Colleges under pressure: Budgeting, presidential competence, and faculty uncertainty

Abstract

Abstract This article reports on a two-case comparative study of college presidential leadership during times of financial stress, and it focuses on how presidents interpret financial hardship to their faculties rather than on how they address it instrumentally. The study concludes that a college budget, like many administrative tools and processes, is simultaneously an instrument and a symbol, and that feelings of financial stress (often induced by a president) may heighten the budget's symbolic meaning for faculty and other members of a college community. College leaders who are not sensitive to this kind of interpretive variability may fail to meet their faculty's expectations for leadership during pressured times.