246 Strategic Leadership
between teaching and scholarship. Beyond aligning policies with practices that
reward a variety of forms of scholarship, he pointed the way toward creating
virtuous circles of connection between scholarship and teaching. If expectations
are textured in terms of institutional mission and vision, such as student involve-
ment in faculty research, then scholarship, teaching, and student learning find
novel and productive ways to reinforce and complement each other in virtuous
circles.
Faculty Roles and Responsibilities
These reflections on teaching and scholarship lead in many related directions,
revealing the systemic character of strategic thinking. One of the issues that they
entail is the re-conceptualization and redelineation of individual faculty roles and
responsibilities. The process is already underway in many institutions, though
usually on a piecemeal basis. If faculty members are to have differential workloads
in teaching, research, and service, there must be a careful definition of respon-
sibilities in terms of what Linda McMillin (2002) describes as a “circle of value”
between the faculty member and the institution. In terms of workload issues, a
faculty member’s teaching, scholarship, and service add value to a department,
which in turn adds value to the institution. The final turn of the circle involves
the institution adding value to the faculty member by providing resources and
support for the individual’s changing responsibilities and evolving professional
interests. In sum, the idea of differential workloads will not be effective if it is
based simply on an individual’s preferences and desires, but only if it takes into
account the needs and opportunities of all three parties, the person, the academic
unit, and the institution (McMillin 2002).
Strategic conceptualization brings to this task a way of locating the issues pre-
cisely at the point of intersection between the institution and its environment. It
brings the question back to the distinctive values, purposes, and competencies of
academic organizations as they have been formed in the real world over time. Stra-
tegic leadership defines the needs, capacities, and possibilities of the organization
and of its academic professionals simultaneously and in relation to one another.
It sets in place a method of strategic differentiation that is able to define com-
mitments that reconcile the perennial conflict between professional autonomy
and the needs of the organization. Although the structural conflict in values will
never disappear, it can become a virtuous circle of possibility rather than a vicious
cycle of frustration.
Liberal and Professional Education
There is a large variety of conflicts in academic decision making where strategic
leadership can provide new insights. The continuing tension between liberal edu-
cation and professional studies is, for example, open to far more creative solutions