Keynote Address
College Board Colloquium
January 17, 2003

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College

I thought a lot off and on over the holidays about what I might say to you that would be helpful or useful to kick off this conference. I'm told that this is a special annual occasion for you and wanted to bring something of value. Several veterans with whom I spoke described this as the meeting that most stretches and inspires them and provides them a short break to refuel and reflect on the bigger questions. So much of our work drains our intellectual capital; reinvesting is manifestly prudent, and yet too often is the LIFO item on our calendars - the one that is "last in and first out" when the pressures build. Kudos to you for making the trek down here.

From my Wellesley colleagues, and from visits to other campuses, I have some appreciation of how full your professional lives are -- what difficult, sensitive and exacting work you are doing, high-profile work laden with consequence. I've seen how sincerely and conscientiously you are doing it, and with that awareness, comes my admiration.

And I have a feel for pressures under which you operate -- in technically-demanding, deadline-driven, time-starved, high-stakes jobs (a string of compound words for a world of stress and complexity). Your results are published every year for all to see, friend and foe alike. You have demanding travel schedules and an annual calendar that consumes your lives, always with another class on the horizon just as you're putting one to bed, always with the hope that next year's class will be the best ever. Advancing technology is accelerating the whole process, creating new puzzles and perils but few efficiencies. And this juggling act with too many plates spinning on too many sticks is taking place in an inhospitable world of contested governance, shrinking endowments, multiple constituencies, conflicting values, and activated and entitled teenaged consumers driven by overly-involved parents.

Reading the reports from your previous colloquia reinforces the impression that, as a professional group, it is you who are bearing the brunt of society's burden for the craziness of the "great college hustle" as James Fallows inelegantly characterized your work in his influential Atlantic piece. In short, the challenges calling for attention are daunting, as you well know -- a multiplicity of vexing issues that are "begging for leadership," in the formulation of your colloquium organizers.

That title conjures up for me the recollection of a greeting card my husband found for me some years ago picturing an unfortunate but earnest-looking gentleman who was holding a large hand-lettered placard that read, "Will be president for food." He was begging for food but offering leadership. We're here begging for leadership … and I suspect we'll be well fed. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Leading Well Is Never Easy

The first observation I want to make is that it is hard to be a leader, especially in our time, carrying as we do so many vivid images of leaders who have let us down, failed utterly to meet their obligations to society and to the organizations or causes they were entrusted to serve. We often see national data on declining respect for leaders in all sectors of society, and we've just closed out a year that will long be remembered for a total meltdown of leadership, in corporate boardrooms, accounting firms, and in the Catholic Church, starting in my home town.

If we think this burden of leadership is new in our times, though, we can invoke Shakespeare's Richard II to bring us some perspective:

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered.

(Richard II, 3.2.155-160)

Sounds pretty grim. And yet today's challenges are even more daunting because we live in a more complex world, one marked by "two contradictory forces," Jean Lipman-Blumen explains, "interdependence and diversity, pulling in opposite directions. The tensions from these twin forces," she says "are rapidly rendering traditional leadership behaviors obsolete."

In the old industrial style of patriarchal management, the leader patrolled the borders of the organization and absorbed or managed uncertainty, buffering others from sources of turbulence so they could produce the technical work. In the post-industrial workplace in today's fast-paced global economy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and contradiction are ubiquitous facts of organizational life. Effective leaders have to guide their organizations toward an understanding of their opportunities, bringing people into awareness of their resourcefulness and engaging differences and conflicts as a necessary resource for learning.

So we begin our exploration of leadership not by gathering around a fire to speak of our despair (because, as the poet Mary Oliver reminds us, "meanwhile the world goes on."). But we do approach this topic with a sense of humility, and perhaps even awe, mindful of how important and yet how rare inspired leadership is. That's why your committee is begging for it. We know that leaders, by virtue of their positions, have an unusual degree of power to create worlds for others that are filled with opportunities or obstacles, with hope or despair. And we see leaders all around us setting their hair on fire, and then trying to put it out with a hammer.

