Role Of President Research Articles

The Relative Importance of Presidential Roles

The Relative Importance of Presidential Roles

The Presidency and Political Change

At a time when the president is attempting a drastic change in economic policy, it is appropriate to examine the development of his role in economic policy. As in so many other aspects of the modern presidency, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt is the watershed. He expanded the president's role as economic policymaker in an unchallenged executive response to the crisis of the Depression. The institutionalization of that role was a process involving several stages that unfolded in succeeding administrations. One stage was the role's definition and legitimation by Congress in the Employment Act of 1946, which defined a new governmental commitment to economic intervention to achieve maximum employment. The same act created the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and placed it in the Executive Office of the President. Since then, the CEA has played a vital part in economic policy. Its importance contributed to a train of economic policy staff agencies that grew as the president's economic policy role expanded with the emergence of such new problems as economic growth, poverty, inflation, stagflation, and foreign economic policy. Throughout this evolution, a constituency of economic policy crystallized, which contributed to the institutionalization of the president's role. President Reagan's efforts to reverse economic policy direction may be difficult, because some of the political institutional supports his predecessors could rely on have undergone considerable change and are now problematical.

THE IMPACT OF COLLECTIVE BARGAINING ON THE ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS AND ROLES OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE PRESIDENTS

This study investigated the impact of collective bargaining on the role perceptions of community college presidents through the use of a role perception instrument. As collective bargaining gains momentum with faculties and more institutions adopt the process, community college presidents need to understand how it affects their administrative roles. The role‐perception instrument contained 32 administrative functions grouped into four major presidential role sections. Respondents rated the administrative functions in terms of priority and time consumption. One hundred community college presidents in collective bargaining environments and a similar number in non‐collective bargaining environments received the questionnaire, and 120 were returned from which data was collected. The tabulation of frequency responses, along with the percentage for administration function and the t‐tests on the four presidential role sections were computed. Correlation analysis was employed to compare priority and time consumpt...

National Security Advice to U.S. Presidents: Some Lessons from Thirty Years

Since 1947 the major formal institution for channeling national security advice to Presidents has been the National Security Council. The Council has operated (1) as a forum where senior officials meet with the President; (2) as a focal point for formal policy planning and decision processes; and (3) as an umbrella for establishment of a Presidential foreign policy staff. The first was the goal of its proponents; the last is what it has most importantly become. But the N.S.C. has reflected the relationships among each administration's top officials more than it has shaped them; hence the need to think of broader advisory “systems” combining the formal and the informal. Among the variables shaping such systems are; a President's particular organizational sense; his attitude toward formality and regularity; whether he has (and wants) strong Cabinet officials; how his key advisers work out their role relationships and jurisdictional boundaries; how widely he casts his net for advce; how broad a range of substantive issue involvement he seeks; how much he seeks operational involvement; and his attitude toward divided counsel and interpersonal conflict.Prescriptions about foreign policy advisory systems tend to stress the President's role as decision maker; they should focus also on the oft-competing role of effective Presidential leadership in getting policies and decisions executed. The importance of execution argues for giving the Secretary of State primacy over other advisers; the need to protect the President's decision authority argues for a White House assistant independent of the Secretary, though perhaps with reduced rank. Presidents also need better advice on the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy, and each could profit from a “mid-term system review” after his institutions and advisory relationships have taken shape.

College presidents' role performance and faculty satisfaction

This research analyzed faculty evaluations of college presidents' role performance with the intent of identifying underlying dimensions and to ask further which dimensions predicted faculty satisfaction with presidents. Data were gathered from 896 faculty members from two technical colleges, three community colleges, two private universities and three public universities in a Western state. The factor analysis revealed three relatively independent dimensions of the presidential role: personal-public image, faculty and student interaction with presidents, and absence of autocratic leadership style. The “personal-public image” was the most important dimension and predicted faculty satisfaction across the four types of institutions of higher learning. “Faculty-student interaction with the president,” while not as important a dimension of the presidential role, predicted faculty satisfaction in three institutional types, but not in public universities. The “absence of autocratic leadership style” predicted satisfaction in community and technical colleges.

Role of the chief executive officer

AbstractThe president's role in the bargaining process may necessitate changes in expectations held by institutional leaders.

