Developing leadership: A paradox in academe

Higher education5 reluctunce to raognize the need to prepare its academic administrators in any vstmntic way reficts the values ofthe acaderny, but not necessarily its needs.

Developing Leadership: A Paradox in Academe Madeleine F. Green

In recent years, the literature of higher education has been preoccupied by questions of managing declining resources and fewer students and weathering the terrible ravages of inflation and skyrocketing energy costs. Coping with federal and state regulations, collective bargaining, and the legal implications of institutional decision making has made it even clearer to college administrators that the business of running a university is a complex, often highly technical undertaking. The problems of running an institution would be a great deal simpler if institutions had only to balance their books and to cope with external pressures. But since colleges and universities exist not to produce a quantifiable result nor to turn a profit but rather to provide students with an education] however this process is defined and constituted, the problem becomes more complicated. There is little precision about what the outcomes of a college education are, what they ought to be, or how they can be measured. Postsecondary institutions have vastly different goals, and there exists within those institutions an array of diverse programs with their own individual objectives. In spite of their imprecise goals and elusive products, institutions and their programs must somehow be managed, albeit in the context of an academic environment. There lies the tough issue for administering institutions and for selecting and developing academic leadership. R. Atwell and M G m n (Eds.). Nnu Dirccrw~~forH*hm Edudwa: Ac&k Sm Frnnciaco: Jos%cy-Basa.Dccembcr 1981.

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12 Leadership and leadership development in academe pose a doubleedged problem: the absence of a bottom line-or to put it another way, the ambiguity of the educational enterprise-makes that enterprise hard to manage, and the negative attitudes of educators towards the notion of managing education compound this basic problem. The negativism is rooted in a value system that rejects the technocratic, reveres the creative, and thereby delegitimizes the practice of management and the deliberate preparation of academic managers. Thus, many academics are reluctant to recognize the managerial component of higher education administration as anything more than a necessary evil. As a result, academic administrators have both little formal preparation for their jobs and little opportunity for professional renewal. Sabbaticals for administrators are the exception rather than the rule. An occasional seminar, depending on the availability of institutional funds, represents most of the renewal and skill updating that administrators enjoy. Ironically, "lifelong learning" is far more available to students and to the community than it is to those who provide it. Additionally, the education patterns of educators themselves are not conducive to systematic organizational efforts at leadership development. The formal educational experiences of faculty and academic administrators are front-loaded; that is, many years of preparation for the doctorate occur at the beginning of their academic careers. Independent study, research, and professional meetings are the standard forms of professional development for faculty. Similarly, movement into administrative positions is rarely accompanied by formal preparation, and most new administrators learn their new roles by performing them. The pattern in business, and in the military as well, is quite different. As a manager or officer rises, he or she participates in a variety of training programs offered by the organization or by colleges and universities. The notion of episodic but ongoing formal training is an integral part of those organizational systems. Yet, these factors alone do not explain higher education's historic failure to pay serious attention to leadership development. At issue here are several fundamental questions about the nature of the academic enterprise, its value sustem, and the resulting attitudes about leadership and its development.

Academe and Business: Their Language and Values The language used to discuss leadership and leadership development in the academic context and in the business world is worthy of some attention, since it reflects the values, traditions, and structures that shape the practices of these two sectors. In colleges and universities, those in positions with managerial responsibilities in the academic sector, such as chairpersons, deans, and vice-presidents for academic affairs, are referred to as academic administrators. Those with significant responsibilities, especially presidents, are commonly

