Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts

4. Using Governance to Strengthen the Liberal Arts

Chapter 4 Using Governance to Strengthen the Liberal Arts Susan Frost Principal, Susan Frost Consulting Shelly Weiss Storbeck Managing Partner, Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates LLC Governance issues in higher education rarely make headline news, but that’s exactly what happened in June 2012 when the University of Virginia’s board of trustees abruptly forced the president to resign, then voted unanimously to reinstate her sixteen days later. While the main issues surrounding the unfortunate incident were complex, they are prevalent in most colleges and universities to some degree: rising pressures to cope with financial and technological changes, different styles of leadership, and multiple communication channels among board members and presidents. If the dramatic events at the University of Virginia serve a broader purpose, however, it is to highlight the importance of good governance in determining the future of an institution. Clearly, the pivotal figure in how a college is governed is the president, because he or she sits between the faculty and the board, the two critical constituencies responsible for making strategic and tactical decisions. With that structure in mind, we devised a survey that looked at two key relationships on college campuses, particularly liberal arts colleges as opposed to research universities with larger administrative units: that of the board and the president, and that of the president and the faculty. Because our population was limited as described below, we consider this survey to be a pilot effort and anticipate that these findings will point the way to a fuller, more comprehensive project in the future. 60 An Opportunity to Lead Exploring Key Relationships We conducted more than a dozen interviews with faculty members, presidents, and board members. We drew our population from colleges whose presidents served on the program of “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education around the World,” a conference supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in April 2012 to help leaders of colleges explore issues related to the future of the liberal arts. Of the colleges represented by presidents on the program, we chose twelve at random and invited either the president, the board chair, or a faculty member with leadership experience in the formal governance process to participate in a telephone interview. Since clearly no one wanted to go on record to talk about sensitive internal affairs, we promised confidentiality in terms of identifying the interviewee and the institution. Of the board members, we asked primarily about their relationships with their presidents ; of the faculty, we asked about their relationships with their presidents; and of the presidents, we asked about their relationships with both board members and faculty. We focused on two basic questions: • What features and practices in the area of governance promote creativity and fresh thinking about the liberal arts? • What inhibits productivity in these key relationships as institutional direction is determined? Our goal was to explore the broad views of decision makers and collect specific examples of useful strategies as well. We asked not only for general views on what improved relationships between the board and the president, and the president and faculty, as well as what undermined these relationships, but also for specific recommendations of “best practices.” We were pleased that our participants described a wealth of good ideas. Two themes emerged from our interviews. First, the 2008 economic crisis affected governance in several positive ways that are still coming to the forefront. During the crisis, administrators, boards, and faculties came together over the need to ease tension between traditional management practices and immediate economic questions and to confront pressures created by major social, economic, global, and technological changes that are occurring faster than ever before. According to a recent survey of presidents conducted by Inside Higher Ed in 2012, these pressures include potential cuts in aid, rising tuition, increased competition Using Governance to Strengthen the Liberal Arts 61 for students, financial support from alumni, and budget shortfalls.1 As a result of the crisis, board members and faculty expressed the hope that the form of collaboration forged during the economic crisis continues in the future. Second, we see a growing culture clash as a younger generation of business and technology leaders, many of them successful entrepreneurs or venture investors , step into leadership positions on higher education boards. Although many of these young leaders have only a few years of experience governing a college or university, they feel strongly about how...