Thoughts on ‘Leadership Matters’

W. Joseph King and Brian Mitchell’s latest, Leadership Matters, is an attempt to define the purpose and importance of effective campus leadership. I say “attempt,” because it reads like the prologue to a much deeper study. It defines some terms and makes some accurate observations in passing. But it never gets either specific enough to be useful or theoretically informed enough to be enlightening. It isn’t wrong, exactly, but I’m not really sure what to do with it. It doesn’t work as a guide to action, or a theoretical clarification, or an empirical study. It’s abstract without paying its dues.

And that’s a shame, because it has a great topic. The combination of longer-term demographic and economic trends with the pandemic and the politicization of education generally sets new challenges for leaders of colleges and universities. Until recently, tributes to retiring college presidents typically pointed to the new buildings and programs established on their watch. For decades, growth forgave many sins. Now that many colleges are faced with declining enrollment and uncertain or wavering financial support, they can’t just build their way out of trouble anymore. The challenges have changed, so leaders need new approaches.

To the extent that they have a theory, King and Mitchell posit three types of presidents: presiders, change agents and strategists. Presiders are the ceremonial heads of state who see their job as staying the course. They’re the ones most comfortable in the sort of priestly function of presidencies. They tend to allow shared governance to run its course, largely by keeping its purview circumscribed. During the growth years, presiders could often last quite a while, as long as they didn’t do anything too egregious. But they’re largely overmatched by current conditions. Change agents, by contrast, tend to be more single-minded. They have something they want to get done, and they often get impatient with processes that take too long or threaten to water down or defeat their pet ideas. Change agents mostly don’t last very long, due to the blowback they engender. Strategists are the Goldilocks version, drawing on the better features of the other two.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. And King and Mitchell acknowledge that each type can make sense when circumstances align. For example, if a campus has recently been through a lot of turmoil but the underlying economics are good, a presider can restore peace to the land. If a college is in free fall, a change agent may be the best hope for survival. Given that boards choose presidents, I would have expected some discussion of how to tell which type a given candidate might become over time. That’s absent.

The discussion of boards of trustees (or their equivalents) is similarly accurate and unhelpful. Boards should stick to policy, they say, echoing the Carver model. Boards should not micromanage or get too deeply into operations. So far, so good. But what if they don’t stay in their lane? Whether elected or appointed, Board members come from somewhere, and they often believe—correctly or not—that they have a mandate to enact a particular point of view. It’s unlikely that an orientation session will disabuse them of that idea. What to do if a board member—or, heaven help us all, chair—decides they’re on a mission? The book says they shouldn’t be. Well, no, they shouldn’t. But what if they are? Is there a way for a president to lead effectively even in the face of a rogue board? The book doesn’t suggest one.

The book is shot through with assumptions that people will put aside politics if they just understand the big picture. As both a card-carrying political scientist and an experienced CAO, I can say that’s simply not true. Disagreement—good faith, bad faith and some of both—is a fact of collective life. What do you do then? The book doesn’t say.

Oddly, the one place in which King and Mitchell acknowledge that is in their discussion of provosts or chief academic officers. As they put it,

“Provosts play a bridge role, explaining and interpreting across the campus with language more commonly understood and accepted by the faculty. To do so, they must maintain a separate presence from the president, effectively creating their own space to protect their credibility and ability to advocate without prejudice or personal agenda.” (68)

Some presidents get that; others struggle with it or are even offended by it. If a provost works in one of the latter settings, what to do? The book doesn’t say.

It’s full of gaps like that. Community colleges go nearly unmentioned and are obviously not what King and Mitchell had in mind. Rising costs are treated as a fact of nature rather than as a sign of Baumol’s cost disease. Case studies are limited to single-paragraph anecdotes when they occur at all. Unions go entirely unmentioned, even in the context of discussions of shared governance and strategic planning. The realities of the public sector are mostly elided. They’re clearly writing from, and about, private colleges. That’s fine, but say so. When governance is shared with local and state politicians and multiple labor unions, the picture is more complicated and may require a different set of skills. The book skips that task completely.

Which is why it’s more of an introduction to a much larger work than a work in itself. It has its strengths—some of the discussion of strategic planning is uncommonly thoughtful, for instance—and the book’s topic matters tremendously. Leadership does matter. It matters enough to warrant a much more thorough analysis.