Leadership in Higher Education: Views from the Presidency (review)

Leadership in Higher Education: Views from the Presidency offers a rare glimpse into the public and private worlds of more than a dozen top educators who have led flagship institutions through the social and institutional complexities emerging since the early 1990s, including the impact of 9/11. Over 400 pages of the book are devoted to interviews ("conversations") that cover the experiences of presidents and chancellors who collectively have served in top leadership positions in a total of 23 institutions.

A foreword by Ken Shaw, Chancellor Emeritus of Syracuse University, summarizes the book's primary contributions to current and emerging leaders both within and beyond the field of higher education:

The interviews are remarkably candid and revealing, personal and direct in their tone. What emerges from them are stories of tremendous power and appeal. . . .

If anyone doubts the common perception that America has the best system of higher education in the world, Fran Lawrence has produced a casebook of leadership stories that will convince all skeptics.

(pp. xi–xii)

The bookend "Introduction" and "Conclusion" chapters are worth the price of the book. The introductory material outlines the national and international challenges that have faced American higher education since 1990, providing a helpful context for the 13 interviews that follow. Topics are addressed succinctly yet substantively, covering such areas of major concern as the global information economy, information technology, demographic changes, the financing of public higher education, and the nexus of funding, demand, and selectivity. Faculty who teach overviews or history classes on American higher education will find this chapter a helpful distillation of the major issues facing our universities in this nation's recent history.

The conclusion summarizes major themes emerging from the interviews, including insights on family life, the encouragement and emergence of leadership abilities early in life, the necessity of teamwork, building diversity in higher education, access, and the themes of intelligence, humility, integrity, and listening as desirable traits on the leadership team. "Command and control leadership has never been the key to success in the university presidency," notes Lawrence (p. 444). Instead, the presidents offer suggestions for tapping into the complementary strengths found on their leadership teams and the intellectual capacity of faculty leaders to move their institutions forward.

The core of the book is dedicated to interview questions and narrative responses from higher education luminaries ranging from Myles Brand (whose chapter covers his presidencies at the University of Oregon and Indiana University, before moving in 2003 to head the National Collegiate Athletic Association) to Mary Sue Coleman, who assumed the presidency of the University of Michigan in 2002, after seven years at the helm of the University of Iowa. Each of the 13 chapters in this section focuses on the life-work of one educational leader.

The chapters seem to be literal transcriptions of interviews conducted in an atmosphere of collegiality and trust. Charles Vest, departing president of MIT, reflected, for example, that

. . . the death knell in a good university is for a president to try to operate by cult of personality. That goes back to my view that most of the institutional vision has to come up from within and be collective. You can't run a group of first-rate people based on ego. If presidents attempt to do that, almost by definition their tenure will be short..

(p. 399)

In addition to applying a fairly standard set of interview questions to these and other highly regarded leaders from institutions such as the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Xavier University in New Orleans, Lawrence covers similar ground in a chapter that provides insights from his own presidency of Rutgers (1990–2002). Each leader is asked, for example, to describe early encouragements to leadership, how the president's leadership team was recruited and developed, what advice should be given to new presidents, what has been the greatest leadership challenge, which critical skills are needed by new presidents...