The community college president

The college president has been the object of more discussion than any other position in higher education. The literature is replete with articles and books which vary from personal reminiscences through descriptions to serious analyses. Officeholders have been pictured as tyrants, authoritarian figures, timid and indecisive followers, as well as organizational leaders of great stature and strength. Each of these views has some validity, depending upon the personality of the individual officeholder and the particular time and place. It is my purpose to (1) define the concept of role, (2) describe some parameters of the president's role, and (3) place the office in its organizational context.

Role of the University President in Governance of the Medical School

Undoubtedly, there are moments when any one of us would like to deny that a university president has any role whatsoever in the governance of a medical school. This feeling could prevail whether we are functioning as faculty, administrators, trustees, or public-at-large, although such doubting is of course, by tradition, the special prerogative of faculty members. On the other hand, we must assume the antithetical premise, and then try to determine how the president's role can be defined, limited, or even maximized. As a guide to reaching whatever consensus there may be on this subject, I will first ask and then propose answers to six questions. If you agree with my formulation of the questions and my tentative answers to them, at least we will be in tune with each other on some of the basic propositions related to present-day governance of medical schools and, therefore, in a better position

The President Reports

In his presidential address to the National Conference of Canadian Universities which met at Toronto in June 1955, Dr. W. P. Thompson of the University of Saskatchewan undertook the task of defining the proper duties of a university president. The protean nature of the president's role would render this a courageous undertaking in any circumstances. Dr. Thompson's decision was particularly heroic since, himself the president of one Canadian university, he was addressing an audience which included the president, principal, or rector of almost every other university or college in Canada. It would be difficult to assemble a more critical audience for an address on this subject. No one knows better than a president the contradictions inherent in a position which places the occupant under legal or moral obligations at one and the same time to five distinct and powerful groups—groups, moreover, whose interests frequently conflict: governors, faculty, students, alumni, and the general public. No one, therefore, has better cause than a president to view with cynicism any attempt to describe the ideal. It is not, however, the purpose of this article to review the difficulties of Dr. Thompson's task, nor to report on his success in dealing with a forbidding subject. (Dr. Thompson's address will appear in the published Proceedings of the 1955 Conference.) We are concerned here with but one of the president's many problems: the preparation of an annual report on the state of the institution. Though not specifically referred to by Dr. Thompson, the problem posed by the annual report proves to be typical of those which face the president, for his efforts to produce a satisfactory report are complicated by the conflicting claims of the five groups with which he deals.

The President as International Leader

Before taking office in 1913, Woodrow Wilson remarked to a friend: It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.1 Today, a President comes to office assured that he will spend most of his time and make his most difficult decisions in the field of global politics. Wilson's hopes were shattered by the First World War; Roosevelt's similar hopes by the Second; and within the last ten years, international leadership-a function that was thought to be temporary-has become a firm institutional addition to the American Presidency. Any President taking office today knows that one of his major responsibilities will be to attempt to exert leadership abroad, if not actually to'lead. The emergence of this presidential function in recent years has added to the already distended powers of the chief executive, has changed in important respects the nature of the office, and has complicated the already complex problems of the Presidency. That this is true is demonstrated by the fact that the major constitutional struggles since the Second World War-the Bricker amendment, the Steel seizure, the Great Debate over presidential dispatch of troops to Europe, the McCarthy episode, and the intervention in the Korean War-were provoked by presidential responses to the demands of the new role. The purpose here is to identify the conditions under which the President can most successfully function as an international leader, to sketch briefly the historical development, to analyze the constitutional and institutional setting of his leadership, and to discuss some of the effects his new responsibility has on his traditional functions as a domestic leader. The phrases used to describe the President's new role are various and frequently misleading. Some speak of the President as world leader, or as exercising world leadership. The existence of the Soviet Union, of course, precludes the use of this term, if taken literally. Others depict him as leader of a of free or of a coalition of the free,2 a title which is closer to the truth but overlooks the conflicting pressures of leadership, the persuasion of neutrals, and the fact that the President tries to lead those, like Tito and Franco, who are not, ideologically speaking, free. The only term reasonably free from ambiguity is international leader, and even this phrase requires severe qualification, for the President's offer of leadership is often rejected. But still, the phrase implies at least an attempt by the President to work in concert with other nations in order to defend the national