Published by the American Council on Education, a Washington-based lobbying group representing colleges and universities, the magazine called Presidency aspires to serve college presidents as Hay & Forage Grower and Kosher Today serve other trades, offering up issue backgrounders, how-I-did-it stories, and advertisements by consultants, conference sponsors, and manufacturers of registration systems and bookstores.

While hardly the lodestar by which college presidents set a daily course (the magazine appears three times a year and is a mere 44 pages slim, on average), Presidency does cast enough light to illuminate the worries that besiege college presidents in their beds at 3 a.m. Recent editions, for example, featured articles by presidents or their advisors on gaining moral authority, the decline in federal research funding, the charge that American campuses don’t support “intellectual pluralism,” and the importance of exuding hope in public settings. Should hope, however well exuded, prove groundless, another article presents a primer on how to resign “with grace.”

That’s what can be read. Anyone attentive to the conversation, however, will also pick up a recurring undertone, a yearning for a lost age when a college president was not a CEO mired in spreadsheets, government directives, and teams of brand managers, but a great man or woman on campus and abroad. This melancholy theme is sometimes played pianissimo, as in the apologetic headline “The Presidency as Journey (Not Destination),” and sometimes fortissimo: “Why have college presidents lost some of the stature and influence they once enjoyed?” (The author’s answer is that they have abandoned the shamanic role of “story-teller.”) And sometimes the distress surfaces as a full-throated cri de coeur, as when a successful college president asks in the middle of yet another vision quest story (“Redefining Presidential Leadership in the 21st Century”): “Does the [college] presidency still include academic and intellectual leadership?”

The question may seem rhetorical, but it’s real, and the answer most frequently offered by those who claim to know the answer is not necessarily. According to the accepted rise-and-fall historiography, in the beginning were 18th-century clerics such as Dartmouth’s founder Eleazar Wheelock, who taught and preached at a few hundred souls each year. (“Eleazar was the faculty and the whole curriculum / Was 500 gallons of New England rum,” went a Dartmouth drinking song.) The next distinctive generation was that of the saintly teacher-presidents of the mid-19th century, of whom Mark Hopkins, of Williams College (1836–72), was the epitome, memorialized in President James Garfield’s maxim: “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”

And then came the Golden Age: Charles Eliot at Harvard (1869–1909), who invented “the university” and characterized faculty as a “ruminating animal” and kept his job; Andrew Dickson White, who founded Cornell and high-end coeducation (1868–85); James B. Angell, who invented great public universities at Michigan (1871–1909); William Rainey Harper, who invented summer school, bold deficit spending, and the University of Chicago (1891–1906); Booker T. Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute (1881– 1915); and Martha Carey Thomas, who devised the modern women’s college at Bryn Mawr (1894–1922).

The next generation—which ruled between the world wars—did feature some remarkable individuals, but the trend was downward, experts agree, and has continued apace into our time, bringing into being the Prufrockian spirit of Presidency: “politic, cautious, meticulous.” And who can fault that? For by contrast with Hopkins, who stipulated that he’d lead Williams only on condition he would not be required to ask anyone for money, today’s presidents are not only expected to ask for the stuff but to collect it in ever increasing amounts; and at the same time see to it that the endowment outruns the S&P Index, that report cards from Moody’s and the editors of US News & World Report show improvement, and that noteworthy advances in staff diversity, technology licensing, and in the talents and happiness of students, faculty, and alumni proceed at a faster pace than is occurring in “competing” institutions. Yes, intellectual leadership would be nice as well, but not so strongly expressed as to draw critics who write op-ed pieces, work on Wall Street, or are considering enrolling their children.

Of his decision to accept the presidency of Columbia in 1948, Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote, “I thought that while doing something useful I would still be in a position to relax a bit.” Later, the man who’d spent three years leading Allied invasions of North Africa and Europe described the first months of his Ivy League presidency as “a confusing, not to say almost nerve-wearing kind of living.” After two years, he went off to recover by commanding NATO.

Our story on the worklife of one university president in the late spring of 2006 begins here.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum