Economic pressures, polarized politics, and growing public skepticism about the value of higher education make for a troubling trend: the rise of the activist trustee.
Strong college governance has long depended on building consensus among a diverse group of trustees, all of whom are grappling with how to fix a higher-education business model that is increasingly regarded as broken. But consensus takes time, and it is clear that some board members have grown so impatient with their colleagues that they feel the need to act alone to change the course of the institutions they lead.
Recent years have provided two high-profile examples, in Virginia and Texas, that serve as cautionary tales for what other colleges may face. At the University of Virginia, in 2012, the board leaders grew so frustrated with Teresa A. Sullivan’s performance as president that they forced her out without so much as a meeting of the full governing body. They provided little public explanation for their action but privately expressed misgivings about the pace at which the university was exploring online education. (Amid a public outcry, Ms. Sullivan was rehired a little more than two weeks after her ouster.)
At the University of Texas system, Wallace L. Hall Jr., a member of the Board of Regents, has been unrelenting in his investigations of the flagship campus, conducting his own probes of the president’s travel expenditures and admissions decisions. Mr. Hall’s voluminous records requests, aimed at a single campus rather than the entire Texas system he is charged with overseeing, have led to criticism that the regent engages in witch hunts that take up university time and resources. A state legislative committee censured him last year for his actions.
TAKEAWAY
Secrets to a Successful Board
- Keep the board focused on strategy, not minutiae that waste time.
- Don’t let cliques develop; they could undermine the board’s collective power.
- Develop a culture in which trustees convince their colleagues, rather than circumvent them, on important issues.
Despite criticism, Mr. Hall’s concerns about admissions on the Austin campus appear to have been well founded. A recent independent investigation concluded that William C. Powers Jr., the flagship’s president, at times overruled the university’s admissions staff on behalf of politically connected applicants. Even so, most governance experts would suggest that the board could have exposed those problems together without Mr. Hall’s conducting inquiries outside of the group.
The Virginia and Texas cases have gotten the most attention, but board activism appears on the rise elsewhere. Late last year, a national commission formed by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges issued a report that lamented the “advancement of political and individual agendas” among trustees across the country.
Philip N. Bredesen Jr., a former governor of Tennessee who led the commission, said the group saw the incidents in Texas and Virginia as warning signs.
“No one thought this activism, where individual board members go out, was helpful at all,” Mr. Bredesen said in a recent interview. It was actually quite hurtful, he added.
Activism by individual board members, Mr. Bredesen continued, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what trustees are supposed to do. Even if a board member grows frustrated with his or her colleagues, which is understandable when boards fail to tackle big problems, the solution is not to go around them, Mr. Bredesen said.
The role of a trustee, he said, “is to convince fellow members of the board not to run off as a wild card” on their own and “do something the board is not doing successfully.”
Activist trustees, particularly those who are politically appointed at public colleges, are often accused of carrying out the agendas of lawmakers or governors.
But the explanation may be more simple and less sinister: Trustees often feel their time is being wasted in meetings where the agenda celebrates a college’s accomplishments rather than highlights problems the board should help to solve. To the extent that some board members become overly interested in operational details, it may be because their meetings focus on day-to-day minutiae instead of high-level strategy.
The National Commission on College and University Board Governance, which released its report on governance last year, suggested board activism might best be countered by making meetings more substantive. In particular, boards should focus a lot more on a college’s auxiliary and affiliated organizations, like foundations created to support athletics, dormitories, and bookstores, the commission recommended. Those entities carry a university’s name but often operate with little central oversight from trustees, the report said.
Additionally, boards should be conscious of their cultures. They should guard against the development of cliques or undue reliance on the executive committee, both of which undermine the collective power of the board, the commission reported.
Activist or rogue board members often say they are just trying to do their jobs or make a difference at the institutions they lead. But trustees who really want to transform colleges, the commission stated, seldom do so on their own.
“At the end of the day,” the report said, “much is disrupted, but nothing changes.”
