus I was surprised when the proprietor of several pizza parlors in the town immediately took the matter to the state legislature and launched an all-out effort to get a law passed that would make such competition illegal. The proposed law was very broadly drawn and would have caused serious disruption to us because it covered such things as the bookstore itself. Some opponents even argued that the language would make it illegal for state universities to offer campus housing. The concept of the law was very popular, however, and there was an outpouring of previously repressed resentment on a statewide basis from the small business community against the universities, which were perceived as arrogant bullies at worst, and as thoughtless and inconsiderate at best. The regents of the

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system were contacted, the press became involved, and something I had hardly noticed was suddenly a genuine bull in a china shop! It did not take much reflection to see that rightness rested on the side of the small businesses, at least in our case, since there was no overriding reason to open the pizza shop on campus. Since the off-campus business delivered directly to student rooms, there would have been no significant savings to students, and it would have been an additional accounting and personnel burden for us. Why then had we decided to go ahead with the project? We immediately assured the private businesspeople that the parlor would not be opened, but they did not withdraw the attempt to pass the law. In the end, only the difficulty of finding sufficiently narrow language brought that campaign to an end. But I felt there was something awry with the university’s processes if something so obviously misguided could happen so easily, and I felt I had a moral obligation as the campus leader to review our policies and sensitize our staff to the principles involved. As we began to trace the process from its inception, we quickly discovered that no one in the higher echelons of the administration had been involved in the decision until it had for all practical purposes been made. Those involved were all staff employees in the university union, and their proposal, when it finally reached a vice president, was presented as a carefully researched and financially sound package that had already been reviewed by all the proper concerns. It had been approved by the student government association, which had originated the request, by the resident hall government council, and by the university union board, which included members from all concerned university constituents. At no time had it occurred to anyone to assess the impact it might have on the commercial pizza producers in the city, and apparently no one had seen the issue in moral terms-that we would be doing unjustified harm to the business community for no overridingly good reason, and that as one set of consequences we would also be harming the university, albeit unintentionally. For example, contributions to the university foundation dropped appreciably as the controversy built in the state legislature. I set out to imbue our decision-making processes with a moral component wherever appropriate. For example, I noted that the university community was supported by the business community not just financially but operationally because we were by far the largest employer in the county and we could not operate without the goodwill of our employees. Many of those employees had spouses who were employed by

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small businesses locally as a necessary part of raising their families in a relatively low-paid area of the state. I argued that the principle of distributive justice and the principle of moral reasoning that requires that moral rules must be universal obligated us to avoid unnecessarily harming the commercial and familial community in which we lived and which in turn nurtured us. I argued that just as the university administration had an obligation to distribute the goods we produce (e.g., wages, salaries, benefits, educational opportunities, health insurance) fairly and equitably to our internal “family,”so this obligation also minimally extended to anyone in the external community with connections to us. There was, after some discussion, general agreement with this. The presentation was henceforth adopted as a part of the educational sessions for new employees, particularly those at higher levels, and is reinforced annually.

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here is nothing new about racial tension in America, nor about manifestations of it on our university and college campuses. Aside from the mean streets of our cities, no place is more available for the expression of profound disagreements about highly emotional issues of importance to our society than our campuses. And this is as it should be, for what are we if not the paramount location where contrasting ideas, even bitterly contrasting ones, can be expressed? But there are occasions when the expression of such disagreements, even though understandable, results in demands that no president can support. There are many possible reasons for this, some legal, some moral, some practical and financial. But the line we draw in the sand should always strive for the moral “bridge too far” rather than err on the side of caution. I left Ohio State in 1970 to become dean of faculties and then vice president for academic affairs of Roosevelt University, a financial underdog in Chicago in those days, but a moral giant. Roosevelt had been founded on the ruins of the old YMCA College in Chicago at the end of World War 11, when the all-white, all-Protestant YMCA board demanded that the college put quotas on the number of blacks and Jews accepted from the demobilizing services. To their everlasting glory, the president, Edward J. Sparling, and most of the faculty walked out, mortgaging their houses in many cases, rented a warehouse, and started Jefferson College, which subsequently developed into Roosevelt. As a result of the nature of its founding, Jews, blacks, and other people who were

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objects of discrimination on the part of “the establishment” flocked to the new college. By 1964, Roosevelt had some of the most prominent black scholars in the country, for example, St. Clair Drake, one of the most highly regarded sociologists in the United States, and other notable scholars from persecuted groups, such as Walter Weiskopf, the distinguished Jewish economist and Austrian refugee from Hitler. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, in a flash, most of the distinguished minorities at Roosevelt were hired away to the establishment universities at salaries Roosevelt could only envy. Interestingly, the minority students at Roosevelt understood what had happened and remained steadfastly loyal. But very slowly, the influence of the Civil Rights Act, various affirmative action measures, changes in federal financial aid regulations affecting banks, and the very considerable and admirable efforts of colleges and universities themselves began to increase the number of black students in American schools, even in the deep south. The issues widened from simply getting more black students into universities into issues having to do with their lives on largely white campuses. At this point a case from Bowling Green State University becomes informative. Like many controversies on university campuses, this one began without great fanfare. There had been a series of assaults on and around the campus, a very small number involving sexual approaches or at least innuendo. One had been a rape. Two had involved black women assaulting white women; in two others white men had taunted and in one case slapped a black woman. The rape suspect had been arrested, but none of the other perpetrators had been apprehended. Rumors had magnified both the number and severity of incidents. It was alleged by the president of the Black Student Union that assaults on black women were very common and that the attackers were almost always white men. Claims were made that rape was common and was being concealed by university officials concerned about enrollments. It was alleged that the city and university police were racists, and anecdotes of harassment and justice denied became rampant. When a sworn affidavit charging one of the university police with violating the civil rights of a black student was filed in federal court, I became even more concerned. In fact, this officer was indeed noted for his negative attitude toward blacks and had been reprimanded for this. He was also a very large and strong man, with a hard facial expression, which seemed to lend credence to the accusation. The charge emanated from a party at a black fraternity house on the edge of campus (but not on university property), which had become unruly. Neighbors called the

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city police, who in turn called the university for assistance, which was part of an agreement the university had established with the city many years before when students were involved. The university police in turn assisted the city in nonuniversity cases when asked to do so. When university police arrived, a confrontation was in progress between the city police and the black fraternity members, who were charging that the police had invaded their premises without a warrant. It was true that they did not have a warrant, but it is also true that the party had spilled out of the house and that at least one fistfight had occurred on the front lawn before the police arrived. A black student, who later claimed he was attacked by the arresting white city officer, was resisting arrest with considerable force when the university police came on the scene. The physically imposing university officer mentioned above immediately went to the assistance of the smaller city policeman and helped subdue the black student, apparently with considerable force, because there was evident bruising and other injury to the student after the fact. As reinforcements arrived, the violence that had broken out, involving physical confrontations between students and police and the throwing of bottles and other objects, was brought under control. Those arrested were taken away, and an unsettled calm restored to the area around the fraternity house. The next day, as might be expected, there were meetings of the black students on campus, and among other things a list of “demands” was composed, which included a doubling of the number of black students on campus, a similar increase in black faculty and counselors, and increased grant and aid moneys to be awarded to needy black students. Furthermore, money was demanded to pay male black students to escort female students after sundown, because of the alleged frequent assaults on female blacks and because black males could not trust the existing student escort service because it was heavily Caucasian in composition and the men who had assaulted the black female students were, it was claimed, white. It was further demanded that the university officer who had been involved in subduing the black student at the fraternity party be fired immediately and replaced with two black officers. Finally, the students demanded a meeting between their representatives, who were the most militant of the black students at the university, and the president. They announced that the purpose of the meeting was to “force the university to accept our just demands.” While all of this transpired, and for some time earlier than these events, the university had not been passive. We had intensified counseling for victims of assaults, infused more funding into the escort service, and tried to recruit more black males to it. The student affairs staff

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worked intensively with black students to keep them accurately and fully informed about the actual numbers of assaults and the details, as opposed to the rumors. An investigative committee had been formed to look into the allegations against the university police officer, and it was chaired by a black woman and three of the five members were women or minorities. A joint committee of the university and the city police department was set up to investigate allegations of city police brutality. The public relations department set u p a hotline for information leading to the arrest of any person accused of assault, and additional lighting was funded for those areas of the campus adjudged to be more dangerous than others. Considerable effort had been expended for years to recruit more black students, an effort made doubly difficult by the negative publicity all this was engendering. These efforts were having no noticeable effect on the growing campus unrest. After conferring with my colleagues, I determined not to meet exclusively with the self-proclaimed and nonelected black students who had demanded to meet with me because I did not consider them representative of the general black student contingent on campus. Rather, I said I would meet any black students, including of course the students making the demands, who wished to attend a public forum for the purpose of addressing all these issues. I set aside a large amphitheater and published a date and time when I would be present. The room held about five hundred, and it was packed. I had asked the student affairs staff to attend, as well as representatives from the university and city police, and the mayor’s office. From the beginning of the meeting, the self-proclaimed leaders of the group noisily tried to disrupt reasonable discussion. They accused black staff and faculty of being Uncle Toms and captives of the white administration. Many of the black students present resented this charge because these staff and faculty had worked selflessly and at their own personal psychological and financial cost for their entire working lives in the cause of assisting young African Americans, including some of the ones now accusing them of betrayal. Then the “leadership” group put on black ski masks and filed out of the room. I immediately announced that I and my colleagues would stay as long as there was anyone who wished to speak with us. The meeting lasted four more hours. Two days later, I had to leave the campus to attend a meeting of the National Council on the Humanities, of which I was at that time a member. While I was in Washington, the militant group exerted extraordinary and threatening pressure on the student affairs staff and the minority affairs personnel among them. A senior staff member acquiesced to their demands and publicly committed funds for the exclusive purpose of hir-

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ing black males to staff a separate escort service for black females only. I was informed of this by my office and came back immediately. Clearly, even had I wished to support the staff and more militant black students, I could not do so. The allocation of funds on the basis of racial criteria at any university receiving public funds is a violation of federal law. The question was therefore not whether to agree but how to disagree, and to take back the commitment made by the staff member in the least harmful and most productive way. I informed the chair of the board that I intended to overturn the agreement made in my absence and gave him my reasons. Then I gathered together the staff who had participated and told them of my decision, announcing that a complete explanation of my reasoning would be forthcoming within a day or two, and then I called the student newspaper and reserved a paid full page for an open letter to the campus community from me to be published two days hence. I saw this task as having four basic purposes, all of them intended to be educational as well as moral in intent. I wanted to formulate the article as a permanent statement of university policy, nonnegotiable and approved by the board, the faculty, and the administration, as well as the student government. The appropriate groups were consulted and they strongly approved. First, I wanted to set a tone that was reflective and serious, and emphasized morality above legality. Second, I wanted to present the issues in the form of general moral principles rather than describe particular instances of injustice that had occurred. Questions embedded in some of these principles included: Shall we separate ourselves from one another because of our race, thereby diminishing rather than increasing our understanding of one another? Shall we repress free speech because we disagree with what is said? Is not ignorance the most important barrier to our mutual understanding? Third, the moral principles at stake were obvious, if not stated openly. One ought to oppose ignorance because it is the frequent source of evil motives and actions. One ought not impede another’s right to express personal opinions, lest one’s own right to do so be supressed. And most obviously, one ought not accept racial differences as sufficient to prove differences in the value of human beings. Fourth, I wanted to leave the door open to further discussion and debate of the principles concerned. Although there were no further public meetings with me, there were many classes in many disciplines in which the statement was used as a theme for debate on these issues. Because it

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calmed the situation, and is the policy of the university, I would like to present it here.

DOING THE RIGHT THING

lnfomzation to the campus community the past several days surrounding the ”Justfor You” escort service proposal has been confusing and contradictoy. The intent of this message is to make it clear that the black escort service has not been approved by the administration and to outline some of the reasons why it has not. ln the life of any complex human organization there are times when we must rgect on what we are doing and reaffirm the principles we stand for and support. This is certainly true within an institution of higher learning such as ours at Bowling Green State University. Reafirming principles is not always the same thing as deciding what is legal and what is illegal. I f this were so, then we would have had to be infavor of. for example, southern laws which prohibited interracial marriage in the 1950s, but surely those laws, although probably legally enacted, were morally wrong. We are confronted today with an opportunity to think about what is right and wrong and what is best for our community. The occasionfor this opportunity to pause and reflect is the proposal by a few students to create an escort service which would, for all practical purposes, be stafed solely by African American male students to escort African Americanfmale students. A second issue, alsofundamentally constitutional in nature, and of moral as well as legal relevance, concerns the context in which the debates surrounding this and similar issues have often occurred. In this instance, verbal coercion, intimidation, and unfair suppression offree speech characterized aspects of last Friday‘s meeting. There are matters of serious concern in this situation, with long range as well as short range consequences. Thefundamental issues are these: Are we to establish policies and practices at BGSU which have the efect of separating the races and ethnic groups here, thereby contributing to a lessening of the understanding which is essentialfor progress in interracial harmony, or are we going to support programs which have the contrary efects? Are we going to encourage open discussion and debate in an atmosphere which isfree from fear and menace or intimidation, and in which argumentsfrom both sides of a question, however controversial, may be heard? Or, are we going to encourage intimidation and repression of speech by rewarding behavior which accomplishes this?

