Table 8.1
Edward J. Ray
Throughout my career, I have held a number of leadership roles. Thanks to luck, timing or fortunate twists of fate, these opportunities have provided me with invaluable lessons and experiences that shaped my views on leadership. My beliefs about leadership are described and illustrated below with some key examples.
I believe that effective leadership must be ethical leadership. Unless grounded firmly on a sound ethical foundation, leadership will not be successful. Lacking an ethical base, sooner or later, things will and do go badly. Yet a sound moral compass is not enough. While ethical leadership is admirable, it is not enough to be successful.
Leadership is about getting things done. In today’s 24/7 world where we are all connected all the time, leadership needs to be dynamic, just in time, and authentic. There is no time for posturing and nowhere to hide. Leaders are doers, not just delegators. We drive, we push, and we follow up to ensure progress is being made on whatever initiative or matter of concern has our attention. Getting things done almost always takes a team effort. Good leaders recognize the contributions of others, celebrate their accomplishments, and recognize that we are all imperfect instruments.
Finally, I have a “no whining” rule. One cannot lead by whining, grousing, complaining, and being stuck in a negative place. When challenging situations arise—and they always do—true leaders, quite simply, carry on and direct the discussions, decisions, and actions required by circumstances.
Let me share some leadership lessons I have learned and explain how they came into play during my academic career and my service with the NCAA and elsewhere.
I became the chairperson of the economics department at Ohio State University at the age of thirty-one and was the youngest department chair in the history of the university at that time. I had no good role model for being a department chair. So I decided to apply the Golden Rule. I aimed to be the kind of leader I myself would be proud to support and that I would model the behavior that I expected to see in others. As department chair with new administrative obligations, I continued to teach, publish research in leading economics journals, and serve on university committees.
I believe that the mantle and honor of leadership carries a responsibility to serve. As a leader, you speak and act for others. People count on you to empower them by looking out for their interests and aspirations. Given this responsibility, which often can change the trajectory of one’s career—and even possibly one’s life—I believe that leaders should always deal directly with individuals whom they supervise and always take ownership for their decisions. Deliver the good news—and the bad—yourself. People have the right to expect that you will be honest with them and respect them. Early in my career, I told a colleague old enough to be my father that his teaching and research were weak, and I could not give him much of a raise. He turned before he left my office and thanked me for respecting him enough to be honest with him. He said previous chairs blamed the dean for low raises. He knew they were lying and that they assumed he could not figure that out.
On a daily basis, leaders are privy to information that must be processed, contemplated, and often acted upon. When appropriate, leaders should share information as quickly and fully as possible. This will reduce the distractions of rumors, rife in today’s world of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles. There cannot be an inner circle if everyone is up to speed on important issues. Similarly, make all decisions openly and transparently. If all decisions are subject to the light of day, you will be more objective, thoughtful, and disciplined.
Positions of leadership require great teamwork and the ability to chart a course with well-trusted teammates. As a leader, understand, articulate, and advance the team’s mission. Promote teamwork, focus, and accountability. Give colleagues responsibility and hold them accountable for results. Team dynamics are interesting to manage and change from team to team and project to project. As a leader, it is always important to avoid favoritism. Good leaders focus on collecting success, not friends. Study problems together, but do not dither. Most importantly, leaders must take responsibility for team success—and failure. If you cannot lead like this, quite simply move out of the way and do not stymie progress.
Just as teamwork is inherent in leadership, so are mistakes.
Leaders make mistakes. No one is perfect, and no one has a perfect day. When these inevitable mistakes occur, quick action is required. It’s important to recognize and acknowledge mistakes, apologize when necessary, and move on. I apologized to a colleague once, and when I told my wife that it went very well, she said she was not surprised because I had a lot of practice apologizing in my life. Mistakes invariably teach us valuable lessons. Pay attention to these learnings, but don’t be too hard on yourself when you make mistakes. Do take time to make amends, but move on quickly.
As leaders, we must work to surround ourselves with trusted allies—people who align with our organizational goals and vision but who also have the temerity to push back, raise questions, and even tell us “no” on occasion without worrying about it limiting their careers. It’s vital to make the chain of command work for you. Understand that most information should flow upward and unfiltered. When you have identified key staff willing to tell you when you are wrong, make sure to thank them for having the character and respect for you to speak candidly and tell you what you needed to hear.
As you assemble your teams, it’s essential that you have the ability to identify leadership potential in others. Make sure you have regular, reserved, and dedicated time to give guidance, share direction, and foster feedback. I ask my direct reports for three or four goals each year in two pages or less and evaluate them based on reported results, also in two pages or less, each summer. While regular communication is always advised, do not micro-manage people—it distracts leaders from doing their own jobs, and it prevents others from getting better at theirs, from learning and from growing into their roles.
Just as it is important to work with your team, it is equally imperative to strategically and proactively manage up. In other words, keep your boss or bosses—and we all have them—up to speed and ask for their help and guidance when you need it. Heroic efforts to solve problems above your pay grade usually make matters worse. Additionally, be honest when you disagree with a decision your boss has made and be sure to keep it “in-house.” Remember, everyone reports to a higher authority.
The toughest lesson I have learned was the realization that you cannot always find a safe exit when addressing a problem. Sometimes you have to “take one for the team” and simply do the right thing, as you understand it to be at that moment in time. With that said, it’s not always easy to know what the right thing to do is. Like my Golden Rule strategy, this is where one’s sense of right and wrong has to be relied upon.
As provost at Ohio State University, I approved extending the tenure-clock timeline for medical faculty from six to eleven years. This was a very controversial decision and one I could have left to others. Already in place in most top-fifty academic medical centers, 625 medical faculty members voted for the tenure timing change. Yet opponents of the new policy urged me to reject the request on a rules technicality, arguing it was an assault on the tenure system. However, I made the change and took the attacks; it was the right thing to do, and it cost me some friends and a lot of political capital.
The decision to have a new governance model at Oregon State University represents one recent example of a decision that I had to make. I took the time to consult with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the university before I made a decision. I wanted to hear what these very important stakeholders thought. After all, I represent them, and they should have a voice. I also needed to balance my sense of what is in the best interest for Oregon students as well as the people of Oregon, not just OSU. Early on in this discussion, I made the case against the creation of institutional boards for Oregon’s public universities. In 2013, the Oregon legislature created institutional boards at two of the public universities and gave Oregon State University the option to create a board. After further broad consultation with stakeholders, I decided we would create our own board. Now I am working hard to help all of us make institutional boards and a new pre-K–20 educational governance structure work as well as possible for the people of Oregon. I believe that is the right thing to do.
Every day, I carry with me the lessons I have learned in every leadership role I assume. Here are a few more examples of how I have applied these lessons.
Here at Oregon State, like any Division I school, athletics compliance is a big responsibility. We make it pretty simple at OSU. Athletics is part of the university, and all students are here to fulfill their goals to complete their college educations. Our student athletes should be part of campus life, succeed academically, and be safe and healthy. They are students first. As president, my job is to put good people in charge. Bob DeCarolis, our athletic director, deserves a lot of credit for the coaches he hires, and the coaches deserve credit for their steadfast focus on doing things the right way. I learned something from our coaches that I took with me in my leadership role with the NCAA, the governing body for intercollegiate athletics. Honest coaches, who genuinely care for their student athletes, become frustrated when there is little accountability required of coaches or institutions that cheat and behave unethically. In turn, good, ethical coaches—who play by the rules—are made to feel like chumps for doing the right thing.
There are three membership divisions in the NCAA, and Division I consists of the largest schools, such as Oregon State University. Each division maintains its own rules on personnel, amateurism, recruiting, and eligibility, among other things. These rules must be consistent with overall NCAA governing principles. In 2007, I joined the NCAA on the Finance Committee and the Executive Committee and served for almost six years. I became chair of the Executive Committee in October 2009 following the death of Myles Brand, president of the NCAA. In this role, in 2010, I monitored negotiations for the NCAA’s new media contract—which is worth $10.7 billion over fourteen years. I also chaired the search committee that hired Mark Emmert as the new president of the NCAA with the concurrence of the entire executive committee.
As previously mentioned, I have always believed participation and transparency are essential within all major organizational issues, debates, and decisions. When I joined the NCAA, board meetings did not include student voices, even though the NCAA is dedicated to student-athlete success and well-being. I helped to change that. Now, the three-division student-athlete advisory committee presidents meet with the executive committee to share their concerns. Additionally, the NCAA represents all three divisions—I, II, and III—but I learned that the presidential councils of the three divisions never met together. So I changed that, as well. Each executive committee meeting now has a breakfast that includes the presidential leaders from all three divisions.
While at the NCAA, I also helped initiate a conversation about rules enforcement. Approximately twenty-five major violation cases are filed each year; about 80 percent stem from Division I schools. Historically, the Committee on Infractions (COI) handled each case separately. Justice was not swift; repeat-violator coaches avoided accountability, and the public had more questions than answers and suffered a lot of frustration. The enforcement group that I chaired proposed changes to speed things up and improve the process. We expanded COI membership from ten to as many as twenty-four members, and panels of five to seven members now manage cases simultaneously. Additionally, a defined violation structure and specific penalty guidelines were established with mitigating and aggravating conditions defined. Violators now know the penalties, which are more severe than in the past, and penalties are more consistent from case to case. The enforcement staff at the NCAA is expanding, and case time is expected to decrease 50 percent while penalties become more predictable and consistent. All aspects of enforcement are now audited annually. These changes went into effect August 1, 2013.
The Penn State case involving former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was an unexpected, extraordinary challenge, and in July 2012, I found myself participating with NCAA President Mark Emmert in a national press conference after announcing serious sanctions against Penn State. I could have sidestepped that event, claiming my term was up in two weeks. I did what I thought was right and helped to explain the NCAA rulings.
