Five years into her tenure as University president, it's tough to find critics of Mary Sue Coleman.

Sure, the student labor activists in the group Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality are still fuming about being arrested after their sit-in earlier this year. And Michigan Stadium traditionalists in the Save the Big House group, the faculty and the University community at large are cursing her for her part in defiling the spirit of Fielding Yost with elitist luxury boxes. Faculty members are even getting a few jabs in, especially after Coleman rejected an addition to a handbook that would have codified faculty input in construction decisions.

Overall, though, Coleman's administration has fended off any substantial controversy. The University Board of Regents is singing her praises for leading the University through two U.S. Supreme Court cases, uncertainty about state funding and weathering a state constitutional amendment that outlawed affirmative action. Last month, it even gave her a 3 percent raise and a heart-warming letter of appreciation for her efforts.

For those who aren't won over by the University's ballooning endowment, Coleman's warm personality adds an element of friendliness that even the most hardened skeptic can't resist.

But a lot has changed at the President's House since Coleman took over in 2002. While Coleman may just be responding to new circumstances, for better or worse, her presidency has veered from the path laid by University leaders of the past. With a new president came a new vision, and a style dramatically different than that of Harold Shapiro, James Duderstadt and Lee Bollinger, the University presidents before her. Instead of standing out as a vocal critic of society, Coleman has fallen in with the national trend of running her college as if she were running a business - seemingly trying to appeal to everyone, especially big investors, or in her case, big donors.

Unlike her predecessors, Coleman is not an exceptionally vocal and visible leader, she avoids controversy and, most important, her muted leadership on social issues is making the University a follower of social change, not a leader.

How soon we forget that those qualities are exactly what has distinguished the University since it was founded, what we have come to expect of our president and what the American university means to society. Within this new style of leadership, finding a balance between a university as a social servant and a university as a social critic will mean all the difference.

Founded on dissent

From its beginning, the University has been - both by design and in practice - an independent, often oppositional force in society.

Founded in 1817 as the University of Michigania, the University existed two decades before Michigan was granted statehood. In 1857 its independence was solidified when the new state constitution granted the University constitutional autonomy - a feature it shares with the other state universities and that still exists today. With autonomy, our frontier university had the freedom to challenge the status quo and blaze a new trail without having to fear the wrath of an angry legislature. And that is exactly what happened.

Challenging the private, parochial universities like Harvard and Yale, it was not only one of America's first public universities; it was one of the first secular institutions. As such, the school offered a break from the aristocratic and moral confines at other colonial universities. And with that break came a more varied curriculum and a more diverse student body, offering an education to all economic classes - unlike its East Coast colleagues.

Summarizing the University's commitment to inclusion, James Angell, the third president, famously said it offered, "an uncommon education for the common man." In other words: 19th century affirmative action.

Although for the next six decades the University maintained a spotty record of adhering to its traditions of dissent and diversity, these values never went away. In 1853 the first black student was admitted - 10 years before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1870 the University Board of Regents embarked on what they called at the time, a "dangerous experiment," admitting women for the first time. Although it was one of the first times that any major university allowed coeducation, women were still late to the game in getting equal status - it took another 86 years before they were allowed to enter the front door of the Michigan Union.