On the nature of leadership

A symposium to discuss the liberal arts and leadership is apt to generate wide-ranging conversation and that's exactly what happened this fall when the presidents of thirty-three liberal arts colleges joined several guests at Union.

During the day-and-a-half symposium, the speakers came at leadership from many directions:

• To Tom Brokaw, the anchor of "The NBC Nightly News," there is a sense of foreboding in our society: "We have allowed, indeed encouraged, the idea of leadership that divides rather than unites, exploits rather than repairs the fractures in our political and cultural landscape." 
• To Raymond V. Gilmartin '63, the president, chairman, and chief executive officer of Merck & Co., Inc., higher education today has many of the same challenges that faced the health care industry, including cost. "Perhaps the experience of the health care industry-both our mistakes and what hopefully will be our successes-can produce some insights into resolving this dilemma of higher education." 
• To Mel Elfin, executive editor of "America's Best Colleges," produced by U.S. News & World Report, the academic world would like to believe that it is immune from the pressures of competition that affect the world beyond the campus. "My first suggestion is to use the language of your students-get real." 
• To Steven Koblik, the president of Reed College, Americans seem to want first-class education at bargain basement prices. "It cannot be clone: not in health and not in education, either. The likely result in both sectors will be a differentiated, competitive marketplace." 
• To Shirley Peterson, the president of Hood College, "survival instinct" may lead liberal arts colleges to make changes that move away from their tradition. "It is more important to save the best of the liberal arts core-while entertaining new approaches to maintain fiscal integrity-than to stand on pure principle while the ship goes down." 
• And to John J. Curley, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of the Gannett Company, selling the benefits of a liberal arts education should be a cinch-but isn't.

Following are excerpts from some of the speakers; each, as would be expected, elicited lively give-and-take from the college presidents.

Tom Brokaw opened the symposium with personal-and at times, emotional-remarks about the nature of leadership.

"We meet at a time of great anxiety and great promise, politically, economically, culturally," he said. "This remarkable nation of deeply held democratic values, unsurpassed material wealth, and breathtaking cultural variety approaches the millennium with at once a sense of pride and foreboding.

"All the symbols of greatness are in place: a stable and responsive government; a rich and broadly based economy; a productive and generous population. No wonder the pride.

"Why, then, the foreboding?"

The foreboding, he said, exists because "we have devalued the place of common welfare in our society....

"Let's face it: we want leaders but we're curiously unwilling to help create the climate in which they may flourish. In fact, leadership in any environment requires a constituency of followers who are prepared to subsume some of their own, most selfish interests for the greater good."

Brokaw said that condition is shown in many ways, such as the willingness to gamble billions of dollars daily on gaming chances while refusing to make an investment in our education system. "We're beginning to resemble the world's largest dysfunctional family," he said.

How to nurture leadership in this environment?

He offered several primary requirements:

• The institutions of mass communication should be encouraged to chronicle success as well as failure, and they must avoid the feeding frenzy syndrome that too often accompanies any perceived flaw or weakness in anyone who steps forward to assume leadership. 
• Political institutions must make a more vigorous effort to separate themselves from the big money of well-organized and narrowly-focused special interest groups. 
• Individuals must be prepared to find common ground with other citizens.

"We have in this society created our own demons and they can be removed only by us," Brokaw said. "Our longing for leadership is understandable. But the admonition to Brutus stands. We'll not find it in the stars. It is within each of us and the influence we have in the place we occupy."

Ray Gilmartin '63 (who serves on Union's Board of Trustees), discussing the challenge of change for liberal arts colleges, turned to his own field-the health care industry-for parallels.

The most momentous driver of change in the health care business, he said, is a competitive marketplace, which has pushed aside a 200-year-old tradition of fee-for-service payment for health care and embraced managed care-a system dedicated to containing costs.

"What strikes me is that higher education faces the same challenge: our society cannot sustain a continued upward spiral in tuition costs," he said.

The experience of the health care industry, he said, might offer some insights for those in higher education. He pointed to what he called three major mistakes the health care industry made when initially countering the demand for cost containment.

First, he said, the health care industry procrastinated in the face of change by defending its value. For too long, the industry pushed against the inevitable by arguing that "people should be willing to pay more for the value we provide."

Second, the industry continued to focus on revenues when containing costs also was the issue.

Third, the industry allowed the specter of rationing-fewer services or restricting access to services-to enter the debate.

To approach each of these areas with a new awareness, Gilmartin said, the health care industry:

• acknowledged that it had to reestablish value based on new market definitions and demands; 
• recognized the need to find ways to contain costs, not just enhance revenues; and 
• took the issue of rationing off the table by recognizing that it is possible to contain costs without reducing service or compromising excellence.

The change has not been an easy one for executives in the health care business, Gilmartin said, and it won't be easy for those in higher education.

