The System and Culture of Academic Decision Making 51
values exemplify the specific forms in which the organization has pursued its
commitment to quality, to learning, to service, to innovation, to diversity, and
to its other central values. These values can be given powerful expression and
distinctive content to create the ingredients for a vision—a coherent statement
of the institution’s best possibilities for the future. Academic professionals will
yield some of their autonomy to serve an “absorbing errand” (Henry James, quoted
in B. R. Clark 1987), a cause such as intellectual quality that requires common
effort and successful institutionalization in order to be attained and sustained. The
pull toward independence is always present, but it can be transcended by shared
values that are precisely defined and that resonate with the authentic possibilities
of creating a great academic organization. Although often buried under routine
and distorted by conflict, it is the power and allure of exalted tasks like these that
brought academic people into the profession in the first place. The task of leader-
ship in academic communities is to reconcile structural conflict by mobilizing a
commitment to shared intellectual and educational values and, as well, to the
institutions that embody them (Morrill 2002).
NOTE
- Several paragraphs in this chapter are an abbreviated, edited, and paraphrased ver-
sion of an earlier discussion of these issues from a book that I wrote for the Association
of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, Strategic Leadership in Academic Affairs:
Clarifying the Board’s Responsibilities (2002). The original impetus for my development of a
theory of value conflict was a study of values and decision making in six institutions orga-
nized by the Society for Values in Higher Education (Morrill 1990). Parallel frameworks
for analyzing issues of decision making among knowledge professionals can be found in
Mintzberg (1979), B. R. Clark (1987), and Berquist (1992).