And still it's a grand and exciting journey, this business of trying to lead; it offers chances to learn and develop that are unparalleled. As leaders we're privileged to have great freedom to try, over time, to craft for ourselves something approaching a complete life, to draw deeply on and stretch all of our potentials -- body, mind, heart and spirit -- to hone the sustained, committed, and self-conscious practices that can foster exciting discoveries and dramatic growth, our own and that of others around us and, ultimately, our organizations'.

A few years ago, my husband was recovering from open heart surgery and a wise friend who later won the Nobel prize in chemistry sent him an unlikely book by Gary Paulsen called Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod. It turned out to be just the right story, offering remarkable lessons in enduring adversity. It also nicely captures the realities of leadership:

First, the race is impossible. It takes 17 days to drive a sled pulled by a team of 20 headstrong dogs from downtown Anchorage to downtown Nome, covering nearly 2,000 miles and stopping briefly for food (but precious little sleep) at 18 checkpoints across Alaska. The race is run in unpredictable conditions of unimaginable danger and hardship: starving, freezing, hallucinating, and repeated brushes with death (in canyons, storms, blizzards, moose attacks, and on thin ice, miles of it, literal and figurative).

Second, everyone is eager to offer advice, and it is mostly wrong. The predominant stories and stereotypes about the race are romantic drivel. Only those who have already run the race can possibly know how impossible it is. But no one who has run the race is ever the same again, can ever imagine him or herself back to that place of wide-eyed innocence from which s/he began.

Ten years into this presidency feels a bit like that winterdance and so I bring you what insights I can, still somewhat snow blind.

Plan for the Talk

What I'll do is first extract a few ideas and principles from reading and thinking I've done about leadership over many years. Then I'll sketch out three of the issues "begging for leadership." Finally, I want to pull those two threads together and see what they suggest about how you might conceive the work you're doing together here in this beautiful setting, with some of your most respected and smartest colleagues.

A Few Insights on Leadership

Let's first reflect on leadership - yours and mine, and ours. I was lucky to have a Kellogg National Fellowship some 15 years ago; an intensive three-year immersion in the art of leadership. And I've delved into the leadership literature quite a lot before and since, most recently just this past summer during a week at the Aspen Institute, trolling for ideas that might be serviceable or thought-provoking. I expect that many of you do the same when you have time, and that you have perspectives or writings on leadership that you especially value.

With that expectation in mind, I decided to organize my thinking for you around books on leadership that I've found especially meaningful, in essence, then to view this encounter as in part a chance to swap reading lists. This is not, I emphasize, a scholarly review of the literature on leadership. Those are available, of course, and I've included a few of them on the bibliography I've provided. This is a more discursive, and a more personal, meander through a few writings on leadership that call me back when I'm prospecting for help making sense of my world. My aim is simply to start our juices flowing about what resources we may have at our disposal to address the problems we face.

And just in case we need a reminder this morning that we are operating one of the country's most deterministic ranking and sorting systems, I'll offer my favorite readings to you (tongue in cheek) as a ranked list -- my top-five contenders for your 2003 re-reading list. And, as a further reminder that our ranking system rests on a high-stakes test, I'll pause for a moment now to let you jot down your top-five list, and we'll see how well it correlates with mine. The stakes, in this case, are nil, I'm happy to report.

1. Burns on Transforming Leadership: A Moral Relationship

Leadership, almost everyone would agree, is about making significant things happen, so my first offering has to be what still stands as the all-time classic, James MacGregor Burns's 1978 book, entitled, simply, Leadership. It was Burns who drew the now widely-accepted distinction between transactional and transforming leadership, the former a kind of win-win barter system in which the leader provides the followers something they want in exchange for something he wants of them - salary for work, jobs for votes, grades for coursework, admission to college for a successful high school career. This is management more than it is leadership, a distinction frequently (and usefully) made.

Burns's transforming leadership, he says, is "more complex and more potent." It occurs when the "transforming leader recognizes and exploits an existing need or demand of a potential follower" and creates "a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents."