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It is the policy of this University to refuse to move a student out of a room in our residence halls because that student does not want to live with someone of another race. It is the policy of the University to increase the number of minority students, faculty and stafwho are members of this academic community. It is the policy of the University to address the special needs of minority populations, and that is why we have an Office of Multicultural Afairs, and why we sponsor a broad variety of social events and cultural programs which are intended to educate the entire population of the University, as well as to increase the opportunitiesfor minority self-esteem, role models, skill development, making contacts in the business world, and generally for feeling comfortable here in a community which is predominantly white. It is understandable that some women of color, and men for that matter, might not feel comfortable being escorted by Caucasian men, or women. But it would be contrary to University policy, and morally as well as legally wrong, to take steps to address this problem which are in reality exclusive and separatist and which lessen the opportunities for interracial understanding, learning and cooperation. Some say the proposed Justfor You escort service will include non-African Americans as escorts and that the service, in spite of its name, is for everyone. I f that is the case, then it is unnecessary to duplicate a service that already exists. We should increase the African American, Hispanic and other ethnic representation in the existing service and not create a service which discourages some segments of our population from using it because of race. Eforts have been made to recruit more men and women of color into the escort service, without much success. The hope, indeed the expectation, is that the publicity concerning the escort proposal will result in more volunteersfor the existing service. What would be the reaction on campus i f a similar proposal were made by white students for the purpose of escorting white females, even ifi because of concerns expressed by nonwhites, the proposal was modified, in theory, to serve nonwhite students? The campus community would, no doubt, strongly reject such a proposal on the grounds that it was racist, separatist, and unfair. The University would not recognize such an organization and would not fund it. Doesn't this same rationale apply in the case presently before us? At the Friday meeting held to consider this proposal, people who have spent decades working to advance the cause of people of color on the campus were told by those in charge of the meeting to be silent, and were not permitted to speak. Even the interim vice presidentfor student affairs was at one point silenced by individuals proposing the Justfor You escort service, and other victims of this demeaning behavior included African American employees and

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administrators of this University whose lives have literally been dedicated to helping students of color in every way they can. Should behavior of this sort be encouraged by the University? Does it not reward intimidating and threatening behavior if the University agrees to implement the proposal? We must insist that discussion of all issues take place in a context wherefree speech is encouraged rather than discouraged, and refuse to reward actions which are contrary to that principle. This has been and will continue to be the policy of this University. The issue is not that the African American students do not have a point. They do. In spite of the University’s efforts, there are degrees of loneliness, estrangement and alienation which affect them. It is perfectly understandable that students of the same ethnic background should seek out one anotherfor many reasons, rangingfrom the academic to the social. But for these very same reasons, the University has an obligation to resist programs and policies which separate us and might encourage discrimination, the very thing we all want to eliminate. This administration will do all it can to encourage more minority students to serve as escorts within the existing service, but the University cannotfund separatist organizations. We are confident that the very large majority of students, faculty and staff of all races and origins agree with this position. With the publication of this notice, the disturbances on campus came to an end. In general, the full-page statement was accepted, as I had hoped, as an official position of the university. The radical black students did not continue their threats of dire action if the black escort service was not funded, and there were only a handful of complaints from black students who were not members of the radical group. Most faculty seemed to see it as a firm but reasoned stand based on principles from which the university would not move under threat of force. That, I think, was both tactically and strategically important. I had learned the hard way in the 1960s that weakness in a central administration was an invitation to chaos and destruction. Although I was not forced to take stronger action to prevent violence on our campus, I was prepared to do so if need be. People of different races and cultural backgrounds have different and important needs, physical and emotional. When it came to satisfying these needs, I decided long ago to accept most of the advice from the students concerned or from faculty and staff of the relevant race or religion. Assuming the personal honesty and integrity of those I consulted and the practical possibility of implementing their advice, I almost always accepted it. Looking back over almost forty years of some responsibility in this area, I believe this was the wisest course of action. Mostly the issues

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were marginal. The provision of certain sorts of cosmetics for African American women in the bookstore, helping a black preacher get permission to use a church in an all-white town, and other examples of this sort were the norm. Occasionally the issues were more serious. Creating black studies programs in tenuous and violent times and instituting black student unions come to mind. But progress has indeed been made. A final word on these and related matters. The language used in confrontational situations is important. The novelist Thomas Wolfe invented a marvelous phrase to characterize the ways rebellious black students treated administrators in the 1960s and 1970s. He called it Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Mau Mau being the name of the rebellious factions warring with the whites in what was then Kenya. On American campuses much depended on how the flak catchers reacted to the language of those doing the mau-mauing. That language was almost always profane by then existing standards and was often laden with threat. But most of it was theater, and Wolfe saw that. The theatrical component was exemplified in costume, demeanor, and gesturethe huge afro, dashikis, black leather, wooden staffs, and so forth. It is critical in times of crisis that responsible people (university presidents in particular) not hide from these demonstrations, and they must develop the insight to apprehend the critically important feelings and convictions behind them. Above all, presidents must have and illustrate the one virtue that will cause opponents to respect them and perhaps to rethink their positions4ourage.

TRUSTWORTHINESS:THE PRESIDENT AND PERQUISITES Many perquisites accrue to the office of university president. These usually include a presidential residence, an automobile, and often grounds maintenance, household staff, aid for entertainment, an expense account, use of university aircraft or other means of transportation, secretarial help for a presidential spouse, and even cooking staff to prepare private meals in the home. The opportunities for misuse of these perquisites are very, very available; in fact it is difficult not to abuse some of them. The cumulative effect of such misuse will almost always become known, and it can be devastating to a presidency. A recent president of the University of South Carolina was brought down by this, and a president of Stanford was badly hurt by accusations of abuse of perquisites. There are issues of moral principle for presidents in these contexts, and after examining certain of the possibilities, I will comment on them.

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It is understandable that a new president and spouse, coming into a house they have had no prior opportunity to make into a home, may wish to do some redecorating. But beware, the entire community is watching. Excess will quickly be noted and judgments as quickly made about the character of the presidential couple. In my experience, community expectations, even in wealthy private schools but especially in public universities, are generally that changes in the private parts of official homes are acceptable provided that they are geared toward turning a house into a home for the new couple. But extravagant changes to the public parts of the residence will be watched and heavily criticized. The source of renovation funds is critical, and the way these are publicized is very important. Couples I know have suffered difficulties because the financial decision makers on their campuses decided to fund renovations or changes through the use of student fee funding. Since these are open to public inspection, the local press will report every nickel. Raising private funds for alterations in the private parts of the home is much preferable to any other route. If public funds are spent for public areas, then all the changes should be reported publicly before they are undertaken, and the source of funding as well as the amount should be fully discussed and approved in public meetings of the board of trustees. The public should be invited to view the renovated spaces and be furnished with explanations of their uses. To the extent possible for new presidents, the board should take responsibility for changes to the home, and if possible an outgoing president should begin these changes to lessen the degree of criticism for the new head of the institution. At public institutions it should be emphasized that the primary purpose of the official residence is to serve the academic and wider community: the president lives there for that purpose. The home should be identified by a plaque or other means as university property and should be connected by the normal communication devices to the campus, especially if it is located elsewhere, and it should actually be used for meetings. If not, the IRS might tax the president personally for its use. Frequently there are other perquisites with the position of president in addition to those listed above. Use of university aircraft and other vehicles, access to vacation property used as conference sites, free travel to many events ranging from athletic events to conventions to private meetings for business or university support or similar things are common. Foundation accounts for entertainment and spousal travel are common, and tickets or passes to be given to supporters are given to the president’s office. Access to the president’s box at football and basketball games is prized.

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Opportunities to abuse these perquisites are many and of easy access. So are opportunities to spread the responsibility for these abuses to others or even disguise them as good (or at least as morally neutral) events. Abuse usually begins with the little things, for example, personal holiday cards are sent on the university’s frank; private calls are made on the office telephone; private guests are lodged in university facilities without payment; university stationery is used for private consulting. A legislator asks that an unqualified student be admitted conditionally when normally he would not be enrolled, or he asks that a salary be continued for an employee who wishes to run for an office on his party ticket, and the president concurs. A president takes his children with him to sporting events but does not pay their transportation costs; gifts of university representation-jackets, hats, T-shirts, paperweights, bookends, pens, golf bags and balls, preferred tee times for the president and guests, and other mementosare accepted by the president and his family, ostensibly to represent the school but in reality given to family and friends; a three-day convention turns into a six-day trip, the last three at a golf resort located on the flight path back home; hotel bills in an attractive city are padded by the simple device of arranging a meeting with a “prospective donor” who can’t be seen until two days after the meeting the president went to that city for; meals at the most expensive and luxurious restaurants are justified and charged to the university foundation as entertainment of persons important to the university; most of the travel costs to a vacation destination are written off because the president arranges a function at a location nearby; trips abroad are taken to investigate the possibility of opening new associations with universities in these countries, or inspecting existing university programs there, and turned into vacations at university expense, and a whole variety of versions on the same theme. These immoral, and in many cases illegal, offenses are still easier to justlfy if the president ensures that a member (or members) of his board is along, the university paying for his or her expenses as well. There are almost limitless opportunities for private gain. A trustee who owns a condo in Florida and has been taken on university business to some pleasant place offers the use of the condo to the president for a few days in the winter. Or a graduate of the university does the same thing. A car dealer who wishes to contract for the replacement of the president’s own car offers to sell a vehicle to a spouse at a much lower price than anyone else would pay; when specialty foods are ordered for special events at the official residence, an extra supply is added and stored in the freezers for private use; the friend of a board member casually mentions that he thinks an IPO will soon be forthcoming for a promising company.

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In some cases presidents are offered membershps on the boards of corporations that do business with the university or have connections to other members of the university board. Corporate gifts to foundations to create professorships, purchase equipment, or construct or refurbish space are offered when the president knows of the expectations of future profit for the corporation from business with the school. And I have already mentioned the potential problems with the awarding of honorary degrees. There are many possible offenses here, legal, moral, and prudential. In many of the examples, the result would be simple theft, which is a violation of an obvious moral rule and more importantly a violation of the trust the university’s constituencies have placed in the president. Particularly in public institutions, even the appearance of a president living the high life betrays the trust of students and parents struggling to pay tuition and fees, as well as the promise implicit in the president’s job to manage the university carefully and responsibly. It is no justification in most of the examples given to claim that the action was really in the long-run interests of the institution. It probably is not true that the politician will do favors for the school in return for admitting the unqualified student or paying the salary of the absent campaigner. Politicians are usually smarter than that, and the more likely consequence is that the president will be diminished in the politician’s eyes. In any case, it is wrong because it is in the first instance a violation of the principle of fairness to other students and in the second instance stealing from university-and state-funds. People who give significant gifts to universities rarely if ever do so because of a ticket to a football game, a university memento, or a free trip or dinner. They give because they find some program, professorship, or scholarship fund compatible with their views and interests or they decide to “give back something to the institution that helped educate them and make them successful. There is nothing wrong with working to create and maintain a friendly relationship with a potential supporter; doing it dishonestly is not only wrong but probably counterproductive. People of substance don’t often want to place their money in the hands of someone they know not to be trustworthy. In the end, as is almost always the case, honesty is and remains the best policy.

TRUSTEE SELECTION: AN IMPORTANT, WEIGHTY TASK Appointment to a university board of trustees is generally viewed as a high honor, and I agree. Service on a board is not easy. Boards usually

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meet once a month in the public sector. Including preparation, travel time to meetings, and service on subcommittees, about a week a month of the trustees’ time can easily be consumed, for as long as nine years. Board service is almost never compensated, and trustees are expected to give generously to university fund drives. At private universities, the willingness and capacity to support the university financially often play a decisive role in determining who is invited to join the board. Even the perquisites of board service are small, particularly at public schools. A seat in the president’s box at athletic events, preference for start times at the golf course, invitations to social events in the president’s home, and similar small favors are about all the trustee receives, and the IRS has ruled that most of these are taxable. At private colleges the perquisites can be more lavish, including free use of weekend retreats owned by the university, free transportation in university aircraft, and so forth. But these too are taxable. Boards of private universities are almost always self-perpetuating, and there may or may not be limitations on the terms served. I am aware of one private college trustee who served twenty-seven years without interruption. The purposes for which private trustees are chosen are almost always congruent with the university’s interests, sometimes financial, sometimes for reasons of prestige, sometimes for political connections. Private boards are almost always larger than public ones. When I was a vice chancellor of Syracuse University, there were more than forty trustees. Schools having affiliations with other organizations commonly maintain ex officio seats for representatives of those organizations. Although I believe this is no longer the case, Syracuse had such seats for representatives of the Methodist Church, which founded it, for example. Private boards usually meet two or three times a year, with the work of the board during the interim being handled by an executive committee and committees. In general, private boards are not as often politicized as public ones and are not as exposed to the public light. They are not normally bound to hold all votes in public, and they do not see themselves as representing any political or public constituency in the sense that public boards do because they do not in fact have a public fiduciary duty. The presidents of private boards are often very influential in choosing new trustees, and at some institutions they have a vote on the appointing committee. It is rare at private schools to have a trustee appointed contrary to the president’s wishes. It is entirely different with public boards. They are generally chosen in one of three ways: appointment by a governor, by public election, or by virtue of holding another office. For example, in Connecticut the

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governor is an ex officio member of the University of Connecticut board. Some states have different procedures for different schools. For example, Michigan State, Michigan, and Wayne State Universities have elected trustees because of a state constitutional requirement, while younger schools like Eastern, Central, and Western Michigan Universities have trustees appointed by the governor. Trustees hold office for a fixed term, and in most states the number of terms is limited, although not in all. In some states gubernatorial nominees must be confirmed by another political body, usually the senate. Other than residency requirements, I know of no official qualifications required for appointment as a trustee, not even that they be college graduates, in any state. And surely this is questionable as a policy. As noted, public boards meet publicly, but for legal and personnel matters, and must vote publicly. Public notice must be given of the time and place of meeting and business must be conducted in the presence of a quorum of the board. Roll call votes are the norm when decisions involving money, such as votes on tuition, are being taken, and this is usually required by law. Trustees are constantly being scrutinized by the press and public. The decisions they make are not trivial. They are responsible for the disposition of millions of dollars, indeed, at some schools billions. Their decisions determine where or even if a student will be able to attend school. They decide whom to hire as a president and when to fire him or her. They raise large sums of money and decide where to invest it, sometimes earning or losing millions in a single fiscal period. They hire, promote, and sometimes fire faculty, vice presidents, and other key personnel. They can ruin a university or make it great. They can fritter away enormous sums on big-time athletics, and they can create wondrous academic institutes, medical centers, and faculties. They are truly powerful people, collectively exerting enormous impact on both individuals and society at large. Their actions can and do increase suffering for many and lessen it for others, and their actions frequently have consequences that could not have been foreseen by the wisest. The quality of their deliberations has determined the fate of nations and many national leaders. Who these individuals are and whether they are qualified to make these important decisions are therefore and ought to be a matter of interest to everyone, particularly in the public sector. Yet, so far as I am aware, no criteria for trusteeship exist. At least in the case of elected trustees, the voting public has a chance to examine their qualifications and decide whether they are worthy to spend our tax dollars. To some extent I think this is true. But it is not at all clear what the qualifications for trusteeship ought to be. High intelligence; no criminal record; knowl-