Through all of my different leadership roles and challenges, I have had to draw upon a diverse set of skills. I am a firm believer in the foundation of an education that offers much experience and exposure to the liberal arts. I’m well aware that today’s anxious parents often counsel their children to pursue STEM disciplines because job prospects are seemingly better in these areas. But in today’s world of changing demographics and a global marketplace, the liberal arts are critical to success in every economic sector. There can be no doubt that they play an essential part in providing a foundation for learning in every professional field.
Clearly, all successful careers require critical thinking, teamwork, sensitivity to cultural, demographic, economic and societal differences, and political perspectives. A liberal arts education provides this grounding. Most people will have six to ten jobs during their careers, and liberal arts majors are the most adaptable to new circumstances. No one knows what the jobs of the future will be, but a liberal arts degree provides a great foundation for adjusting to new careers and further education. We do know that a third of all Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts degrees. For example, Leslie Moonves, who leads CBS, has a degree in Spanish from Bucknell University, and Starbucks’ CEO, Howard Schultz, majored in communications at Northern Michigan.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently launched the LEAP Employer-Educator Compact to make the quality of college learning a national priority as employers seek college graduates with a broader set of skills and knowledge. LEAP—Liberal Education and America’s Promise—is a national advocacy, campus action, and research initiative that champions the importance of a twenty-first century liberal education for individuals and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality.
I was among one hundred college presidents, all members of the LEAP Presidents’ Trust, who developed the compact in concert with employers who are advisors to this initiative. These education leaders and visionary employers were the initial signers of the compact. More than 350 colleges, community colleges, and universities, and eight state systems of higher education are working through LEAP to ensure that all their students achieve this essential learning.
Increasingly, the information we receive from many sources—including 140-character Twitter feeds, videos, and other social media—is tailored to our presumed interests. Search engines and social networks track our online habits to influence our preferences. The ability to quickly assimilate information, analyze what’s needed, and aggregate content for personal or professional use are skills that stem—no pun intended—from liberal arts training and are critical in all aspects of life today. Leaders put these skills to good use through their various trials and tribulations. I am so passionate about advancing liberal arts education because I know it fosters skills critical for effective leadership.
People often ask me about leadership. And I always urge them to explore what motivates
their own style of leadership. I genuinely like people. I like helping others solve
problems and being part of causes more important than me. I always felt that if I
had children—and my wife and I have three—I would want them to be able to be proud
of me. My wife Beth and I celebrated
our forty-fourth anniversary in 2013, and, for most of my life, I have been trying to impress my girlfriend.
So in closing, I ask: What motivates you?
Acknowledgment: To my partner and best friend Beth.
Thomas F. George
There is no unique pathway to becoming a president or chancellor. While the most common pathway entails progressing through the academic faculty and administrative ranks, successful presidents and chancellors have come from outside academe, such as from the corporate world, government, and private foundations. Generally, a president who moved through the academic faculty ranks has at one time had a successful program of personal research and scholarship, and my chapter here will apply largely to such a person. However, my comments also can apply to those taking other pathways, depending on the individual. Let me also indicate up front that my faculty appointments have always been in chemistry and physics so, while I understand and appreciate the entire array of disciplines represented by the faculty of a comprehensive university, I will frequently draw on my own experiences and the practices of a scientist in the research arena. When I use the words “research” and “scholarship,” the reader can interpret them according to the particular discipline, like exhibitions for artists and performances for musicians, among others.
I was appointed dean of natural sciences and mathematics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, at age thirty-eight, never having served as a department chair, although at the University of Rochester I had been on numerous committees, both departmental and university-wide, and for five years I was the sole lecturer and person in charge of general chemistry, a course of 750 students, which required administrative as well as teaching skills. A question that I was asked when I arrived at SUNY, Buffalo, was: “When will you shut down your personal research program?” I “naively” said that I had no intention of doing so, and during my six years as dean, I maintained three major grants from the Air Force, Navy, and National Science Foundation, which supported a team of postdocs and graduate students.
This was possible because I came in with a robust, funded research program—such a program could not have been started from scratch in a decanal position—and I had a supportive provost and president at the university. Upon moving to the position of provost at Washington State University with a wider range of responsibilities, the size of my research group and level of external funding were reduced. However, I started capitalizing on the power of the Internet and collaborators around the world that I had met at various international conferences—the world became my research group.
Moving on to my two chancellorships (in Wisconsin and now Missouri), my research group was reduced to the size of one (i.e., just me), but the Internet collaborations became my main modus operandi in the research arena. I have opportunistically sought external funding, and during my past decade at the University of Missouri, St. Louis (UMSL), I have served as principal investigator on research and teaching grants from the Office of Army Research, National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and St. Louis Institute of Nanomedicine. Analyzing my list of publications, you would find that 150 of my 750 papers (journal articles and book chapters), two of my five authored and five of my eighteen edited books have been written since I became chancellor at UMSL in 2003, and I periodically present invited research lectures at universities and conferences, albeit not with the same frequency as in my earlier years when I was a faculty member or dean. It is probably safe to say that in regard to research and scholarship, I have indeed maintained my role as a faculty member.
Furthermore, I have insisted at the beginning of each of my administrative appointments that my faculty appointment as a tenured professor go through the rigorous process applied to other faculty at the university. I should add that I am a theoretician, such that my research takes place with computers and “pencil and paper” (but, I do interact with experimentalists in different fields), so I do not have the burden and expense of running a laboratory.
To be successful in maintaining research and scholarship without compromising the position of president/chancellor, one must define well the type of research and its place within the administrative portfolio, both with respect to content and to the devotion of time and energy. It helps to personally be savvy in the use of computers and the necessary software relevant to one’s discipline.
While you can lean to a certain extent on secretarial assistance, you must realize that your primary position is president/chancellor—the program of research and scholarship takes a back seat and should never interfere with your administrative responsibilities. You will have to compromise on how much “free time” you might have, since your research often will take place in the wee hours of the morning or on weekend mornings (if they happen to be free). It is important to get into a rhythm with respect to both research and administration. If one is absent too long from one’s discipline, especially in the sciences, it can be very arduous and time-consuming to get back to speed without taking a sabbatical.
The extent one would work in teams varies across the disciplines; in much of the sciences and engineering, research is carried out in a team setting. The skills developed there can translate directly to the team approach, which is so prevalent in administration. One learns to capitalize on the strengths of others, recognizing that one person alone will probably not accomplish a given task. The varied backgrounds of team members help broaden the perspective and expand the arsenal of tools that can be brought to bear on a given problem/challenge.
In addition, since research/scholarship is not necessarily expected of a chancellor/president, and hence not used to evaluate his or her performance, one can “loosen up” and more easily explore new directions. In fact, here at UMSL, while my particular expertise is in laser-induced processes in chemical and materials physics, with special emphasis on nanoscience and nanomedicine, I have coauthored eight different papers with faculty collaborators across six academic departments: finance, management, music, chemistry and biochemistry, physics and astronomy, and mathematics and computer science. What a joy it is to work with these outstanding faculty members and to learn from their wealth of knowledge! It has also helped me gain a better appreciation at the ground level for the way publishing is done in different disciplines, including the unique challenges for each discipline.
In some cases, as one gets more entrenched in administration and becomes more removed from the cutting edge of his/her original discipline, research and scholarship can take different forms, such as focusing on how the academy functions and evolves its role in society. In this case, the president/chancellor draws on his or her administrative expertise and how this can be used to address important issues in higher education, leading to authored papers in appropriate journals and to authored/edited books.
Let me start with the benefits and rewards. One’s visible engagement in research and scholarship helps set a tone for the institution. We expect fulltime tenured/tenure-track faculty to maintain a program of research and scholarship, and leading by example can help in this regard. Creating or discovering something new and then presenting it to the outside world, such as through peer-reviewed publications, exhibitions, performances, and so forth, keeps an administrator attuned to the practices of faculty. Fighting the journal referee battles and proposal reviews is an ongoing challenge, and doing it yourself imparts a special appreciation for the successes and challenges of faculty. Besides interacting with peer colleagues in the disciplines, an active research program enables one to make substantive presentations to various lay and student groups, as I will do, for example, to high school students. And then there is the overall sense of self-worth and the added dimensions to one’s life made possible through research and scholarship.
Assuming one’s research does not lessen one’s ability to serve as a president or chancellor, it is difficult to find a drawback to having a research/scholarship program. A president or chancellor must of course realize that their performance will be assessed on how they succeed as an administrator, not as a researcher or scholar. While it can be fun and entertaining to talk about one’s research at a reception/dinner, which I will do especially in regard to my work in nanomedicine and laser-cancer therapy (there is that instance when someone asks what I do, and I reply “quantum physicist”—now there is a conversation stopper!), most of the time I am wearing my “chancellor’s hat” in my conversations both on and off campus.
While this chapter has focused on research and scholarship, I tip my hat to those presidents and chancellors who continue to teach, either in a classroom or online. Teaching is another way of keeping engaged with the responsibilities of faculty and, of course, having substantive interactions with students. Teaching and research are not necessarily mutually exclusive endeavors—they often reinforce each other and even merge in some cases, especially in regard to working with graduate students. One can engage in the “scholarship of teaching,” leading to publications in pedagogical journals. Introducing undergraduate and even high school students to research is encouraged at many universities. As an example, a physics colleague and I worked with high school students on the topic of how birds learned to fly, where we applied Newtonian mechanics to describe the motion of wild geese on our campus; this ultimately led to a jointly authored paper in the journal The Physics Teacher.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the value of a constructive, passionate hobby. A president/chancellor could call research/scholarship a hobby and intellectual pursuit, since it is a kind of outlet and release for different kinds of creativity, but frequently one encounters presidents and chancellors who are adept at something outside their official office. In my case, it is music. While I have studied jazz piano with some prominent musicians, such as at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, I do not have an academic degree or certificate in music. In K–20 I was a student of classical piano and pipe organ, and I eventually switched to jazz in my early twenties. I started performing in clubs, restaurants, churches, schools, and other venues, often “gigging” several times a week in Rochester, which is how I “developed my jazz chops.”
