COLUMN ONE : The Hunt for Water Walkers : Choosing a new college president has become an increasingly complicated, politicized and sometimes even traumatic affair.

Should a college president be more of a fund-raiser or a serious scholar? A moral authority or a publicity figurehead? A chief executive officer or a sports cheerleader? Or all of those?

Those questions are being asked with more frequency in academia these days. As a result, selections of new campus leaders have become increasingly complicated, politicized--and sometimes traumatic--affairs.

“Often the search for a new president is a Rorschach test for an institution. It brings up a lot of the struggles of a campus. It’s a time when the campus is being unfrozen and a lot of things are up for grabs,” explained Judith Block McLaughlin, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education who has co-authored a new book on how schools choose leaders.

McLaughlin doesn’t have to look very far for an example. Amid spirited rumor swapping in the coffee houses of Cambridge, Harvard is looking for a successor to Derek Bok, who plans to resign in June after 20 years as president.

Meanwhile, in guarded secrecy, USC trustees are making the final cut in their choice of someone to take over after the imminent retirement of James H. Zumberge, president since 1980. And such diverse schools as New York University, Mills College, Iowa State, Pomona College, Brandeis University, American University, the University of Arizona and the Cal State system are all looking for new chief executives.

What are they really looking for? That, of course, depends on the institution.

Some schools are looking to come back from such scandals as the arrest of American’s former president for making obscene telephone calls. Others want a navigator through financial troubles, as at Mills where a move to admit male undergraduates was canceled earlier this year but where survival as a women’s school is uncertain.

Some, like USC, want a leader to make a campus better known internationally and more ethnically diverse. Some want better relationships with state government, like the Cal State system after last spring’s force-out of Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds in a furor over executive pay raises. And, a very few like Harvard seem not to want much change at all.

In general, as several experts quipped only partly in jest, schools are looking for someone who can “walk on water.”

“There is no shortage of people who want to do it but there is a significant developing shortage of people who can meet all those central qualities,” said John Phillips, a managing vice president of Korn/Ferry International, the prominent executive search firm hired by such universities as USC to help solicit applications.

Increased job pressures have caused the average tenure of academic presidents to shrink to about seven years, compared to the common reigns of 15 and 20 years before the student protest movement of the late ‘60s and the financial crunch of the ‘80s. So, searches are more frequent.

Meanwhile, the selection process itself has changed. Only a few years ago, executive search firms like Korn/Ferry were sneered at by academics. But now such so-called headhunters are used in the majority of searches. Many schools have broadened search panels to include students and faculty, although most final decisions are still made by tight-knit boards of trustees. Women and minorities are being considered more even though college presidents remain predominantly white males.

“The process is much more complicated and there are more players in it than 10 years ago,” said McLaughlin, whose book, “Choosing a College President: Opportunities and Constraints,” co-authored by the well-known Harvard sociologist David Riesman, is due out soon.

That book deals at length with new laws in some states that require the curtain of secrecy be lifted at the very start of searches at public universities. (California does not have such a law. So the Cal State trustees, scheduled next week to choose a headhunter and establish criteria for selecting a new chancellor, probably will not reveal identities of candidates until finalists are chosen.)

Both Riesman and McLaughlin recently gave depositions on behalf of the University of New Mexico in a lawsuit brought by news organizations seeking to review all applications, even rejected ones, for the recently filled presidency of that school. Such complete openness, the authors argue, discourages the best candidates from applying in fear of public rejection and risking their current jobs. Journalists and students say disclosure promotes more democratic evaluation and prepares candidates for the spotlight.

With the changes in the selection process, some experts say, has come a return to tradition.

Colleges, some contend, are becoming less interested in business manager personalities who were popular in the ‘80s and instead increasingly want well-respected scholars who can use their offices as bully pulpits to boost their institutions and higher education. Often-mentioned role models from the recent past are Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame and Kingman Brewster at Yale.

“The pendulum is beginning to swing back to the great academics, the ‘Great Man’ and, increasingly, the ‘Great Woman,’ ” said Ira W. Krinsky, whose Los Angeles-based executive search firm worked on finding chancellors at the Los Angeles Community College District and UC Berkeley. “Today, I’m seeing schools want vision and academic credibility.” Most schools have large bureaucracies and talented vice presidents to handle budgets and hiring, he said.

However, Clark Kerr, president emeritus of the UC system who has written extensively about college leadership, dismissed that argument. Financial and legal problems, particularly involving affirmative action and racial diversity among faculty and students, will be the toughest challenges in the ‘90s, he said.

“My impression is that the chairmen of search committees always start out saying they want a great academic leader. But when it gets down to it what they really want is somebody to get the money and keep them out of trouble,” Kerr said.

Reality may be somewhere in between, according to Joseph Kauffman, professor emeritus in educational administration at the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, who headed a presidential search committee there. “The idea that you are looking for someone who has been a splendid scholar and will be acceptable to scholars on the faculty has been twisted a bit,” explained Kauffman, who was president of Rhode Island College from 1968 to 1973. “You still have to be credible and show that you understand and respect academic values. But even the faculty wants a good manager for the enormous pressures that have to do with fund raising and good political skills.”

Yet everybody agrees that an ability to speak well and present a solid image is important in this media-drenched age. Meanwhile, except at schools with strong religious affiliations, marital status and a spouse’s willingness to share ceremonial duties are less scrutinized than a generation ago.

