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Many African Americans cheered the election of President Obama in 2008 with the hope he would cause an easing of the pain of economic and political barriers to collective black progress in America. This chapter assesses the role of President Obama in addressing these issues.

The Presidential Bully Pulpit is presented as a framework for addressing racial inequities. Properly used it can bring keen attention to issues a president deems important for consideration by the American public. Socio-historical texts and secondary data are used.

Data are presented to show how racial discrimination continues to affect African Americans during the age of Obama. These include housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and racial profiling. This chapter shows Mr. Obama has not used the office of the presidency as a bully pulpit for addressing these racial inequities. Rather he has tended to use the bully pulpit to chastise blacks, especially black males.

Also discussed are some promising developments challenging racism that have emerged from his administration, primarily from the Department of Justice, and how President Obama could use the bully pulpit more productively.

This chapter presents a contradiction in the actions of President Obama. While he seldom uses the bully pulpit to push his own legislative agendas or to push toward solutions to relieve racial inequities in society, he does use the bully pulpit to criticize black males.

The White House Communications Office is distributing press releases on an experimental system developed during the Clinton campaign at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This chapter suggests that social justice for African Americans during the era of Obama presidency will advance less from what Mr. Obama does and more from what social scientists and others do. President Obama is not expected to provide much leadership on this issue for at least four reasons. First, presidents and other high-level elected officials do not tend to make policy without strong public advocacies for such policies. Second, Mr. Obama has put forth a universal rather than a targeted approach to dealing with issues concerning African Americans. Third, he is unlikely to use his bully pulpit to advance social justice for African Americans because he has been reluctant to use the bully pulpit to advance his major legislative agenda. And fourth, the Obama administration has made a habit of fumbling on teachable moments about race. See the missteps in the Henry Louis Gates affair, and the timidity in the Shirley Sherrod and the Van Jones affairs.

This paper aims to look at some classic business leader communications to assess which ones succeed and which ones fail to meet that standard. From Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, from Churchill to Lady Thatcher, we have grown used to the idea that the words of our leaders in times of crisis can change history. Is this also true of business leaders? Can their words transform companies?

The paper looks at specific leadership communications examples from IBM, Nokia, Starbucks, as well as McKinsey research, to try to tease out the elements of successful leadership communications in company transformations.

What we found is that successful leadership communications in culture transformations share four principal characteristics: they are authentic to the personality of the leader; they are not one-time communications, but the beginnings of a cascade; they are personally relevant to each individual employee; and they are quickly followed by visible actions springing from the strategic direction set by the leader’s communications.

As a subjective review of a limited number of cases, the elements selected are potentially vulnerable to counter-examples.

The four characteristics of leadership communications isolated in the research can be applied by any corporate leader or communications team to create effective communications in the context of culture transformation.

To the extent that corporate leaders adopt these principles, their communications will be more credible to external stakeholders and, by extension, enhance the reputation of business leaders as a whole.

While this subject has been studied by others, the four principles for successful leadership communications have not been articulated in this way before to the best of the author’s knowledge.

The function of college degrees in general, and PhDs, in particular, seems increasingly, to serve as a measure of certification and, in some instances, control for entrance into a profession. Advanced degrees in the humanities seem to have lost credence outside of academic circles as hard scientists have assumed the bully pulpit on many issues once the domain of the philosophers, as students, increasingly, question the rhetoric of “The Academy” (and some in the private sector) promoting broad liberal studies, a, especially, as less of the cost is provided by public funds. The entire post secondary experience is becoming increasingly questionable when analysis shows, that for the foreseeable future, less than 30 percent of US jobs really require a college degree. The facts are that in the USA over 44 percent of faculty are adjuncts, often with less than a PhD, and less than 40 percent of current positions are tenure track. This editorial aims to alert readers to underlying trends which are reshaping the roll of the academic both within The Academy and the world at large. It may suggest the need to bring rhetoric of the past in line with the reality of the present/future and change the model of post secondary education.

Looks at the area of the PhD in the humanities in the academic world.

Administrators and policy analysts need to assess the changing roll of faculty and the implications for both the fiscal and structural soundness of the university in the digital age as well as its roll and position within the larger society.

Provides information that is useful to administrators and policy analysts.

This paper presents the idea that the direction of the university, today, must be seen, first as an enterprise that is different from the idea of the university as seen by Newman, Kant and von Humboldt. Secondly, it must be seen as a problem for the faculty and not that of the institution.

This article examines and discusses the future of universities.

The probability of institutional closings is high. As with consolidation in any industry, the demand for employees, even with increasing enrolments will diminish and the purpose of the institutions, as with the replacement of one technology by another, will change. For many, particularly medallion institutions, survival by providing a selective on‐campus experience will be a defined opportunity. On the other hand, many institutions will become virtual or will be mixed in both brick and click space. These, of course, will have presence on the net that will not be tied to time or place. Others will become certification providers of many forms, from record keeping and advising to evaluation of qualifications for both students and employers.

The university is changing due to both internal and external pressures. Current efforts to formulate solutions are based on a model that no longer exists. Survival of many post secondary institutions depends on recasting the direction based on new models; survival of faculty at the baccalaureate level requires rethinking the idea of a teacher and a scholar.

This paper discusses the future and direction of universities.

Presidential books vary in range and scope. They include memoirs, collections of essays on common or similar themes, topical and exploratory books that examine a single topic and collections of speeches and essays prepared for different audiences. The three books reviewed represent two of these types, and exemplify the effectiveness of each. The books are critiqued and a summary of each is provided.

Many traditional economists view trade unions as monopolies; unions challenge capital by having control over labor as a production input and threatening to withhold it to achieve union goals. Yet, unions also strategize around citizenship and consumer roles with political action and consumer boycotts. Little researched is how unions challenge corporate authority by encouraging workers to defer consumption and become owners of capital through pension funds. This new role as capital owners is leveraged through pension fund activism, which challenges corporate decisions that are not much affected by political action, organizing, or collective bargaining. This chapter puts these developments in the context of familiar theories of the economic effect of trade unions and the history of union pension activism.