Perhaps you detected here an evocation of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The transforming leader taps higher-order needs -- for affiliation, belonging, esteem, efficacy -- rather than mere survival or comfort. "Transforming leadership," Burns writes, "raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both."

There is much richness, clearly, in this definition (and still more in Burns) but for now let's take away from him the insight that leaders initiate and maintain effective relationships with others toward the pursuit of a goal that is motivating because it is elevating in some palpable way. Leadership is a moral activity, one conducted in relationship.

2. Socrates and the Critical Spirit: The Leader as Teacher

But before we get too caught up in trying to define our elevating goal, we need to travel back to the 4th century BC to find the foundation for a western philosophy of leadership in the Socratic dialogues. These are codified by Plato, principally in the Republic, and in the example of Socrates's life and death. Again, we're going to do the unpardonable and extract a few simple take-home messages from this profound and subtle body of work.

For Socrates a critical spirit was the moral grounding of all human endeavor (hence the famous dictum, "the unexamined life is not worth living"). And the leader, the philosopher-king, bore a special responsibility to open himself and his behavior to a constant process of scrutiny and critique. This exercise of humility and self-scrutiny implies a particular interplay between leadership and power.

Leaders who fool themselves into thinking they have superior knowledge -- who suspend their critical questioning -- "become identified with their purposes" (I'm now quoting an interesting essay by Leonard Grob), and these purposes "inevitably congeal into fixed doctrines or dogma … [become], finally, the mere wielding of power on behalf of static ideals." And this absence of the critical dialogue designed to challenge complacency and untested assumptions seems a fair description of what derailed Enron, Arthur Anderson, Tyco, Warnaco, WorldCom, and the Catholic Church in the past year. All for the lack of Socratic humility.

From Socrates, then, we can take away the concept of the leader as teacher, but a particular kind of teacher, one who truly believes that s/he has far more to learn from a sincere, thoughtful, and open-minded exchange with others than to impart.

3. Warren Bennis On Becoming: The Leader as Learner

So our leader is a teacher of a certain sort, and she's also a lifelong learner, as Plato and many of the best contemporary writers on leadership emphasize. For my third selection, then, I turn to Warren Bennis's work, over many years, and particularly his 1989 book, On Becoming a Leader. Its premise, he writes, is that "leaders are people who are able to express themselves fully." By this he says he means "that they know who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to fully deploy their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. They also know what they want, why they want it, and how to communicate what they want to others, in order to gain their cooperation and support. Finally, they know how to achieve their goals."

Well, that sounds like a tall order, but before we become discouraged we need to understand this as a process, not an end state, not an inventory of innate or fixed assets or attributes. Because "the key to full self-expression," Bennis continues, "is understanding one's self and the world, and the key to understanding is learning - from one's own life and experience." In sum, "becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It's precisely that simple, and ... that difficult." We're back on the perilous ice floes racing to Nome.

And this man knows the terrain. As a former provost and executive vice president of SUNY at Buffalo and former president of the University of Cincinnati (from 1971 to 1977), Bennis developed a unique perspective on the gaps between theory and practice in the academy. Viscerally, he knows how exhausting it can be to balance the conflicting demands of diverse constituencies, to fight entrenched bureaucracy, and to deflect the diversionary impact of unrelenting routine.

Bennis opens another of his books, Why Leaders Can't Lead, with the disturbing story of a good man, Charles Johnson, who ended a dispiriting academic year as an acting university president in a fatal automobile crash that smacked of a suicide. It was 1969 and the pressures were intense. Bennis analyzes factors that led to Johnson's "battle fatigue," including a colleague's suggestion that he "cared too much."

"I don't think it's 'caring too much' when one identifies his own self-esteem with the success of the institution," Bennis observes. … [identifying] so much with their institution that they become indivisible from it …

To care about an institution means to create a self-activating life, a life of its own, where there is a possibility for others to understand it and care for it in the face of difficult odds, to make their work have meaning in a humane and democratic manner."

