Do University Presidents Make a Difference? A Strategic Leadership Theory of University Retrenchment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the general consensus is that university presidents do not make a difference, most research on this issue is atheoretical and perceptual in nature. Consequently, I draw on strategic leadership theory to examine whether observable experiences of presidents affected the adoption of retrenchment (early faculty retirement) plans among Ontario universities from 1989-90 to 1997-98. In doing so, I also advance strategic leadership theory by introducing novel measures of leaders' observable experiences and by testing their impact on an outcome (retrenchment) in a noncorporate setting. Since early faculty retirement plans have spread across universities, and since evidence indicates that they combine financial benefits and academic costs, their adoption represents a key structural change begging for explanation. Although the literature attributes the adoptions to uncontrollable forces, I report that presidents play a major role in the adoptions. Those who lack seats on corporate boards, who have non-business or non-economics backgrounds, who are male, and who are recruited externally adopt the plans at lower rates than their respective counterparts. The results portray presidents as exercising circumscribed agency, strategizing on the basis of their personal and professional experiences and making a difference even under inhospitable circumstances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".