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edge of the university, its history, and the many roles and mission it serves; concern for tuition levels; a commitment to academic excellence and important research: certainly these and other similar attributes would probably be the sort of thing the public would expect to find in candidates for these important positions. But scrutinizing candidate claims and reasons for wanting the job can be depressing. Among actual reasons given for desiring to be a trustee, I have come across the following: to fire or retain the football coach, the athletic director, the president (sometimes for reasons related to the athletic program among others) or all three; to close an academic program because it presented “obscene” material to young people; to get rid of tenure; to reduce tuition and cut salaries; to get rid of subjects that do not lead directly to employment; to get rid of all services that “compete with the private sector”; to require university foundations to deposit their funds with the state; to break up the major flagship institution of a state and relocate its parts around the state where local economies need help; to require a public examination for anyone standing for tenure or promotion; to require all universities to accept the associate of arts degree from any community college as satisfying the university general education requirements on its face; to guarantee the graduation of students; to penalize the university for any student who takes longer than four years to graduate from the undergraduate program; to require faculty to be in their offices five days a week from eight in the morning to five in the evening except for a one-hour lunch break and classroom teaching. I do not know whether any of these candidates were elected. I can only hope not. But their views suggest that the establishment of and review of candidate qualifications are really necessary. Perhaps, one might think, the appointive method might be better. This hinges on the nature of the appointing official, usually the state governor, or in practical terms the person charged with handling his appointments. And there is no way of ensuring that this individual will be thoughtful and perspicacious in reviewing the credentials of potential trustees. In my experience, the general quality of board appointments has been surprisingly good, but there have been disruptive exceptions and it only takes one or two bad choices to make a board chaotic and preoccupied with its own internal problems as opposed to serving the institution. I know of the appointment of senile persons and cases in which nonresidents of a state requiring residency were embarrassed by having to be removed after they had been seated. It is not uncommon for people with little or no college education and no informative connection with the institution to be appointed, often

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because of financial contributions to a successful politician’s campaign or for service to a political party. Although it is possible to educate oneself in general and to learn the intricacies of university cultures while having no association with one, it is clearly easier from the board and administration perspective if the new members already have some understanding of these matters. And there is always the governor who has an antipathy toward a president and decides to load a board with people who will fire him or her, regardless of the quality of the board members or the president, for example, Governor Ronald Reagan’s deposing of Clark Kerr at the University of California. I have always loved Dr. Kerr’s comment in, I believe, his last speech to the faculty, when he said he left the presidency the same way he came to it, “fired with enthusiasm!” In more recent times, Michigan State has lost at least one and possibly two very competent presidents because of trustee interference with alumni and intercollegiate athletic matters, and I know of several similar examples. The lack of systematic review of trustee qualifications in any state, so far as I know, and the absence of recommended qualifications have probably led to the appointment and election of individuals who have harmed rather than helped their universities. In other areas of importance to the states and the nation, there are established review procedures. The American Bar Association reviews candidates for judgeships, and the American Medical Association examines potential appointees to a variety of positions, including surgeon general of the United States, for example. Already existing organizations could perform this vetting function for appointing and electing authorities for potential trustees, for example, the Association of Governing Boards, whose purposes include informing trustees, helping boards evaluate presidencies and conduct presidential searches, and rewarding especially excellent service by trustees. It is a solidly established organization with a history of sound service, which is recognized by all the professional associations such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, the American Council on Education, and most private associations of colleges and universities, such as the Association of American Universities. And this is but one possibility. The American Council on Education, which is the umbrella organization for higher organization, would also be capable of providing such a service. As I have already mentioned, public presidents do not play a sigmficant role in choosing trustees. In over twenty-one years as a public pres-

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ident I never knew the identity of a new trustee until I either read it in the newspaper or received a courtesy call from the governor’s office. But it seems to me that if the goals of higher education, particularly public higher education, are as I have tried to articulate them in this book, then appointing authorities are missing an important opportunity by not seeking presidential advice prior to appointing trustees. I do not advocate veto power for presidents in this matter, nor do I think it is acceptable for presidents to try to influence the appointments of friends and known supporters. But presidents, especially ones with some experience on the job, understand their institutions and the higher education establishment better than anyone else, I think, and certainly better than most political appointing authorities. I do not see any direct role for presidents in the public election of trustees. But in choices by election and by appointment, there is an important consulting role for presidents, which could consist in outlining and reviewing the qualifications for trusteeship in general, and then in serving on one of the evaluating panels that might be established to review confidentially lists of possible candidates for institutions other than their own. There are thirteen universities in Ohio. A rotating panel of five presidents could accomplish these nonbinding confidential evaluations easily, and this could be a model for at least the larger states and systems. What might a list of qualifications for serving as a trustee include? As a president for twenty-one years, I know what I looked for in my board members, and I know my presidential acquaintances and friends had similar views. Intelligence and self-control are paramount, and discretion, objectivity, and honesty equally so. A reputation for integrity and respect in their own communities and a position of some influence in those communities are very helpful. A board in general should have expertise from a variety of sectors represented in its membership, particularly in professional areas included in the university’s curriculum. Business knowledge of a high level is indispensable, an awareness of state and national politics and acquaintance with officeholders are helpful, and entree to corporate and financial boards is prized for obvious reasons. The absence of a personal agenda, particularly if it is directed at an individual, is critical. Trustees should understand the critical differences between business operations in the commercial world and the peculiar institutions called universities, which do not produce a uniform product, are not in the world to make a product, and in some ways must run counter to the methods business efficiency would dictate. Basic research, for example, is not cost-effective unless a commercially viable product is discovered almost

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immediately. How could one cost out the theory of relativity? They need to understand the governance structures of their institutions and why these structures have evolved. They need to understand their function: to establish policy for the university. But the president must have their delegated authority to manage the institution within those policies, and they must be willing to respect that very essential division of authority. Most of the members of a board, but not necessarily all, should have some connection with the university, such as being a graduate, holding an honorary degree, or having children who attended the school. There should be geographical representation on a state basis, trustees should have no holdings in businesses contracting with the university, and their personal financial dealings should be without blemish. Trustees should have a judicious reputation and be able to listen well and investigate issues with patience. They must be able to give the required time and be nonpartisan in their approach to the university’s affairs. A sense of humor is indispensable as is the ability to communicate effectively and in a nonthreatening manner. A trustee should come to the position with the view that the president is honest, competent, intelligent, and deserving of the trustee’s support, unless that judgment has been disproved before the appointment. Nothing can destroy a board, and a president, faster than trustees who come to their appointments with an agenda based on personal or political prejudice. If the trustees cannot come to the initial appointment assuming that the president is someone whom they respect and would enjoy working with, then they should not accept the appointment. I believe that prospective appointees should be closely questioned about this particular matter, since it is so critical to effective board functioning. The question of monetary gifts is perplexing. Ideally, if a donor has the necessary qualifications and has also made a significant gift, I can see no problem in the private sphere, where this is quite common. In the public sphere, assuming that the prospective appointee has the qualifications, I think it would be prudent to arrange that the donor’s gift not be given until sometime after the appointment. But if the donor who is seeking appointment does not meet the qualifications, say, if he has the intention of firing a coach or the president, then I believe both the gift and the appointment should not be approved, either in the public or the private sector. Father Timothy Healy, formerly president of Georgetown and the New York Public Library, once said to me that people expected presidents to be “God on a good day.” Sadly, Father Tim, of whom I was very fond, is gone now, but his words still ring true. If presidents should be godlike,

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then how much more so the people for whom they work-the trustees? They should at least have the sorts of qualifications I have suggested, and there ought to be mechanisms for determining this before the fact. As of this moment, there aren't any. Surely it is clear that appointing trustees simply because of political contributions or financial support of politicians, or electing them without the chance to scrutinize their qualifications carefully, is not on its face as careful and objective a procedure as requiring some sort of professional review of those qualifications by some well-informed and professional body such as the Association of Governing Boards. These are important, influential positions, and if only for reasons of prudence those who hold them should be well suited to the task. The issue is not merely prudential in the narrow sense, it is moral as well. We are dealing with the future of our young people, the training of our doctors and scientists and teachers, our lawyers, engineers, and technicians. We are dealing with the well-being of society at large over the short and the long run. And this is surely a morally relevant set of questions and issues, for all the reasons I have tried to lay out earlier in this book.

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n this book I have tried to illustrate the sorts of moral decisions presidents and trustees face in the context of their respective responsibilities to their universities. For the most part, I’ve used a sort of “case method” approach, using actual examples to bring out the factual contexts as well as the ethical dilemmas, particularly as they concern presidents. As noted in the beginning of the book, the principles relevant to the decision malung of presidents and trustees do not differ from the ones concerning us all because moral principles are universal. But the contexts in which presidents must make moral decisions, as well as the constituencies affected by the consequences, are unique and sometimes critically important. These contexts are indefinitely large in number and are constantly changing. The twentieth century forced troubling and portentous matters onto the agenda facing trustees and presidents. Many of these, although new in context, force us to confront ourselves with some of the oldest philosophical questions humankind has asked, for example, What is a human being? Is life intrinsically valuable, or is it quality of life that matters? Is it permissible to use life to save or improve other life?and so forth. As I write these words, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill outlawing the use of cloning techniques to produce human embryos for any purpose, including research, and the president of the United States today announced his total opposition to the procedure. The Senate is supposed to consider the matter in the near future. Yet to my mind at least, the debate has not been at all clear; it has been highly emotional in tone, and the issues have

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not been accurately presented to the public. Forty Nobel laureates recently signed a letter urging approval of cloning for medical purposes. Is this a debate in which university presidents should join? The stakes are enormous, especially for those suffering from injuries and diseases that might be helped through the use of stem cells. I believe that because of the principle that we ought to lessen human pain and suffering whenever that is possible, presidents have an obligation to join the discussion, at least indirectly, through encouraging faculty experts to write about and speak about the questions involved-philosophical, scientific, psychological, and medical. I know this is a controversial stand to take, especially since the whole matter cannot be divorced from other greatly divisive issues such as abortion. But the presidency is a very visible and influential pulpit if used with dignity and discretion. Where can our society find a better qualified locus for the consideration of such critical matters than our universities? Because of the horrors of September 11, authorities are pressuring for more investigative powers. Should universities agree to provide personal information about students and employees to the federal government for investigative purposes, when no formal charges have been laid? If individuals have moral as well as legal rights to privacy, then abrogating these rights, unless there is an overriding reason to do so, would surely be immoral. The current effort to combat terrorism might seem to provide such a reason, namely, that the safety of the nation outweighs the individual’s right to privacy. But there are important unanswered questions. What level of surveillance ought to be permitted on our campuses? Opening private mail? Just e-mail? Gathering information about someone’s sex life? Eavesdropping on private conversations without a warrant? Searching personal medical files? Again, these matters have not been discussed openly and in thoughtful and objective ways by people qualified to forecast the legal, moral, and social consequences of the proposed changes. I believe universities are an appropriate locus for such investigation, and I urge this on today’s college presidents and trustees. Presidents should seek opportunities to testlfy before state and federal committees, speak about these issues before service clubs and other public groups, and invite qualified individuals to our campuses to engage in discussion. I am not opposed to measures that would make the apprehension of terrorists and other criminals more likely. But I worry lest the trauma of terrible tragedy cause us to adopt measures without adequate deliberation. Should we permit research into the deadly properties of chemical and biological substances that could be used in war? But what if that same re-

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search enables us to combat the effects of toxins spread accidentally or naturally, or to defend ourselves from attack?And what of the moral principle enjoining us to protect freedom of inquiry and combat ignorance through sharing the results of our studies? Is it acceptable to seek Defense Department grants if we know that the results might be used to advance nuclear weapons technology, even if the same work can make nuclear reactors safer? In the age of the computer, I do not believe that dangerous knowledge can be permanently withheld from those who might use it immorally, nor do 1 believe that research into deadly subjects can any longer be suppressed, even in totalitarian states. On the news wires today it was announced that the detailed design specifications for Britain’s World War I1 atomic bomb had been published on the Internet! If “ought” implies “can,”as Kant taught, then we therefore have no obligations to withhold or suppress knowledge. But we do have an obligation to do what we can to ensure that, to the extent possible, the technical ability to apply such dangerous knowledge is controlled. Recent anthrax scares in this country and the discovery of plans for the design of fission weapons in Afghani caves underline the moral necessity of this attitude. I believe that since so much potentially threatening research is done at universities, presidents ought to urge scientists and policy makers to develop university-based protocols for the control and dissemination of transfer technology, and to do this in cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies. Our planet is already very crowded. Should we continue to invest billions in making it possible for humans, or some humans, to live for more than a century? Or should we instead be studying how to change our laws, clanfy our moral thinking, and develop the means to die with little or no physical or psychological pain and suffering, and make dying, if not pleasant, then at least an experience we do not fear so much? Which of these proposals is more consistent with the moral principle that one ought not cause unnecessary human death, pain, and suffering?I suggest the second is, and if this is correct, then there are ramifications for educational and medical policy making at all universities with or without health care programs, with concomitant implications for presidential leadership. According to many sources, the fastest growing segment of our population is the over-sixty cohort, and this has negative ramifkations domestically and internationally of enormous consequence. This is a set of moral issues that will become acutely important very quickly. Oregon has adopted an assisted suicide law, and so has the Netherlands. Should universities develop policies for assisted dying if patients choose

