ABSTRACT
Ambition and leadership skills, key values in other areas of our society, are suspect qualities in academe. Thus, by virtue of their appointment different from the colleagues with whom only a while ago they shared office space, students, and commitment to a discipline, administrators are widely regarded as having abandoned the intellectual enterprise they are supposed to conduct. For older academics, discontent with their lot often grows out of a sense of powerlessness. The desire to run an enterprise, to exert leadership, to make decisions that can reshape a life or redirect an organization is shut off, frustrated, and in its stead one finds only the familiar round. Faculty need the assurance that efforts are being undertaken in good faith to make the connection between the performance of faculty and the treatment of faculty more firm than it has been in the past.
