This speech argues that educational administrators are ill-equipped to meet contemporary challenges because of their lack of present-day administrative knowledge. Two general modes of generating such knowledge are outlined and contrasted -- the humanist (involving verbal theory and "soft" data) and the scientific (involving formalized theory and "hard" data). A categorization of articles in Educational Administration Quarterly and Administrator's Notebook reveals an imbalance in favor of the humanist tradition. The implications of this imbalance for the advancement of knowledge and for the resultant service of university departments to the field are discussed. (Author)