The University-A Contrast in Administrative Process

Abstract

imminent change. The measuring rods and searchlights of the students of administration are being applied to the university. Problems of structure are beginning to be identified, the roles of the chief actors-trustee, president, dean, and faculty member-are receiving expert attention. The processes by which curriculum is devised, the student taught, the budget balanced are now proper subjects for serious study. More general problems of governance involving public bodies, executive and legislative, and their proper relationship to independent academic institutions, public and private, are in process of identification. Last and far from least it is recognized that administration requires administrators and, mirabile dictu, it is even believed in some quarters that the laws of pure chance, as the sole guarantor of administrative competence, are unreliable indeed. Training of administrative talent can be thought about and even attempted. The care and nurture of administrators is important and if we aren't careful the dean may even cease to be the subject of the annual Throttlebottom joke. The four authors whose essays follow are leaders among those who are lending the weight of their experience and prestige to this development. Their papers do not pretend to cover all the various problems and fields of interest that could and should attract the readers of the PAR. But their papers do open a number of doors through which we hope others will pass in increasing numbers. John Corson is almost uniquely qualified to write on the comparative aspects of academic, business, and governmental administration since he has been a professional participant and analyst of all three arenas. Harold Dodds reminds us forcefully that the academic administrator is not a neutral presiding over a neutral apparatus but must provide leadership in an academic community and that this function shapes his administrative task. Algo Henderson, like Dodds a man with experience in an academic presidency, describes some of the current efforts to identify and train academic administrators. Harlan Cleveland, a relative newcomer to collegiate administration, winds up the series with a lively piece on the man in the middle-the dean. These papers, let us repeat, are largely suggestive of some of the issues that should attract and excite the student of administration. This exercise will have well served its purpose if problems of academic governance and administration receive recurring attention in this journal.