Since coming to St. Louis, I have been fortunate to perform in major concert halls and other settings with some of the very best musicians in St. Louis, often in connection with fundraising events for UMSL and other community organizations. I often play with faculty and students, which is most rewarding. I have taken my playing overseas, such as on recent trips to Bosnia, China, Croatia, Hungary, Kuwait, and Romania in connection with trips on behalf of the university.
In a trip in 2012 to develop academic partnerships between UMSL and the University of Sarajevo (Bosnia) and the University of Dubrovnik (Croatia), I also gave jazz concerts at both universities as well as a research seminar at the former location. While I would not label my musical activities as research or scholarship, I get the same sort of “rush” from these as from basic scientific research and having a paper accepted in a leading journal or a grant funded by an outside agency.
While I have commented above that one’s research/scholarship should not interfere with the responsibilities of the administrative post, let me be as bold to say that, crafted appropriately, research/scholarship can actually enhance one’s ability to function as an administrator, and vice versa. Granted, there are a number of superb administrators who do not have a personal program of research and scholarship, but in the case of myself and various others I know, I feel that wearing multiple hats besides the “chancellor’s hat” has made me a better (or at least a more interesting) chancellor. At the same time, I have leaned on my chancellorial skills to address problems and issues in working with my research collaborators.
The distinction of my multiple hats was recently emphasized by my receiving two honorary doctorates. The first was from the University of Szeged in Hungary for my research as a physicist, which went through a rigorous review by the faculty, including an examination of citations, before it was granted. The second was from Phranakohn Rajabhat University in Thailand for my role as chancellor in economic development in the St. Louis region. It was fun being purely a faculty member during my trip to Hungary, where I presented the Doctor Honoris Causa Lecture on laser-induced electronic and vibrational excitation of nanoparticles, and being exclusively a chancellor in Thailand, where I made a presentation on the role of higher education in economic, cultural, and social development. As an aside, while in Bangkok in 2013, I had a chance to ride an elephant—one of the perks of being a chancellor, I suppose.
Wearing just one hat at a given time can have its amusing moments. I recall being invited to present a seminar on my research on optical intersubband transitions in semiconductor heterostructure quantum wells to the Department of Physics at the University of Jyväskylä (170 miles north of Helsinki in Finland) when I was provost at Washington State University. Besides my seminar, I spent a lot of time with the faculty discussing science and their university overall, and I recall their complaining about the upper administration to me as a colleague physicist, since they were not receiving sufficient resources and faculty positions for their department—I of course commiserated with them.
To conclude, let me mention that a colleague of mine is fond of Chinese scroll paintings,
especially those that depict mountains with many different
paths to the top. Certainly, there are many different approaches to blending research and scholarship with a top administrative, or for that matter, any administrative post. I hope the personal story and examples portrayed herein will be useful to our readers.
David Hodge and Bobby Gempesaw
In his book, Managing in Turbulent Times, Peter Drucker noted that “the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” Despite the fact that faculty are aware of the importance of new ways of thinking in their research and pedagogy, higher education institutions ironically tend to be resistant to change, and creating change is often a slow and arduous process. This presents a challenge to academic leaders as colleges and universities across the nation deal with shifting student demographics, reduced public funding, increased public demand for accountability, heightened competition, rising tuition cost and student debt, rapid technological advances, and other factors that call for significant change. Responding to these challenges will inevitably require changing long-held ideas and practices. In this chapter, we share three examples of recent major initiatives at Miami University that demonstrate how academic leadership can effectively bring about change in a university: changing the structure of an academic unit, changing budget priorities, and changing the approach to strategic planning and accountability.
Miami University is a public university located in Oxford, Ohio. With a student body of 16,000 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students on its main campus, and another 5,000 students on its regional campuses, Miami is recognized as one of the most outstanding undergraduate-focused institutions in the United States. In the 2014 edition of America’s Best Colleges, U.S. News and World Report, Miami was ranked third among the nation’s top universities for its exceptionally strong commitment to undergraduate teaching and as the second most efficient university for producing high-quality results.
Although the educational mission of a university may not change drastically over time, it is now clear that universities must evolve to remain relevant and successful in fulfilling their missions. The ever-changing patterns of expectations, resources, and demand for higher education place significant stress on universities—especially within their academic units. Thus, university leaders increasingly must make difficult decisions regarding such controversial options as downsizing or closing academic programs, merging academic units, limiting faculty hires and increasing teaching loads, reducing professional development support, and imposing higher standards for personnel evaluation. Implementing these kinds of changes presents a great challenge for academic leaders. Robert Diamond, president of the National Academy for Academic Leadership, states that “in higher education, particularly at larger institutions, individuals are more committed to their unit or in the case of faculty to their discipline or department, than they are to the institution. Any shift of resources away from their own area is viewed as a loss to be avoided at all costs.”[1] Thus, proposed changes are invariably met with strong opposition.
Successfully implementing major change requires the careful balancing of engaging and pushing. On the one hand, it is important to solicit the input of those who will be most affected by the proposed change. Solutions should come from the collective efforts of the administration, faculty, staff, students, and alumni who must work together to achieve the desired outcome. With the board of trustees often demanding immediate solutions, it is tempting for academic leaders to simply dictate what needs to be done, but such an approach will most likely result in low faculty morale and implementation stalemates. Because change generates anxiety and uncertainty for those who will be affected by it, academic leaders will find it productive to listen to their concerns and engage them constructively in finding a solution. On the other hand, it is also critical that academic leaders resist the urge to delay the development of a path forward because of the loud opposition from those who refuse to recognize the need for change. Academic leaders must have the courage to do what is right, while earnestly following the appropriate procedural guidelines to enact change.
In 2006 Miami University, after three years of turmoil and resistance, downsized and reorganized an interdisciplinary school from “school” status to a program located within another college. The school had been experiencing a decline in student demand for several years, had received two less than favorable program reviews, and had a very low student to faculty ratio. Nonetheless, the decision to remove the school status was met with considerable opposition, which, fairly or unfairly, criticized the process as much as the rationale. As a result, the university senate, with the concurrence of the administration, passed a resolution in 2008 that required a substantially rigorous process for making administrative decisions that involve eliminating, partitioning, or merging academic units.
The university senate resolution influenced the way the university managed a similar scenario in 2011, when evaluating the viability of reorganizing our regional campuses. Created in 1966 to provide two-year degrees to residents of the regions and to prepare students to relocate to the main campus to complete baccalaureate degrees, the structural relationship of the regional campuses to the main campus had remained largely unchanged. It was especially noteworthy that faculty appointments and curricular matters at the regional campuses all reported up through departments on the main campus. However, over time, the number of students transferring to the main campus declined significantly to less than 6 percent of students enrolled on the regional campuses.
In 2008, the Ohio Board of Regents emphasized the importance of distinguishing the mission of the regional campuses throughout the university system of Ohio and to build them into institutional entities that more purposefully serve the people of the state of Ohio, specifically the Ohioans who live near the regional campuses and have the most direct access to them. Over many years, we had been evaluating the mission and role of the regional campuses. In 2010, the matter was addressed in the university’s strategic priorities task force. Prior to that in 2009, a regional campus committee was convened to examine the issue. The main recommendation of each of these groups was virtually identical: (1) the university needed to re-envision the regional campuses as locations where we can increase the availability of affordable four-year degree opportunities, and (2) students must be able to be fully complete those four-year degree opportunities on the regional campuses.
Clearly the mission of the regional campuses had changed while the organizational and academic structure had not. All of the committees who had studied the regional campuses had recommended some form of unit reorganization and other changes. However, many recommendations were not implemented primarily due to the vocal opposition from the faculty on both the regional campuses and the main campus as well as from members of the community.
By 2011, with the growing emphasis on four-year degrees and the reluctance of the departments at the Oxford main campus to approve new degree programs—like criminal justice—on the regional campuses, the tension between mission and structure had reached a critical point. Instead of imposing change through a top-down approach, we followed the procedural guidelines and intent of the university senate resolution and engaged those affected fully. We described in detail the challenges and opportunities faced by the regional campuses in fulfilling their mission and the serious consequences of maintaining the status quo. Of equal importance, we engaged in authentic discussions with faculty, staff, and students that yielded valuable insights that shaped the final recommendations.
Working with various faculty committees and in coordination with the university senate and the full support of the board of trustees, the university was able to complete the creation of the new division, with curricular autonomy and the responsibility to appoint tenure-track faculty, in two years. This outcome has provided the new academic division with the flexibility to offer new programs and degrees to meet the educational needs of the region and to hire faculty that align with those programs.
In less than two years, the new division has developed five new four-year degrees that were readily endorsed by state government and are experiencing early signs of success and better signs of financial stability. Do all of the faculty members and staff support these changes? No. Even with this approach to change, there was strong opposition to the reorganization and many difficult moments. But the process worked, and effective change was achieved. Academic leaders must have the courage to lead and make difficult decisions about academic structure in order to avoid what could be even more difficult decisions down the road.
Like many higher education institutions, Miami University faced extraordinary fiscal constraints brought about by the recession of 2009. Typically, in this scenario, the central administration would decide where to make cuts, how to reallocate, or what specific budgetary changes to make to resolve the shortfall faced by the institution at that time (which in our case was $40 million). Instead, the president formed a task force of faculty, staff, and students representing all divisions and levels of the university. The task force was very carefully chosen to include forward-looking and respected individuals. Few decisions are as important as who is chosen for this challenge.
The task force was charged to construct a forward-looking framework to guide decision making over the next five years (and beyond) in order to advance Miami as a premier national university. The task force’s specific charge was to prioritize and align the university’s strategic goals with the new economic reality and competitive context of higher education by creating a sustainable baseline budget that would yield an even more successful and highly regarded university.
