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t he shift in value of higher education from a public to a private good centers power and authority on senior administrators, who are taken to be responsible to delimit a particular brand of excellence that will maintain the health of the enterprise. at the same time, faculty governance under the sign of the proletarianization of professions is transcribed into ever more time-consuming administrative duties. the tension between a centripetal management manifest in an increasingly centralized administration and a centrifugal managerialism—evident in the diffusion of accountability protocols among faculty and staff—generates all manner of fault lines as to which kinds of decisions belong to whom and what conditions of partnership advance the university’s purpose. the simultaneous centering and dispersion of management speaks to the more general blurring of the boundary between what is inside and outside the university as an organization. the result is a series of mixed metaphors and messages. these confound the instrumental demands for survival and growth and the substantive values from which the sense of exceptionalism rises. the university is all business (like any other) and, at the same time, it has a unique mission, calling, and ethical mooring that bespeaks its ecclesiastical origins (whose Greek root “ecclesia” means “to call out” and refers to the civic assembly). these schisms become more vertiginous as one ascends the administrative heights. the university president is at once chief executive officer and shepherd, fund-raiser and benefactor, rule maker and adjudicator. yet these roles are seldom left to coexist in a happy plurality. if a fund-raising drive mandates procuring $1 million a day, it is not such a stretch to guess who’s coming to dinner or to imagine what whispers will likely fill the presidential ear. 5 The Work of Administration _ 108 • ChapteR 5 the drive to excellence, which all campuses are subject to, produces assiduous attention to a metric without any determinate content. Movement on a scale of ratings provides its own justification for outcomes-oriented strategic assessment. the rhetoric of strategic planning, responsibility-centered budgeting , benchmarking, and other rationalizing schemes are offered as valueneutral techniques for mobilizing the university community to coalesce through a participatory process. yet, in practice, distributions are always substantively particularizing in one direction or another—driven broadly by the need to niche and brand in order to achieve a competitive platform while simultaneously dedifferentiating from others by emulating best practices. the swirling doubts regarding the value of education and the believability of faculty selfreports as to performance have been used to justify regimes of accountability, while at the same time, a pursuit of venture philanthropy replaces publicly accountable judgment with private discretion over what is worthy of support. equally confounding to cogent leadership is the interaction between the positional advantage of the ratings and the more ineffable measures of reputation that come from news-making acquisitions of faculty, new programs, and signal achievements. these last have the potential to unseat the equilibrating rationality of distribution, and they lend support to initiatives that contribute to the brand as tied to a unique attribute rather than to a mission as a generalizable feature of the institution. the business model is that the best and brightest are not simply marginally better than the mean, but they are logarithmically more productive. the star analyst makes markets while the academic zenith makes a field.1 decisions to invest in presidential salaries or those of select faculty are a consequence of this reasoning, but the context is a conversion to a value-added model of the university along the lines of the emphasis in corporate governance on delivering market price to shareholders . Far from being a repository of unchallenged expertise, higher education is open to judgment from all quarters. Unlike the shareholder whose demand for return is said to derive from a tangible investment, the notion of public stakeholders shifts the demand for answerability to any voice capable of making itself heard. Consequently, greater demand is placed on a particular figure of leadership to assume the burdens of representation—to be both the face of the institution and to assert which differences, initiatives, or decisions are to make all the difference. in this regard, leadership in higher education assumes the form of a kind of arbitrage, the investment activity by which small variations in value (outsized salaries in academia are modest by corporate standards) are leveraged to immediate positional and reputational effect. the arbitrager must be ever vigilant for better opportunities, which...

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