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Vision, Lemon Spritzers, and Saying Thank You: A New Job Description for College Presidents

This paper was prepared for discussion with the Connecticut College trustees in 1992.

College presidents are an endangered species, according to the latest round of news. As a relatively new member of the breed, inaugurated just four years ago, I think I begin to understand why the stresses of this job create high frustration, short terms in office, and therefore, uneven leadership in America’s institutions of higher education. The job is complicated. The constituencies are diverse and their needs often conflict. Yet I also have come to think that many of the stresses in the college president’s life come from distortions in the job description that encourage presidents to misdirect their energies.

To many people, the job of a college president has one facet: fund raiser. The problem here is that funds follow good ideas and good programs, so good presidents need to be good academic leaders. That is harder than ever because the task of leadership has changed, not just in academia, but in American society. People no longer listen, let alone follow, just because the title of president precedes a person’s name. Our pluralistic, democratic culture intensifies the need for leaders to speak not just from a compelling and personal vision, but out of wisdom derived from their constituents.

This shift has produced another one-sided job description of the college president as manager, attending primarily to processes, committees, and budgets. This also sets up frustrations and misdirects a president’s efforts. Bureaucracy deadens, and the farther the president lives from the classrooms and the athletic fields, the faculty lounge and the library, the faster he or she becomes a paper-pusher who relates only too tangentially to the real mission of the institution.

One by One

When I became a college president, I had only a partial idea of what it would take to sustain and enhance the community made from the college’s constituencies of students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends of the college, and people with a stake in it including local, state, and national groups. Since then, faculty, students and staff have been my teachers. Trustees have encouraged me to listen and learn. And I have come to realize how deep a commitment community building takes.

To be a leader, a president must be “present” to far more than wealthy alumni. He or she must feel responsible for the quality of life of the kitchen and custodial staffs as well as of vice presidents, secretaries and students. The president has got to take a lively, personal interest in the evolution of individual faculty members as well as in the faculty, which is the college’s critical, self-perpetuating strength and creates natural resource.

For me, this part of leadership has come to mean holding annual state-of-the-college meetings with faculty and staff at all levels to discuss our achievements and goals. It means being available for confidential meetings with faculty members who feel they have gotten off track and need special help reorienting their careers. It means that my husband and I have dinners for students at the president’s house and listen to their hopes as well as their fears, their complaints as well as their compliments.

It means speaking each year to interested children of employees about orienting themselves to higher education and making sure they have academic options after high school. Sometimes it means writing to discouraged young people whose parents think a note from me would help their children believe in themselves and hold onto their dreams despite personal difficulties. And while all colleges have a dean of faculty and a dean of students, at Connecticut College the president inevitably is the closest thing to a dean of parents.

In short, as leader, the president must listen and speak to individual members of all the college’s constituencies, not just to committees or those who can make major donations. Out of that discourse the president leads and strengthens the community.

Vision and Hackles

Besides building community, I believed when I began this job, and still believe, that my mission as president was to articulate a vision for Connecticut College, to connect the college’s traditions to the current and future environment outside. I thought I should try to sense as many distant tremors of impending change in society as I could and communicate my awareness of the future. But I also knew the community would need to teach me its traditions, give me its own sense of society and the world, and develop trust in my sense of the future. So in the months between my appointment and my arrival on campus, I visited the college every few weeks for a full day. Through the campus newspapers I asked everyone to come and meet with me and tell me what I needed to know to lead the college well.

They came: cooks and librarians, coaches and custodians, students and safety officers, faculty at all levels and in a full range of disciplines. They brought reports and studies and plans done years before. They brought hopes and worries. They came with broken hearts and raised hackles and great pride in their fine liberal arts college. I took notes. I asked questions. I listened. And I went home and read and thought and began to evolve a sense of the college’s strengths and weaknesses, and mainly, a sense of its values. Out of the richness of those hours, refined through talks with trustees and alumni, came the vision I articulated in my inauguration address that fall.

