Trouble at the Top

After scrutinizing 60 campuses, Princeton's former (1933-57) President Harold W. Dodds last week glumly concluded in The Academic President--Educator or Caretaker? (McGraw-Hill; $5.95) that "the position of the president as a force in education continues to decline." Dodds's report, financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, cites estimates that college presidents often spend only 10% to 20% of their time on educational matters. Snarled in "business management, public relations, fund raising," says Dodds, they should be devoting half of their time to real academic leadership.

Too many of them are just big-name laymen: "This is no place for a retired governor or general per se or a minister whose congregation or bishop wants to kick him upstairs." It is no place for politicians "on ice until the next election" or executives brought in from business. The problems of university presidents are "more like those of the manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company than those of the president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company." They must, above all, keep the schools they administer in balance, making the institution a true university and not a "multi-versity."

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