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this? Should we educate the public and our students about the consequences of population distribution, and should we research psychological and pharmaceutical issues that might lead us to easier dying when recovery is not an option? I believe we should, and I believe there is an important educative role for presidents in this area. Indeed, I think this and the other issues I have addressed so briefly in this volume are of sufficient import to warrant university-based commissions of presidents dedicated to popularizing and explaining their critical importance to our future, and indeed the future of the world. The earth's forests continue to be depleted at alarming rates. The depletion is most rapid in the poorest countries of the world. Pollution from internal combustion petroleum-burning engines and from other sources of industrial degradation continues to foul the air and deplete vegetation on a global scale. Do we have the moral authority to bring a forced conclusion to this environmental disaster? We certainly don't have the legal authority in other countries, but if there were reason to believe that at a certain point of depletion, coupled with other sources of pollution, the atmosphere could no longer sustain life, would we have a moral obligation to take the necessary technical steps to save human life? It seems to me that we would, and that universities would be an essential part of the process leading up to these formidable actions. Should we be teaching and advocating such viewpoints now? I think so, and not just in environmentally focused science classes. Regardless of your view of the present state of global warming, the preponderant view of the scientific c o m u nity is that such a phenomenon is occurring, and I think we ignore it at our peril. But even if we leave that issue aside, there are so many other reasons to take measures to lower carbon dioxide and other emissions that I think we still have an obligation, a moral one, to pursue solutions. We already have the technology to do so, and there is money to be made in the effort. What of our obligations (if any) to present, defend, and illustrate the basic values of our moral beliefs? It is popular and always has been to question the objectivity of moral and indeed of any value judgments, but it seems to me that there are certain fundamental principles, of the nature of axioms or given truths, that are shared by virtually all human beings and without which it is not possible to maintain even the most primitive of societies. One of these, perhaps the most basic one, I have used throughout this book: it is wrong to cause unnecessary human death, pain, and suffering. I contend that even groups that are diametrically opposed to one another in morally relevant and highly emotional contexts would adhere to this principle. What separates them is not this moral

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principle, but the facts concerning the contexts in which it applies. When is suffering and death “necessary”?And who, or what groups, constitute legitimate “targets” for the imposition of suffering and death deemed to be necessary? Will the imposition of death and suffering on innocents lead to the redress of perceived or real wrongs? Is the perceived possibility of personal reward ever a justified motive for harming others? Is the existence and function of religion in the world a help or a hindrance to the implementation of this basic principle? Should these controversial topics be required in our curricula? I believe they should be, and as general university requirements, because unless they are, we will never achieve clear thinking by our graduates about the exquisitely intertwined and complex moral issues involved in today’s world. If this is true, then surely presidents have a moral obligation to lead our institutions of higher education in such directions, regardless of controversy or offending feeling. I believe that presidents have a moral obligation to ensure that such thought-provoking subjects are explored in the curricula of our colleges and universities, and that they have a moral obligation to present such challenges personally, through speeches and writings targeted at faculty, students, and the general public. Obviously a president who is not a biologist is not normally competent to teach biology in a course about the degradation of forests in poor countries. But he might well have an obligation to use the suasive force of his office and personality to ensure that such a course is added to the curriculum, even if another less important course has to be dropped. I believe that this obligation rests on other, supervenient moral principles, among them the obligation to combat ignorance, to reduce human suffering, and to keep our implicit and explicit promises to provide the best education we can to our various constituencies. To be a genuine leader, it is not enough to be a quiet, efficient administrator. The presidency is, as Theodore Roosevelt said, “a bully pulpit,” even the presidency of universities. We have a moral obligation to use it for the greater good. This carries risks, but so does everything except the hidden acceptance of the status quo. N o significant university president is ever remembered with admiration because nothing happened during his or her tenure. The theses I advance cannot be supported unless one agrees with the unspoken assumption that virtually all the activities we take in our universities are value laden. I believe it was Brand Blanshard who noted that all the structure of human invention has no meaning except in the context of serving human values. Without the values, instrumental and intrinsic, the structure has no meaning. The most important and the most fundamental of these values is moral value, for without it, the rest

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of the structure is without purpose and direction. This is as true in the microsystem of our universities as it is in the global interweaving of communications. Our universities are critically important because tomorrow’s leaders will mostly be developed there, and how we influence them will make that world better or worse. And that is why university presidents cannot and should not avoid the moral issues confronting them. It is also why they need to be clear about the moral principles to which they adhere, and about how these principles justify the actions they take. That is what this short book is all about.

Part Two

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Congratulations! Now What? Advice for New Presidents Jon C. Straws

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n a whimsical article in the fall 1994 V I Journal,’ my wife Jean described seven rules for being a college president’s wife, which he learned during our “three thousand, three hundred, and seventy-nine days” in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute president’s house. A similar format might serve to share lessons I learned, often the hard way, about the modern college presidency during those same days as president of WPI . There are few things in this life that are as frustrating, yet as gratifying, as the modern college presidency. At the same time that you are criticized by the students for not responding to their latest demands, damned by the faculty for not recognizing their proper role in the scheme of things, chided by the alumni for trying to change their alma mater, and chastised by the trustees for not being able to bring these constituencies together, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are making a difference. The personal identification with the institution is intense, and the psychic rewards of success are commensurate. Unfortunately, you may be one of only a very few who recognize the success. My comments here make no pretense of completeness; rather, they touch lightly on various aspects of the presidency that, from my experience and that of other colleagues, present interesting challenges. Most new college presidents are destined to determine which issues are most relevant to their presidencies the hard way. It can’t hurt, however, to be forewarned. 123

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GET YOUR UNDERSTANDINGS IN WRITING New college presidents often are surprised to find that their constituencies’ expectations of them seem to have changed since the “courtship” period. Offer letters generally are very specific about title, salary, benefits, and perquisites, but often are silent on such issues as the president’s latitude to change key staff, renovate the president’s house, define the role of the president’s spouse, and carry out the many other initiatives discussed with such passion during the recruitment process. Perhaps the single most important initial understanding, and yet the most difficult to quantfy, is the manner in which the president and trustees will work together and how much and what sort of support will be there when needed. All too many search committees and boards hire presidents for their scholarly credentials, their educational ideas, their energy, and their leadership, and then are surprised when the chosen candidates attempt to exercise those attributes.

THE PRESIDENTIAL HOUSE CAN BE DEADLY! The history of the college presidency is rife with examples of presidencies that have foundered over issues related to the president’s house. If at all possible, the trustees should make any agreed-upon improvements before the new president is in place and should establish a budget, shared with the campus leadership, for furniture, renovations, maintenance, and staffing. It should be enough that institutions believe they are doing presidents a favor by requiring them to live in overly large, very public places in which they can’t share in real estate appreciation. But, to then expose the president and the president’s family to public criticism for the trustees’ decisions compounds the problem. Institutions should consider carefully whether they truly need such a facility, and, if so, whether it is necessary for the president to live there.

YOUR SPOUSE’S ROLE DESERVES RECOGNITION Most institutions undervalue the many contributions of the presidential spouse. He or she is expected to host the many presidential events and even such other events as faculty spouses’ teas, play a leadership role in community affairs, pursue a professional career or personal interests, and, often, raise a family-all in a very public environment.

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Periodically, active spouses argue that they should have formal job descriptions and receive appropriate compensation. A number of boards have tried to respond to these concerns, but often by assigning a portion of the president’s compensation to the spouse. While compensation would be nice, the principal issues are recognition and respect. Most presidential spouses simply don’t want to be taken for granted. Formal recognition of the presidential spouse as a member of the institutional leadership team would help.

ENJOYTHE HONEYMOON! For all the jokes about the presidential honeymoon, it is very real. During this initial six- to 18-month period, the new president has extraordinary latitude to establish new patterns of communication and new ways of doing things. Of course, the honeymoon period will be a lot shorter if the various institutional constituencies perceive that the new president is taking inappropriate advantage of this latitude. The important thing here is to recognize the latitude and employ it consciously for the long-term benefit of both the presidency and the institution.

WATCH OUT FOR HOW-TO BOOKS Another potential pitfall is the plethora of how-to books, full of homilies and advice (such as that presented here), that are written by former college presidents. The problem, in my experience, is less the advice itself than who knows you are following it. Many new college presidents have been surprised to find that the grapevine has alerted the campus, particularly the faculty, to which book the president is reading and, consequently, to the recommended behavior patterns and emphases. This typically is not a deal breaker, but it can be very embarrassing to be second-guessed, if not lampooned, for following advice that looked pretty good on paper.

THE COMMON WISDOM IS PRETTY GOOD In addition to advice from how-to books, the new college president typically is subjected to all sorts of well-intentioned commentary from presidential colleagues and organized seminars conducted by ACE, NAICU, and other presidential organizations. I was, as suspect were most of my

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colleagues, initially surprised at the negative character of much of this advice. We were warned of the favorite ploys of the various constituencies and were told how to deflect criticism and provide leadership to these hostile, self-serving hordes. Our typical reaction was something like: “Not me; I’ve been a faculty member all my life. These are my colleagues. I understand them and they respect me. Moreover, the trustees are fme, well-meaning people who look forward to joining forces with me in leading our institution to greater excellence.” Eighteen months or so later, our retrospective reaction to that advice is akin to that when we realized how smart our parents became in those five years between when we were 16 and when we turned 21. We may have been faculty members all our adult lives and the trustees may well be fine, well-meaning folks, but that does not mean either of these groups respects our opinions or our leadership. And, this is before considering students, staff, alumni, or neighbors.

IT’S LONELY AT THE TOP The primary reason for all the presidential organizations and meetings is not to share hard-earned wisdom; rather, it is to have someone besides your spouse with whom to share frustrations. The trustee leadership can be helpful here, but a number of presidents have found some of their shared confidences coming back to “bite” them. Perhaps the best available advice in this regard is found in that phrase generally attributed to Disraeli: “Never complain and never explain.”

IT’S DIFFICULT TO BE THE SOB DOWN THE HALL! When I was vice president at USC and Pennsylvania, I prided myself on how well I got on with the various constituencies despite the fact that I was responsible for the administrative, financial, and plant services about which they often complained. As I began to encounter relationship difficulties at WPI, I realized that I had previously deflected criticism, if not curried favor, with statements like: “I’d love to help you, but that SOB down the hall won’t let me.” It is a shock to new presidents to realize that they have become “that SOB down the hall.” Public sector presidents have demonstrated some success in deflecting anger and blame to governors and state legislators (where it probably is often well-deserved), but to do so to private sector trustees, particu-

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larly without their prior agreement, typically is not healthy for one’s presidential career.

KEEP PUSHING AGAINST THE TREE A number of presidents have found comforting the image of the presi-

dency as a force pushing against an almost immovable object. This is not to say that you are, or need to be, the irresistible force; just that you should not expect easy movement on anything. Many presidents have found that perseverance is behind at least 90 percent of ultimate success. One caveat: When the “tree” does fall, make certain that you’re not underneath it. While it may be symbolically attractive to martyr one’s career for the good of the institution, it’s neither becoming nor practical.

THE PRESIDENT MUST LEAD In one of his many books, former University of Cincinnati President Warren Bennis notes: “Managersdo things right; leaders do the right things!”2 Former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner, however, expresses discomfort at the notion of any necessary incompatibility between these qualities, and proposes instead six distinguishing characteristics of a leadedmanager: They think longer term, look beyond the unit they are heading and gauge its relationship to larger realities; reach and influence constituents beyond their jurisdiction; put heavy emphasis on the intangibles of vision, values, and motivations; have the political skills to cope with the conflicting requirements of multiple constituencies; and think in terms of renewaL3 Whether called leader or leadedmanager, the main point should be clear. The president’s primary role is to provide leadership and that will not necessarily manifest itself in the popular conceptual model of “being out front on a white horse.” In fact, given the idiosyncrasies of the academic culture, to be perceived as being out front may almost guarantee failure. But, it is the experience of most successful college presidents that conscious attention to Gardner’s six characteristics of leadership will pay big dividends. The style, however, must be your own and must reflect the needs, aspirations, and expectations of your institution. Many have suffered needless embarrassment and frustration by moving quickly before understanding fully the particular characteristics and cultures of their new institutions.

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Many new to the leadership role fall into the trap of working so hard to “listen”that they do not “hear”what is important to their potential followers. A leader without followers gets very lonely. Leadership, particularly in a collegial environment, requires trust, and trust is best built through learning about and satisfying the needs of the followers. Ronald Reagan often is credited with another helpful perspective on leadership: “You can get a lot more done if you don’t care who gets the credit.” The key here is to articulate a common vision for the institution, one with which most constituencies and individuals can identlfy, and even claim as their own, but which, taken as a whole, moves the institution forward in the accomplishment of its mission.

”IF IT AIN’T BROKE. ..” Often, in their haste to leave their leadership mark, new leaders appear to favor the motto: “If it isn’t perfect, make it better!” While this may be personally satisfying, there are times when it is better to fall back on the old standby: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Conservatism and resistance to change are endemic in higher education. When leaders do advocate change, it is important to start with the highest priority issues. It is also the case that leadership is very much the “art of the possible.” While presidents can hope to influence an institution for the better during their tenure, the likelihood of Fisher’s “transformational ~ h a n g e to ”~ which so many aspire is low, if not nil. Far better to help the institution set realistic, attainable goals and to share in the excitement of success than to try to force the institution to go where it cannot.