Our role as leaders included defining and contextualizing the problem, asking important questions, and providing accurate data to help shape the recommendations. The task force was asked to distinguish enduring values from those traditional practices that were no longer serving us effectively in order to develop creative and entrepreneurial recommendations. Task force members were explicitly encouraged to use their area expertise but to take a university-wide perspective while working independently of outside influences. It took a bit of time for the task force to fully grasp what this meant, but their success in doing so was vital to the quality of their recommendations. They took their work seriously and exceeded our high expectations. The group examined all areas of the budget and produced an ambitious set of thirty-five recommendations regarding the academic and administrative organizational structure, graduate education and research, student life, intercollegiate athletics, administrative support services, physical facilities, and, most importantly, new sources of revenue, budgetary cutbacks, and a new performance-based budgetary framework.
The task force performed its work as the university faced the perfect storm affecting higher education. Guided by the task force recommendations, we selectively reduced our workforce (mostly through attrition), froze hiring, and chose not to award salary increases for two years. At the same time, we embraced new structures and measures of accountability. It was a difficult time, but four years later the university is flourishing. We are aggressively (but selectively!) hiring faculty and staff, enjoying record numbers of applications, recruiting the most academically accomplished first-year classes in our history, and providing annual salary increases. Do we believe that all the employees agreed with the task force recommendations when they were made? No. But because the task force represented all parts of the university and not just the administration, these recommendations were widely embraced. The task force proved that an institution that is able to plan with focused goals, anticipate challenges with an inspiring vision, and is disciplined enough to implement much-needed changes will be a better institution for everyone in the community—and particularly our students.
In the fall of 2007, in what was a favorable economic environment, the university launched a process to determine its strategic goals for the next five years. The process was led by senior administrators and then vetted with university stakeholders. The goals were not controversial, and, as was common at the time, included only a handful of university-level goals.
In the summer of 2012, in a much more uncertain and challenging context, the university initiated the development of a new strategic plan (the Miami 2020 Plan) to achieve its vision to offer “the best undergraduate experience in the nation, enhanced by superior, select graduate programs.” Unlike the previous strategic plan, we recognized that this effort would require a more inclusive strategic-planning effort to secure shared ownership since this strategic plan would require specific metrics and accountability at the unit level as well as at the university level. The stakes were high, given the headwinds confronting higher education and the general resistance to change that is found in academia. Fortunately, we completed the process on time and with a strategic plan that is forward looking, emphasizes metrics and accountability down to the unit level, and is widely embraced by the university community. We achieved this outcome by adhering to several leadership principles.
In The Wisdom of Teams,[2] Katzenbach and Smith advise that, more important than selecting team members with charismatic personalities, it is best to select members who possess the complementary technical, functional, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills to address the problem at hand. When forming the fiscal-priorities task force team in 2010, the faculty who were selected to co-chair the task force came from different academic divisions but had keen knowledge of faculty governance, budget, and finance principles. The rest of the team was comprised of members from all levels and areas of the university, who brought with them diverse, complementary skill sets. In developing the Miami 2020 Plan, we followed this same logic by appointing the faculty chair of the university senate and the dean of Arts and Science to co-chair a coordinating team of twenty faculty and staff members who shared those attributes that made the fiscal priorities task force such a success.
The coordinating committee initially settled on five broad goals and set up a subcommittee for each goal. In consultation with academic deans and vice presidents, we then appointed another thirty members of the campus community to be part of five target goal teams. The deliberations in each of the target goal teams were shared/discussed/debated with the full coordinating committee, and the coordination committee co-chairs reported directly and regularly to the president and provost. Thus, we had both an outstanding core coordinating committee and an extended group of faculty and staff focused on the initial set of five broad goals.
It is important that team members understand the urgent and worthwhile purpose of solving the problems at hand. The more that urgent and significant problems are understood, the more likely it is that a high-performing and functional team will emerge. To highlight the urgency and importance of the Miami 2020 Plan, the president focused his State of the University address on the challenges faced by the university, the urgency of meeting the timetable in developing the plan, and the expectation that all units in the university should participate and contribute to the university’s strategic plan. He highlighted the evolving challenges facing higher education by emphasizing that we could either “anticipate and lead” or “react and follow.” He concluded the address by stating: “The Miami 2020 Plan will provide the vision of where we want to be, the measureable objectives that will both inspire us and hold us accountable, and action plans that integrate our individual and collective efforts. Together, we, the extended Miami community, will determine all of these elements, and we will own our future.” In order to deepen the understanding of the challenges to higher education and the need for urgency, the university also invited several national leaders to educate the community. These independent voices engaged the coordinating committee and the broader community most effectively.
To ensure that the team stays on task and makes effective progress, leaders should encourage frequent interaction among team members. Team members’ time together should ideally be both formal and informal. Indeed, creative insights as well as personal bonding require casual interactions just as much as analyzing spreadsheets, poring over the professional literature, and interviewing stakeholders. As senior leaders of the institution, the president and provost met regularly with the coordinating and target goal team leaders to review their progress, provide guidance, and answer questions. We invited members of the board of trustees to participate in the discussion and sought their opinion on the general direction of the plan. We also invited alumni and other external experts to help the team understand the critical task on hand. During all of these interactions, though, we emphasized that the coordinating committee had the responsibility for driving this forward. Effective leaders guide their teams to uncover their shared aspirations for success, analyze their assumptions, and identify breakthrough possibilities. As progress is made, they applaud and celebrate those accomplishments.
As Heifetz and Linsky suggest in Leadership on the Line, leaders need to “give the work back” to members of their organization to promote a shared ownership of the need to solve the problem. The Miami 2020 team leaders held numerous open sessions with faculty and the community to discuss their progress and seek broader consensus. These meetings were at times quite contentious, underscoring the value of having broad and respected leaders on the coordinating committee. The council of deans engaged their department chairs and program directors in defining their unit contributions and challenges in meeting the university goals. Regular updates were presented at the university senate, faculty assembly, and academic administrators meetings. Open faculty meetings were also held to solicit feedback from the campus community. The team leaders also worked closely with the communication and marketing staff to make sure timely updates were provided through the university’s electronic newsletter and website.
Effective leadership requires that leaders be willing to listen as well as push the process. One trademark of academia is the presence of free and open discourse. Academic leaders must be willing to share the podium with others and to listen for ideas where win-win situations can be achieved. Effective leaders also, though, use clear timelines to keep momentum going. Effective leaders understand that disagreements are unavoidable; however, disagreements can be managed more productively by carefully listening to all input before making the difficult decision. Effective leaders must also be willing to take risks during the process. At the start of developing the Miami 2020 Plan, we received numerous ideas and suggestions for possible goals and objectives. Some of the proposed goals and objectives were problematic because team members understandably brought their divisional or disciplinary priorities to the debate of ideas. After carefully listening to and working closely with the coordinating and target goal team leaders, we pushed the committee to focus the strategic ideas and took the risk of alienating team members whose ideas were not integrated into the 2020 plan. We explained that it was critical that we develop focused goals at the university level that will advance the whole university and not just one or two units. The divisions, departments, programs, and other units were then given the flexibility and support to be creative in crafting their specific contributions to the university goals.
The result of this process is a new strategic plan that is forward looking, provides metrics for all goals, identifies goals for units as well as the university, and is widely embraced by the university community. The Miami 2020 strategic plan is the shared pathway to our future.
Universities and colleges undertake many new initiatives every year, and every year the urgency of making change becomes more apparent. However, not all of these initiatives will be successful, usually because there is a lack of buy-in or support from constituents during the process. In our experience, for major and often controversial initiatives to be successful, academic leaders must provide a compelling vision, be honest about the challenges at hand (including admitting mistakes in dealing with these challenges), and follow appropriate procedures. The leadership must also be willing to take appropriate risks and spend political capital in making difficult decisions to achieve the objectives set forth.
The practice of effective academic leadership requires following shared governance principles, or what is known as distributive leadership. It is important for academic leaders not only to follow the governance planning process but to also distribute the responsibilities of achieving the institution’s goals with deans, chairs, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and other constituents. Major initiatives can be sustained only if the campus constituents own the creation of the goals along with the responsibility for achieving those objectives. Effectiveness in academic leadership requires that we not only share in developing the strategic direction of the institution but also share the accountability for developing the pathway toward those goals. Finally, and most importantly, academic leaders must share the rewards and recognition with everyone who contributed in elevating the university toward greater excellence in ensuring the success of our students.
Diamond, Robert M. (2006). “Why Colleges Are So Hard to Change.” Trusteeship,
November–December 2006 issue. Retrieved at www.thenationalacademy.org/readings/hardtochange.html.
Drucker, Peter F. (2009). Managing in Turbulent Times. New York: HarperCollins e-books.
Hodge, David (2012). Annual Address 2012. Retrieved at www.miamioh.edu/about-miami/leadership/president/reports-speeches/annual-address/2012/index.html.
Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D. K., (2003). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York: HarperCollins.
U.S. News and World Report (2013). “Best Undergraduate Teaching: National Universities.”
Retrieved at colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-uni
versities/undergraduate-teaching.
Diamond, Robert M. (2006). “Why Colleges Are So Hard to Change.” Trusteeship, November–December 2006 issue. Retrieved at www.thenationalacademy.org/readings/hardtochange.html.
Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D. K., (2003). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York: HarperCollins.
Marc A. Johnson
Strategic plans guide preservation, inertia, and growth of an institution. The subject of a strategic plan is the institution. The strategic actions guided by the plan carry the institution from its current condition to a desired condition through the unknown sequence of future, exogenous forces that reality provides. Each institutional strategic plan is different; each institution starts with a unique current condition, represented by parameters that are mostly unchangeable, like tenured personnel, policies, contracts, and facilities. The desired, realistic, future condition is affected by institutional mission, economic realities, governance structures and personalities, and the consensus vision of the actors within the institution.
The example used in this chapter is the University of Nevada, Reno. The university was founded in 1874 and remained the only institution of higher education in the state of Nevada for the state’s first seventy-five years of existence. As such, it has developed as a broad liberal arts and sciences university: the land-grant university, the agriculture school, the mining school, and the medical school. When the university developed its last strategic plan, covering 2009 to 2015, it was classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a “Comprehensive Doctoral, Arts and Sciences/Professions—Balanced, High Research University” and ranked by the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges edition as a Tier I institution.
