During the late 1970s the Higher Education Research Institute of Los Angeles conducted open-ended interviews with 45 presidents of private, liberal arts colleges that had received grants from the Exxon Education Foundation between 1973 and 1977. The responses indicated that the collegiate style of governance exists at these schools only in limited form. The presidents displayed very ambivalent views of their faculty members. Typically, they praised their faculties' teaching abilities to the skies but otherwise found the faculties fractious, argumentative, and difficult to deal with. In evaluating their campuses' strengths and weaknesses, the presidents manifestly used subjective norms. They obviously measured their own schools not against national norms but against a small group of other colleges of the same approximate quality, in the same geographical area, or under the sponsorship of the same sect, as their own. (Author/PGD)