If you think it’s hard to keep a higher-education collaboration going, imagine the challenges facing a membership organization that serves such consortiums.
Higher-education collaborations run the gamut — generally comprising five or more institutions and offering a variety of services, such as cross-registration for courses, joint health-insurance programs, and shared purchasing. Best practices can be difficult to tease out because of the variability in the way collaborations are structured: Some have just a single full-time employee or none at all, while one of the largest, the Claremont University Consortium, has a staff of 325.
More private colleges want to collaborate to share costs and administrative responsibilities. But such coordination isn’t easy.
For nearly 50 years, the Association for Collaborative Leadership, known as ACL, has brought the leaders of these diverse collaborations together to exchange ideas. But the limited pool of potential members and the inherent instability of collaborations — which can be snuffed out or lose vibrancy as college presidents come and go — has resulted in a hand-to-mouth existence for the umbrella group. Its membership contains most of the major college-and-university collaborations, but that adds up to only about 50 consortial members.
Since its founding, in 1968, ACL has gone through three name changes and has hopscotched its home office to no fewer than eight cities. Currently it operates from the Nellco Law Library Consortium, in Albany, N.Y., but it is looking for a new home.
“The main goal is for it to be self-sustaining,” says Amanda Adolph Fore, the association’s only employee, and a part-time one at that. “We want to ensure that all of the knowledge that we’re losing as consortium directors retire gets retained in a way that it won’t get lost.”
Ms. Fore handles communications for the association, but its board members, nearly all of whom are leaders of higher-education collaborations, do most of the work. This summer, for the seventh straight year, the ACL will conduct an institute for senior higher-education leaders who are interested in creating or joining a collaboration. The association also holds a conference each fall at which consortium leaders gather to exchange ideas.
Although the diverse approaches to collaboration make generalizing difficult, some of the wisdom shared at ACL gatherings has stood the test of time.
One takeaway is that colleges should approach a collaboration like any long-term investment, and not expect an immediate payback on the set-up costs. “You’ve got to give it least five to 10 years to get it going,” says Phillip DiChiara, an ACL board member and managing director of the Boston Consortium for Higher Education.