At first glance, a university president may seem similar to a corporate executive. After all, both are leading complex, multimillion-dollar-a-year enterprises much in the public eye. And both are well compensated. According to a study last year by the American Council on Education, the average salary for the chief of a large university was $115,000, although some receive well above $200,000 and most get on-campus housing or housing allowances, cars and perks like country club memberships.

However, American academia, with its tenured faculties, is supposed to welcome dissent more than corporate life does. And the grooming for succession, so common among business leaders, is rare at colleges. Because of vocal criticism of their decisions, deans and college vice presidents often find their accession to the presidency at their current campus blocked. They are more likely to move up the ladder by switching schools. One recent survey showed that 70% of schools hired their chief executive from another school.

“Universities often need, just as corporations need, injection of new patterns of thinking about things,” said headhunter Phillips. “But the philosophy at many schools is that the devil you don’t know is better than the one you do. And that is quite different than in the corporate world.”

Moreover, academic chiefs are caretakers for the minds and bodies of young people, guardians of Western civilization’s intellectual tradition and shapers of new advances in science and technology. Not to mention, final arbiters of how many basketball scholarships should be offered, which classrooms must be air-conditioned, when best to ask a wealthy donor for more money and how to decide a sexual harassment case against a teacher.

So, it is also rare for non-academics to become heads of universities. Some exceptions: After the Civil War, Robert E. Lee took over what became Washington and Lee University in Virginia and Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of Columbia University from 1949 to 1950. Former Indiana congressman John Brademas is leaving office after 10 years as president of New York University, but he had been active on education issues in Congress.

“A lot of committees will begin by wanting a wide-ranging search from all walks of life--government, foundations and corporations--and work to that end,” said Kerr. “But it’s pretty hard to find the special bundling of qualities in someone whose professional life has been all outside of academic life.”

Even within academia, Kerr added, searches are harder than ever because half of the nation’s provosts and vice presidents don’t want the fund-raising responsibilities. A frequent result is “settling on the person who hasn’t been rejected. So you tend to get a blander candidate and it takes longer too,” said Kerr, whose book, “The Many Lives of Academic Presidents,” co-written by Marian L. Gade, is considered a Bible in that field.

The landscape of presidential searches is littered with some infamous disasters. Among them:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in February named one of its own renowned biologists, Phillip A. Sharp, as president. But a few days later, Sharp stunned the school by withdrawing his acceptance, saying he wanted to stick with his cancer research and teaching. In June, MIT chose Charles M. Vest., the University of Michigan’s provost.

The chancellor of the University of Maine quit after just two weeks on the job four years ago. Jack E. Freeman resigned so quickly because he said he was disillusioned by a furor over his $114,000 salary and realized he would never get enough resources to lead the school to national prominence. He returned to his old job as executive vice president at the University of Pittsburgh and later took a similar post at Temple University in Philadelphia.

- The University of New Mexico has had six presidents in 10 years and is now embroiled in the legal dispute over how far the state disclosure law should apply to presidential searches. Most embarrassing, the university chose a Washington banking executive to be president in 1984 only to meet fierce faculty criticism about his lack of academic experience and his reportedly close friendship with the head of the executive search firm hired by the university. The new president resigned after a few weeks.

USC clearly hopes to avoid such disasters. For one thing, participants in the USC search have kept their vows not to reveal finalists’ names. In sharp contrast, 10 years ago USC trustees and other sources liberally leaked names to the faculty and press with the intention, some officials now concede, to sabotage some candidacies and boost others. The result was a botched search and then a restart that led to Zumberge.

“Those leaks represented schisms on the campus. I’m not saying USC is not without divisions today, but it’s not nearly the way it was in 1980,” said Warren Bennis, the USC professor of business administration who heads its current presidential search committee. Bennis, president of the University of Cincinnati from 1971-77, is an expert on leadership in academia and business.

Administrators, teachers, students and alumni were on his 20-member search committee, formed last March. Along with the search firm, they solicited and reviewed applications, cutting from 125 serious names, to 70, to 25. Then committee members began meeting with applicants. Last month, what Bennis and others will describe only as a list of five to seven names was given to a panel of USC trustees. Trustees are focusing on two people, one from inside USC and one from without, according to sources outside the search process. The final decision is expected by the Dec. 4 meeting of the full Board of Trustees.

According to campus officials, USC wants its academic reputation, improved much under Zumberge, to continue. The university wants better relations with the surrounding neighborhoods, a sensitive matter because of crime on and off campus and USC’s plans for major real estate projects nearby. Boosting undergraduate enrollment and racial diversity in students, teachers and administrators are other goals; freshman enrollment dropped 18% this year, causing much alarm, and officials are particularly concerned about low enrollment of blacks and Latinos.

According to Bennis, USC also wants an effective spokesman for higher education, someone who can represent the school and Los Angeles as centers of the Pacific Rim economy and culture.

One candidate who looked promising on paper was eliminated because, Bennis said, “I almost fell asleep listening to him. He had the energy of a flatworm.” Others “were ferociously charismatic, but I was not sure they could start a car, let alone balance a multimillion-dollar budget.”

According to Harvard’s Riesman, the decisions at USC and other schools promise to be “tremendously searing and intense.” In the worst outcome, a new president at a badly divided campus never overcomes the bitterness surrounding his or her selection. Riesman stressed, however, that the choice of a new president can be “a healing act of consensus, a joyful decision.”