The Institutional Strategic Plan, 2009–2015, www.unr.edu/president/strategic-and-master-planning/strategic-plan, was initiated in the summer of 2008 after the first announcement of a likely major budget reduction for fiscal year 2010 but before the magnitude of the reduction was known. The plan was ready for approval by June 2009 but was not actually approved by the board of regents until December 2009. The plan was developed through processes that included much information synthesis; numerous faculty, staff, and student meetings; and subsequent drafts and reviews. The transmission letter from the president to the board of regents describes the “current condition” of the university, the priority to preserve the ability to fulfill core missions, and the imperatives of service to address critical issues facing the state:
The University of Nevada has served the State of Nevada for 135 years, first from Elko and then from Reno. The University of Nevada, Reno has evolved through time to become a comprehensive institution of higher education for learning, discovery, and community engagement across the full range of academic disciplines. The University has developed special emphases to reflect the important industries and social conditions of the State, e.g., adoption of the Land Grant University principles, development of the Mackay School of Mines, and growth in agriculture, medicine, health care, engineering, business, education, and journalism. Today, the challenges of Nevada include: young people’s success in school, economic and environmental opportunities with renewable energy, health care for citizens, environmental quality, and diversification of the State’s economy, in addition to support for Nevada’s traditional industries. The University continues to evolve to address these challenges with professional workforce development, new knowledge and technology, and direct community involvement, relevant for citizens of Nevada, the Nation, and the world.
While planning for the period 2009–2015, the University’s community recognizes the difficult economic realities of this period. Beginning at a time of deep economic recession with an uncertain path to recovery, the most important values and capabilities of the University will be protected so the University can emerge in a strong position to continue as cultural and economic pillars of Nevada’s progress. In the next six years, the University of Nevada, Reno will diminish a number of the programs which developed in good economic times, to assure capacities in the fundamental teaching, research, and outreach functions of a comprehensive research university. Primary values include the ability of students to obtain a quality education, the ability to discover and apply new knowledge, and the ability to share this knowledge with citizens of Nevada and the world. The University will emerge from this recession and resume growth at a rate and in directions largely determined by the entrepreneurship of its faculty in response to opportunities in the State and the Nation.
This institutional strategic plan is a requirement of the Nevada System of Higher Education. The plan has been developed in accordance with a procedure developed by the Executive Board of the Faculty Senate. After collecting large amounts of information from across the university, central administration developed a first draft. The draft was presented to all university faculty, student leadership, and administration for review. A second draft incorporating comments was reviewed by a large committee composed of students, faculty, and administrators to suggest additional changes. The third draft was shared with college advisory committees for additional input. The final draft was then submitted to the President for approval and presentation to the Board of Regents.
The transmission letter summarizes several messages: (1) the current condition of the institution, (2) the priority to preserve momentum in the core capacities of mission fulfillment while sacrificing some programs, and (3) the path of emergence dependent on entrepreneurship of faculty rather than reliance merely on state funds. The entire plan is best summarized in the one-page statement of institutional vision, mission, and goals.
Institutional Vision, Mission, and Goals
Preamble: The University of Nevada, Reno was constitutionally established in 1874 as Nevada’s land grant university. In that historical role, the University has emerged as a nationally and internationally recognized, comprehensive, doctoral-granting research institution of higher education.
Vision: The University of Nevada, Reno is an internationally-respected, high quality, accessible, arts and sciences university, fully engaged with Nevada’s citizens, communities, and governments to improve economic and social progress.
Mission: The University of Nevada, Reno: (a) prepares graduates to compete in a global environment through teaching and learning in high-quality undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees in the liberal arts, sciences, and selected professions in agriculture, medicine, engineering, health care, education, journalism, and business, (b) creates new knowledge through basic and applied research, scholarship, and artistry, in strategically selected fields relevant to Nevada and the wider world, (c) improves economic and social development by engaging Nevada’s citizens, communities, and governments, and (d) respects and seeks to reflect the gender, ethnic, cultural, and ability/disability diversity of the citizens of Nevada in its academic and support programs, and in the composition of its faculty, administration, staff, and student body.
Goals of the University of Nevada, Reno:
Goal 1: Serve as an accessible, comprehensive, doctoral-granting, research university with characteristics of a high-quality liberal arts university and Nevada’s land grant university, combining undergraduate and graduate education, fundamental and applied research, and engagement with Nevada’s citizens, industry, and governments.
Goal 2: Serve Nevada’s traditional mining, agricultural, gaming, manufacturing, news, and logistics industries, and the emerging renewable energy resource industries, with professional workforce preparation, modernizing research, and involvement in innovation.
Goal 3: Prepare Nevada and Nevadans for the diversified knowledge economy.
Goal 4: Cooperate to prepare Nevada youth to participate in the world economy through education.
Goal 5: Improve the physical and mental health of Nevadans.
Goal 6: Enhance sustainable environmental quality in Nevada.
Goal 7: Participate in Intercollegiate Athletics with success in sports competition and success in graduation and character-building of student athletes.
Goal 8: Build the University’s infrastructure to provide facilities, operations, and policies which enhance the productivity of students and personnel in fulfillment of the University’s missions.
During fiscal years (FYs) 2009 through 2014, the University of Nevada, Reno, sustained four major budget reductions, which amounted to more than a third of state fund revenues ($76 million less in state funds in FY 2014 than in FY 2009). (After increasing student registrations fees significantly and attracting robust growth in enrollment, the net result still is nearly $50 million less revenue in FY 2014 than in FY 2009.) In the first round of reductions, many special academic centers were stripped of most of their state funds (most survived), vacant positions were closed permanently, and administrative and student services were curtailed with layoffs. Two vice president positions were put on hiatus for five years and one was closed. Active faculty positions were preserved in hopes of maintaining all academic and research programs.
Nine months into the fiscal year 2010, the state legislature was called into special session to address significant revenue shortfalls; a second round of budget reduction was required in midyear. In the second round of reductions, closures of academic and research programs were required, with associated layoffs, in addition to further reductions and layoffs in administrative and student services. Reliance on the strategic plan and data were essential to carry the university forward through severe resource reductions in an effective way. When approaching academic program closures, reorganizations, and downsizing, procedures in the Nevada System of Higher Education Code and faculty contracts guided the process of decision making. Policies require following a process of curricular review before reducing or closing a program or unit. The preamble to the curricular review proposal of March 1, 2010, states the principles followed:
The University of Nevada, Reno will maintain strength in quality teaching, research and outreach capabilities with a two-part approach. First, the University will narrow its scope by closing some programs completely to protect the current size and quality of remaining programs. This will leave the University in a position to spring forward at the end of the recession with much of its current strength. Second, the University will make further reductions in state fund expenditures in other areas.
The primary criteria for the review of programs include:
Degrees granted.
Enrollment in the major.
Student Full Time Equivalent production.
Scholarship productivity.
External scholarship grant award and expenditure performance.
“Connectedness” or importance to the fulfillment of other programs at the University.
Centrality to mission.
National and international uniqueness of the program.
Other considerations to preserve complementary elements of programs.
The strategic plan states clearly that protection of the core missions of learning, discovery, and community engagement are central and that sacrificing those programs with lesser mission fulfillment would be the cost of preserving “the size and quality” of remaining programs.
In the third round of reductions, curricular review processes were accomplished again with more academic program closures and significant reductions in budget and personnel in the university’s larger public service units of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. During consideration of the third round of large budget reductions, a faculty budget advisory committee confirmed the desire to protect those academic and research programs that had built the highest volume of student enrollment and research revenues and the importance of maintaining a path of hiring tenure-track professors into vacancies, rather than being tempted to hire less expensive part-time faculty. The purpose of the latter is to maintain a balance of learning and discovery missions, consistent with the strategic plan.
The fourth round of budget reductions was less severe; student fee revenue increases exceeded the loss of state funds. No further program closures or layoffs were necessary. Continuous use of the principles of the strategic plan and continuous mention of elements of the plan throughout budget adjustment processes helped to maintain a focus throughout the university on maintaining the core programs at a high quality level. The third year accreditation review by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities noted two commendations: (1) the strategic approach to absorbing massive budget reductions was done in a way to preserve the core missions of the university in a quality fashion and (2) recruiting materials for undergraduates are friendly and encouraging. By maintaining the size and quality of those academic units attracting most of the undergraduate and graduate students and performing most of the research, while preserving the core of outreach unit capacities and administrative and student services, the university has emerged in a strong position to move forward into the future. The results of these strategic actions include record enrollments, record numbers of graduates, record proportions of ethnically diverse students, record numbers of National Merit and Presidential Scholars, and record research expenditures. There has been strong progress in the five topical goals in service to Nevada.
The greatest challenge of adjustment came from an alternative view that protection of all existing faculty positions should take priority over protecting the “size and quality” of those programs contributing most to the institutional mission. The university continued to fill vacancies in units to be preserved, while layoffs continued in programs being closed. With small budget reductions, both objectives can be accomplished. Under conditions of catastrophic resource reductions, the strategic plan guides decision makers toward institutional preservation.
State revenues are growing again in Nevada. Along with strong increases in enrollment year after year, conditions look good for revenue increases for the next few years. The strategic plan serves as a useful guide to grow the impact of the university’s core missions in the future. The university will not reinvest in programs that were closed during the times of budget collapse. Rather, the university will deepen its investment in the units and programs that were preserved. The university will seek to move toward a Carnegie classification of “Comprehensive Doctoral, Arts and Sciences/Professions—Balanced, Very High Research University,” as well as a “Carnegie Engaged University.” The university will continue to serve National Merit and Presidential Scholars while serving as an access university for first-generation and low-income students ready to succeed in college. Graduate education and research will encourage multidisciplinary approaches and drive more research results toward commercialization. The university will expand graduate teaching-assistant positions and faculty, almost exclusively tenure-track positions, to balance growth in both teaching and research missions and improve quality with a reduced student-to-faculty ratio. Staff and operating resources in academic, administrative, and student-service roles will complement faculty growth. The university will continue to focus teaching, research, and outreach resources on the key issues identified in the strategic plan (viz, seeking to add well-educated workforce and innovative research to diversify and grow the Nevada economy, to enhance healthcare in the region, and to preserve the Great Basin and Lake Tahoe).
