Leadership and ambiguity: the American college president,

by Michael D. Cohen

Examines the American college presidency, discusses goals, budgets, policy decisions, and tenure, and recommends ways to improve university administration

270 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Marie desJardins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yawn. Despite the title of this book, it is *not* about leadership and ambiguity. It's mostly an overly analytical look at a survey of college presidents, deep-diving into graphs and charts of various survey responses -- demographics, roles, and the like. No insight into leadership or ambiguity there. Then there's a couple of chapters that posit computational models for decision making (with no empirical evidence that these models are actually behaving in ways that are at all reflective of actual decision making), and analyze the heck out of those models. Finally comes a chapter on ambiguity, which has a few tiny grains of insight into the types of ambiguity that a leader might face, and a few grains of insight into some strategies for leading under ambiguity -- but these are awfully small grains in reward for wading through so many pages of attempts to "science-ize" what is fundamentally not scientific.

As a side note, I get that this book was published in 1974; still, it's jarring and annoying that the authors really have no comment whatsoever about the fact that only two of the interviewed presidents were women (and as far as I can figure, none of them were African-American). Throughout the book, they refer to presidents collectively as "men."