There's more to Bennis, naturally, much more, than that leaders must be learners, self-actualizers, and motivators of others but this one connection signals how closely our opportunities for leadership dovetail with our understanding of the essential purposes of a liberal education. Our leadership challenges are mirrored in the educational missions of the institutions we serve.

An Aside on Liberal Education

To sharpen that reflection, we can draw on Martha Nussbaum's recent book, Cultivating Humanity. She describes a liberal education - "the preparation of a whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life" -- as entailing the "cultivation of three essential capacities:"

1. "A capacity for critical examination of oneself and one's traditions." We're back to Socrates's examined life, a life that "accepts only those beliefs that survive reason's demand for consistency and justification. … A democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves rather than simply deferring to authority, who can reason together about their choices rather than just trading claims and counterclaims."

2. "The ability to see ourselves not simply as citizens of a local region or group but also and above all as human beings bound to other human beings by ties of recognition and concern" - some of the higher-order goals that catalyze Burns's transforming leadership.

3. "Narrative imagination, that is the ability to imagine what it might be like to be someone else, to understand the world from the point of view of the other, not uncritically but withholding judgment until we see the meaning, learning how to be a human being capable of love and imagination." Harkening back to Bennis's self-activating life.

John Dewey reasoned that education for democracy ought to be conducted democratically. We can push that one step further now and posit that institutions aspiring to provide education for effective leadership in a complex postmodern world can and should be led effectively in ways that reinforce the ideals of a liberal education. What if the quality of our leadership had as great an impact on student learning as did the content and structure of our formal curricula and the excellence of our faculty? I watch our students watching us and I think it may. There's a humbling thought.

4. Goleman's Emotionally Intelligent Leaders and Teams

This brings us to the fourth and most recently-published book on my hit-parade. (If you're counting you'll notice that I cheated and sneaked Nussbaum in on the side). Daniel Goleman, a journalist and a psychologist whose best-selling 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence, is morphing into a corporate enterprise, has defined emotionally-intelligent qualities of leadership in a new book with two co-authors entitled (awkwardly) Primal Leadership, "primal" because effective leaders "prime good feelings in those they lead," and because (as a corollary) "the primal job of leadership is emotional." Despite some discomfort about the title and the commercial buzz around the work, I find much in it to ponder.

It synthesizes distinct leadership styles, a question that comes up frequently in the literature, and in commonsense experience as well. We know from our own observations that there are many types of leader producing many kinds of result and as much as we might have a valence or value preference for one style over another, convincing evidence to support a particular bias is not so easily found.

Goleman and his coauthors argue, as contingency theorists before them have often done, that the appropriateness of a particular style - visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic - depends on the circumstances, and that the most effective leaders have a flexible repertoire, adapting style to situation. This is true, to an extent, but it's equally true that (as Bennis emphasizes) the most inspiring leaders have an authenticity and integrity that comes of a style that is deeply rooted in who they truly are.

Two additional styles - pacesetting and commanding - are rarely effective, these authors argue, pointing to damage they too often inflict on the emotional climate of the organization. In contrast, "resonant" (inspiring) leadership is possible in the right circumstances in all four of the styles they term "emotionally-intelligent," and it can extend from individuals to self-aware and self-managing teams that can drive an effective change process by bringing a high degree of emotional intelligence to work environments.

Workplaces led in this more resonant way, the book concludes, are more values-driven, more flexible and informal, better connected to people and networks, more open and frank and they foster far greater innovation and participation than the old-style industrial organizations headed by authority figures who led by virtue of the power of their positions. As appealing as this is, it's not so easy to execute well.

