Ten presidents and seven spouses participated in the second year of Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission Seminars this summer. The parallel program for prospective presidents included 23 campus leaders as well as 19 spouses. Presidents met on July 16–19 and prospective presidents on August 6–9, both at Glendorn in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

The Independent recently asked Bill Frame, president emeritus of Augsburg College (MN) and the CIC senior advisor who is guiding the Lilly Endowment-funded program on Vocation and Mission, about the seminars.

Independent: CIC’s program is hardly the only one available on the college presidency. What makes it different from other programs for current or prospective presidents?

Bill Frame: Among the spate of workshops on the college presidency, CIC’s focus on vocation, both of the president and of the college or university, is distinctive. We don’t draw immediate attention to the conduct of the presidency, but to two prior questions: “Why did I seek—why should I seek—a presidency?” and “What lasting contribution do I want to make as a president—or in whatever turns out to be my vocation?” The best answers to these questions will have decisive bearing on both the conduct and satisfaction of the work.
We hope that the active pursuit of them will extend the all-too-short average tenure of the college presidency.

Independent: You have chosen an interesting array of texts for these seminars—classical and contemporary Christian writings on the vocationally-oriented life, Platonic dialogues, speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., passages from de Tocqueville, a reflection by Jill Ker Conway on how she decided to accept an offer to be a president, and a book chapter on the “sagas” of distinctive colleges, among other readings. Why such a variety of texts?

Bill Frame: Together, they help us grasp four interrelated points. The first is that vocations are not constructed, as are careers; they are discerned. (Those who have participated in the program thus far tend to think that what is true of vocations for persons is also true of missions and visions for colleges and universities. They too must be discerned rather than constructed, discovered rather than created.) The second point is that friendship is crucial to discernment of one’s vocation. The third, which is illustrated in several cases by the readings, is that the rhetorical arts play a community-development role for vocationally oriented presidents, beyond the administrative role they play for careerists. The ultimate point is that the vocational president, in leading the increasingly self-conscious college, is constructing for the community a vision of the future strong enough to overcome the alienation between work and life that is one of the unfortunate hallmarks of our time.

Independent: CIC is known for including spouses in its programs, with parallel program tracks. Is that the idea here as well?

Bill Frame: Indeed! Spouses are a critical constituent of these seminars. They are not provided with separate fare in this case, however—they are in the thick of the conversation about vocation and mission. Why? I think that most of us recognize that the college presidency is an expansive, even all-encompassing assignment. Spouses, and other friends of the president for that matter, need defenses, in the form of their own vocations, to avoid either the loss of identity (by fusion with that of the president) or the development of an “individualist” withdrawal from the presidency. We regularly hear appreciative reports that the seminars encourage enriched conversation between a president and his or her spouse on both shared and independent vocational issues.

Independent: Tell us about the differences between the seminars for current presidents and “prospective” presidents.

Bill Frame: The longer we have been at this project, the sharper the differences have become between the two versions. We have struggled to prevent the inquiry for those who have been nominated—the prospective presidents—from turning into a workshop about the nuts-and-bolts of what the presidency is like and how to land a position. By engaging experienced and successful presidents as facilitators for this seminar, we have satisfied this curiosity and returned the focus to the subjective from the objective, to calling rather than opportunity. The facilitators for the presidents’ seminar, by and large, are people who have thought long and hard about the idea of vocation, the character of political communities, and the relationship of faith and reason. This has generated an atmosphere in which presidents and spouses can honestly and realistically identify and celebrate the vitalizing aspects of the job.

Independent: Have there been surprises or things that have pleased you about the way this program has developed?

Bill Frame: When we went into this, we thought the challenge would be to get people talking about personal things, like ambition and life purposes. If we could do that, we thought, we could link ambition and service, sociality and self-knowledge, freedom and community, faith and reason. But in each of the four seminars that we have so far convened, the conversation has moved directly and quickly first to the personal and then from the personal to subjects which can only be described as “public” rather than “private”—from the assessment of one’s gifts to stewardship, for example; from statements of or about faith to the character of education; from one college’s “saga” to the role that a crisis often plays in clarifying institutional identity; from self-development to community development. And we have noticed that new self-understanding grows naturally among participants as they pursue the inquiry in the several conversational circles they are drawn into during the seminar. All that yields a deeply satisfying and entirely unembarrassed sense of community. And that is a rare and a good thing.