A Breakpoint Moment: Leadership Visions and Values for Trustees of Collegiate Mission
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Original Article
A Breakpoint Moment: Leadership Visions and Values for Trustees of Collegiate Mission1 E. Grady Bogue Published online: 8 February 2006
ABSTRACT: American higher education is an enterprise of complex heritage, mission, and governance culture—an enterprise expected to serve as both cultural curator and cultural critic. Contemporary issues such as the call for accountability and the pressure of marketplace ideology present colleges and universities with a possible breakpoint change moment in both mission and leadership, as established policy and philosophic principles are challenged and leadership vision and values are similarly called to question. This article probes the particular effect of marketplace ideology on colleges and explores three metaphors of leadership role and value: the Servant/Exemplar Leader, the Steward/Trustee Leader, and the Artist/Designer Leader. KEY WORDS: college leadership; college mission; higher education and the marketplace; breakpoint change.
As we enter the twenty-first century, what Likert weight or ranking might collegiate leaders assign to the issues and the tensions of purpose and performance confronting American higher education? Might they “strongly agree” that managing under revenue constraints is important or perhaps number one? Or would they assign premier place and weight to promoting diversity and community, responding to calls for accountability, reconciling academic and athletic cultures, or fashioning a proper response to marketplace pressures? Beyond the complexity of these issues, there is a dramatic complexity in collegiate mission. Colleges and universities are expected to be both cultural curator and cultural critic, to honor heritage and to assault the 1 This
article is adapted from a keynote presentation given to the Association for Student Judicial Affairs 2005 Annual Meeting in Clearwater Beach, Florida. E. Grady Bogue is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Tennessee, is Chancellor Emeritus of Louisiana State University in Shreveport, and has also served as Interim Chancellor of Louisiana State University and A&M College. He holds the B.S. in Mathematics, M.A. in Education, and Ed.D. in Educational Administration from the University of Memphis and was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University in 1986.
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C 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.
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INNOVATIVE HIGHER EDUCATION
limits of common sense, to hold hands with the past even as we reach for the future, to tend the commons of our national life while respecting its pluralism. We are expected to teach our students to appreciate cultural, economic, political heritage while we simultaneously equip them in skill and motive to criticize and transform that heritage. We aspire for them to discover and develop their individual talents and self-interest but to place these in service to cause beyond self, to civic interest. These are not the mission expectations of corporate friends such as General Motors, Fed Ex, or Dell Computers. These are mission expectations
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