A Primer for Nontraditional College Presidents

Sylvia M. Burwell ran charitable foundations and held a cabinet post in the Obama administration before she became president of American University, but she had not been working on her free throws.

When she stepped up to the foul line for a free-throw competition during halftime at an American Eagles vs. Bucknell Bison game in February, she lost to the interim student-government president in front of a home crowd. “I didn’t take enough time to practice,” she says. “Next year I need to clear my schedule in terms of that.”

A college president’s job is unique and challenging — it demands the zeal of an inspirational leader, the acumen of a corporate executive, the folksy touch of a small-town mayor. It also forces leaders to steer a course tempered by the unruly democracy of shared governance.

How Nontraditional Presidents Can Adjust and Thrive

Academe is a very different culture than business, government, or NGOs. But careful listening and good guidance from senior cabinet members can help a new leader acclimatize to shared governance and establish a good working relationship with faculty.

• How a Nontraditional Presidency Can Succeed
• 5 Tips for Nontraditional Leaders

Boards of trustees are hiring more leaders from beyond the tenure track to take over these increasingly complicated positions. A cadre of relative outsiders is being asked to learn the ins and outs of running colleges, and administrators are the ones helping them learn the ropes and avoid critical mistakes.

What does a president who is new to academe need to know? What do the members of his or her administration need to keep in mind to help their new boss, and their institution, succeed?

Burwell had little experience in academe before becoming president of American last year, but she had a lot of experience changing jobs. In the past five years alone, she has also served as president of the Walmart Foundation, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She has developed an approach to acclimatizing to any new position, she says, which has helped her during her first year as a college president. New leaders must focus on learning the substance of their organization, including their leadership team. They must learn the culture of the organization. They must learn the sector, she says, and how the sector and the organization fit into the world around them.

But perhaps the first step in learning the job of college president involves accepting that if you haven’t risen from the faculty ranks, you will have a lot to prove to some stakeholders — especially the faculty.

When Kevin F.F. Quigley left the Peace Corps, where he had served as president, to become president of Marlboro College, a small, private institution in Vermont, he could point to a raft of qualifications for the new position. He’d earned a Ph.D. in comparative government from Georgetown University and had taught as an adjunct or visiting scholar at several colleges. He had published in peer-reviewed journals. He had even served on a couple of college boards. But when he got to Marlboro, in 2015, he realized that his long peripheral involvement with academe didn’t necessarily function as an entree: “You know you’re still an outsider.”

The advice that all such nontraditional college presidents and their cabinet members repeat is, “Listen.” Leaders new to academe have a lot to learn, and are unlikely to learn it any other way.

Sue Ellspermann served as lieutenant governor of Indiana for three years before being named president of Ivy Tech Community College, a 19-campus statewide system, in 2016. She had a strong sense of the state’s expectations for the system and had worked with some of the campuses and some of their chancellors. “But I didn’t know what it would look like under the hood,” she says.

So she embarked on a listening tour, visiting administrators faculty and staff members at every campus over the course of about 30 days. She needed to get a sense of how they saw things, she says: “Where was the morale? How open would they be to change?” She learned how each campus was doing, academically and financially, as well as gaining a better understanding of the system as a whole. She also learned about issues that might have eluded her had she remained more remote. “I discovered that one of my campuses did have some very significant personnel issues,” she says.

Jeffrey Fanter, vice president for marketing and communications at Ivy Tech, who accompanied Ellspermann on her tour, noticed other benefits. It allowed the new president to introduce herself and her own academic background. (She earned a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Louisville, taught at several colleges, and worked in work-force development at the University of Southern Indiana.) It also gave her a chance to try to allay any anxieties about a former politician running the system, which she did by raising the issue herself. Fanter says Ellspermann began many conversations acknowledging that faculty members and others probably had doubts, “so I’ll start that conversation with you and welcome questions that you might have.”

She is the third new president of Ivy Tech to take office during Fanter’s 15 years there, and all have come from outside the traditional academic-leadership path. He stresses the importance of actually listening, “as opposed to you rolling out your vision right out of the gates — because everyone has one when they come,” he says.

Ellspermann “listened before she ever started to talk about what her ultimate vision was going to be,” he says. “That gained trust with individuals and began to educate her more on what the community-college setting is like.” Rather than devising a much-needed strategic plan right away, Ellspermann took stock of what she’d learned and took her time, introducing the plan in January 2018.

It’s also important for new nontraditional presidents to listen to the seasoned staff around them. Early on in the tour, Fanter says, “Sue would ask me, ‘What do you think, and did it go OK there?’ " Because of her forthrightness, he felt comfortable making some constructive suggestions about things to keep in mind for future conversations. Honest feedback, he says, is only going to help that leader be more successful.”

Says Elspermann: “Trust the team that you’re coming in to lead to provide you their best insight.”

New leaders need to cultivate relationships on campus, but they, and their institutions, also benefit from building relationships off campus.