Strategic plans are living documents that chart a path from the institution’s condition at one point in time to a set of conditions at some point in the future. These are roadmaps that bind employees of an organization together in a common direction and purpose. Strategic plans are useful when guiding preservation and growth, through thick and thin.
Mary Ellen Mazey and Anne L. Balazs
Shared governance is a fundamental norm at most institutions of higher learning. It has, of late, been threatened by a rising concern for financial sustainability. In recent years, higher education has developed toward a model of corporate governance rather than shared governance. This shift has occurred because of the decline in state funding and a need to find new sources of revenue for the institutions. Before these changes, colleges and universities operated in a decentralized system, which fostered duplication, created silos, and led to inefficiencies in some of these organizations. The question then arises, how will colleges and universities need to change in order to still foster shared governance, but at the same time deal with the “new normal” of budget realities? This chapter will discuss the value and challenges of shared governance, the need to build a cooperative community, and the leadership requirements for developing productive campus relationships.
Because of the nature of their work, colleges and universities have always prospered in a shared governance system. Academic freedom and the tenure system are essential in the academy. Such freedom produces a value added that is based first upon discovery and creation of knowledge from multiple disciplines and perspectives and then the dissemination of this knowledge. Diversity of thought is highly respected in the academy and is essential to producing knowledge, though in a practical sense, a multitude of opinions also can produce conflict. Faculty members are in charge of knowledge production, while administrators are responsible for the effective leadership of the academic enterprise. Understanding these role definitions is critical. As a matter of fact, most senior university leaders have risen through the ranks of the faculty and are familiar with the day-to-day realities of the academic mission. However, not all faculty members are interested in administration, and some indeed refer to it as “the dark side.”
Since faculty members play the major role in creating and delivering the curriculum, they often believe their knowledge base goes beyond their academic role and challenge the university administration about how best the university can be operated. Even though administrators focus on the environmental scanning and strategic planning to move the institution forward, the faculty takes a major interest in how the budget is administered because of the ownership of their disciplines and programs. For example, in a unionized environment there tends to be an emphasis by union leadership on increasing the number of faculty members and salaries rather than on the financial viability of the university. The strategic plan should drive the budget. What becomes the most difficult task in such a unionized setting is building consensus on that budget, even if the strategic plan represents a shared agenda. The process becomes a “teachable moment” guiding faculty, staff, and administrators to fully understand and agree on the assumptions and data needed to make good financial decisions.
Recently at Bowling Green State University, we hired a consulting firm, Accenture, to evaluate our overall efficiency and effectiveness as an institution of higher education. An outside perspective offered objectivity, but when the final report was released, the faculty, staff, and even some administrators were apprehensive. What were the opportunities we all failed to see? And worse, how would it affect our respective areas? Therefore, in the name of transparency, we allowed time for all employee groups to read the report and its recommendations and offer input. In addition, as we began the implementation of the Accenture recommendations, we formed advisory groups composed of faculty, staff, students, and administrators to allow them the opportunity to provide input. The goal was to focus the campus on achieving the goals of increasing institutional revenues and lowering our costs of operation and at the same time allow all governance groups to participate in the implementation phase. The goal was to move forward, together, as a stronger, more viable university.
This campus-wide effort promotes shared governance in a variety of ways. The future of the university was at stake, which affects everyone in the campus community. This feeling was palpable and could invoke fear. By creating the working groups, all constituents are represented and have a stake in the outcome. A diversity of opinion would foster creative solutions on how best to address the budget challenges. Ideally, ownership would beget determination and team building. Alternatively, a top-down authoritative leader could handle the budget cutting alone and face the consequences of excluding others from the process. If the university as a whole recognizes the seriousness of the situation and then acts in a coordinated fashion, this should lead to greater resolve and compliance with the solution.
This is not an isolated case. Budget cutting, restructuring, and balancing are annual exercises for most institutions, and rarely does a president experience the luxury of a budget surplus. Creative solutions are required each year to exhibit good stewardship of resources borne of the students, donors, taxpayers, and others. While some have resorted to extreme measures of deleting programs, other institutions have offered incentives for reengineering degree programs, collaborating with new partners both public and private, recruiting lifelong learners with new technology, and retaining current students with the personalized support they require. In a period of retrenchment, some of the extras, such as elaborate celebratory events, free parking, and sports ticket giveaways, are being replaced with extended computer refresh calendars, reduced travel budgets and early retirement incentives. If everyone can agree to the “belt tightening,” it makes the experience much less painful.
Colleges and universities are organized as hierarchies but do not function as a hierarchy. This means we have levels of authority that ultimately report to a president, but because of the tenure system and shared governance system, presidents do not have the authority to terminate many of the individuals within their span of control. What we have are faculty and staff members who report to chairs and directors, and they in turn report to deans, who in turn report to vice presidents who report to a president. Despite a small span of control, there always seems to be a (mis)communication issue. The bureaucracy doesn’t allow for information to flow directly, and the message gets lost in translation. Whether it is good news (“We have met our capital campaign goal!”) or bad news (“We are facing a budget shortfall and must look for ways to economize.”), there are always some who interpret the message contrary to its intent. (“See? There is money out there. We should have set a higher goal.” Or, “The University can simply fund academic affairs with money from the athletic budget.”) Administrators must be prepared for their communications to be interpreted in multiple ways and be prepared to address fallacious reasoning.
A number of presidents limit their communication with the faculty, which is the constituency group most interested in and in need of good information. Again, in a unionized environment, the perception of an adversarial relationship gets more attention and response from the membership than in a cooperative climate. Conflict seems to be inherent on many unionized campuses, and this hurts the entire organization. Bargaining often centers on workload, benefits, and salary increases. Shared governance would promote the valued input of the faculty on ways to innovate, economize, and thrive. Faculty members should be incentivized to creatively contribute to the discussions of institutional sustainability. If universities are to build a strong financial future, they will need to break the mold and adopt new avenues of discourse and problem solving to meet the demands of a world that is rapidly changing, while maintaining the valued relationship with their constituents.
In order to grow and prosper as a university, a climate of cooperation and collaboration must be built. So the question becomes, How can this take place? From our experience, creating a strategic plan with common values is the first step. In doing so, a process for the strategic plan must be developed that guarantees “buy-in” from all constituent groups—faculty, staff, students, alumni, and administrators. The process itself will take four to six months, but in the end it produces a blueprint that everyone feels they had an opportunity to create. The administrators should view themselves as facilitative leaders throughout the process of developing the strategic plan and as the implementation takes place. It is essential that the environmental scan be open, transparent, and with data that provides everyone an opportunity to reach the same conclusions about the future needs of the university. The vision statement should have ennobling language and target the place the university hopes to be, at some point in the future. The core values need to encompass the current uniqueness of the university and also be coordinated with the major goals of the plan.
Once the strategic plan is finalized, each unit in the university should develop its own strategic plan that further operationalizes and corresponds to the university’s plan, fulfilling the goals that were delineated in the process. Chairs, directors, deans, and vice presidents, as facilitative leaders, should ensure that the strategic plans developed move the institution forward on a continual basis. Once the unit’s strategic plan is approved, annual goals for all faculty and staff should align with the plan. Deans/directors should account for progress at least annually on their unit’s accomplishments and the extent to which goals were achieved. Any adjustments or refinements to strategies or targets should be documented and shared. Collectively, the campus will address overarching goals together. Recruitment, retention, and graduation are critical issues on our campuses, and we must ensure that all members of the academy are working toward these common goals. Sharing the information at regular intervals is the first step. Creating a culture of continuous improvement is ongoing.
The key to successfully creating a cooperative community within the university setting of shared governance is bringing groups of faculty, staff, and students together in facilitated sessions to address key and critical issues for the institution. Universities tend to be in silos, and breaking out of these silos is important. For example, it has been determined that incoming freshmen should have a freshman seminar that promotes their potential for success in college. Such a seminar can be developed through a facilitative process to fit the institution’s incoming students, and training can be given to graduate students, faculty, and staff to implement the seminar. This will bring individuals from across the university together who have never worked together as a community to collaborate and produce a freshman seminar that is key to the university’s retention program. Again, collective action toward a common goal builds community.
Leadership is the key to building a productive campus that embraces shared governance and has a sense of community. Facilitative leadership will be the key to building a strong shared governance system in a university. A facilitative leader has excellent listening skills, is able to study and absorb the university’s culture and issues, and addresses these issues strategically to move the institution forward. Moreover, the facilitative leader focuses on others and understands that it not about what she or he accomplishes but about what the leader can get others to accomplish. That is the reason a consensus-built strategic plan is so important to a university’s future, because all constituents must be moving in the same direction.
The facilitative leader always privately and publicly recognizes the accomplishments of others and only privately provides criticism of others. The focus must be on institutional success and collective success rather than individual accomplishments. The individual successes can accumulate into institutional success, especially in the case of nationally and internationally recognized faculty members. There are many facilitative leaders on any campus, and their ability to collaborate with each other will ensure that the institution is moving forward. Moreover there is a sense of shared accomplishment of “everybody pulling on the same rope” after a milestone is reached. There is always a need to problem solve in any university, and mediation skills for an administrator are a tremendous asset. Over the years we have engaged in open and active conflict resolution. When a problem arises, all parties are invited to discuss the problem and possible solutions and to agree on how to resolve the conflict. This takes place in round-table fashion, with all individuals present. In this setting, mediation skills are essential to the facilitative leader in resolving the issue.