WHEN SPEAKING IN PUBLIC, KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE The college president is called upon to deliver innumerable welcomes, pep talks, state-of-the-institution messages, and other addresses to audiences ranging from students, visiting committees, faculty, and trustees, to the media and alumni. It was during a talk to an alumni audience that I learned most graphically the importance of tailoring the delivery to the audience. When Jean was pregnant, the two of us were introduced to an audience by a speaker who ended his remarks by noting that I would be the only standing president in WPI’s history to have a child while in office. Completely forgetting both the age and the conservative New England

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heritage of my audience, I looked at Jean and blurted out: “Obviously,I wasn’t standing all the time.” There was a very long pause, and then shocked whispers swept through the audience. While the evening ultimately turned out all right, I vowed to be much more careful with offhand remarks in the future.

DEVELOPMENT CAN BE FUN! Given the scholarly backgrounds of most college presidents, many, at least initially, view asking others for support as an unnatural act, no matter how fervently they believe in the cause. One soon finds, however, that there is wisdom in that old saw about it being better to give than to receive. In saying that, I am not encouraging college presidents to go around lecturing potential donors on the benefits of sacrificial philanthropy. Rather, I am suggesting that you should focus on what’s in it for them. Properly presented, charitable support for an institution can be viewed as an investment for which there will be a return. The “investment” may be conceptual and the “return” not denominated in dollars, but both are very real nevertheless. Nothing I did in my more than nine years as a college president was more gratlfying than the complete follow-through on major gifts, from interesting potential donors in the concept, through the development of the investmentheturn notion, to the commitment, and then to the donors’ continuing interest and gratification in the success of their gift. Handled properly, the donor’s identification with the project’s success is very personal and the returnspsychic, rather than monetary-are very real. Moreover, the resulting satisfaction encourages repeat business, which is why current donors are the best future prospects.

COMMUNITY SERVICE CAN BE CONSUMING In the process of working with community leaders and neighbors to lobby for special treatment, ask for support, avoid PILOTS (payments in lieu of taxes), and/or apologize for the obstreperous behavior of students, most presidents soon find themselves called upon to become involved in community activities. From United Way activities, to neighborhood cleanups, to board service on hospitals and community organizations, unwary presidents can find their time consumed by community activities. This service

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can be very gratifying, but the short-term character of many community activities can be frustrating. Community leaders have an understandable tendency to seek a short-term, high-publicity payoff, which seldom matches well with institutional schedules or goals for cooperative ventures. The board leadership can be very helpful here in helping target one’s efforts for maximum effectiveness.

TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE One things that most college presidents learn the hard way is to stick with what has worked. After all, you were selected to be a college president based on a career’s worth of accomplishments, and those accomplishments were due in no small measure to your personal style. Of course, if you have been primanly an academic, the demands of the presidency will require you to respond to external needs as the institution’s leader and spokesperson. But many new college presidents have found that when they try to be something or someone they aren’t, they fail miserably. The analogy that choosing a president is similar to selecting a marriage partner should not be lost on search committees and trustees. While there is every reason to expect continuous improvement and adaptation to the demands of the job, critics should not plan on reforming basic personality traits. It is not fair to the individual and it certainly is not good for the institution. Some boards are proud of their subtlety in this regardthey retain “coaches” to help recast their president’s style and image. With the right personal chemistry between coach and “coached,” this may work, but it may send a signal to the community that the board believes something is broken and needs to be fixed.

THE BOARD MATTERS! Through their own accomplishments and their corporate, institutional, and societal involvements, trustees can be enormously helpful in promoting the institutional recognition that is so important to everything else. This is particularly true in developing philanthropy and public support. But for trustees to be truly effective, they must believe the institutional message before they repeat it. While this is easy to speak and write about in the abstract, it can be enormously challenging to actually accomplish.

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For all the good that individual trustees can do for the institution, their collective actions as a board can be surprising. Many college presidents view board meetings with excitement, but also with more than a little trepidation. The “downside risk of some incident getting blown out of proportion and even acted upon can be far greater than the “upside gain” of the board acting in concert to do something unexpectedly positive. War stories abound. The more successful college presidents learn not to ask questions to which they might get the wrong answer. (Which may well be another version of the notion: “It is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.”) There are a number of guidelines for trustees, but I found the following list of four board functions to be most descriptive: Hire and fire the president; Oversee corporate, particularly fiduciary, matters; Perpetuate the board; and Develop the institution. Of these, I always praised the WPI Board on its perspicacity with respect to the first (at least the first half of the first), but stressed the last ( i e , development). This includes personal giving, of course, but mainly it involves making connections and building recognition. Many college presidents, myself included, find they spend much more time and effort in identifying, recruiting, and developing trustees than they expected they would. In fact, I found this was one area in which I could influence institutional outcomes most rapidly. Consequently, I devoted significant time and energy and took pride in the resulting success.

TRUSTEES ARE FOREVER Trustees are powerful people, but they are human and they have long memories. When you make a decision with which they disagree, they may respect your judgment on a professional level, but resent it on a personal level. Many college presidents have found these personal feelings coming back many years later, long after the original issue has been forgotten. While I am not suggesting that presidents look continually over their shoulders or second-guess their own judgment, they should be conscious of the long-term implications of certain actions. It is not sufficient to be “right,”and it certady isn’t wise to advertise it!

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My own initiation to this phenomenon came even before the start of my presidency at WPI. I did not follow to the letter what I thought to be “friendly” advice from a trustee about how to introduce myself to the community. This trustee thought that his advice was tantamount to an order. His negativism ultimately was discredited, but not before doing sigmficant damage to the community’s perception of my leadership and my presidency. In retrospect, I should have been more politic with both this individual and his fellows.

BEING ALARMING ISN’T NECESSARILY BEING ALARMIST In the current climate for higher education, presidents must be agents for change in helping their institutions adapt to rapidly changing external conditions. Unfortunately, the inertia of higher education being what it is, one of the biggest problems is getting folks’ attention, and to do so, presidents often must describe the dire consequences of inaction in alarming terms. In the process, they may acquire the title of “Chicken Little” or be accused of “crying wolf” when these alarming statements are interpreted as alarmist. Any number of such situations developed during my tenure at WPI over issues ranging from the projected imbalance of next year’s budget, to the rising admittance rate, to the increasing tenure percentage. Obviously, the president must tread a very narrow line here, and it is important that the trustees provide assistance in assessing the degree of external risk and then in supporting the credibility of the alarm raised by the president.

EXPERIENCE HELPS, BUT BAGGAGE ACCUMULATES Many aspects of the presidency improve with experience and with the personal relationships that the president develops with hundreds, if not thousands, of representatives from various constituencies. However, time is not always an ally. In the process of being “theSOB down the hall,”the president invariably says no a lot. The president also says yes a lot, but human nature being what it is, a “yes”typically is interpreted as reflecting the justifiable worth of the proposal. A “no,”on the other hand, is interpreted as a rejection. Given the longevity of the tenured faculty40 say nothing of the long memories-it is not long before those rejections begin to accumulate. And, as they do, it becomes more and more difficult

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to provide leadership to an increasingly alienated, yet very important, faculty constituency. If any one phenomenon can explain the relatively short average tenure of the modem college presidency, it is this. As my presidency progressed, this baggage accumulation manifested itself in an interesting way. It was not a day-today phenomenon. Rather, as incidents developed, whether over the more predictable budget or enrollment issues, or over more singular planning priorities, the tolerance of the system lessened. Such phrases as “lack of trust” became more common, and this climate became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately, when it was not possible for me to marshal support to improve widely acknowledged flaws in the marketing of the institution, it became clear to me that my presence was hindering, rather than promoting, institutional development. That was a sobering realization.

WHEN IT’S OVER, IT’S OVER! Donald Walker, the former president of Southeastern Massachusetts University, is fond of retelling this story: The departing president takes the new candidate aside at the inauguration and comments on three envelopes that have been left in the president’s desk to be opened successively in response to the first three crises of the new presidency. The new president, as is typical of new presidents, is confident there will be no crises but leaves the envelopes in place, just in case. Wouldn’t you know, after six months, the faculty are up in arms (probably about parking!) and the new president opens the first envelope to find the message: Blame me/, which he proceeds to do. The faculty, being faculty, are ready to believe anything of the former president, of whom they had grown very tired. They accept the excuse and the crisis passes. After another six months, the new president, now feeling somewhat less new, encounters the second crisis, this time with the trustees. The second envelope contains the advice: Blame thefaculty! The trustees, being trustees, find that eminently understandable and the crisis passes. But, before long the third crisis occurs, and this time the third envelope yields the advice: Prepare three envelopes!

Well, that’s it! Some lessons learned, some just experienced, and some, no doubt, ignored. But, no one said it would be easy. There are, after all, many more aspirants for these strange and wonderful jobs than can be accommodated, despite the short tenure. A natural question about a nine-plus-year college presidency was whether it involved nine years of experience or one year’s experience,

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nine times. The fact that so many things repeated (parking issues, for example) may suggest the latter, but then again it may just confirm, as presented so poignantly in the movie “Groundhog Day,” that vexing issues need to be addressed again and again until they are resolved. Perhaps that is the real lesson!

1. Strauss, J. A. “Three Thousand, Three Hundred and Seventy-nine Days at One Drury Lane,’’ W ZJournaZ, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, Fall 1994. 2. Bennis, W. G. On Becoming a Leader. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989. 3. Gardner, J. W. On Leadership. New York: Free Press, 1989. 4. Fisher, James L. Power of the Presidency. New York: American Council on EducatiodMacMillan Publishing Company, 1984.

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Confessions of a Public University Refugee John A. DiBiaggio, Steven B. Sample, and Gordon A. Haaland

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t’s as though I’d died and gone to heaven. That’s the response each of

us has given (or been tempted to give) when we’re asked to compare our previous jobs with our current ones. As former presidents of public universities who left to head private institutions, we’ve given a lot of thought to the differences between the two realms. While some of the distinctions are fairly obvious, the most significant are not so readily apparent to outside observers. In particular, it may come as a surprise that, for presidents, the differences between public and private governing boards are among the most profound and have the most far-reaching effects. But before we address the differences among boards, it may be useful to point out how the institutions themselves differ. To start with the most visible differences: Private universities tend to be smaller than their public counterparts and usually enjoy better studentfaculty ratios. Moreover, private institutions generally have the privilege of selecting students who are all very competitive, which means the band from which the students are selected is far narrower than it would be in a public institution. This is a major advantage to faculty at private institutions who are then freed from the challenge of trying to teach students in the same class whose precollege preparation ranges from excellent to marginal. Private universities derive the majority of their support from student tuition, endowment, and private fund-raising. Public universities rely heavily on state appropriations, although public and private research

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universities both receive substantial amounts in grants and contracts from the federal government. State support for private institutions is very limited and tends to be restricted to specialized programs or student aid. One major result of the different funding sources is that state politics are of peripheral importance to presidents at private institutions. A private university or college president does not need to have regular and intense contacts with the governor and the legislature of his or her state. In contrast, public university presidents almost always are closely involved in their state’s political process, since they must contend with other powerful interests and organizations to receive a share of limited state resources. On the other hand, presidents of private institutions may have to work extremely hard to raise sums from private sources equal to the state appropriations their public-institution counterparts receive. The fund-raising hours can become very long, and the pressure can be intense. There are other less obvious differences between heading a public or private institution. First, decision making is generally faster and easier at private institutions, and presidents there have greater freedom to invest in good ideas. Such presidents also can make personnel decisions much more quickly and flexibly because private institutions do not have to worry about cumbersome civil-service laws, which sometimes make it all but impossible to promote the worthy or fire the incompetent. In addition, presidents of public institutions generally have less privacy than the men and women who head private colleges and universities. Public university presidents almost always are public figures, in some states subject to almost as much public exposure and scrutiny as the governor. Lack of privacy is not nearly so large an issue for private university presidents. In Massachusetts, for example, which claims almost 60 colleges and universities in the metropolitan Boston area, no president, no matter how prestigious the institution, is likely to be recognized by anyone other than alumni or friends. The lack of privacy also means that a public university president often has much less control of his or her personal time than does the head of a private institution. The job is equally time consuming, but the private institution president can exercise greater strategic control. The budget process at a private institution is far more streamlined than in a public university. Public universities must begin to prepare their budgets 18 to 24 months in advance of their approval by state government. This is necessary because most public higher education budgets

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must be (1) approved by the board of trustees, (2) submitted to the governor’s office, and (3) forwarded to the legislature as part of an overall state budget. Furthermore, the budget for a public university may not be approved until late in the summer of the academic year. This makes planning very difficult, particularly tuition-setting and funding for new programs. In the private sector, on the other hand, the budget process can be completed the year before the funds are to be used. Thus, decisions about the price of tuition can be made when information is available on enrollments and other sources of funding. This allows for far greater flexibility and better planning.