13 referred to as h u h . Efforts to prepare these individuals to perform their jobs effectively are called &&shz$ devdopmmt. The corporate sector, on the other hand, commonly refers to its leaders as managers or executives, whopundergomanagement or executive development. That the academic world is avoiding the terminology of the corporate model is obvious. The existence of these parallel terms tells us something important about the academy’s values and attitudes as well as its structure and functioning. The higher education literature is much more insistent on the distinctions between management and leadership than the management literature. In the higher education context, leadership stresses vision- the ability to set goals and to define mission in accordance with the followers’ sense of their own needs, values, and purposes. Management connotes the mundane, the operational, the ability to get .things done in order to accomplish a predetermined goal. As the semantic differences indicate, the substantive gaps between higher education and business are profound and obvious; the value systems and organizational structures underlying each institution are more dissimilar than alike. In business, where there are clear lines of authority and profitability is a stated shared goal, the role of management and the mission of management training become much clearer. Educators have a less obvious path to travel. As Cohen and March put it, the academic environment is an “organized anarchy,” (p. 81) and its attitudes and values follow suit. Academicians prize creativity, scholarship, academic freedom, and the absence of external constraints that could impede the pursuit of these goals. The concepts of academic leadership and the principles of development of academic leaders are built on these values. Traditionally, the academic and even many of the nonacademic administrators come from the faculty, and their first commitment is to teaching and research. Many, if not most, academics do not consider administration to be a very lofty art. Often, we hear of the administrator who took the job only under duress, intending to return to the classroom at the first available opportunity. The true member of the academic community is expected to long for the classroom and the library. When administration is viewed in this way, training for it cannot be valued. Even if this exaggerated view is tempered and few people accept these notions wholeheartedly-the strength of the caricature persists. The unwilling administrator, the administrator who manages by sheer intellect and instinct, the notion of born leaderall these are alive and well in academe. These beliefs and values explain the prevailing prejudice in university settings against administrators who have prepared for their work by earning a doctorate in educational administration. Armed with no true discipline, goes the argument, the professional administrator cannot completely understand the mind of the real academician. Therefore, professional administrators are generally banned from holding the positions heading the faculty ranks. In this value system, administration is not worthy of study; it is simply done.

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Leadership Development on Campus, Then and Now Higher education has not totally ignored the development of its amateur managers, but only recently has serious atteation been paid to it. Historically, higher education has been far less attentive to this important activity than the industrial and governmental sectors have, both of which devote considerable energies and resources to management development. Estimates of the magnitude of the total training effort in industry vary widely, but they range from the substantial to the staggering. A major portion of industry’s $1.6 billion training effort is devoted to executive development (Lusterman, 1977). Through in-house programs and university-sponsored courses or degree programs, businesses have systematically identified and prepared a cadre of executive leadership. While postsecondary education has approached the training of its leaders in a far less ambitious way than business and government have, its efforts are expanding rapidly. The sixties marked the real birth of systematic training for academic administrators, with Harvard the first to organize short programs for deans and presidents. These programs were later to be continued by the American Council on Education, with its Institute for College and University Administrators program. In 1964, the Council inaugurated the Academic Administrators Internship Program, now known as the ACE Fellows Program. These efforts responded to the need for training people to administer rapidly expanding institutions and programs. Higher education was growing faster than the supply of experienced administrators, and such programs aimed to expand the pool of available talent. Until recently, such programs served small numbers of new administrators, and their content focused largely on educational and leadership questions that traditionally and fruitfully occupied professors turned administrators. Thus, curriculum, leadership styles, the management of growth and ample resources, and other topics appropriate to a different era filled the agendas of such leadership development programs. The number and variety of programs for academic administrators have grown dramatically in the last five years. A recently published compendium of training opportunities, A Cuidc to Professional Development Opportunitiesfor College and University Administrators, lists some 700 courses, seminars, and workshops available to administrators. Marketing, strategic planning, legal issues, and the use of computer models are but a few of the seminar topics advertised regularly in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The development of nonacademic administrators -managers in financial areas, in housing, in physical plant and the like -has fared somewhat better than development efforts for academic administration. Many institutions have staff development programs for these managers, whose effective performance is recognized as vital to successful operation of the institutions. The

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notion that financial managers need training and development is far less troublesome to academics than the idea that academic leaders also need training, and as a result, colleges and universities have done a better job in recognizing and acting on their development needs.

