Liberal Arts Colleges: A Call to Leadership
W T tHAT are the conditions for effective leadership by private colleges? Private colleges cannot give leadership in American higher education unless they encourage and exemplify able leadership within their own precincts. In both universities and freestanding colleges, the obstacles to effective leadership are vast. But if a college can create the conditions in which leadership flourishes, it will be able to recruit the leaders it needs. Indeed, potential leaders will seek it out. The leaders we wish for the colleges will not all be presidents, trustees, or administrative officers. We speak of "leaders" in a broad sense, including faculty, students, alumni, and members of a larger community who can play a substantial part in shaping the future of a college; for we see many colleges as requiring a diffuse, decentralized, multifaceted type of leadership. Even though some colleges may arise and thrive for a time under thoroughly autocratic or hierarchical leadership, these patterns will become more and more exceptional. Why do we suppose that leadership will change in the direction of decentralization? Research on management suggests that a bureaucratic or autocratic pattern of governance works best where the task is simple and unchanging and where the activities making it up require little