Stephen J. Nelson, a research associate in Brown's education department, is the author of the recently-released "Leaders in the Crucible: The Moral Voice of College Presidents." During Brown's search for its 18th president, GSJ writer Kristen Cole asked Nelson for his thoughts about moral leadership and university presidents.
If, as can be reasonably argued, education is understood to have at the very least moral aspects and possibly at its foundation to be a moral endeavor, then moral leadership by college and university presidents should be a significant and critical responsibility of their office. It goes without saying that presidents bear complex responsibilities - administration, fund raising and development, and public relations. To a large degree in previous eras, but also including contemporary times, this expectation of moral leadership from presidents in the academy has always been the case. So, moral leadership - what I call moral voice - has been, and should continue to be, a traditional and substantial part of the expectations of the office. This leadership quality is something for which we should be looking, along with all the other traits we expect and desire in presidents, when selecting those who are to lead a college or university.
What are the competing demands on the role of a university president?
The demands which compete for a president's moral voice are the needs to manage increasingly complex bureaucracies, to amass the financial and other resources, to lead faculty and academic life, to present the institution to both internal and external constituencies, and to handle public relations. All of this has to be accomplished in increasingly political - highly ideological and often divisive - campus climates and institutional expectations. The responsibilities are substantially the same as those performed by Eleazor Wheelock when he founded Dartmouth or James Manning when he founded Brown. But today the climate in which presidents must lead and act has intensified, and competing constituencies have heightened the stakes of the demands on presidential leadership.
How can college and university presidents continue to be moral leaders?
The first, and in some ways the most important, factor in ensuring that presidents are moral leaders is that those responsible for selecting them and the constituencies primarily responsible for supporting them - trustees, alumni, faculty and students, and political leaders in the case of public universities - need to place a premium on expecting that presidents will lead morally, that they will exercise moral voice and that, while there may be disagreements, the moral voice, vision and leadership of presidents should not be silenced.
Second, the leadership of colleges and universities, other than presidents themselves, must be prepared to defend presidents and the institution in the face of "negative" reactions and publicity.
Finally, and closely connected, is the need for competing constituencies - especially those driven largely by ideology - to understand that for presidents to exercise moral voice the academy, per force, be characterized as a climate embracing free speech and expression, open discussion of ideas, disagreement and debate, elements of controversy, and that, if the university is truly to be the university - everyone cannot get "their" way all the time.
What is a recent example of a president's moral leadership impacting a college or university?
There are a number of outstanding examples. Asked to pick one, I would suggest the moral leadership and voice of James Freedman at Dartmouth in the midst of swirling campus controversy resulting from nearly a decade of journalistic license by the Dartmouth Review, the conservative off-campus newspaper at Dartmouth in the 1980s. In the first months of Freedman's tenure the Review ran a front-page story "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedman" parodying the Holocaust and suggesting that Freedman (a Jewish president) was rounding up conservatives and putting them on train cars to remove them from campus.
Freedman, along with much of the campus, reacted. A campus rally on the Dartmouth Green attracted over 3,000 students, more than three-quarters of the on-campus student body that fall. Freedman spoke in measured and at times, out of character for him, passionate terms. He maintained that they had a right of freedom of the press, but that their "journalism" had crossed a line which permitted him, even obligated him, to criticize and condemn them because they were now hiding unfair, ad homonym, and slanderous attacks behind a shield of freedom of the press and free speech.
The result of Freedman's leadership was to give support to those who had long endured the Review's hostility and abuses of free speech, and subsequently to prick a boil in the Dartmouth community. After Freedman's speech in the fall, 1987, the Review was never the same. What many had considered an extraordinarily negative force on the campus and chapter in Dartmouth's recent history was ended.