I can't think of any college or university presidents that I really admire, and it's been a long time since I could. For the most part they don't make much difference even though they do very difficult jobs. I can look back and remember when what leading presidents said was of interest, at least on occasion. Edward Levi, James B. Conant, others. Now I just don't see anything much to admire.

Hank Brown probably did a good job at Colorado but I'm skeptical it will make any real difference. The clowns like Ward Churchill will probably be a little more cautious, the science people there will still keep winning Nobel prizes, mainly because of the national labs associated with the campus. The State of Colorado will still keep starving the Boulder campus of money, and the campus will keep going by charging outrageous (by public, not private school) out of state tuition to Boulder's amazingly buff and good looking students. I wonder if my faculty pals there still hold special "office hours" for select students, or have they learned to behave better? I dunno.

Qualities of a good academic leader surely have significant, though not total, overlaps with qualities of a good leader in any field. Some of these are:

1)Facing up to problems instead of just kicking the can down the road in the hope the problem will go away or someone else will deal with it later. This almost always involves antagonizing influential consituencies, as Frederick Hess says.

2)Taking responsibility for things even when they are not your "fault." A great example of this is provided by Anne Mulcahy's leadership at Xerox. She was made CEO when the company was in very serious trouble, and there was great pressure on her to put the firm in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. No one could have blamed her: she wasn't the one who had broken it, and it would have been less stressful than what she actually did, which was to rescue the company without defaulting on its obligations.

3)The power of personal example, which is well-illustrated by this story:

The date, sometime during the late 1800s. The scene, a Westinghouse Electric factory complex in Pittsburgh, with an unpaved yard between buildings. A young laborer--a recent immigrant--is trundling a wheelbarrow, filled with heavy copper ingots, over an iron slab which serves as a track across the yard. The wheelbarrow goes off the track and into the mud. As the laborer struggles to get it back on the track, other workers begin mocking him.

At that moment, a man in formal clothing is crossing the yard. It is George Westinghouse, founder and chief executive of the company. He wades into the mud and helps the man get the wheelbarrow back on the slab.

Not a word was said, but powerful messages were transmitted: when someone is having problems, you don't laugh at him--you help him. When things go wrong, no one is too important to dive in and get his hands dirty.

This is a splendid example of how good organizational cultures are created: through the power of example. Think how much more effective Westinghouse's action was than the mere posting of a "corporate values statement" containing phrases such as "we must respect our fellow employees at all times." Not that such things lack value, but they are meaningless unless backed up by action.

It would have been very easy for Westinghouse to simply ignore the incident and continue on his way. After all, he was heading to a meeting about something--a multi-million-dollar bond issue, say--compared with which a wheelbarrow stuck in the mud would seem to pale in importance. But his instincts were the right ones.

(The story is from Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes)

4)Communication style. Some verbal styles are extremely destructive, and particularly so when used by a leader. I tend to agree with Field Marshall Lord Wavell, who wrote:

"Explosions of temper do not necessarily ruin a general's reputation or influence with his troops; it is almost expected of them ("the privileged irascibility of senior officers," someone has written), and it is not always resented, sometimes even admired, except by those immediately concerned. But sarcasm is always resented and seldom forgiven. ..He (the general) should never indulge in sarcasm, which is being clever at someone else's expense, and always offends."

5)Dealing harshly with certain kinds of harmful behavior. Gen Eisenhower once fired an officer for calling an allied commander "a British son-of-a-bitch." He said he might have let it pass if the man had just called the other a son-of-a-bitch, but the *British* part of the insult was too destructive to inter-allied cooperation to let pass.