ABSTRACT
The determination of a successful university leader is based on his or her ability to "show to the public and faculty alike the relationship between the most pressing external factors and their impact on academic citizenship". Transformative leadership hinges on change, and it is inherently value based and dependent on values of the organizations rather than merely the university president's values. The pluralistic philosophies of university leadership and the various attempts to systematize leadership lessons of presidents through biographies and autobiographies are some aspects of the complexities of the phenomena of university presidential leadership. In hermeneutics, understanding means understanding of historical and contemporary context. In double hermeneutics, there is mutual interaction between the life of the researcher and the life of the researched. In phenomenology, the researcher shifts from things to their meanings or "from the realm of the objectified meaning as found in the sciences to the realm of meanings as immediately experienced in the 'life-world'".