"What both enterprises must do is continue to improve our performance by transforming the way we deliver health care and education," he said, "and to recognize that we cannot depend on price or tuition increases to maintain the financial basis required to stimulate excellence through innovation."

Mel Elfin acknowledged that the role he plays at U. S. News & World Report "annoys, irritates, bothers, or deeply troubles" many people in the academic community.

"But I also know that on occasion friendly critics outside the academy may have useful suggestions," he said.

He then rattled off a number of them:

• college-organized health care groups;
• "outsourcing" such functions as dining services, security, buildings and grounds, accounting, and computing; 
• trimming "Wal-Mart sized superstores of course listings;" 
• examining tenure, "an idea whose time has come and gone;" 
• setting priorities for research "to distinguish the ideas that are unoriginal from those that bear promise of truly advancing scholarship."

Elfin's most impassioned remarks came when he talked about teaching.

"The true revolution of higher education will come through the amalgam of the best of American high technology and the tradition of the Oxford tutorial," he said. "In my vision, the computer is an interactive, multimedia instructional tool that can redefine learning the way the printing press once redefined reading."

Furthermore, he said, the computer can allow faculty members to do what they do best tutoring individual students or small groups of students. "I ask you here to stop nibbling at the edges of true reform and start thinking in terms of a profound, comprehensive change," he said. "Surely this is not an easy task, but the alternative is the slow descent of higher education into unaffordability and irrelevance."

To Steven Koblik, the president of Reed College in Portland, Ore., one of the main concerns for college presidents is to preserve the teaching faculty.

The curriculum, buildings, admissions, and other aspects of college are important, he said, but without an effective faculty, liberal arts colleges will flounder and eventually die.

"We need highly intelligent, broadly as well as deeply educated, dedicated teacher-scholars," he said. "Yet we recruit our faculty from graduate schools that have defined their missions to train scholars primarily in narrowly-defined disciplinary research.

"We have been lucky historically. The question is, will we be so lucky in the future. I don't think so."

He said that the "terms of the trade," with an emphasis on scholarship and publication, do not favor the liberal arts college's teaching traditions.

"Yes, we reward success at our institutions with tenure and good compensation," he said. "But these successful teachers have no mobility. They are, in effect, reasonably paid, respected, indentured servants rather than able-bodied professionals whose highly skilled services are transferrable.

"How are they and their families going to prosper in the economy of today and tomorrow, whose primary characteristics are increasing change and demand for mobility?" he said. "I believe we will shortly face the same problem that now confronts K-12 institutions-a shortage of the best teachers."

He urged his colleagues to think about creating greater flexibility for "our most important resource: the teaching faculty."

Shirley Peterson, the president of Hood College and the former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, said the main issue is how to preserve the "national treasure" of the liberal arts in the face of challenges that threaten to overwhelm small, independent colleges.

"After years of battling the forces propelling more and more students toward `professional' or `technical' education, we now face the even greater challenges of adjusting to diminishing resources at a time when technological advances appear likely to transform the educational experience," she said.

For a start, she said, those at liberal arts colleges need to speak up for the advantages of their institutions.

"The fact is that a liberal arts education is something clear and precise, and it includes among its chief virtues clarity and precision," she said.

"Although it embodies the repository of wisdom across the ages, it is specific, rigorous, focused, and particular," she continued. "It is a coherent program of study whose sole and defining purpose is the creation of a strong, subtle, supple, resourceful, and capacious human mind. In its long history, our species has not found a better way to produce such minds."

Given all that, she said, liberal arts colleges cannot take the risk of being unable or unwilling to change.

As one example, she discussed the major-the expression in the undergraduate curriculum of the powerful impulse toward specialization.

"One of the first questions we need to address is what level of specialization is appropriate for a scholar and teacher whose principal role is to liberate the mind of her student," she said.

It is likely, she said, that fifty percent of liberal arts college graduates will earn a living in -- -- I ways for which they had no specific academic training, and twenty-five percent of them will work at jobs that do not now exist.

"While these are good arguments for the kind of resourcefulness and flexibility developed by a liberal education, they may portend a reduced emphasis on specialization," she said.

Alternatively, if specialization is essential, then liberal arts colleges should consider sharing specialists, since none can afford to be "all things to all people."

John J. Curley, the Gannett Company president and a member of Dickinson College's Board of Trustees, asked, "How often do you see a story or opinion article about the value of liberal education?

"The answer is rarely," he said. "But even if you saw it often it would not necessarily have the desired impact of enhancing your marketing.

"For the people who believe it, the message reinforces their view. For those who have little understanding of it, the message probably won't be read. And for those editors and producers who have to decide whether to carry the philosophy without some specific news, the answer is that they probably won't run it."

He told the presidents that the best approach is direct marketing-targeting each constituency with specific messages.

"By its very nature news is something that's different or unique," he said. To reach the people you must reach, he continued, "analyze your strengths and micro market."

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