THE BOARD CAN BE THE PROBLEM While the differences discussed so far are important, all three of us agree that the most significant difference between public and private institutions is the nature of the boards of trustees. Indeed, the character of the board of trustees may be the single biggest reason many presidents leave their positions at public institutions. In our experience, it generally is easier for presidents and others to work with boards of private institutions. That is, private boards generally are more cohesive, proceed with greater civility, and are better advocates for their institutions than public institution boards. This difference stems from several factors: 1 . Board members of public universities either are appointed by governors, sometimes with legislative approval, or are elected statewide. As a result, many individual trustees come to the board with a political agenda or feel compelled to represent a particular constituency. This is not the case for the vast majority of private university or college trustees. They usually are selected by the board itself, with advice and counsel from the president. They consider membership on the board to be an honor and see their role as maintaining and enhancing the quality of the institution. And as a general rule, it is possible to attract people of much greater stature to private boards. 2. Private institutions are not constrained by open-meeting laws, so they can deliberate in private, particularly when they need to discuss sensitive issues. This does not mean that private institutions avoid the sharing of information; it simply means that boards of private institutions can proceed with greater candor and frankness in their deliberations. In addition, at public universities, where all meetings among trustees are

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public, the press has a tendency to focus on disagreements and to encourage controversy and mistrust among members of the governing board. 3. Private university boards tend to be much larger than those ofpublic institutions. It is not uncommon for private institutions to have 30 to 50 board members, whereas boards of public institutions often have fewer than ten. Having a large board, coupled with the absence of the press at board meetings, makes it extremely difficult for one or two trustees to dominate the decision-making process. 4. Private university boards meet f a r less frequently than do public boards. For instance, at Tufts University the board meets only three times a year; most public university boards meet from seven to 12 times a year. At private institutions, executive committees of the board do meet more frequently, but they also have more authority than they might have at a public institution. 5. Public and private university boards place different emphasis on their responsibilities. All boards are charged with carrying out the same fundamental duties. These include the selection and periodic evaluation of the chief executive, policy formulation, accountability, and advocacy and/or fund-raising. Public university boards focus much more on political accountability than is the case at private universities because public board members feel they represent external constituencies. Private university trustees tend to focus more on accountability on behalf of the institution itself. As a consequence, they devote much more of their attention to being advocates for the institution and to generating support for it. Thus, at private universities, the board usually gives a great deal of attention to defining the institution’s vision, developing realistic plans, and holding the president accountable for achieving specific goals. It pays much less attention to the media and the demands of various special-interest groups. 6. A significant percentage of boards ofprivate universities are composed of leading business and professional people who perceive thepresident as a CEO, and not simply as anotherpublic employee. One of the effects of this difference is that private university presidents tend to be compensated more handsomely than their public university counterparts, both in salary and in other benefits. More important, however, is that private boards as a rule refrain from second-guessing their presidents, in sharp contrast with what one sees among so many public universities these days. Most private boards would rather fire the president than constantly undercut him or her.

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LESSONS FOR PUBLIC BOARDS There will, of course, always be significant differences between serving as a president of a public institution and leading a private one. However, our experience suggests that it may be time for public colleges and universities to learn some lessons from their private counterparts. First, we believe public universities should take steps to make their governing boards more like those of private institutions. It would be helpful, for example, to depoliticize the process by which board members are chosen. We suggest that high-level, nonpartisan commissions of experts nominate a range of outstanding, nonpartisan candidates who are people of great stature within their own professional spheres. The governor then would appoint public university board members from among these highly qualified candidates. In addition, the states should consider modlfying their Sunshine laws to allow freer discussions at board meetings and to create an environment for presidential search that does not discourage sitting presidents from becoming candidates. Looking back, all of us are proud of our many years of service in and on behalf of public higher education. It is a noble enterprise that deserves the best leadership America can produce. But in the climate now prevalent in this country, not one of us would want to return to a public presidency.

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An Honor, to a Degree James 0. Freedman

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eremonial occasions provide college presidents with opportunities to emphasize an institution’s values, and no occasions are more potent than commencement ceremonies. In bestowing an honorary degree, a university makes an explicit statement to its students and the world about the qualities of character and attainment it admires most. Thus, the annual ritual now occurring on campuses across the country is a practice rich in opportunity-but it is also ripe for abuse. Honorary degrees have been awarded in the United States from an early date. Some say the first was given in 1692, when Harvard University conferred the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology upon its own president, Increase Mather. Others cite 1753, when Harvard awarded an honorary master’s degree to Benjamin Franklin for “his great improvements in Philosophic Learning, particularly with Respect to Electricity.” Although no reliable count exists, in the aggregate several thousand honorary degrees are conferred every year by the nation’s more than 3,000 colleges and universities. In 11 years as president of Dartmouth College, I had the opportunity to hold up to the graduating students and our commencement guests the lives of more than 90 men and women worthy of emulation, a living tableau of persons from different walks of life, different areas of genius and accomplishment. In choosing honorees, I emphasized intellectual distinction and public service. If Dartmouth was to confer honorary degrees at all, I believed, the reason had to be to celebrate distinguished and sublime achievement.

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Few would deny, however, that at some universities political considerations sometimes influence the selection (or nonselection) of honorarydegree recipients. In 1959, Harvards president, Nathan M. Pusey, received a letter from two eminent members of his faculty, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, calling his attention “to the continuing preference for members of the Republican Party and the near exclusion from such honors of liberal Democrats.” The letter went on: “We note with equal concern the virtually total exclusion of labor leaders.” As Schlesinger and Galbraith suggested, the conferring of honorary degrees has always been one of the ways in which the establishment honors its own. The practice often seems to follow party lines. Brandeis University has, for example, awarded numerous honorary degrees to prime ministers of Israel who were members of the Labor Party; it has yet, to my knowledge, to honor a prime minister who was a member of the Likud. There are, as one might expect, conspicuous instances of omission quite aside from political considerations. A few years before William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the University of Mississippi voted against awarding him an honorary degree. Even after Faulkner received the Nobel Prize, the university never corrected the rejection. Until recent decades, men were the overwhelming, if not exclusive, recipients. Only in 1922 did Dartmouth award its first honorary degree to a woman, the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Harvard was even slower: The first woman to receive its honorary degree was Helen Keller in 1955. During the 19th century, most honorary-degree recipients were Protestant, including many clergymen. Religious restrictions have long since disappeared, but the median age of honorary-degree recipients remains high, probably more than 60 years old. Another practice devalues honorary degrees-and our ideals. Some institutions, on occasion, have engaged in the mass awarding of degrees as a means of celebrating an anniversary and augmenting its pomp and ceremony. Princeton University conferred 81 honorary degrees to mark its 150th anniversary in 1896; Columbia University, in 1929, while commemorating the 175th anniversary of the granting of the original charter to Kings College, named 134 honorees. James Bryce may have had such ceremonies in mind when he tartly observed, in 7;be American Commonwealth (1888), that honorary degrees are sometimes awarded “with a profuseness which seems to argue an exaggerated appreciation of inconspicuous merit.” But not every potential recipient is interested in receiving an honorary degree, creating an occasion for much embarrassment. In 1936, George

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Bernard Shaw made it amply clear that he did not wish to be honored at Harvards 300th anniversary celebration. To an alumnus who proposed his name, Shaw replied: “If Harvard would celebrate its 300th anniversary by burning itself to the ground and sowing its site with salt, the ceremony would give me the greatest satisfaction as an example to all the other famous old corrupters of youth, including Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, etc., etc., etc.” Conversely, over the years certain individuals have not been shy about suggesting themselves for honorary degrees. In 1773, when Dartmouth was four years old, one Oliver Whipple of Portsmouth, N.H., wrote to the college’s founder and first president, Eleazar Wheelock, requesting “the favor” of an honorary degree, noting that he already held a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge and “would gladly become an adopted Son of Yours.” N o record of the president’s response exists, but Whipple did eventually receive a degree. In the course of my presidential years in Hanover, I heard periodically from several persons, including one alumnus who had written several books and served as the president of three universities. Year after year, he brazenly approached me with requests for a degree, always supplying an exhaustive rksumk and fistfuls of adulatory articles. He never was honored. Honorary degrees are, of course, one of the ways in which universities advertise themselves. Most announce the names of their honorees well in advance of commencement, to generate favorable publicity. But the practice can backfire. From time to time, controversies have erupted among faculty members or students (sometimes both) when the names of prospective honorary-degree recipients have been made or become public before the ceremony. A celebrated example involved Oxford University’s proposal, in 1985, to award an honorary degree to its alumna Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. After much contention centering upon her government’s parsimony in the financing of higher education and scientific research, the university faculty turned down the proposal by a vote of 738 to 319. Sometimes, too, campus controversy leads a prospective honoree to withdraw. The novelist Anna Quindlen backed out of a commitment to a prominent Roman Catholic university after she foresaw that the church hierarchy, when it realized that she held a pro-choice position on abortion, would eventually cancel the invitation. Indeed, in 1990 the Vatican blocked the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, from honoring Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee; his statements on abortion, the Vatican said, had caused “a great deal of confusion among the faithful.”

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In 1986, Drew Lewis, the former secretary of transportation, stunned the commencement audience at Haverford College, a Quaker institution, by ripping off his ceremonial hood and declining the honorary degree just bestowed upon him. He acted upon learning that there had been substantial faculty and student opposition to the award because of his role in responding to a controversial strike by air-traffic controllers. He told the audience that he came from a Quaker background and shared the denomination’sstrong belief in the principle of consensus. “There is no consensus on this degree when one-third of your faculty object,” he said. The original purpose of honoring distinguished personal achievement has also been widely modified-some would say blighted4y institutional desires to flatter generous donors and prospective benefactors to whom more relaxed standards (typically pecuniary) are often applied. (Indeed, some wags have argued that such degeneration into a quid pro quo style enables a college “to get rich by degrees.”) Similarly, any aspiration to populate an American peerage is surely trivialized by decisions to garner a fleeting moment of public attention by awarding an institution’s ultimate accolade to mere celebrities who are famous principally for being famous. Among any institution’s list of honorary-degree recipients, there are bound to be curiosities. For reasons now obscure, Dartmouth has conferred honorary doctorates twice upon two of its alumni: Robert Frost (in 1933 and 1955) and Nelson Rockefeller (in 1957 and 1969). Many institutions have realized that husbands and wives make a fetching combination for degree-granting occasions. Among the most popular in that category have been Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Melvyn Douglas and Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. On the plus side, public officials who have a moral dimension to their character are especially prized because they are thought likely to use the occasion of being a commencement speaker to make an important public pronouncement. The model most cited is George C. Marshall, who, as secretary of state, proclaimed the Marshall Plan at Harvard’s commencement in 1947. High on such lists in recent years have been Mikhail Gorbachev, Vhclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (In an interview, Havel once said, “I was awarded honorary degrees at universities around the world, and at every one of those ceremonies I had to listen to the story of my life. And those biographies were always the same fairy tale.”) In recent years, African-American artists and scholars, especially Maya Angelou, John Hope Franklin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Cornel West, have also been popular.

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Every president is conscious, at honorary-degree time, of being caught up in a prestige race with other colleges and universities. This is an age that commodifies fame. So intense is the competition that many colleges now pay some honorary-degree recipients, at rates that commonly exceed $10,000, to lure them to deliver a commencement address. Dartmouth never did so during my 11 years there, and I know of no instance in its past. In paying an honorary-degree recipient to speak, a college s e e m to be acknowledging that it desires having the speaker’s services more than the speaker values having the college’s degree. Moreover, despite all the effort that is devoted to selecting and then attracting honorary-degree recipients, there is little evidence that commencement speakers have more than a fleeting impact on their audience. Most adults, in my experience, cannot recall the speaker or the honorary recipients at their own commencement, probably because, in the excitement of the day, their thoughts were elsewhere. Honorary degrees do serve at least one important purpose beyond suggesting role models to students and enhancing institutional prestige, however. They often, in my experience, forge enduring bonds of friendship and mutual regard between the college and the recipient. In the years that follow, honorees may be amenable to visits from students, providing summer jobs and career counseling, opening doors to professional opportunities, and offering personal encouragement. Often they return to the college to deliver speeches, appear at symposia, or meet with classes. Perhaps the greatest risk is that a recipient will turn out, in retrospect, to have been ill-chosen. Ten universities-including Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Brown University+onferred honorary degrees upon Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States before World War I; many institutions withdrew his degree after the war began, on the ground that, as one said, “he was guilty of conduct dishonorable alike in a gentleman and a diplomat.” Finally, a few words about honorary-degree citations. Such efforts are something of an art form unto themselves. Unfortunately, the crafting of elegant citations has fallen into considerable disuse. Too often presidents read citations that have been written by others-that is why they sometimes seem unfamiliar with the text-and are prolix, cliched, and embarrassingly fulsome. Although I always wrote my own citations, I now see that I, too, may sometimes have been guilty of lapsing into excessive adulation. For example, I saluted Maurice Sendak, the author of classic children’s books, as one whose “claim upon a generation of readers has been so great that, among members of this graduating class, you may

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well be the single most widely read author.” Although the graduates applauded enthusiastically, I promptly heard from indignant friends and admirers of Theodor S. Geisel-a Dartmouth graduate, no less-who as Dr. Seuss, was the author of more than a few books widely popular with the graduating generation. Despite the problems, however, on balance the practice of awarding honorary degrees strikes me as salutary. For all the occasional abuses, frivolities, incongruities, and howlers, there are still too few opportunities in our society for recognition of men and women who have made contributions of genuine significance. If universities honor such people, they also honor their own essential values. When I was president of the University of Iowa, I always regretted that we did not award honorary degrees, because of faculty hesitation. Even though I appreciated the concern that political influence might trivialize the process, I believed that we missed an important opportunity. When conferring honorary degrees at Dartmouth, I hoped to persuade our students and commencement guest that the character and attainment of those we were honoring were worthy of emulation and admiration. So long as every recipient meets that mark, a college is entitled to believe that the public ritual of awarding degrees addresses sacred matters and illuminates the relevance of liberal education to the lives of men and women.