At Bowling Green State University, we have recently begun to use forums for greater communication to all and selected constituent groups, such as the one to the unionized faculty on how we allocated raises or the one to all employee groups on the status of the budget. In addition, we continue to have meetings with chairs and directors to assist them as they transition from a nonunionized environment to a unionized environment (since 2012). It is important to communicate electronically and via one-on-one and collective personal interaction. In a decentralized administrative environment, there is no such thing as too much communication or over-communication. Transparency and consistency of the message are critical.
As administrators, we must communicate our message and direction for the future of the university as much as possible. That communication will create a sense of a common vision and direction in a time of uncertainty and fear for the future of higher education in general and at individual institutions. We must be willing to change and communicate how that change will occur. Even in this day of so much electronic communication, the personal touch is still needed in the academy. As administrators, we must be willing to attend university senate meetings, departmental meetings, and forums to assure our multiple internal constituencies that we can achieve that future by everyone working together. In a unionized environment, building trust through continual communication is even more important because a mutually agreed-upon agenda for the institution is extremely important and many times more difficult to achieve.
For those who are considering a shift in ranks from faculty to administration, or union to management, a period of adjustment is required. Aside from the change in responsibilities and vantage point, the orientation to the role should reveal some shared and time-honored values. One certainty is the knowledge that no matter which position you hold, your commitment to the university’s mission and well-being is transcendent. All members of the university have a vested interest in its success. Thus, the respect for shared governance that you held as a faculty member does not disappear. You are simply playing a different role in the process.
For recently appointed administrators, we strongly urge you first to understand the role of the new position. Furthermore, there must be an understanding of how your administrative role can be differentiated from other administrator, faculty, or staff roles. We have found that once there is a common understanding of administrative roles, the new administrator must work to build trust and transparency. It is with this trust and transparency that the shared governance system can prosper even in these difficult budget times.
Although a unionized faculty can generate conflict, there are ways to facilitate “buy-in” for the strategic agenda of the university. This can be accomplished by creating working groups across colleges and departments to foster collaboration on important issues such as online learning, recruitment, retention, and research. Even though faculty unions are often critical of the administration, it is important for all administrators in a unionized environment to problem solve and mediate conflicts that arise before these conflicts create an unworkable situation. In all university settings, but even more so in a unionized setting, continuous communication to the constituencies is very important to building trust and transparency.
In conclusion, the mark of a good, strong academic leader is in including the campus community in generating a strategic plan, providing updated information on its progress and other issues of concern to the faculty, and further sharing that information with as many constituencies as possible. Shared governance and your institution will prosper by your creating an environment where every faculty member, staff member, and student can feel empowered to propel the institution to its next level of national and international recognition, both on an individualized and collective basis, through a common vision and strategic plan. It is incumbent upon administrators to instill strategic thinking and planning across the campus to ensure the university embraces change and meets the challenges for its future development.
Kenneth P. Ruscio
In 1839 George Ruffner, the president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) wrote a novel entitled Judith Bensadi. It contains a passage about how groups of college students would go hiking and gaze down on the valley below from high atop a place called House Mountain, which is a landmark near the campus formed eons ago when the land around it collapsed, leaving a mound of limestone suspended prominently in its midst.
Here is how the students described their experience:
The little homesteads that spotted the hills and valleys under the mountain, the large farms and country seats farther away, and the bright group of buildings in the village of Lexington relieved the mind from the painful sublimity of the distant prospect and prepared us, after hours of delightful contemplation, to descend from our aerial height and return with gratified feelings to our college and our studies again.
I have sometimes cited that passage to our students at Washington and Lee as a reminder that occasionally it pays to step back from our daily lives and our deep engagement with problems and view the world from a different perspective. It is a message those of us in positions of leadership need to be reminded of as well. It is too easy these days, given the pace of change and the advancements in communications and information technology, to become immersed in the minutia and the specific, to follow intensively the challenge of the day, to be overwhelmed by the complexity and to seek refuge in simplicity.
The case I want to make is that we have to be more intentional and deliberate in finding ways to see our worlds from a different perspective. One way—not the only way—is through literature.
Many of us can remember what I would call our first intellectual epiphany, that moment of youthful insight when we saw something in a different way. It might have been in fourth grade when a math equation with letters and symbols as well as numbers suddenly made perfect sense. Or maybe it was during a music lesson when notes came together in a sequence that struck us as beautiful. Or maybe it was watching the tide roll out along a shoreline and leave behind strange creatures that dug into the sand before we could grab one, and we marveled at their movement and the mystery of their destination.
My epiphany happened in seventh grade. I picked up a book called The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. I can’t remember why I read it. A teacher hadn’t assigned it. It was not my usual fare, which to that point in my life consisted of Superman comics and paperback biographies of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Willie Mays.
I discovered at the moment, clear as day, the power of the written word. The Red Badge of Courage is the Civil War story of Henry Fleming, a soldier in the Union Army, anxious and fearful of his first battle, but eager to prove his mettle. I read passages over and over again—depictions of brutal fighting; expressions of a young man’s conflicted emotions; and vivid portrayals of loss, of death, of command.
I was stunned by how a skillful writer could convey through his characters and narrative the moral complexity of pursuing a righteous cause by killing fellow human beings.
My discovery of Crane’s novel coincided with the discovery of a wider world beyond our neighborhood. Some older kids down the street were being drafted into the military to fight a war in a place called Vietnam. Watching the evening news, which everyone did back in those days, and thinking of Henry Fleming, I sensed how those neighborhood kids must have felt. I could only imagine it, of course, but that was precisely the point. I could imagine it.
I began to understand as well the moral debates within our society. Those of us who lived during that time remember the personal losses; we remember also the uncertainty of knowing what we were fighting for, the divide within our nation, the heated arguments among neighbors over fences in the backyard and among family members around the dinner table.
I remember all that and I remember how a work of fiction depicting another time, another place helped me understand the world in which I lived.
A few years later, the country was facing another crisis. President Richard Nixon had been resoundingly reelected in 1972. There had been a few news stories during the election about a burglary in an office complex called Watergate. Nothing major, it seemed, until several months later the break-in was revealed as the tip of a massive iceberg of political corruption. There were congressional hearings and Supreme Court cases and presidential news conferences where Nixon proclaimed he was not a crook and would never lie and suggested that the accomplishments of his presidency should outweigh whatever means he used to pursue them.
By that time I was a college student majoring in political science and taking a course on the legislative process. We followed the news closely and even simulated the impeachment hearings, each of us playing our assigned roles, and each of us feeling deeply connected with the events of the day and fully aware of the high stakes our country faced.
On the side, I was reading a wonderful novel, mainly to escape from the arcane language of lawyers and constitutional scholars. I had heard about All the King’s Men, written by Robert Penn Warren many years before. Here was the fictional political world of Louisiana, the story of a powerful populist governor named Willie Stark, of his admiring and conflicted aides, especially Jack Burton, and of political enemies and scores being settled.
In the hands of a skillful writer was yet another complex morality tale, this one about how the raw exercise of power was not the same as leadership.
Do the ends ever justify the means? You can’t grow grass without dirt, Machiavelli might have said. Governor Stark put it this way:
Dirt’s a funny thing. . . . Come to think of it there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that gets awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?
I returned to my course with a much deeper appreciation of why power corrupts, and how our own constitutional order tries mightily to come to grips with a fundamental problem of human nature.
A work of literature again helped me see the world differently. And it is a lesson that sticks with me to this day. In positions of authority, we sometimes confront painfully and uneasily the cold reality of Machiavelli’s political science (for he was, after all, the first political scientist who advised seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it should be.) The ends never justify the means, we know, but Machiavelli cautioned that the problem for leaders who want to lead a life of virtue amid those who are not virtuous translates into ineffectiveness and loss of authority. It’s an ethical and political dilemma we have been sorting out ever since. Here’s one more example.
As administrators in organizations with systems of shared governance and elaborate processes incorporating many constituencies—boards, faculties, students and their parents, alumni, public authorities, and local communities, to name just a few—we are mindful that how we do things is as important as what we do. We hope that fair and just processes necessarily yield fair and just outcomes. But what if they do not? What if fidelity to the process results in an outcome that is anything but fair and just? It is the classically difficult case of doing the wrong thing the right way or the right thing the wrong way.
Billy Budd, Melville’s complex novella, presents this in it starkest terms. The youthful, angelic Billy Budd is impressed into service aboard a British ship during the late 1700s when Britain is at war on the sea, and stories of mutiny abound. The evil Claggart, envious of the admiration Budd received from his shipmates, wrongly accuses Budd of plotting a mutiny. Captain Vere arranges for the accuser to confront the accused, and the innocent Budd, incapable of comprehending the inexplicable charge and the character of the person making it, is left speechless. He lashes out physically at Claggart, who falls, strikes his head, and dies. In a moment, as Melville puts it, the good and the evil have seemingly switched from one person to another. The captain, though he knows Budd is innocent, feels duty bound to follow the military procedures—which, when all proper forms and processes are scrupulously maintained, tragically lead to Budd’s hanging.
Vere faced the choice between a just process or a just outcome. He could not have both.
My point is not that literature provides the answers to the challenges we face. The decision when to step outside the process to avoid an unjust outcome is intensely difficult, derived from the particular circumstances and the ineffable quality of judgment required of any good leader.
Nor is it to make the case that we should read for pleasure. These are not books one necessarily reads for “fun.”
Nor is it to make the case for the virtues of immersive reading or what some have called the “power of the narrative” and “moral imagination.” The lesson I want to draw is consistent with those others, but different.
As administrators and leaders within complex organizations, we need to have the capacity, the willingness, and the means to see our worlds from a different perspective.
This is not a call for idle contemplation, or clearing one’s mind, or—especially—escaping from the world around us. It is about engaging the issues even more deeply but with the widened or adjusted angles that come from stepping away from it.
There are costs as well as benefits that come with our brave new hyperconnected, Twitter-based, Instagram-fixated, cell-phone obsessed, Linked-In world. The quality of argumentation diminishes in direct proportion to the ease of transmitting opinions. The ability to persuade through reason and evidence diminishes in direct proportion to the convenience of reading and seeing only what we want to.
