This paper discusses how to design useful research and scholarship on higher education governance, trusteeship, and the academic presidency, proposing radically altered decision making mechanisms and several research approaches derived from the humanities and social sciences. The paper describes the world into which today's graduates are moving, noting that there is no serious consideration of this world and the adequacy of current educational practices to prepare students for it on campus or in trustee meeting rooms. Successful leadership, meaningful shared governance, and the capacity to initiate substantive change is impeded by stakeholders who come from different cultures, speak different languages, and have different visions of the modern institution and whom it should serve. These stakeholders hold widely varying understandings of one another's roles and responsibilities. On most campuses, faculty members, staff, unions, students, and administrators function within hierarchical bureaucratic structures that compartmentalize information and responsibilities. Suggestions for offering faculty members the ability to meet their commitments to the welfare of their institutions include securing grants to: support research on cross-cultural communication and cultural divisions among stakeholders; examine how institutions would design themselves today; and investigate how states would design an ideal higher education system today. (Contains 12 bibliographic references.) (SM)