5. Heifetz and the Holding Environment

But we have one more card to play. I saved the fifth book for last because I want to draw on it. In truth, it may be my favorite. (So much for rankings. We know better than to trust them anyway.) Published in 1994, it's called Leadership Without Easy Answers, by Ronald Heifetz and I want to extract just one concept from it to round out our tour. Heifetz, as a psychiatrist and Kennedy School professor, has an unusual perspective. You've probably encountered him or his work; it's well known. If you have, you may remember his thoughts on "applying power" which he illustrates with two quite different stories, one about an oncologist leading a family through the 14-month ordeal of the husband's cancer diagnosis and death, the other about the head of the EPA managing a heated environmental struggle in Tacoma, Washington. From these two cases (and others) he deduces that, "constructing and managing holding environments for transforming stress into work is a central task of leadership from positions of authority."

The concept of a "holding environment," borrowed from psycho- therapeutic practice, resonates for modern leadership because so many of the problems we face are what Heifetz designates "adaptive challenges." They don't lend themselves to the application of existing technology because they involve the unknown and require multiple vantage points from which to see and assess reality.

"Adaptive work," he writes, "consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. Adaptive work requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior." (p. 22).

These value-laden adaptive problems cannot be solved without mining multiple viewpoints. By creating a holding environment for the organization to engage its conflict (akin to the containing vessel parents create for their child's developmental steps) the leader can regulate the level of stress generated by the adaptive work, so that it continues to be motivating without becoming overwhelming.

Once you start thinking about this possibility that leadership originates in the creation of a holding environment, it takes you in many directions. Surely, a well-crafted space for a special kind of learning encounter is what inspiring teachers make of their classrooms. Ritual and ceremony in academia (inaugurations, convocations, commencement, reunions) are containers for holding the community, its past and its future, its best hopes and highest aspirations. Strategic planning processes, when they are creative, and retreats for thinking ahead, can be vessels for containing tensions between current reality and a desired future, tensions that can be catalysts for conceptual leaps.

From Heifetz, then, we can take away this notion that leadership consists in part of shaping and maintaining very intentional and specific holding spaces where people can get on with doing difficult "adaptive" work that the organization needs them to do but that is sufficiently fraught with ambiguity, risk, and conflict that they'll be pressured to direct their energies elsewhere to avoid taking it up.

Issues "Begging for Leadership"

Let's move on now to some difficult issues that we face in admissions, financial aid, enrollment management and we'll end with some brief thoughts about how these principles we've extracted might apply. We could generate a very long worry list but one thing we know about effective leadership is that focusing attention - our own and that of others - on the few issues that matter the most is critical. You have three major substantive issues on your program today and tomorrow -- early decision; affirmative action and diversity; access and affordability. Let's look at them.

1. Early decision (ED) is the session scheduled next on the program. I came to higher education through public health, an unorthodox pathway but an interesting one. And we often invoked the first precept of the Hippocratic Oath before unleashing our theories and schemes for "the public good." That precept, primum non nocere, first, do no harm, is a minimalist ethical injunction, to be sure, but a useful one. And it's not so easy to follow, especially in the complex systems we operate. It's hard to avoid doing harm, through omission or commission, and there are many ways in which ED may be doing both kinds, not least by contributing to the progressive erosion of public trust in our enterprise.

You know the arguments well and you see the fall-out first. And you, as I, have watched the public commentary become increasingly dubious, then resentful and cynical, as leaders in higher education have been jockeying for a foothold on the moral high ground. A system that purports to offer an option for students, we are told, is exacerbating the inequalities that are hard-wired into the college admissions game (we know the ED pool is more affluent), feeding the culture of stress that is contaminating adolescence, and relegating the senior year to irrelevance. Too many students are going through the process not because of their clarity about which college is right for them but because they're being driven crazy by the intensity of the college sweepstakes and want to get everyone off their backs, or because they're afraid they'll lose out if they play it straight in a system rigged for gamesmanship. They're not wrong.

Worse, the public has caught on to the fact that the early decision option is not really for students at all. It is transparently an enrollment management device and a marketing tool, a weapon driving the ever-escalating arms race between competing institutions. Whether we need to end it or mend it is a question I leave to you. As a minimum, I believe we ought to cap it and try very hard to find our way back to the original intent of offering this option. On the "do we say what we do?" test that you applied at your colloquium last year, ED as being practiced today fares poorly indeed, in our own eyes (if we are honest), and certainly in the public mind. First, do no harm.