The community did not say it just wanted a fund raiser as president. It did not say it just wanted a manager, or even just a public relations jock. As its concerns meshed with mine, I sensed a desire for someone who would articulate a vision — a collective vision — and a sense of direction. What also emerged was a search for ways to sustain the community’s values of respect for diversity, commitment to ethics through its honor code, and focus on internationalization, volunteerism and student leadership. It became my responsibility to lead in the development of programs that would demonstrate and enhance the ways the college community lives these values.

Respect for diversity, for instance, meant we would create a summer program to challenge disadvantaged high school freshmen to direct their teenage years toward finishing high school and going to college. Encouraging diversity also meant we would go beyond divesting our holdings in companies with business in South Africa and develop a supportive partnership with a village there, a partnership involving college students collaborating with local middle and high school students on behalf of young people in the village. This idea, incidentally, was born at a dinner at the president’s house where students, faculty, staff and New London leaders talked together.

Those and similar meetings in the past three years also have led to strengthening our 78-year-old honor code, to increased student volunteerism, to more student leadership in everything from designing off-campus community service programs to redesigning the curriculum, and to scores of faculty initiatives, including a new Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts.

To be sure, the president’s personal values shape and influence the whole community, but the president’s larger job is to help the community sense its own collective values, confirm its own commitments, and confidently connect words to actions.

Lemon Spritzers

This does not mean neglecting good management. Parents and the public have a right to know that academic leaders are not “slow learners” about financial management, as a recent Forbes article suggested. But here too, the job description needs to specify collaboration. It is the president’s job to set the stage for responsible and inclusive planning and decision making. The president has to make sure management structures make cost containment and good planning top priorities, and that financial monitoring and modeling force courageous answers to the question: “What can we stop doing, with the least negative impact on our mission, to achieve serious cost savings?” In an academic setting, students and faculty need to sit with administrators to help make these tough decisions.

It also is the president’s job to be candid. The pressures and stresses of a college presidency tempt one to avoid risks, risks of making people angry, and risks of telling trustees, staff faculty or students facts they are unprepared to deal with. Eventually, constituencies come to respect the courage a leader shows in confronting difficult issues, in taking risks, in being willing to be wrong, and when wrong, in being willing to apologize. Here, another essential part of contemporary leadership is not only the courage to be straightforward, but also the skill and time to help people deal with what they learn. A good leader helps a group take institutional lemons and make them not just lemonade, but lemon spritzers.

Finally, it is the president’s job to express the appreciation of all constituencies for the good work of individuals, departments, athletic teams, and groups of all kinds. When people feel alienation, isolation and frustration at work, it goes home with them, follows them to the kitchen table, and touches spouses, companions, and children. People should commit themselves to spending both time and energy at work, but a good leader tries to make sure people don’t also spend away their spirit. Going home or back to a dorm dispirited usually means poor management, organization, and supervision are occurring somewhere. And it also means people feel unappreciated.

Usually, college systems are set up to thank influential volunteers and donors (as well they should be), but systems also have to be in place to thank the crews who maintain the physical plant or work in the dining halls when their work is excellent, or the faculty for a significant jump in the number of students they are willing to supervise in honors study. It is the president’s responsibility to set the tone for how people are treated and how they treat each other. It is the president’s job to say, in active gestures of support, in public speeches, and in careful private notes, “thank you, on behalf of all of us.”

Hard Work, Low Stress

This kind of job description is labor intensive for the president, but for me and for colleagues who work this way, it is surprisingly unstressful. This kind of job description expects the president to listen and to speak, to aim to live the values that if practiced widely would strengthen the community, and to balance being accessible to normal representatives of constituencies with accessibility to individuals, whose confidence in the institution is strongly enhanced by the confidence the president shows by spending time with them.

Of course fund raising is part of the job. But so is admissions work and curriculum development. I also teach every year because the classroom is the center of the college and the president belongs there, too. My colleagues at megaversities and at institutions with fierce legislative, legal or financial problems face the challenges of size and crisis. But many use this same general approach.

Maybe I have the job description wrong, but at Connecticut College, giving was up 47 percent last year. Admissions are strong despite the demographic trends that temporarily are reducing the pool of applicants, and the college community has a sense of pride that visitors remark on. The Trustees of the College have a lot to do with these strengths. They understood how to direct a new and green president. So now, as I enter my fourth year as an American college president, I don’t feel like a member of an endangered species at all. I love my job.