Fellow presidents are among the most important allies a nontraditional college president can have. When Robert Mong, a former editor of The Dallas Morning News, was named president of the University of North Texas at Dallas in 2015, he, too, set about educating himself about the public university, and about higher education generally. He is eager to cite a litany of regional leaders and administrators he consulted for advice in his early months in office.

Among them were Hobson Wildenthal, then interim president of the University of Texas at Dallas, and Calvin D. Jamison, vice president for administration there. North Texas at Dallas was founded in 2000, and when Mong took over it was still a commuter campus. But “their message was, Don’t wait on starting residential,” he says — adding that more beds at UT-Dallas had spurred enrollment growth there. UNT-Dallas opened its first residence hall last summer.

Mong reached out beyond higher education, too. Because he had worked at the Morning News for more than 35 years, his contacts in the area ran deep. In his first year, he scheduled more than 100 meetings with local businesspeople, community leaders, political figures, and institutional leaders, as well as with officials at local public and parochial schools. “For every one person I knew, that would lead to three or four others that I didn’t know,” he says.

Rekindling old connections, and making new ones, began to pay off. The university entered partnerships for dual-enrollment programs in several local high schools. Mong got it invited to be part of the planning of Dallas County Promise, a program that will provide free community-college tuition for area high-school graduates. The program could increase local degree attainment, and lead to future enrollment growth for UNT-Dallas, and it “all directly came out of building rapport with our partners at the Dallas Independent School District and the community colleges,” Mong says.

Mong’s relationships may eventually pay off for the university through its fund raising, too. He may know thousands of people in Dallas, “but he’s never asked them for money,” says Monica G. Williams, vice president for advancement. Since Mong hired Williams, in 2016, the two have worked together to translate his connections into potential gifts to the university.

Williams has taught Mong the ropes of university advancement. A president has to learn to feel comfortable asking friends to invest in his or her vision, she says, but also learn when not to ask, or at least not yet. “He might think, let’s just go to this person and ask for a scholarship,” she says. “Well, if you do the research and see that that person has never invested in a scholarship anywhere, odds are great that may not be a funding priority for them.” Sometimes fund-raising success comes not from knowing people but from strategizing how to match their passions with an obvious need at the institution.

Perhaps the most significant difference between higher education and other sectors, and the most flummoxing to college presidents from outside the tenure track, is shared governance.

Quigley, the president of Marlboro, says its board of trustees and many of his new colleagues had advised him to be sure to respect and engage the college’s shared-governance structures. That is especially important at Marlboro, because everyone on campus, including students, has a say in how the college operates, aired in open sessions based on New England town meetings. But Quigley came to Marlboro with “a long checklist of things that I think we should do to strengthen the college,” and he felt some urgency to get them underway.

He found himself frustrated last spring when an attempt to rewrite campus policies on drug and alcohol use, an issue which he believed involved “the life or death of our students,” bogged down in disagreements. Students and others were concerned that the proposed changes were too punitive. New policies, revamped with more input from the community, were finally approved last fall.

The fact that neither the president nor anyone else at a college can tell the faculty as a group what to do “is a hard thing for folks who don’t come out of a faculty background, because it’s not intuitive,” says Richard Glejzer, the provost at Marlboro. “I’m sure that was frustrating for him.”

But new presidents need to adapt to the methodical pace, and the lengthy debate and discussion, of shared governance in order to advance their agendas. Getting accustomed to working through mundane issues in collaboration with faculty members sets “a rhythm and a tone for when you do have bigger decisions to make that are more controversial,” Glejzer says.

Quigley says he’s worked to engage and build trust with the faculty, and while he still finds the fits and starts of the academic calendar a hindrance to getting things done efficiently, he has achieved a measure of peace with shared governance. “It takes time. It takes effort,” he says. “You don’t always get the ideal outcome. I do think the outcome is better by having gone through the process, and it is much more likely to endure.”

On the flip side, if faculty members are skeptical of new presidents from nonacademic backgrounds, they should remember that the new leaders were hired for a reason, says Sherri L. Hughes, associate vice president in charge of leadership programs at the American Council on Education. Leaders from outside academe can bring new ideas and new energies to institutions that really need them, she says, and “the hiring body is expecting things to move.”

Mong, of UNT-Dallas, says he has had his own frustrations with the pace and process of academe. When he set out to hire a new vice president for advancement, it took almost a year. “In my old life, I would have had that done in a month to six weeks,” he says. But he has learned to appreciate and follow the protocols, and the results have been impressive. UNT-Dallas’s enrollment has grown 41 percent in the past two years, retention and graduation rates are up, and student debt is down. Listening and collaborating are crucial ingredients for a robust presidency, but nothing bolsters credibility like success.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.

Correction (5/7/2018, 8:45 a.m.): This article originally misspelled the last name of Marlboro College’s provost. He is Richard Glejzer, not Glezjer. The text has been corrected.