What is role of a university president? (#95; Topic E)

Yesterday, the president of Harvard University, Dr. S, announced that he would resign after this academic year. Today, the Wall Street Journal had a long story on his stormy 5-year tenure. At one point, WSJ stated that Dr. S was not accustomed to academia's collaborative spirit, so different from the hierarchical environment in government and industry from which he came (he was formerly Treasury secretary and, before that, the Chief Economist for the World Bank). Reflecting upon it, I found this to be indeed so. About 3/4 of my professional career was in the academia. While I never had the honor of serving as a university president, I did have my share of administrative responsibility in an academic environment. In my view, the faculty is the core of an institution, while the president is best viewed as that institution's spokesman -- a PR representative, if you will. (Dr. S, according to the WSJ report, assisted a friend of his, a faculty member, to escape from being disciplined by the faculty for a serious ethical misconduct. This, in my view, is a no-no for a president.) On my third year on the Cal State Fullerton faculty, as a mere associate professor, I was elected as the chairman of the Faculty Council, representating the faculty in dealing with the administration -- this clearly demonstrates that academic rank and administrative assignment are two different matters. Similarly, at U of Washington, I was a full professor, but we voted an associate professor to take the department chairmanship. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I was both professor and dean of the faculty of social sciences and commerce; I viewed my latter role as merely coordinating and facilitating -- precisely the collaborative spirit stated in the WSJ article.
Posted at 11:20 pm, Wednesday, February 22, 2006