[Update: RISD Provost to Step Down in Aftermath of No-Confidence Vote (5/4/2011)]
John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, may be the only college president to publicly describe his leadership as “in beta,” a product rolled out before it’s fully tested.
He’s tinkered with using social media to connect with constituents on and off campus. He’s blogged, posted video messages on YouTube, and tweeted more than any other college president. (He has more than 175,000 Twitter followers.)
He even has a new book due out this month, called Redesigning Leadership (MIT Press), relating scenes from his three years at RISD and samples of his tweets. One example: “When people ask if I’ve stopped designing I say, ‘No. I’m designing how to talk about/with/for our #RISD community.’”
But many professors at the art school do not appreciate being part of Mr. Maeda’s high-tech experiment in leadership. In March, more than 80 percent of faculty members voted “no confidence” in his performance. To them, all that tweeting feels more like distraction than engagement.
Worse, they say, despite Mr. Maeda’s promise to be an open leader through his online activity, professors felt left out of key decisions and uninformed about sweeping changes he was making in the university. In documents explaining their vote, they describe a “climate of fear” among faculty and staff members worried about being reprimanded or even fired if they criticize the boss.
“There’s been a growing gulf between the administration’s rhetoric and its practice,” said Mark Sherman, a professor of English. “It has reached a point that the faculty just couldn’t imagine how to bridge that gap anymore.”
Students, too, have protested his decisions, and have plastered anti-Maeda stickers around campus. One displays an upside-down RISD logo and the slogan “Maeda Mistake.”
Ironically, Mr. Maeda’s new book on leadership emphasizes the value of seeking out criticism and quickly adapting—or “iterating,” in design parlance. That’s what good designers, and good leaders, must do, he argues—"fail productively.” One question now is whether Mr. Maeda can make his own advice work at RISD. He recently acknowledged mistakes in communication and said he was trying to learn from that no-confidence vote—what he calls a “helpful critique” by professors—and so far the Board of Trustees has pledged continued support.
The deeper question, though, is whether Mr. Maeda is the hero or the villain of this tale of unconventional leadership.
His fans see him as a kind of savior, transforming an old-fashioned institution into a hip, agile one that can better survive a changing education landscape. His critics, meanwhile, paint him as a techno fanboy run amok, carelessly smashing a 134-year-old institution to serve his own ego.
Transformative Visions
Mr. Maeda never served as a department chairman, dean, or provost—the usual stepping stones to a top leadership post in academe. When a headhunter called him about the design school’s top job a few years ago, he was already at the top of his game, but that game was as a university professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was associate director of its esteemed Media Lab. And he was cheered as a kind of rock star in tech-industry circles for his cutting-edge interactive art and his commentaries on humanizing technology.
Mr. Maeda described the job interview that scored him his presidency during a recent public meeting with students. He said he showed up 45 minutes late and delivered one message: that the Rhode Island institution had the chance to seize national and international leadership in the importance of art and design in innovation, just like MIT took a leadership role in engineering after World War II. That pitch resonated with the search committee, which unanimously selected him, said Merrill Sherman, chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees and president and CEO of Bancorp Rhode Island.
“What we saw was someone who was immensely talented and creative,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle. “We always teach our students to take risks, so why not institutionally do so?”
Even before Mr. Maeda arrived on campus, he began a blog about his presidency. The goal, he said in his inaugural address, was to find out what was on people’s minds—"at the time, parking, poetry, and holiday gifts, among other things.”
In the early days, his appointment was largely praised.
“He communicated with great enthusiasm a role for artists and designers in the 21st century,” said Ellen Driscoll, a sculpture professor, of that inaugural speech. “I said, Wow, I get it. This guy is a great thinker, an outside-the-box communicator and an advocate for what we do.”
Soon Mr. Maeda began popping up all over campus. He helped students move into their dormitories and even served food one day in a campus cafeteria. And he began breakfasts for small groups of faculty members, where he made them oatmeal. He could be spotted every month on YouTube, on a regular video address he filmed in his office giving updates on campus events.
Even early on, though, some of his online experiments backfired.
On his blog, for instance, Mr. Maeda started “anonymous Tuesdays,” a kind of public complaint box where he promised to respond. Complaints did come in, but not about the kind of big-picture issues he had imagined. Instead, he found himself dealing with gripes about the kinds of burgers served in the dining halls. Relevant administrators felt he was micromanaging, he says, and “it disrupted the entire chain of command.” He eventually stopped blogging altogether.