Creating a Broader Model of Shared Governance Eugene I? Trani

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ecently, some governors and trustees have tried to dictate policies on dmissions, tenure, and curricula at prominent universities. Such highly publicized challenges to the authority of university presidents have raised concerns about micromanagement of campus affairs by governing boards and the politicians who appoint them. What kind of authority can presidents wield when public-university trustees style themselves as the real guardians of the curriculum against political correctness, unilaterally curtail affirmative action in admissions, or try to dictate policy on post-tenure reviews without consulting faculty members? In the wake of such actions, a report last fall on the American collegeand-university presidency prescribed a restructuring of shared governance in which presidents would be ceded more authority to decide what is best for their institutions. The document, “Renewing the Academic Presidency: Stronger Leadership for Tougher Times,” was the product of the Commission on the Academic Presidency, sponsored by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. The panel was chaired by Gerald L. Baliles, who, during his tenure as Governor of Virginia, had been a leader in advocating more support for higher education. According to the commission, “The greatest danger we see is that in this new era of growing doubts and demands, colleges and universities are neither as nimble nor adaptable as the times require. Why? Because

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the academic presidency has become weak. The authority of college and university presidents is being undercut by all of its partners-trustees, faculty members, and political leaders.” Rather than having “to meet an endless stream of individual needs and special demands within and outside the institution,” the report says, “presidents must resist academia’s insatiable appetite for the kind of excessive consultation that can bring the institution to a standstill.”Instead, presidents should “be given the authority they need to lead their institutions and manage their resources,” especially in such areas as reducing or closing academic programs, setting budget priorities, and acquiring technology. The report’s objective is to reduce the amount of consensusbuilding inherent in shared governance, to allow college presidents to become more flexible in adapting to the grim realities of declining revenues and public confidence. Institutions do need to expand their resources and improve public confidence in their work. But I believe that successful college presidents now and in the future will be those who seek more consensus-rather than less-by directly involving even more people in the governance of their institutions. Policy decisions will continue to reside with presidents, trustees, and faculty members. But those decisions will be affected by a broader spectrum of constituents. Indeed, this is unavoidable, because many sectors of society beyond the campus already have a stake in campus decisions. According to some recent scholarship, a new kind of university is forming around the traditional core of teaching, research, and service. This university encompasses partnership with industry, other joint ventures with the private sector, academic collaborations with other institutions, private fund raising, education offered beyond the campus through technolagy, and community-relations programs. Those activities necessarily are turning presidents into entrepreneurs who must reach out far beyond their campuses. This trend is not surprising. Given the decline in public revenues for higher education, some state legislatures are beginning to reconsider their relationship with public institutions, often extending them greater freedom to go after non-traditional, possibly lucrative activities. Such activities inevitably create new constituents with an interest in, and a willingness to support, universities. But new constituents also mean that the university president, as well as other campus officials, must engage in more collaboration with them. This is particularly true if the new constituents have invested substantial time or money in projects involving

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the university and, in some cases, even have some joint legal responsibility for the decisions that are made. Virginia Commonwealth University learned the value of expanded shared governance the hard way. In 1989, the university proposed a long-range building plan that, in part, called for some expansion into nearby neighborhoods. V.C.U.’s consultants, however, had failed to talk with the neighbors. The plan created a great deal of controversy, and, when I was named president of Virginia Commonwealth in 1990, the Board of Visitors and the faculty asked me to scrap it. This year, the board approved a new master plan that included the input of community advisory boards, which we had established to generate greater local involvement. As a result of this advice, our new plan focuses on abandoned areas, rather than on neighborhoods, as sites for expansion. It also contains architectural guidelines for construction that respect the urban and architectural character of the surrounding community. The plan took six years of the kind of endless consultation that troubled the Baliles commission, but it is a much better plan than the old one. In addition to the community advisory boards, I now work with four private foundations that are linked to university activities, including a realestate foundation-created at the same time as the community boards-to assist the university’s capital planning. A fifth foundation in which I am involved is our intellectual-property foundation, created to help the university address technology transfer. I also work with two boards set up to handle decision making for the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park; I chair both boards. And I head the board of directors of a hospital authority set up to manage our teaching hospital. I know other university presidents who work with as many or even more boards, authorities, and other advisory bodies not strictly tied to the campus. The creation of the hospital authority is an example of the need for new entrepreneurial activity by presidents, in this case to free public teaching hospitals from state restrictions that impede their ability to operate in the new managed-care market. In fact, reductions in federal and other traditional sources of funds for academic medical centers, combined with a volatile market for health-care delivery, virtually demand an entrepreneurial response on the part of presidents. Not only are some universities establishing new governance structures for their hospitals or even selling them outright to avoid financial losses; they also are entering into joint ventures with insurers, health professionals, health-maintenance organizations, and other hospitals to

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increase their base of patients. At V.C.U., we sought and won state legislation that permitted this kind of joint venture and established a new governance structure for V.C.U.’s teaching hospital, to give our academic medical center a better competitive position. Consider some other examples of actions that create new constituents with an interest in colleges and universities: In Virginia, state officials worked out packages of incentives to attract Motorola Inc., 1.B.M.-Toshiba, and a Motorola-Siemens joint venture to locate facilities in the state. In collaboration with university presidents, state officials included education-and-training funds for several universities and the community-college system in the packages. For Virginia Commonwealth, that meant financing for a microelectronics laboratory in our new engineering school. (The school itself was created with funds we raised from industries and other donors.) One important result of the school’s support from industry was the establishment of an industrial advisory group to work with our faculty to design a curriculum that will prepare people to work in high-tech companies. Private fund raising helped establish a new agribusiness program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a new arts center at the Ohio State University, to mention only a couple of other examples. Very often, donors to universities also include municipal governments, which provide grants for projects that are of benefit to their communities. Then the local governments become participants in the new programs that their grants have helped to create. That is the case at V.C.U., where the trustees of a private foundation that we set up to aid the engineering school represent state and local governments, as well as industries. Some universities also are well into the process of investing in commercial spinoffs from high-technology and biotechnology research. Although new financial resources can result from such non-traditional activity, other, less-tangible outcomes are equally important. For example, members of advisory groups and private boards can help trustees, administrators, and faculty members at institutions sift through potential conflicts of interest between the universities’ mission and that of the private sector. In sum, although activist members of boards of trustees can have an impact on an institution, the group dynamics of other councils, authorities, and ventures in which the university is involved can serve to miti-

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gate the influence of partisan individuals on shared governance. Many more people than just trustees today know what’s going on in an institution’s varied activities, understand what factors can have an impact on the institution, and have a role in some decisions. I believe that recognizing and accepting this broader model of shared governance, rather than an authoritarian model of the university presidency, is the best route to building loyalty to, and a sense of ownership in, an institution. Out of such loyalty may come higher education’s greatest defenders: trustees, faculty members, business leaders, and community officials who truly believe in what the institution is doing and who care deeply about its future.

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Where Are College Presidents’ Voices on Important Public Issues? Theodore M . Hesburgh

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en I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even when they didn’t pertain to academic life. Yet nowadays, I don’t find many college presidents commenting on such issues on the front page of The New York Times or in any of the country’s other major news outlets. Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional amendment for the 18-year-old vote, but I wonder whether we’d hear them taking stands on similar topics now. I also wonder what that all says about changes in the culture of higher education and how presidents view their roles as spokespersons on important public issues. My opinion seems to be reflected in a recent American Council of Education report on public perceptions of higher education, which found that “the vast majority of Americans rarely hear college presidents comment on issues of national importance, and when they do, they believe institutional needs rather than those of the students or the wider community drive such comments.” Let me provide a disclaimer up front: American higher education is still one of the wonders of the modern world. Although they may have slipped from view in the news media, the presidents of our colleges are maintaining the country’s leadership in educating a citizenry for the responsibilities of a democracy, as well as producing pioneering research in an age driven by science and its applications.

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College presidents today, however, do seem to be less involved in public debate than in the past. In the 1950’s, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed two college presidents to the original five-person US. Commission on Civil Rights: John Hannah of Michigan State University, who served as chairman, and myself. Educational leaders strongly influenced public policy and opinion in areas that seemed far from ivory-tower concerns. Yet I recently ran across a comment from William Galston, a former White House domestic adviser and a leader of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, who was less than sanguine about the current lack of national leadership from college presidents. “There are very few voices,” he was quoted as saying, “that speak with moral authority today, not just in politics but everywhere. Once university presidents could speak with such authority. Now they’re administrators and fund raisers.” That may be somewhat harsh, but it is yet more evidence that others have noticed a vacuum. Where we once had a fellowship of public intellectuals, do we now have insulated chief executives intent on keeping the complicated machinery of American higher education running smoothly? College presidents may be less present to the American public today because they are less present to one another. In the ~ O ’ S I, spent one weekend every month for six years at meetings of the Carnegie Commission for the Study of the Future of Higher Education, chaired by Clark Kerr. I met frequently with people like Bill Friday of the University of North Carolina, David Henry of the University of Illinois, Nathan Pusey of Harvard University, Jim Perkins of Cornell University, Carl Kaysen of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Katharine McBride of Bryn Mawr College. It seemed nothing to know personally-and well-250 fellow presidents. Collaboration in a common task fostered friendships; we shared birthday greetings as well as platforms. We were quoted on the issues of the day, sometimes in unified chorus, sometimes in agreed disagreement-such as when it came to whether a liberal-arts education should convey moral values as well as facts. In contrast, today’s college presidents appear to have taken Voltaire’s advice to cultivate their own gardens-and, as I’ve said, they are doing that very well. At the same time, however, “assistant to the president” has become such a ubiquitous administrative title that one wonders how much personal contact between presidents, the kind of bonding that grew out of the Carnegie Commission, can still occur. Presidents now preside over institutions that have grown much more complex and bureaucratic. As Marvin Lazerson and Ursula Wagener, professors of htgher education at the University of Pennsylvania, and Larry

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Moneta, associate vice president for campus services at Penn, wrote in 7be Chronicle (July 28, 2000), many colleges now operate like “minicities,” and presidents must manage a growing “array of public works, social services, and market-sensitive functions.” Meanwhile, the rapid and constant changes in new technology demand that presidents be entrepreneurs and visionaries--always keeping an eye on the cutting edge. Many presidents are simply too busy to speak out on issues beyond the immediate concerns of the institutions. It’s also true that presidents must play an ever-larger role in raising money for their institutions-and often from supporters who have strong views on what presidents should or shouldn’t say in the press. Getting involved in controversial public issues complicates the already neuralgic life of a college president. It is tough enough to maintain an irenic atmosphere on a campus without inviting criticism for taking stands outside the academy that will inevitably alienate one constituency or another. Yet John Hannah confronted that risk when he took on the chairmanship of the civil-rights commission in 1957, as did W. Allen Wallis, the president of the University of Rochester, when he was named to the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Forces in 1969. I am certain that they got angry letters, as I did when I was named to President Gerald R. Fords Presidential Clemency Board in the 1970’s, dealing with “Vietnam offenders” like draft dodgers and deserters. The 60’s and early 70’s were contentious times, and college presidents found themselves in the midst of acrimonious and sometimes violent clashes not only over civil rights and the Vietnam War but other societal concerns. Peace and justice issues, as well as the debate over the “military-industrial complex,” gain a certain urgency when your R.O.T.C. buildings are on fire, as was the case at more than one institution. In fact, I kept a suit-pocket necrology during the days of the student revolution, noting fellow presidents who were forced from office. Courtney Smith at Swarthmore College even died in his office of a heart attack after confrontations with protestors. Painful as those days were, however, they taught a powerful lesson: We cannot urge students to have the courage to speak out unless we are willing to do so ourselves. The true antidote to the public’s view that colleges are simply ivory towers of intellectual dilettantism is engagement with important public issues-however difficult and thorny those issues may be. Becoming knowledgeable and articulate on complex social issues is a process that takes time and energy as it imparts wisdom. One must be

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willing to invest in it. I knew little about immigration, a radioactive issue in American politics, when I began serving on the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1979, but I knew a lot more after sitting through hearings in nearly every port of entry to the United States. As a theologian who spent 12 years on the National Science Board, I received perhaps the nation’s best education in science from the greatest minds in the field. Today, the issue that would most galvanize me as a college president would be affirmative action in higher education. I applaud the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard Universities, William Bowen and Derek Bok, for their 1998 study The Shape of the River, which supports racial preferences in higher-education admissions. (As an exception to prove the point, the book and its authors received prominent news coverage in The New York Times.) We need more presidents like Lee C. Bollinger of the University of Michigan, who termed his institution’s recent defense of affirmative action in courts “a critical moment for our society.” Another area longing for the attention of college presidents is developing educational programs that seek to improve the status of womenespecially in Asia, South America, and Africa, where many are secondclass citizens. In some areas of the world, the life expectancy of women is less than 50 years, the literacy rate less than 20 percent. Only education can break the bonds, primarily of custom, that keep many women worldwide from realizing their God-given dignity and rights. In fact, technology now gives us the reach-if we have the imaginationto deliver mformation to any corner of the world. We had a Green Revolution years ago, when we worked to increase and diversify crop yields in less-advanced countries; it fed the stomachs of an impoverished Third World. We now need to feed minds, especially those of the portion of the human race most overlooked. If we can create virtual law schools on the World Wide Web, why can’t we deliver elementary education to those most in need7 Of course, those are just my own top concerns. Our country and world are rife with other important moral and social issues. As the founder of the Worldwatch Institute, Lester Brown, with whom I worked for some years on the Overseas Development Council, said so well, “An affluent global minority is overfed and overweight, but more than half of humanity is hungry and malnourished; some can afford heart transplants, but half of humanity receives no health care at all; a handful of Arnericans have journeyed to the moon, but much of mankind cannot afford a visit to the nearest city; several thousand dollars are spent on a college

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education for a young American, while much of mankind lacks the limited resources required to become literate.” I would welcome signs that more presidents of our colleges were willing to take the lead in tackling at least a few of those issues, reminding the public-and perhaps even each other-that they are custodians of institutions where independent, ethical, and compassionate thinking must flourish.

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The Dumbing Down of College Presidents Clara M . Lovett

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n recent months, [this essay was first published in April 20021 various articles in the national media have bemoaned the decline in the public roles and intellectual stature of college presidents. Citing former chief executives like Charles Eliot, Robert M. Hutchins, Daniel Coit Gilman, Clark Kerr, and Theodore Hesburgh, journalists and other observers are asking: Why are leaders like those individuals-who transformed institutions, created new ones, provoked national debates, and advised U.S. presidents-so rare today? In a widely syndicated column on the topic, “It’s Lowly at the Top: What Became of the Great College Presidents?,” Jay Mathews of The Washington Post noted one oft-cited answer: “Instead of being thinker in chief,” a college president is now “expected to be fund raiser in chief.” Beyond question, raising money in various forms does consume presidential time and energy, to the detriment of other pursuits. And the need to keep donors satisfied-and many other stakeholders as well-may reduce presidents’ willingness to engage in controversial subjects. But, in fact, the fund-raising imperative plays a relatively small part in the demise of “thinkers in chief.” The problem results much more from how governing boards have come to select presidents, especially at public institutions-a trend that began about 20 years ago and has become the norm in presidential searches. That selection process screens out potential intellectual and educational leaders in favor of men and women who look, speak, and act like candidates for political office.

