Are They Singing from the Same Hymn Book?

A fact of academic life is that faculty and presidents primarily concern themselves with different institutional tasks, attend different institutional meetings, and pursue different institutional goals. In short, faculty do "faculty things" and presidents do "presidential things." They have different perceptions of institutional life (Peterson and White 1992). Differing perspectives can easily lead to standoffs between the two powers in academe—those who teach and those who administer—and those standoffs happen quite frequently (American Council on Education & Pew Higher Education Roundtable 1996; Schuster et al. 1994). Faculty-administrator differences are not a new phenomenon; examples exist at Williams and Dartmouth Colleges from 100 years ago (Finkelstein 1984).