Leadership Development: A Leadership Problem The ferocious pressures of the 1980s and 1990s should make the debates about management and leadership, education and training superfluous. Leadership efforts will be needed to promote the development of new hybrid academic administrators who are part educational leader and part manager and who can successfully preserve a constructive tension between the academic and managerical components of their roles. Armed with an understanding that commitment to academic values does not always suffice to keep an institution solvent and with the knowledge that good management practices do not necessarily produce quality teaching or research, these individuals will be equipped to lead our beleaguered institutions through the tough times ahead. These leaders will require preparation to cope with the management of large but insufficient budgets and declining enrollments and to respond to the pressures of federal and state regulations, taxpayers, and student consumers. Because the task of leadership in the future will be difficult, leadership development will become increasingly urgent. Conflicting values and forces will have to be reckoned with if forward-looking and hard-nosed managerial techniques are to be applied in an environment that is-and ought to be-fundamentally inhospitable to such techniques. Neither the wholly educational nor the managerial values can prevail. If colleges and universities are going to find creative, workable solutions to the myriad problems ahead, serious attention will have to be paid to leadership development. Higher education will have to work consciously at striking a productive balance between the academic and the managerial requirements of leadership and give each its just due. The notion of management development in academe will have to become completely respectable, so that we can devote to it the level of effort that it deserves and bring to bear the resources and expertise of the talent within our own institutions. When the sociologists, psychologists, educational researchers, and financial experts are fully engaged in the process, leadership development in academe will benefit enormously from their contributions, as training in business and government already have. A tremendous capability to enhance the management of our institutions already exists. Business schools have been creating management programs for businesses for a long time now; their professors are out teaching these programs and consulting on management problems in the industrial sec-

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tor. Colleges of education have the capability to communicate management expertise through a variety of instructional models. Almost no major business is without a vice-president for human resource development. While colleges have not reflected the importance of human resources in their organizational chart, human resources have always been the principal wealth of colleges and universities, even when financia3and physical resources were far more plentiful. As with other resources, human resources need conservation and nurturing. The preparation and continued development of academic administrators are one dimension of the task. While the vast majority of deans, vice-presidents for academic affairs, and presidents are amateur managers, in the sense that their training and prior experience have not been in the management of higher education, they ought not remain novices indefinitely. Good instincts and on-the-job training will go a long way for some, but they are not enough. Instruction in the management of people and resources will accelerate the learning process and provide new skills and insights that would otherwise be gained haphazardly, if at all. The selection and preparation of academic administrators is, in the final analysis, a leadership issue. The best scholars do not necessarily make the best administrators, although excellence in scholarship is a key criterion used by selection committees. Leadership from the top is needed to develop selection criteria that will identify administrators with the academic records that will enable them to lead the faculty but who also have the temperament and ability to manage people and money. Presidents will have to demonstrate their commitment to providing leadership development opportunities by creating in-house programs and by devoting scarce resources to the professional development of administrators. The release of a faculty member to work half-time with the provost or president is an excellent investment as training, and it carries the side benefit of increasing faculty understanding of institutional administration. The opportunity for administrators to attend national seminars where they can meet with their counterparts from other institutions will pay off in new ideas brought back to the college and in the revitalization of individual administrators. However, academic leaders must also be aware of the danger in losing sight of the uniqueness of the educational enterprise. We have already seen time wasted and sights shortened in unproductive and mechanistic efforts to embrace this budgeting or that planning system. Administrators enamored of new mkagement techniques that do not help them to accomplish their fundamental mission will not further either effective management or quality learning. Decisions and goals that respond more to financial and enrollment pressures than to educational policy questions represent another danger. Hastily added programs may make neither financial nor educational sense; elimination of programs may cause quality to suffer without contributing significantly to the financial health of the institution. In short, deciding which programs to keep, which to drop, and how to follow through on these difficult decisions

17 without foreclosing the future or taking too devasating a toll will take all the leadership and management abilities that administrators have. In the coming years, educators will have to abandon the notion-or rather relinquish the wish-that the art of administration requires little if any training. Paradoxically, however, we will also do well to sustain the peculiar nature of leadership in higher education and the coexisting tensions in the academic leader's role. The recognition of this paradox will help us to understand the need for leadership development and to accomplish it with our eyes wide open.

References Cohen, M.D., and March, J. G. Le&sh$andAmb&iiQ: TheAmnican ColrCge President. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974. Fisher, C. F., and Coll-Prado, I. (Eds.). Guide to Projksionai Deuclopmcnt Opportunitiesfor College and University Administrators. Washington, D.C. : American Council on Education, 1979. Lusterman, S. Education in Industry. New York: The Conference Board, 1977.

Mdleine F. GrcGn is msmatc directorfor the Centcr for Leadership Development and Acadnnu Administration and director of the ACE Fellows Program at the American Council on Education.