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Like politicians, even before entering specific races, aspiring university presidents know that they must win the votes of diverse boards of trustees. Especially in public higher education, they also know that the road to presidential appointment goes through large screening committees, whose members are watchdogs for various interest groups within and outside the university. For example, the governing board and consultant currently searching for Arizona State University’s next president are working with a committee of more than 30 members. Aspiring college presidents navigate this treacherous political process in one of two proven ways. They play it safe and avoid disappointing anyone on the screening committee, in the hope of emerging as “the compromise candidate,” or everybody’s second choice. Or they quickly identlfy the most influential or assertive trustees and play up to them, assuming the consultation with the entire committee will be perfunctory. It is no coincidence that political candidates plan and manage their campaigns for elective office in similar ways. Also like politicians, today’s higher-education candidates usually fare best if they are articulate, photogenic, and skilled in the art of self-promotion. Campaigns for presidential appointments call for carefully prepared r6sum6s, glossy photos, speeches and other public appearances, and broadcast interviews. Sometimes, for an especially nice touch, the candidate offers-and highlights-tidbits about his or her spouse and children. And, of course, sartorial correctness is a given. The goal is to look like the college president from central casting. In the past decade, I have known several aspiring presidentsmost of them graduates of doctoral programs in highereducation administrationfor whom this strategy has worked well. Typically, they sought formal training in public relations and spent years perfecting their personal and professional image. In such an environment, creative and original thinkers-who abound in academe-have no advantage over intellectual lightweights with engaging personalities. In case after case, candidates for appointments do not compete on the basis of quality of mind, or depth and breadth of professional accomplishments. Nor do they compete on the basis of an exceptional understanding of any particular institution; presidential wannabes usually enter several races simultaneously. Like stereotypical tourists in a hurry-“If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium”-such peripatetic candidates are more interested in landing better jobs than contributing to higher education through the power of their ideas and their ability to shape institutions. In fact, whether in politics or academe, those most likely to succeed rarely trust their own talents and ideas. Increasingly, they instead put

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their images, career plans, and job quests in the hands of public-relations and marketing professionals. Political consultants have long played such roles in campaigns for elected office. Today, in academe, their counterparts are executive recruiters, or headhunters. In the past 10 years, large executive-search firms have added highereducation practices to their portfolios, and smaller firms that specialize solely in highereducation searches have proliferated. In fact, an estimated 80 percent of the governing boards of major public universities today choose to engage professionals in the presidential-search process. Trustees or university-system heads who engage such commercial firms usually pay all search-related expenses plus a percentage of the successful candidate’s first-year compensation. Headhunters have a twofold interest in successful placement: immediate financial gain and the prospect of repeat business from satisfied clients. Seasoned veterans in the business conduct as many as 10 to 12 searches per year, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for their firms. Like political consultants, higher education’s headhunters know what sells. As a result, they are unllkely to promote candidates known to be brilliant but controversial or eccentric and, therefore, hard to work with. trustees-and the dyBased on their assessments of their clients-the namics between them and the screening committees, headhunters will usually choose between two strategies. They will either steer the search in the direction of safe candidates (again, everybody’s second choice), or advance the candidates most likely to shine in corporate boardroomsthose who can impress audiences outside academe, including the news media. In either case, the search process often screens out, from the start, individuals who can think critically about their institutions, challenge the conventional wisdom of their constituents, and create new paradigms in higher education. Three years ago, for example, the presidential search at a large public college-which was well positioned to become an elite institutionattracted strong, though unconventional, candidates. The consultant and the system’s chancellor, however, were reluctant to take risks. They opted for an experienced, semiretired executive who was able to manage what he found but was uninterested in taking the college to a higher level of national prominence. Reversing that pattern may prove as difficult as freeing major universities from the stranglehold of big-time athletics. Yet an attempt should be made, and two steps might take us in the right direction. First, we should try to free governing boards and system heads from the political necessity of working with large, unwieldy committees assembled

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on the principle of Noah’s ark. Instead of following the principle of constituency representation, trustees and consultants might develop criteria for committee membership, such as demonstrated knowledge of crucial issues in higher education, experience with recruiting chief executive officers and other managers, or an understanding of the mission of the institution and its environment. Such a change would not preclude important constituencies from commenting on the candidates, nor would it eliminate opportunities for interaction with the finalists during public interviews. But it would greatly reduce the advantage for candidates who cater to the most vocal constituents, make empty promises, and dance around tough issues with photogenic smiles and shallow answers. Second, we should rethink the roles of trustees and headhunters in the presidential-search process. Boards of trustees are entitled to full disclosure about the track record and modus operandi of the individuals and firms whose services they pay for. It is especially important for trustees to understand the criteria and methods by which the headhunters identlfy promising prospects, bring them into the search process, and advocate for them while opposing the candidacy of others with equal or stronger credentials. But full disclosure should work both ways. Successful headhunters are good talent scouts and campaign managers. They are not, however, miracle workers. They almost always become the fall guys in aborted searches or failed presidencies. As a result, they become reluctant to take even calculated risks on candidates who do not fit the “central casting” criteria. The headhunters are entitled to know all there is to know about the trustees’ agenda; they need to understand why the screening committee and job description are structured as they are. Consultants will be most effective if they feel free to engage the trustees in a dialogue about the longterm prospects of the institution. They should also have the opportunity to question the trustees’ stated preferences for particular kinds of leaders. Such preferences often reflect either the political compromises among constituencies or the emotional responses of some trustees to their experiences with former presidents. A positive emotional response may generate a desire to clone a cherished former leader, with little attention to the institution’s changing needs and opportunities. A negative emotional response may lead the trustees to see the recruitment of a new leader as a silver bullet for the institution’s real or perceived problems. A well-informed consultant who is not afraid to question his or her clients’ wisdom can bring objectivity and balance to the process. That happens, but not often enough.

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In our fast-paced information age, higher education needs “thinkers in chief” of the caliber of those who in previous generations had the talent and the courage to help invent entirely new models of higher education and to take public stands on key issues. The selection processes now in vogue are not giving us those kinds of leaders. We have nothing to lose-and much to gain-by trying to return to the days when presidential searches were something other than political campaigns, when at least a few “mavericks” with imagination and powerful intellects rose to the top.

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Index

AASCU (American Association of State Colleges and Universities), 42 AAUP (American Association of University Professors), 33 academic: abortion, 116; departments, 6; graduate colleges, 7; schools, colleges, 7; standards, 40 affirmative action, 110, 156 AIDS, 70 alcoholism and dismissal, 35, 39 American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), 42 American Association of University Professors (A") 33, American Bar Association, 110 American Council on Education, 110 American Medical Association, 110 anthrax, 68,117 Aristotle and practical reasoning, 79 Association of Governing Boards, 110 Astin, Alexander, 69 Bennis, Warren, 127 bidding, 81, 86

Blanshard, Brand, 119 board memberships, nontrustee, 106 boards of trustees, 135-40; and composite win of, 107-8; decisions of, 108; presidential authority on private compared to public boards, 137; private vs. public, 107; procedures of, 108; qualities of trustees, 20-22; responsibilities of, 18-19; service, 107; size of, 138; structure of, 17; Syracuse University, 107, 137 Bok, Derek, 156 Bowen, William, 156 Bowling Green State University, 73, 96, 100-101 Brown, Lester, 156 budget: definition of, 9; preparation of, 136 bureaucracies, federal, 59 Campbell, Scotty, 69 Carnegie Commission, 154 categorical imperative, 30 Central Michigan University, 108

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charitable support, 129 chief executive officer (CEO), 65; and college presidents, 67-69; and obligations, 66-67 civil service laws, 136 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 58, 96 classified staff, 60; council of, 61 competition: between departments, 7, 8; and Title M,8 conflicts of interest, and negotiation, 25, 29 consensus, 148 contracts, 63-70 criteria, quantitative and qualitative,

44

curriculum: censorship, 71; cloning, 116; relevance of, 10; and Vietnam War, 10 Dartmouth University, 141ff. decision making, speed of, 136 degrees, doctoral, 42 departments: niche, 44, 46; and promotions, 44 disclosure, 72 duties, negatives, 79 dying, assisted, 117-18 Eastern Michigan University, 108 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 154 endowments, 43 environmental pollution, 118 Environmental Protection Agency, 80 equitability and justice, 39 evaluations, 39 factionalism, 82 faculty: hiring of, 33; and medical staff, 75; senate, 49; tenuring of, 33 Fermi, Enrico, 68 foreseeability, reasonable, 28, 46 foundations, 149 fund-raising, 136 Gardner, John, 127 gifts, 8-9,1&11

G.I. legislation, 42 global warming, 118 governance, 4%57 grants, 8; and military, 117 handbook, faculty, 33, 46 Hannah, John, 154-55 Hesburgh, Theodore M., 153 ff. higher education, changes between 1900 and 2000, 12-15 Hitler, Adolf, 9 homes, presidential, 104 honorary degrees, 22-24; prominent recipients of, 142-46 hospitals, 87, 149 hypothetical imperative, 30 industrial support, 150 insider bidding, 81 International Nickel Company of Canada, 67, 69 Ivory Tower, 77 Jefferson College, 95; and E. J. Sparling, 95; and Roosevelt University, 95 justice: distributive, 39; and process, 40 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 72, 117 Kenya, and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, 103 Ken; Clark, 154 Labor, Department of, 59-64 leadership, 127 legal advice, 51-52 legislature, state, 91-92 life, prolonging of, 117 loans, forgiveness of, 70 management versus policy, xi Meredith, James, 59 Michigan State University, 108 Michigan universities: Eastern, Central, Western Michigan

Index

Universities, 108; Michigan State University, 108; University of Michigan, 108; Wayne State University, 108 misdemeanor, and destroying a public document, 27 moral principles, 90,99,118;and truth and falsity, 64 morality, public and private, 69 moral rules, universality of, 93 Morrill Land Grant Act, 58 motion of no confidence, 53-54 National Council on the Humanities,

98

National Geographic magazine, 67 “niche” departments, 46 Nobel laureates, 116 normal schools, 41-42 normative judgments, 79 Notre Dame University, 19 Ohio State University, 95 open meeting laws, 137 “ought” implies “can,” 117 party politics, 82, 84 perquisites, 104-5 personnel policies, 57-58 pizza, 91 political correctness, 147 political influence and private schools, 11, 136 practical lessons, 57 precedence, 57 presidents: and board relations, 19-21; and compensation of, 124; and contract with board, 124; and home, 104, 124; and honeymoon, 125; kinds Of, 31-32; knowing when to step down, 133; obligation to speak out, 116, 155-57; political campaigns, 81; and professional image makers, 160; and public educational

167

responsibilities, 78; qualities of, x; responsibilities of, 3-6;role in selection of trustees, 111; selection process for, 159, 161; and spouse, 104, 124; and trustees, xi, 111, 112, 130-31; and voices on public issues, 153-57 principle, definition of, ix principles: moral, 28; prudential, 28 privacy rights, 116, 136 promises, 56 promotions, 4-4 public education and moral relevance, 11-12 public policy and morality, 29 public vs. private, differences, 135ff. race and housing, 5, 6 rank and salary, 61 rankings of promotion and tenure criteria, unwritten, 40, 41 Reagan, Ronald, 110, 128 reasoning, practical, 79 reasons given for wanting to be a trustee, 109 research, 41, 47; parks, 80, 149; sponsored, 71 residence hall councils, 92 resignation, 34 Roosevelt University, 95. See also Jefferson College; E. J. Sparling St. Clair Drake, 96 searches, 53 senate, 53 settlement, legal, 27 sexual harassment, 26 Sparling, E. J., 95 Sputnik, 58 standards, 40 Stanford, 103 state colleges, 42 state funding, 69 student government association, 92 style, 130

168 supervenience, 47, 90; and moral principles, 30 symbolism, 3€&39,-9 Syracuse University, 107; Maxwell School of, 69 teaching and research and service, 40-41 tenure: AAUP guidelines for, 35; changes in concept of, 34; definition of, 3934; process of granting, 36-38 termination, 34 tobacco, 72; and universities, 86ff. trustees: desirable qualities of, 111-12; selection of, 10€&10 Tufts University, 138 United Appeal, 74-76 universities: culture of, 75-77; and planning, 137; “products” of, 69;

Index

structure of, &8; student union boards, 92 University of Connecticut, 107 University of Michigan, 108 University of Pennsylvania, 126, 154, 155 University of South Carolina, 103, 126 University Relations, Office of, 10 US. Congress, 115 Voltaire, 154 Walker, Donald, 133 Wallace, George Corley, 58 Wayne State University, 108 Western Michigan University, 108 Wolfe, Thomas, 103 World War 11, 58, 87 YMCA College, 95

About the Author

Paul J. Olscamp was born in Montreal and was educated through the master’s degree at the University of Western of Ontario. In 1962, he was awarded the first Ph.D. in philosophy ever given by the University of Rochester. He has held faculty and administrative positions at several universities, including Ohio State, Roosevelt and Syracuse, and in 1975 at age thirty-seven he became president of Western Washington University. In 1982 he was appointed president of Bowling Green State University, where he served for thirteen years. Retiring in 1995, he then was appointed interim president of the University of South Dakota, and he is currently interim president of Mayville State University. Olscamp has published in several leading philosophical journals, and he is the author or translator of four books, two of whch, Descartes: The Dbcoume, @tics, Geometry and Meteorology and Malebranche: The Search After Truth (with Thomas Lemon), are the standard English-language references. His The Moral Philosophy of GeorgeBerkeley is the only book ever written about Berkeley’s ethics. Olscamp is president emeritus of both Western Washington University and Bowling Green State University and is distinguished service professor with lifetime tenure at the former. Paul J. Olscamp Hall at Bowling Green was named in his honor.

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