2. Affirmative action, as you'll be discussing in depth tomorrow, is up for review, and with it the whole structure of thinking and of law governing national policy on diversity in education. This is an issue that is both urgent and important. The Bakke decision, tentative as it was, has withstood many challenges since 1978, and it has profoundly shaped our institutional beliefs, values, and actions. This issue is close to home for you, in fact, Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, makes a provocative case that affirmative action became a necessary antidote to the SAT, to counter the problem of racial disparities in test scores:

"The solution was to leave the tests alone and explicitly take race into account in admissions decisions," he wrote. "Testing and the educational system … were off the hook.... But this meant that affirmative action, jerry-built and unlegislated, had to bear a very heavy load."

Already the imminence of a Supreme Court case is provoking press accounts of the allegedly "creative, even sly ways" (as a New York Times reporter recently wrote) in which private colleges and universities in Texas, Florida and California (where lower-court decisions have already rolled back Bakke) are meeting their diversity goals and still obeying the law, in letter though not in spirit. The intent of commentary like this is to raise more questions about whether we in fact "do what we say we do," and it will be important to counter this kind of partisan publicity with real facts whenever we can.

We know from experience, and, increasingly, from research that we need affirmative action. It enables us to achieve the diversity on our campuses that students are correct to want as they prepare for tomorrow's world. Watching our diverse students struggle to engage their many differences - with intelligence, honesty, integrity, and compassion -- as our nation prepares to mount a pre-emptive war is all the evidence I need that we must continue this work. And reading the papers these days, it's most of the hope I can muster.

The Court's decision will likely turn on the question of whether the educational value of diversity is a sufficiently compelling interest to justify considering race as one of several factors in the admissions decision. We now have some powerful tools to support that argument - The Shape of the River, the work of Harvard's Civil Rights Project, the studies of respected scholars including Daryl Smith, Dick Light and others. Amicus curiae briefs are being prepared by several groups.

The particular purview it seems to me that you bring to the mix is your professional knowledge of - as Janet Rapelye often says to me - how uneven the playing field is out there for America's young people and of how impossible it will be to level it if you can't factor into your deliberations race as one variable, and a vital one. I'm sure you're thinking of ways you can be certain that your perspective is adequately represented for the court. Meanwhile, I hope you are thinking strategically about how your institutions -- and your profession -- will handle the various conceivable decisions the court could hand down. We need your leadership there, where the "we" is both your institutions and our country.

3. Access and affordability (another topic scheduled for tomorrow) is an integral part of this picture. The economic value of a college degree has been rising steadily. At the same time, spending on need-based aid as a proportion of all financial assistance has been declining in the public and private sectors alike. Programs designed to assist middle- and upper-income families are gaining ground (federal tax deductions, tax credits, and varieties of merit aid programs sponsored by states responding to political pressures and by colleges and universities addressing competitive pressures).

You know these data well and you know the pressures even better. Much of the information comes from regular College Board reports on trends in student aid. And there's a new and cogent synthesis in the Blue Ribbon Panel Report of the National Dialogue on Student Financial Aid about which you'll hear tomorrow from Mike McPherson.

For us today, as we ask ourselves what harm we may be doing, the critical question is what's driving these trends, what's our role, and what leverage do we have to decelerate them. The answers are not easy; if they were we would have acted by now. Many of the forces operating on us are outside of our control, not least the specter of antitrust enforcement against those who collaborate to address issues that clearly can't be solved without collective action. I do think we may have more power to act in the public interest than we have exercised since the overlap group was accused of restraint of trade and I think we have a social obligation to explore what those degrees of freedom are, as the 568 group has been doing. And is there collective action we could take to de-fang the ranking and rating industry? You know better than I how feasible that might be. It's an intriguing question that comes up all the time.

