140 Strategic Leadership
where it mot merely survives but has great power. Many academic men and
women know that power.... In devotion to intellectual integrity, they find a
demon who holds the fibers of their very lives” (1987, 275). To try to understand
the mission of an institution without awareness of the depth of these values and
beliefs is to miss a central motif in the institution’s story of identity. When we
see an institution’s mission as the self-investment in worthy ends, then we see
more clearly how strategic leadership draws on a rich well-spring of motivation
and loyalty.
CASE STUDY: THE MISSION OF THE
NEW AMERICAN COLLEGE
We have emphasized the importance of clarity of purpose for the tasks of
leadership while knowing that most academic institutions produce mission
statements that are vague or perfunctory. Rather than fill our text with lengthy
examples of flawed mission statements pulled out of context, it will be more
useful to describe an effort to reconceptualize mission that has made a telling
difference for many of its participants.
Now formalized into an association of colleges and universities called the Asso-
ciated New American Colleges (ANAC), the group began in the early 1990s as
an informal but continuous dialogue among the chief academic officers of a set of
small primarily undergraduate universities and comprehensive colleges offering a
range of programs in liberal and professional education. (At the time, the institu-
tions included the University of Redlands, the University of the Pacific, Trinity
University, the University of Richmond, Ithaca College, Susquehanna University,
North Central College, Hood College, and Valparaiso University.) The conversa-
tions began in frustration occasioned in part by classification and ranking systems
that listed their institutions as an indeterminate “regional something else” that did
not fit the primary and more prestigious categories of national liberal arts college or
national university. There was no clear model of educational quality to which they
could aspire, and their missions were portrayed and perceived negatively, as that
which they were not or, as one of the deans put it, as the ugly duckling of higher
education (cf. Berberet 2007).
In fascinating ways, the deans’ conversations paralleled the concerns of the
inimitable Ernest Boyer, whose uncanny ability to frame old issues in novel
ways crystallized an emerging consensus in the deans’ conversations. Boyer
(1994) wrote about the need for a new kind of American institution of higher
learning, one that was more engaged with the world, more practical in its
vision of the power of education, and more spacious in its understanding of
the different forms of faculty scholarship than traditional colleges and uni-
versities. In a word, Boyer portrayed an institution that would be definitively
integrative in working across the boundaries between disciplines, the liberal arts
and professional studies, undergraduate and graduate education, the campus
and the wider world, and the classroom and campus life. In doing so, he coined
the phrase the “New American College” to describe the institutional type he
was describing.