36 Strategic Leadership
and choice processes of academic organizations. Although the president’s role
is administratively essential, it is an illusion to expect the dominant forms of
leadership that may appear in other types of institutions. The responsibilities of
symbolic interpretation and legal authority, of administrative coordination and
collegial facilitation, are necessary forms of leadership that come with the posi-
tion. Add to these shrewd political insights and tactics, and presidents will be able
to get things done. So, personal characteristics, knowledge, and abilities as well as
authority count in the leadership role. Nonetheless, except in periods of crisis or
in a few special kinds of organizations, modest and passing presidential influence
is all that is possible. Rhetoric, nostalgia, and desire notwithstanding, the basics
of the situation cannot be changed.
Not everyone shares the same interpretation of the president’s authority and
leadership. The 1996 and 2006 reports of the Association of Governing Boards
of Universities and Colleges suggest that the weakness of the presidency and the
confusion of shared governance are real but remediable. Presidential authority can
be affirmed and asserted, governance clarified, strategy processes implemented,
a vision adopted, and the influence of politics reduced. A summons to moral and
professional responsibility can motivate change. The presidency may often be
weak and ineffective, but it can be made stronger to achieve integral leadership
(Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges 2006).
According to Fisher and Koch, the assertion of presidential authority does not
need remediation of the powers of the office. They describe the effectiveness of
presidents who have entrepreneurial characteristics and who know how to use
the power inherent in their role. They believe that when charisma, expertise,
confidence, and risk taking are combined with legitimate authority, the result is
transforming and entrepreneurial leadership.
Leadership. Governance. Authority. Decision Making.
As we look below the surface of the various studies, analyses, and proposals
that we have reviewed, we find several central themes: leadership, governance,
authority, and organizational decision making. In many ways, the challenge of
understanding leadership in higher education reduces to ways of reconceptualizing
these interwoven themes, both to grasp each more fully in itself and to consider
the relationships among them. Taken together, these factors produce a number
of ironies for the study of leadership. Whereas we might expect that concepts of
distributed and reciprocal leadership would be dominant, we find instead a central
focus on leadership as the exercise of the responsibilities of the presidential posi-
tion, whether it is conceived as weak or strong. In terms of leadership practices,
the research primarily proposes administrative tactics to manipulate and cognitive
principles to interpret an otherwise daunting system of shared authority. Recent
literature offers practical guidance about how to manage the responsibilities of
academic positions, yet analyses of more encompassing and systematic processes
of influential and engaging leadership are not in evidence. A genuine integration