The world we live in grows ever more complex, yet our angle of perspective grows smaller and smaller, and our vision shrinks accordingly. Unless, that is, we find ways to scale a House Mountain from time to time, and widen our views.
Colleges and universities also are deeply connected to the world around them. That’s a good thing, and one of the admirable developments of modern academic is its ever-expanding engagement in its communities and in addressing and solving some of society’s most pressing problems. Engagement is not to be disparaged; being connected does indeed have benefits.
My call is for retaining some balance, some equilibrium in the tension between immersing ourselves in the world around us and occasionally detaching ourselves to see the reality critically and more expansively, which is not to get away from it. It is a lesson for the organizations we are a part of. It is a leadership lesson for us personally as well.
Robert J. Sternberg
The Stylistic Challenges of
Administrative Leadership
The toughest part of administrative leadership is knowing when to lead how. Styles of leadership for academic administrators can be divided roughly into four categories. These four categories are summarized in table 8.1.
A successful administrator needs to lead in different ways in different situations. Administrators who have a rigid style of leadership are at a disadvantage in their work.
There are two distinct aspects of leadership style: problem formulation (or definition) and problem solving. We tend, in our educational experience, to get more instruction and practice in problem solving than in problem formulation. But both are important to administration, lest we end up either solving the wrong problem (inadequate problem formulation) or solving the right problem the wrong way (inadequate problem solving). Therefore, as educational leaders, we need to focus both on how we solve (and prevent) problems and on ensuring we are solving (or preventing) the problems that truly need to be solved (or prevented). We will combine discussion of problem solving and problem prevention because preventing a problem is a problem to be solved in itself.
Style I, or authoritarian leadership (upper left cell of the table), involves an administrator’s taking primary responsibility for both formulating or posing problems and for solving them. Educational leaders with a strong vision and a strong sense of how to implement that vision are most likely to utilize this style.
This style is particularly useful in three kinds of situations: when you need to act quickly and can’t wait for faculty committees to be formed and come up with solutions that may or may not work; when you need to ensure that you are getting a solution to the problem you have posed rather than some other problem; and when you need to show who’s the boss, which sometimes is necessary when one’s authority is being tested. This style leaves no doubt as to who is running the show.
There are, however, three potential drawbacks to this style: First, some, and perhaps many, faculty members are likely to feel disempowered. Second, faculty members who feel cut out may end up—overtly or covertly—sabotaging the outcome so that it becomes very difficult to implement over an extended period of time. Third, if faculty members end up distrusting you, it may be hard ever to get their trust back.
Here is an example of where Style I leadership is needed. A president starts his term, only to discover that the previous president has hidden serious financial problems at the institution. The institution, which had appeared to be doing reasonably well financially, is actually on the brink of insolvency. The president does not believe he has a year, or even six months, to form a broadly representative committee to figure out what to do: In six months, the institution will be bankrupt unless something drastic changes. The president thus decides that he needs to take rapid action with regard to dubious programs, tuition levels, and financial aid. He knows that his actions will create a storm, but he feels he has no choice. Thus, after discussing the matter with his board of trustees, he informs the university community of the situation and takes rapid action.
Style II, administratively based authoritative leadership (lower left cell of the table), involves the administrator’s taking primary responsibility for formulating, posing, or otherwise defining problems but involves delegating much of the responsibility for solving the problems to faculty, ideally working in collaboration with administration. This style does not signify that the administrator poses problems without listening to faculty. On the contrary, it is impossible to gain a sense of the important problems facing an institution without active, careful, and mindful listening. Rather, it confers on the administrator the primary responsibility for deciding which problems to tackle, when to tackle them, and how extensive the resources should be that are allocated to them.
There are three kinds of situations in which this style of leadership is particularly appropriate: when administration believes that the faculty and perhaps other constituent groups have been dragging their feet on needed, but perhaps painful, reforms; when there is a strong culture of shared governance in the university and decisions made unilaterally are viewed as illegitimate; and when faculty acceptance is key and nonparticipation by faculty in the decision-making process will result in large pockets of resistance.
The style has three potential drawbacks: First, the outcome of the faculty-driven committee or task force is likely to be different, in some degree, from what the administrative leader hoped for, or even a clearly suboptimal solution. Second, the rate of implementation of change may be relatively slow. The third is the possibility that a task force may drift and produce a report that addresses a problem other than the one the administrator hoped it would solve.
In my experience, this style usually is successful, empowering both faculty and administration to work together for a common good. But it requires patience and a willingness to accept outcomes that are not quite what the administrator initially sought.
A successful use of Style II leadership would be a provost who wants more stringent evaluations of teaching than are currently used in her university but who recognizes that if she introduces a new, more rigorous evaluation procedure, faculty members are likely to rebel, believing that evaluation of teaching is their responsibility. She believes that faculty members know that more rigorous evaluation of teaching is needed in the university but that they have been reluctant to institute it because of a belief that such evaluations will be used to deny tenure or promotion to faculty members. She forms a faculty-based task force that includes students and administrators, asking them to recommend a procedure. The students, in particular, are adamant that faculty members be more rigorously evaluated for their teaching. The committee recommends new procedures, which are passed after much debate by the faculty senate and then are implemented.
Style III leadership, which I refer to as faculty-based authoritative (upper right cell of table), essentially reverses the roles in Style II leadership. The administrator draws heavily on faculty leaders, perhaps through a faculty senate or similar body, to set the agenda for change, and then takes it on him or herself to figure out how the change should take place. Educational leaders who follow this style are likely to want major faculty participation in agenda setting but feel that unless they, as administrators, take charge of implementation, little will actually get done with any deliberate speed.
This style of leadership is particularly advantageous under three conditions: when an administrator wishes to send a message of empowerment to faculty members by letting them set the agenda on issues that affect them; when the administrator wants to show she prefers to work with faculty, not in opposition to them; and when the administrator needs to set the pace of implementation to make sure things get done.
The style has three potential drawbacks, however. First, administration cedes primary responsibility for setting the agenda of the institution to the faculty, who may not have a broad view of the university’s needs. Second, some stakeholders, especially trustees or regents, may see agenda setting as an administrative prerogative. Third, problems that an administrator really would like to solve may never even be addressed.
A successful example of the use of this style would be when faculty members decide that their procedures for awarding tenure are not well specified and generally unclear and bring up this problem with a department head (chair), dean, or provost. The administrator then takes responsibility for formulating more rigorous procedures and presents them to the faculty as a package. The faculty senate or equivalent unit may or may not get to vote on the procedures.
Style IV, laissez-faire leadership (lower right of table), involves assigning primary responsibility for both problem formulation and problem solution to faculty. The main responsibilities of the administrator are to allocate resources, to serve as a resource, and to guide the faculty in its leadership over academic matters.
This style of leadership is particularly useful under three conditions: when a matter is entirely a faculty matter, such as curriculum, and the administrator believes she has no role in intervening; when, perhaps due to past feelings of learned helplessness on the part of faculty, it is important to maximally empower faculty members to guide the institution and its future; and when, to generate goodwill on the part of the faculty, they are, to the extent possible, given control of their own destiny.
The potential disadvantages of this style are threefold. First, the administrator might be seen by some as abrogating his role as an academic leader, leaving it to others to do what he was hired to do. Second, it may put faculty in a position of greater power than they may be prepared to assume, given that their perspective on the institution often is somewhat limited by their role as faculty members. Third, supervisors above the administrator may begin to question whether they have hired someone with the leadership skills to do the job for which he was hired.
A successful example of this style would occur when a dean realizes that she has a structural deficit, and the central administration tells her that she will have to cut her budget in order to deal with it. The dean empowers a faculty committee to recommend to the faculty senate how to deal with the deficit. She makes no suggestions to the committee on the origins of the cuts, leaving it in their hands. They suggest cutting several programs, something she never could have done without instigating howls of protest. Of course, implementation of the recommendations may present a whole new set of problems.
There is no one style of leadership that will always produce (a) an optimal educational outcome (b) with the greatest possible speed and (c) to the satisfaction of all relevant stakeholders. In my experience, faculty tend to care a lot about process, so Style I (authoritarian) may lead to faculty members being unwilling to accept the outcomes, even if they are positive, because of what the faculty view as an inadequacy of process. Style IV (laissez-faire) may lead to maximum acceptance on the part of faculty but may produce results that are skewed in favor of faculty interests because of the lack of bird’s-eye perspective that administrators and others have to contribute to the process. I believe Style III (faculty-based authoritative) can work but that the agenda may be limited in scope by faculty’s tending to pose problems that are primarily relevant to their own interests. In my experience, Style II (administrator-based authoritative) works best, on average, although it certainly is not without risks or shortcomings. It lets administrators lead but also lets faculty have an active part in governance.
In the end, it may be that different styles work better not only for different situations and at different times, but also for different administrators. An administrator may find that alternating among styles works best, depending upon the situation and the set of problems at hand. For example, at one extreme, if a problem is particularly urgent and simply does not allow for a long, deliberative process, Style I may be the only alternative. At the other extreme, if a problem is not urgent or is clearly most directly relevant to faculty—such as revising faculty-governance procedures—Style IV may be appropriate. Style III may be appropriate for a faculty-driven issue in which there are irreconcilable differences among factions of faculty and it is useful for an authority, such as a dean or provost, to settle the matter.
Although Style I might seem as though it would be most damaging, on average, to faculty morale, Style IV can be equally damaging. In the case of Style I, faculty may feel disenfranchised and left without a meaningful voice in matters that vitally concern them. But in the case of Style IV, many faculty members may come to feel adrift, as if they are floating in a boat with no clear destination or even direction.
Style II may work best, on average, with complementation as needed by Styles I, III, and IV. Administrators all have to decide what style or styles of leadership will contribute toward achieving optimal outcomes, given the circumstances encountered in their daily work.