Such failures get mentioned in Mr. Maeda’s new book, where he explains that he has found that employees on campus prefer hearing news in person from appropriate administrators, rather than in a blog, a video, or e-mail message from him.
And he put the lesson in a tweet: “The shortest communication path between two people is straight talk.”
It wasn’t a great time for poor connections.
Tensions rose quickly on campus due in part to budgetary pressures, since Mr. Maeda’s June 2008 arrival was just before the national and global financial crisis that hit that fall. The Great Recession led the school’s endowment to fall and the administration to lay off some staff members.
In August 2009, the director of the school’s popular art museum resigned abruptly. She was forced out after a disagreement with Mr. Maeda, according to an account in The Boston Globe. More than 20 staff members and administrators have either left prematurely or were laid off since Mr. Maeda’s arrival.
“When a lot of people are getting laid off and there is this climate of fear, nobody’s going to put anything on a blog or in an e-mail to the president,” said Deborah Bright, acting dean of fine arts, who is one of the few faculty members who lobbied against the no-confidence vote, but who nevertheless criticizes Mr. Maeda’s leadership style.
“Because of the world he lives in, he’s very technologically engaged, so he moves very fast,” added Ms. Bright. “He’s Twittering, he’s texting, he’s sending something on the blog. What he did not do is cultivate relationships among the faculty.”
Failure to Communicate
These complaints about getting ideas across are being laid at the door of someone who, by many accounts, is a gifted storyteller. Just after he accepted the presidency, he delivered an illustrated version of his life story at a talk at the annual TED conference, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and aims to bring together gurus from each of those worlds.
“I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle,” he told the audience, noting that his parents, immigrants from Japan, taught him the process of pressing and slicing tofu blocks. “Because working in the store was so hard, I liked school—it was like heaven,” he said. His favorite subjects were art and mathematics.
He went to MIT as an undergraduate, where he became fascinated by computers and majored in software engineering. Then he completed a Ph.D. in design at the Tsukuba University School of Art and Design in Japan, where one of his projects was a performance-art piece in which he had students act out the various functions of a computer. He said he didn’t like the way design schools sectioned off computers into unattractive labs in basements. In part as a reaction, he made paintings with Palm Pilots stuck in the middle, and more recently exhibited work that included a sculpture of a fish made entirely from iPods.
A few years ago, while still at MIT, he became frustrated with being told he did not understand the financial and organizational side of the art world, so he completed an online M.B.A. program at Arizona State University.
“Although I’m a technologist, I don’t like technology very much,” he said at the end of the TED talk. “The problem isn’t how to make the world more technological. It’s about how to make the world more humane again.”
But in his own human-to-human interactions on campus, Mr. Maeda has had difficulties connecting with many professors and students.
Some professors attending those breakfasts did not come away with a warm, fuzzy feeling. For instance, Mr. Sherman, of the English department, said, “I tried to bring up an issue of substance, and he didn’t really want to talk about it. I guess you could say there was a bit of the elephant in the room. It had a surreal quality to it.”
Many say that one critical moment was his closing of the Office of Public Engagement, which worked to add community service to courses, and to connect students at the school with service opportunities. It was led by Peter Hocking, a figure highly respected by students and professors.
Last April, the university did not renew the office’s financing, citing shortfalls.
That sparked an outcry on campus. Students held protests. At one public meeting, several students broke into tears as they pleaded with Mr. Maeda not to shut the program down.
And even though Mr. Maeda made efforts to respond, Jane Androski, a graduate student who participated in the protests, said the president’s gestures seemed insincere. “He sat down on steps and talked with us—not for two or three minutes but for 20 minutes. That seems like exactly the right move,” she said. “But what’s bizarre and hard to quantify is that the whole time he was sitting talking to us, I never got the sense that he was hearing what we were saying. He was just repeating his own thoughts.”
Several people interviewed, even fans of Mr. Maeda, noted that he is prone to speaking in the same kind of aphorisms that he uses on Twitter, which often seem to ignore or dodge the questions at hand.
