Title: Making sense of leadership
Description: This study looked for a systematic relationship between the tactics of two-time college presidents and institutional performance in both presidencies, as measured by the racial/ethnic composition of the undergraduate student body. Each of the three two-time presidents in the sample is associated with an extreme pattern of change in student diversity: high growth in both terms, low growth in both terms, or highly divergent results from one term to another. Few issues in American higher education have received more attention over the past thirty years than student diversity, and there is a common thread that binds the ongoing debate: presidents must take the lead, whether in advancing the cause or holding the line against overreaching. For many years, both the scholarly and popular press have been filled with hopes and theories about how leadership can solve important, complex problems. But few empirical studies test these propositions in higher education against specific, quantifiable measures. A case study of each president, based on interviews with the president and his constituents and analyses of historical documents, details the student diversity-related tactics each employed when, and to what effect. Concurrent analyses of perceptions of the president's particular role and general reputation help refine the list of consequential tactics by accounting for interviewees' attributional biases and errors. A review of relevant contingencies establishes the boundary conditions that enabled and limited the president's efforts to engender change.

The central finding is that the association between presidential action and institutional outcome was neither consistent (each president used a similar tactical repertoire in both terms) nor important to constituents. What mattered most to them, far more than change in the composition of the student body--even if it was an espoused goal--was the fit between the president's diversity tactics and the organization's culturally accepted approaches to the issue. In sum, presidential tactics are lenses not levers, two-time presidents are constant not adaptive, and the value of their experience is in the details each term adds to their portraits, not the contents added to their bags of tricks.
Subjects: Educational leadership, Case studies, School management and organization, College presidents
Places: United States