University Leadership Quotes

Our universities are run by leaders who are models of the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics and culture. It deems the rights of certain people less worthy of protection than others; it divides the world into oppressor and oppressed. You can call for the murder of all Jews, but say sex is biological and you will be punished.

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.

I've been president of Brown and chancellor of Vanderbilt, where they have very high completion rates.

Being president of a major public university is the most political nonpolitical office around.

I'm on the university board in Limerick, so I visit the city often.

I had gotten a master's degree in administration supervision with it in mind that I would some day be a professor, then get a doctorate degree and move up and eventually be president of a university.

The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you've won a great victory, now the war will end. And I'm certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.

I think the most important leadership lessons I've learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution.

I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.

You have great athletic directors, you let them run it; you keep yourself informed, but I'm not the athletic director. I'm the president of the university.

When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.

As a scholar, you don't want to repeat yourself, ever. You're supposed to say it once, publish it, and then it's published, and you don't say it again. If someone comes and gives a scholarly paper about something they've already published, that's just terrible. As a university president, you have to say the same thing over and over and over.

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

Many university presidents assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy.

Mississippi State University and other institutions are established leaders in the development and integration of unmanned aerial systems.