When asked in a recent interview about how things are going, for instance, he quickly moved to an idea he was working out for a tweet, comparing social media with spray glue and face-to-face communication with Elmer’s glue. “It’s extremely resource-intensive,” he said of the latter. “It’s very meaningful, but it doesn’t scale. I’m very curious about those kinds of spray-glue ideas, but on a college campus, it’s those one-on-one interactions that matter.”
Natalia Ilyin, an adjunct instructor of design at Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle, who teaches a weeklong workshop at RISD once a year and has been writing about the campus controversy on her blog, said that Mr. Maeda’s struggle has been making the switch from guruspeak to a policy realm, where people want detailed answers. “He’s a genius, and I don’t think anyone would say he’s not,” she said. “But he’s not a leader in that he’s not the face of a public institution—he’s about being John Maeda. Leadership is different from being a bleeding-edge guy.”
After the meeting with tearful students, Mr. Maeda relented and said he had found money to continue the Office of Student Engagement for another year. Several months later, though, Mr. Hocking resigned in frustration, and the administration shut down the office. (Mr. Hocking still teaches as an adjunct professor at RISD.)
Many professors now point to that scenario as the administration’s pattern—make a quick decision, appear to listen to objections, then plow ahead anyway.
Mr. Maeda insists that the school has more public-outreach projects than ever, now under the guidance of another dean’s office.
But Ms. Bright, though she opposed the no-confidence vote, admits that the administration has done a poor job explaining that shift.
“It would have been nice if he had run an institution before he became president here,” she said. “A conventional college president wouldn’t have made these mistakes. At the same time, his unconventionalness is his biggest asset.”
Achievements Amid Controversy
Mr. Maeda has scored several accomplishments as president, and Ms. Bright said she is surprised that the multimedia communicator has failed to explain those victories.
“He has not been adept at reminding faculty that when the endowment tanked, he really sheltered the academic programs from the brunt of those cuts,” she added.
The head of the Board of Trustees, Ms. Sherman, said Mr. Maeda’s high profile has helped bring in record fund raising for scholarships and put RISD in national conversations about art and design.
Roger Martin, dean of the business school at the University of Toronto, is a friend of Mr. Maeda’s, and wrote a blurb praising his new book on leadership. Like Mr. Maeda, he took an unconventional path to university administration, coming to his deanship straight from being a management consultant. “There is sort of a hair-trigger that I think academics have on being consulted with,” he said. “I could well imagine a guy like John running afoul of it because he is an externally focused, busy guy.”
One issue that precipitated the no-confidence vote was the creation of a new strategic plan, which the Board of Trustees asked Mr. Maeda to devise. Committees of professors, administrators, and students were organized, and countless hours were spent debating, drafting, and revising plans. The thrust of the document was to update curriculum, improve scholarship and financial-aid offerings, and set various other goals for the next five years. Professors hoped they were finally contributing.
Then, as the deadline for the draft plan neared, administrators suddenly produced an edited version that made changes no one had ever seen before, according to professors involved with the process.
“There were sections of the plan that said, Don’t worry about this; we’ll work out the details later,” said Ms. Driscoll, the sculpture professor. “The plan is probably fine, but we don’t trust the implementers.”
At a faculty meeting, the professors voted to reject the strategic plan.
Meanwhile, the provost, Jessie Shefrin, announced a plan to restructure disciplines at the school. Professors countered that doing so without consulting professors violated the terms of their contracts, and they threatened to file a formal grievance.
Soon came the no-confidence vote, which named both Mr. Maeda and Ms. Shefrin.
One former student of Mr. Maeda’s, Golan Levin, now an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, said that program reshufflings and curriculum changes are particularly difficult in academe. “It’s pretty much a suicide mission for anyone, considering the way that people’s identities are so bound up in these disciplines and departments,” he said.
In late April, after the sting of the faculty vote, Ms. Shefrin backed off from her plan to restructure disciplines at the school, a move that left several faculty relieved but the future of Mr. Maeda’s reforms uncertain.
In the end the issue boils down to leadership, and what works in the unusual world of academe.
“A leader’s job is to get people on board with his vision—and he’ll try whatever tools are at his disposal to do it,” writes Mr. Maeda in his leadership book.
That line struck Mr. Hocking as opposed to traditional academic values. “I understand leadership in a very different way than he does,” Mr. Hocking said. “I’m much more interested in how we catalyze different people to reach certain goals. He’s more in the vein of the individual, charismatic, heroic leader.”
