Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against

Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against short-term gains and speculation. Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook. In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now. I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay: >> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. << >> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left << http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html