4 Strategic Leadership
the leadership theme, for it continues to be associated with vague and unattain-
able educational objectives, and it is suspiciously tied to the moral ambiguities of
privilege and power—to which history’s leaders often bear bloody testimony.
Perhaps the culminating irony is that colleges and universities, the institutions
that study leadership analytically and empirically, rarely make their own decision-
making and leadership processes and practices the object of formal programs of
development or inquiry. There are notable and growing exceptions concerning
leadership development programs in larger institutions, but even in these cases
the emphasis is often on the responsibilities of designated positions of authority
(Ruben 2004b). They often focus more on management than leadership, at least
understood as a process that involves setting directions, motivating others, and
coping with change.
When we turn to academic decision making proper, the idiom in currency in
higher education is governance rather than leadership. The authoritative texts
and documents that define campus decision making say much about “joint effort”
or “shared governance,” but little about leadership. Bringing various forms of cam-
pus authority and the decision-making process into proper balance, and parsing
texts and delineating practices to do so, is often the focus of faculty and admin-
istrative activity. The larger and often-pressing question of leadership—of the
ways, for instance, to develop a shared vision for the future—is pursued obliquely
through activities such as strategic planning that have an awkward place in the
formal governance system itself. Leadership as a process of change and motivation
remains a repressed theme.
This is a peculiar and troubling form of neglect, especially given the ever-
intensifying demands on colleges and universities in a challenging environment.
Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell, voices a recurrent theme: “The
development of responsible, effective, and balanced governance, leadership, and
management is one of the most urgent priorities for the American university as it
enters the new Millennium” (2001, 201).
If we are to bring new resources to bear on this complex set of issues, it will
be in some measure because of the convergent understandings of leadership that
have emerged in a variety of fields in the last several decades. Although the work
on leadership is of very mixed quality and importance, from self-aggrandizing
memoirs to groundbreaking scholarship, there is much to be learned from the
best of the literature. It gives us reason to believe that it is worthwhile to look
closely again at leadership in colleges and universities through the lens of these
perspectives. As we review and synthesize some of these studies of leadership, we
shall keep before ourselves a central question. What can we learn about leadership
that will increase our understanding and improve the practice of it in colleges
and universities?
MOTIFS IN LEADERSHIP
We use the words “leadership” and “leaders” in everyday language to describe
an enormous variety of relationships and contexts in which certain individuals