In addition, though, it should worry us that the American people are losing sight of the public value of higher education. This matters because it undermines the policy commitment to need-based aid not only as the fairest way to allocate a scarce resource but also as an economic and social necessity for a strong democracy. Could it be happening in part because we are trumpeting so loudly in expensive promotional materials the personal benefits of the education we now market so aggressively? Did Nancy Donehower's Chronicle of Higher /Education piece last week resonate with any of you? "Admissions directors are reaping what they've sown," she concludes somewhat harshly - "applicants [who] are more packaged than ever before [are] mirroring the [increasingly packaged] presentation strategies and tactics of the colleges to which they are applying." Primum non nocere.

And it should worry us even more that, as Paul Krugman captured so portentiously in The New York Times Magazine, income inequality has grown appreciably in our country in recent years and will surely continue to grow as the new tax breaks take effect. I used to study the negative impact of income disparities on health and they are ubiquitous; the impact on our democratic experiment is more troubling still. There's not a lot we can do about these contextual factors, including the fact that mounting cost pressures in a flagging economy will diminish our degrees of freedom. But we absolutely can insist that the limited dollars we control for access to college - and thence to the American dream - are being spent on the most promising and deserving kids who most need our help. If we don't, who will?

Summing Up

To wrap up, I want quickly to apply the inferences we drew from the leadership literature to these three issues of yours that are begging for it.

From Burns, the three issues all come together in one that has the highly- motivating salience of a challenge ripe for transforming leadership. It is this concern I know we share that the arms race in the admissions process is exacerbating a shift in values that is undermining the messages we want to be sending young people about what college is for and what it can enable them to dream for their lives. This is the gnawing worry that we may be doing harm.

From Socrates, we need leaders who are teachers because there are many misperceptions to be countered. But we need those leader-teachers to be genuinely curious and humble listeners, because there is much we do not understand about the world we have created for our children.

From Bennis, we need to be leaders who are lifelong learners, who have a sense of history and of perspective. We need to pace ourselves and understand that there's only so much any one of us can do, even as we do our best to bring to these important social issues every ounce of competence, conscience, and continuity we can summon.

From Goleman, we know we need to develop flexible repertoires for making positive ("resonant") connections that bring out the best in our multiple constituencies: trustees, faculty, students, colleagues, and the public in its many forms.

From Heifetz, finally, we can take the liberating notion that our task at times may be simply to create a holding environment. It's not up to us alone to solve all these problems. Clearly we can't. What we can do is trust the momentum of things and trust our colleagues, help them stay focused on their tasks and clear about their roles, help them find their way back to home base when the going gets rough and they get lost, appreciate them, learn with them, hold them in our hearts. That's a lot. And that's enough.

Thanks so much for having me here, and thanks for all you do. ______________________________________________________________________ Works Cited
Bennis, Warren. Why Leaders Can't Lead (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1989).

Bennis, Warren. On Becoming a Leader (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989).

Bowen, William G. and Derek Bok. The Shape of the River (NJ: Princeton, 1998).

Burns, James McGregor, Leadership (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1978).

Donehower, Nancy, "The Personal Touch is Gone from College Admissions," Chronicle of Higher
Education, January 10, 2002.

Fallows, James. "The Early-Decision Racket," The Atlantic, September 2001: 37-52

Goleman, Daniel, Richard Boyantzis, Annie McKee, Primal Leadership (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

Grob, Leonard, "Leadership: the Socratic Model," in Barbara Kellerman, Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984: 270-281).

Heifetz, Ronald A. Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

Krugman, Paul. "The End of Middle-Class America (and the Triumph of the Plutocrats), New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2002: 62.

Lemann, Nicholas. The Big Test (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

Lipman-Blumen, Jean. The Connective Edge (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996). Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997)

Paulson, Gary. Winterdance (New York: Harcourt, 1994).

Rost, Joseph C. Leadership for the Twenty-first Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991).

Acknowledgement: Richard S. Nodell, an organizational consultant who works closely with me and the senior administration of Wellesley College, has greatly influenced much of my recent thinking about (and practice of) leadership, in particular my understanding of the concept of a "holding environment."