Checks and Balances

YOU'D THINK THAT college presidents would enjoy their jobs. With their prerequisite mansions, free food, enough parties with alums and sherries students to keep anyone satisfied sounds tantalizingly attractive. But gathered together recently with Symposium on Higher Education at the Education School, though, four once and future college presidents expressed more than mixed feelings. Moderated by the presiding dean of of American sociology. Ford Professor of Social Sciences emeritus David Riesman M. ex-officials addressed the question "How Much Authority Does a College President Really Have?" Like most questions punctuated with reality, the question begs answers that will debunk certain myths--or denials so complete they invited suspicion where none existed before.

Predictably enough, the college president emphasized their own lack of authority. "A college president," said Thomas Graves, president of the College of William and Mary, "has responsibility without commensurate power."

Waving the bylaws of William and Mary that charge him with direction of the operation of the college, supervision of the work of the faculty, and internal discipline of students, Graves said that invoking such power routinely would not let him last even two weeks.

And other expressed similar sentiments Roxbury Community College President Brunetta Wolman points to a heirarchy of authority that flows from the General Court to the Board of Regents to a local board of Trustees and constituencies as the faculty, students, and deans revelling in what they suppose to be their dimming power. She likens college authority to a pie, suggesting that her own slice as president is excruciatingly miniscule.

And why not? If as Riesman charged, student radicals look to the president as someone to blame "all that is hideous on." would not the presidents want to deflect that responsibility else-where? And if the presidents must indeed be held "inceasingly responsible to constituencies that are often antagonistic to each other," is it not natural and not inconvenient to blame al failures, real or imagined, upon some amorphous lack of authority.

WITHOUT DOUBT, the college constituencies, as these politicians in the academy call them, exhibit ambivalence over the power of the president "Students do not want the president to enforce the local drinking age," claimed Riesman, who established his academic career decrying trends among our generation in The Lonely Crowd, "but are happy to invoke in loco parentis surreptitiously when they get in trouble." The faculty of a college, Riesman argues, feels ambivalent about the president's power, expecting some sort of errand boy to free them from lowly administrative chores, but skeptical of any real power.

On one level, the complaints--often raised to state-of-the-art whining as in Graves' characterization of "one crisis after another being a president without authority"--reflect the implicit ambivalence of the presidents themselves. Alberta Arthurs, former president of Chatham college, correctly observes. "We tend to teach our best students to admire individualism rather than the institution. I don't think that's a bad thing, but that makes thing tough for college presidents."

But as Arthurs and the other college officials seemed reluctant to note, they come from the very same academic environment that cultivates individualism as irreverence and even antagonism to constituted authority, and views power as yet another phenomenon to critique.

"In our zeal to catalogue power." University of Connecticut President John DiBiaggio warned, "we threaten to subdivide the university into ineffectiveness." A dentist by training and a leading authority on preventive dentistry. DiBiaggio suggested an easy route to failure. "As with other forms of impotence," he said, "worry can create the problem."

At his own university, DiBiaggio struggles under a complex and demanding set of "open door" requirements that require him to discuss all business with the governing boards in public--even the awarding of honorary degrees. "I am in awe of the office," he nonetheless said, adding, "you can't appreciate it until you live through it."

But for all the talk of "responsibility without comensurate authority" and administrative impotence, the presidents agreed that they retain a degree of influence over the university. "What you can do [as a college president]." Graves said, "is keep the institution in touch with itself." Two weeks into his administration. Graves called a "convocation" to set his goals for the college and to try to establish that elusive consensus. "Like campaign promises," he said, "you hope they soon forget."

On several occasions, Graves said he risked losing his office on matters of principle. "The college president has very little real authority," he concluded, "but he has all he needs." Ultimately, however, scant the "real" authority presidents exercise, they possess more prominence and more authority than any single person on campus.

W WHATEVER THAT AUTHORITY, though, a new president often faces expectations too extravagant ever to fulfill. In 1971, after a selection process that cost over $40,000, involving mailings to thousands of educators, and air travel for the four candidates to criss-cross the country. Harvard finally chose its top administrator. One Crimson editor said of the new president, "He's Derek Bok, he's the Answer, the Savior, the Lucky Ticket, the Academy Messiah."

Some 13 years later, with student riots the thing of nostalgia pieces, and hardly the overbearing threat that could effectively halt classes and occupy University Hall, Harvard's Messiah seems remarkable mortal--mortal enough to fuel occasional speculation over his successor.

And as Graves said, "A college president needs to remind himself every morning that he is just somebody else's predecessor."

In 1970, a Crimson editor wrote, "The philosophy and competence of Pusey's successor will largely determine the University's future."

Whatever his real authority today, although Bok was only recently ranked as the nation's leading educator, his successor will largely determine the future not just of this university, but over future discussions of college presidential power as well.