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Chapter 5 Orchestrating Shared Governance Joanne V. Creighton President Emeritus and Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College Having served as president at three liberal arts colleges,1 I have thought a lot about the relationship of the president to the board and to the faculty. Indeed, I believe that the president’s success in large part will rise or fall on how skillfully he or she handles these relationships. The Janus-faced college president stands between the board and the faculty, is a member of both, is accountable to both, must speak the language of both, must be able to translate one to the other, and must help to facilitate communication and shared work while at the same time being the executive leader who sets and keeps the focus on a clear agenda for the institution. In his various commentaries on boards, Dick Chait has helped those of us in the academy to be more aware of the various kinds of capital that trustees bring to the academic world: intellectual, reputational, political, and social, not to mention actual capital.2 Typically incredibly generous with their time, energy, and money, they are essential to the very existence of our colleges. When you think about it though, the board of trustees is a curious entity: a body of unpaid volunteers, many with no experience in higher education, who come to the campus typically three or four times a year and who are vested with considerable authority and responsibility for the welfare of the institution. The board is the “boss” of the president, yet most trustees do not have an in-depth understanding of the president’s job or of the guilds of professionals who make up the intricately complex academic culture, nor do they have the time to learn all they would need to know. Part of the president’s job is to help to educate the board and to ensure that important institutional information is synthesized and organized in such a way that the board can exercise strategic oversight of the effectiveness of president and of the institution. Of course, trustees will use their own professional judgment honed from other contexts as well, offering often valuable 70 An Opportunity to Lead perspectives. This job of educating trustees is always a work in progress, because usually some trustees are cycling off and new members are cycling on to the board, so the composition and dynamics of the board keep changing. Just as the president must try to explain the institution to the board, he or she must also try to explain the board to the campus—to the students and staff and to the faculty especially. Indeed, the president is the most important interface between the on-campus and off-campus constituencies. He or she must elucidate, negotiate, and reconcile what can sometimes seem like two cultures: that of academia and that of business—since so many trustees, in my experience, work in corporate America. What is valuable about this interface and educational for the president is that much is to be learned from both perspectives. Faculty members have a great wealth of knowledge to impart to students and deeply held commitments to academic standards, but they can be naive about how their institution exists in a competitive world. So too, although many trustees have highly developed business acumen, they can be impatient and simplistic about how to get things done in an academic environment. The president tries to draw from the strengths of each while not being deterred by their limitations. In this shared governance setting, an important issue has to do with jurisdictional boundaries and who is responsible for what. In truth, as president I try to maintain boundaries with the board and to blur them with the faculty, although I also try to draw them all together to shape the priorities of the institution. In my view, under ideal circumstances the board hires the president, who hires the senior staff, who together with the president administer the institution with the board one step removed—receiving, reviewing, suggesting, approving, but not directly managing or micromanaging. Of course, in addition to its hiring and firing of the president, the board has responsibility for the fiscal integrity of the institution and ultimate oversight of all aspects of institutional functioning. But the expectation usually is that it will delegate leadership and management to the president. Many of us have worked with boards and senior administrators to develop “dashboards of leading indicators” and other...

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