The Long View

Our local newspaper has announced the sudden (but not unexpected) news that the president of one of our two state universities in town (I’ll call it Stepping Stone State University) is leaving for another university presidency after seven years on the job.

We are fortunate to have two respected state universities in town: a historically black university and a university that got its start as a branch division of  one of America’s older higher ed institutions.

Coincidentally, on the same day that this report appeared, Inside Higher Ed featured an article entitled “Counterpoint to Presidential Careerism.” It explores the curious notion that a college or university presidency is a vocation, a calling not a career. (You can read it at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/08/vocation )

Time was when becoming a college president was the jewel in the crown of a highly respected and able scholar. This was the Age of Titans, people who transformed scholarship and education. I can recall, for example, when a highly respected medieval historian at the Catholic University of America (one of my alma maters), Elizabeth Kennan, became president of her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College. Kennan did so at a time of extreme economic difficulty (remember Jimmy Carter, “stagflation,” and the oil crisis?) and at a time when single-sex education for women had begun to decline. The college thrives today, even though Kennan did not have an EdD in Higher Education Administration.

The Age of Titans has ended. We live in an Epoch of Careerist Dwarves, jumping from campus to campus and executive position to executive position with the frequency of a cheap ham radio (to paraphrase Dan Ackroyd). Adept at resume building by leveraging the labor and accomplishments of faculty and administrators, these higher ed “executives” are primarily concerned with “measurable outcomes” rather than with scholarship, learning, or knowledge. They will never inspire or even lead; they will merely manage.

Translating the Greek Hippocrates, the Romans famously and aphoristically said, Ars longa, vita brevis. Life is short, art endures. My corollary: Presidencies are short, faculty endure.

A colleague of mine at Stepping Stone State University once lamented this “executizing” of higher education, pointing out that gone was the ideal of servant leadership: a college presidency as the summit of a learned career in which the scholar would give back to higher education what he or she had received. I think I will nominate her as Stepping Stone State’s next president.