The upcoming departure of Harvard University's president could serve as a warning for university leaders who come from backgrounds outside the ivory tower of academia.
Increasingly, college and university presidents are coming from the business world, rather than from the ranks of the faculty, and many of them govern accordingly. But too great an emphasis on finance and business may become a liability.
According to education experts, this managerial style was embodied by Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who will resign at the academic year's end.
Harvard German professor Judith Ryan said that Summers' management style and the policies shaped by it were ultimately the cause of his downfall.
Ryan was a critic of Summers and was planning on introducing a no-confidence motion against him at the time he announced his resignation.
She cited Summers' financial decisions and his request for a large number of deans to step down as examples.
When some faculty became suspicious that the dean of the school's faculty of arts and sciences was forced by Summers to resign, it was "the last straw" for the arts and sciences faculty, Ryan said.
The resulting conflict, she said, probably prompted Summers' own resignation announcement.
"Many universities are now shifting to a more corporate managerial style, and that is definitely a style that is very uncomfortable for the professoriate," Ryan said.
Former Penn President Judith Rodin exemplified a more business oriented style during her decade of leadership that ended in 2004, Penn Political Science professor Henry Teune said, citing her emphasis on fixing Penn's ailing public image.
But Teune said that, in Summers' case, this management style was taken too far and the faculty could no longer relate to him in an academic setting.
He contrasted Summers with current Penn President Amy Gutmann, who he said "had a posture on what higher education should be in terms of democracy and citizenship" when she was initially considered for the job in 2004.
Summers "does not always present himself as an intellectual. Harvard always had presidents who had interesting thoughts about higher education. ... Here's a fellow who has nothing really to say," Teune said.
During his career, Summers has served not only as a Harvard faculty member but also as a public- and private-sector economic specialist. He was even Treasury secretary for the last year and a half of the Clinton administration.
Teune said that universities first began their trend toward a stronger emphasis on corporate-style management in the 1980s and 1990s because more government regulation was placed on funding for higher education.
College admissions also began to take the form of a major public-relations campaign.
Universities therefore began hiring administrators who were equipped to tackle the growing business element of higher education.
Norma Kent, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Community Colleges, said that today, there are "more people coming out of non-traditional venues" to take university presidencies.
