In the United States, the executive and ceremonial roles are not split, which means that a university president assumes an enormous burden in terms of the sheer breadth of their duties and responsibilities. The president is expected to preside over all major ceremonies, including graduations and presentations of awards and honors, while also reporting to the board of trustees and personally handling certain high-level executive functions: external relations (especially public relations and fundraising) and long-range planning and strategy (especially the creation and termination of university degrees, programs, and policies). Most other decisions are delegated to their second in command, especially operational day-to-day decisions. The second in command often has the final say on resource allocation decisions, difficult tenure decisions, whether to initiate recruiting of star faculty from other institutions, and whether to initiate defensive measures against such recruiting of the institution's own star faculty.