Searching for a UMass President: Transitions and Leaderships, 1970-1991

This article traces the history of the five presidential successions that have taken place at the University of Massachusetts since 1970. No manual or campus report will reveal the one best way to conduct a presidential search. How to do so is not easy to prescribe. Suitably fleshed out, the events surrounding these five searches tell us a great deal about what works and what doesn\u27t. It is one thing to offer case illustrations of past events, another to say how they might be put to use by other people in another era with quite different situations and concerns. In evaluating these transitions and leaderships, this article also raises the question of what is the proper role of the president in university governance. The hard question for us is not that the public land-grant university is an integral part of state government. It is, rather, How integral should it be? To the extent that these examples provide for broad understandings of the system, they are valuable for heuristic purposes