Blacksburg, Va.
A mundane day was in the works at Virginia Tech on Monday, April 16. The highlights on the university’s public-events calendar were a bowling break at the Squires Student Center, a luncheon sponsored by the African Students Association, and a town-hall meeting on environmental issues.
Charles W. Steger, the university’s president, could not have predicted that the decisions he would make that morning and in the days to follow would be the most important of his 40 years at the university.
Several hours after the last shots rang out at Norris Hall, Mr. Steger, 59, would be at a podium answering barbed questions from Katie Couric and dozens of other reporters. They would ask why he kept the campus open after two students were shot and killed early that morning in a residence hall. The shooter, subsequently revealed to be a student, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 30 students and faculty members later that morning at Norris Hall, and then turned the gun on himself.
Mr. Steger’s description of a tragedy of “monumental proportions” would be heard and read by millions of people around the world that day. And on Tuesday, he would share a stage with President George W. Bush during an internationally televised memorial convocation to mark the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
It was a sequence of events that no college chief can be fully prepared to handle. Who could have foreseen the magnitude of the tragedy? As the events of April 16 recede in time, however, leaders of other colleges and universities are sure to look at Mr. Steger’s performance and question the readiness of presidents to act like corporate executives, take visible control of a campus in crisis, manage the onslaught of cameras and microphones, and strike the right tones of both grief and confidence.
As Mr. Steger joins the ranks of leaders who have been called upon to manage campus disasters, higher-education observers say crisis management continues to grow in importance among the skills that institutions look for in their presidents.
The shift in leadership priorities began after September 11, 2001, says Michael N. Bastedo, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. Before the terrorist attacks, he says, search committees would have been unlikely to ask presidential candidates such questions as, “What would you do if someone bombed your campus?”
Not the First
Some parents of Virginia Tech students criticized Mr. Steger’s decisions, and news reporters amplified those complaints at the news conferences and in their subsequent coverage. But the president was also widely praised, particularly for the gravitas he displayed in his public statements. He received a 30-second ovation at the April 17 convocation.
Hand-written messages on a sign taped beside a stairway leading to Burruss Hall, where Mr. Steger’s office is located, summed up the feelings of support for Virginia Tech’s suddenly famous president:
“An honorable man facing the impossible,” said one message, signed Brian Berne, an alumnus.
Although the scale of the tragedy at Virginia Tech is unprecedented, Mr. Steger is not the only university president to be confronted by a seemingly impossible challenge in recent years. Tulane University’s president, Scott S. Cowen, and other New Orleans college leaders faced a desperate scramble after Hurricane Katrina savaged their campuses in 2005; Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, struggled with a racially sensitive furor over rape charges (since withdrawn) against members of the men’s lacrosse team in 2006.
Some presidents have lost their jobs as the result of such crises, including Elizabeth Hoffman, who resigned in April 2005 as president of the University of Colorado after a series of high-profile controversies rocked that institution, most notably sexual assaults linked to the football team.
College presidents can expect more fast-breaking crises to land them in the glare of the national news media, say higher-education experts, including past and present campus chiefs. As a result of the Virginia Tech shootings, they say, search committees will put an increasingly higher value on crisis-management skills when hiring presidents, while presidents and their aides will put disaster training higher on their to-do lists.
Higher education is notorious for the glacial pace of its decision making, a result partly of its tradition of shared governance and tenure. But in an emergency, presidents have the ability -- even the responsibility -- to circumvent the usual channels of committees and deliberation, several leaders say. Colleges, they argue, should be able move as fast as corporations, the military, and other big institutions.
“If you get a big problem,” says M. Peter McPherson, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and a former president of Michigan State University, “the academy allows the president to move much quicker than if you’re going to change course loads.”
The reason, he says, is simply that “people accept the need.”
Taking Charge
College presidents say they get too much criticism and credit for the day-to-day happenings on their campuses. Provosts, deans, police chiefs, student-affairs officials, and spokespeople make important decisions, too, and act with varying degrees of independence from the president’s office.
When calamity strikes, however, it is the president’s power that becomes conspicuous.
“The president is the only person in the institution who has the command of the e-mail and the phone to assemble people quickly,” says H. Keith H. Brodie, Duke’s president emeritus, who led the university from 1985 to 1993. “You can command the authority of literally everyone.”
Mr. Brodie says he was able to bring together different teams of advisers within an hour to deal with crises on Duke’s campus during his tenure, which included a kidnapping at the university hospital and a tense protest over apartheid in South Africa.
College chiefs lead increasingly complex, diffuse institutions. And they must now cope with the 24-hour news cycle of ravenous cable-television news, talk radio, and blogs. The difficulty of decision making is compounded by that volatile mix.
But that challenge requires the same approach presidents use in less desperate situations, says Mr. Cowen. The four tenets of presidential leadership, he says, are intellectual and moral leadership; political skills, such as compromise and maneuvering; and -- most important in emergencies -- corporate-style managerial abilities. Those principles, he says, were just as important for him before the hurricane as they were in the months that followed -- for example, when he made the painful decision to lay off 9 percent of the university’s employees, including 243 full-time staff members.
“You need the competencies that you would see in a CEO,” says Mr. Cowen, who is also a professor of economics and business at Tulane and has served on corporate boards and worked as a business consultant. Specifically, he says, presidents should emulate the efficient and decisive managerial skills of successful corporate chiefs.
“In a time of crisis, the necessity is speed,” he says.
Lloyd A. Jacobs, president of the University of Toledo, agrees. “I think presidents need to act more like CEO’s and less like academics,” he says. That means moving quickly to “step out and take some risk.”
When Dr. Jacobs is called on for decisive leadership as president, he says, he draws on his experience as a cardiovascular surgeon: “Taking charge in an emergency is an appropriate use of power.”
Previous experience in the business world or in dealing with emergencies should not be requirements for college presidents, however, says John R. Ryan, chancellor of the State University of New York. As a former U.S. Navy vice admiral, he commanded six naval bases and three military hospitals.
Although his 30 years of crisis planning in the military has helped him as a university leader, Mr. Ryan says, new presidents can adequately prepare for a crisis while on the job. “As long as you pick the right woman or the right man,” he says, “you can run them through” disaster training in their first few weeks as president.
That said, Mr. Ryan thinks the Virginia Tech shootings have increased the urgency for better crisis training. “We don’t need to wait until they’re comfortably ensconced after the inauguration a year later,” he says.
More than half of the leaders of public colleges had served as provosts before being hired for their first presidencies, says Mr. McPherson, of the state-university association, citing the group’s research. Many provosts are experienced fund raisers, he says, but they “don’t deal with angry students very often.”
Colleges should let provosts and deans handle some tasks in high-pressure situations, like talking to the news media and lawmakers and managing student protests, says Mr. McPherson. That way, he says, those administrators will be better able to deal with a full-blown crisis as presidents themselves.
When an emergency strikes a college, people look to the president for a reassuring voice. “People need a rallying point,” says Mr. Cowen.
In Mr. Steger’s case, that role extended well beyond the campus, as millions of people followed the news.
“Somebody had to take charge,” says Kevin Bircher, a Virginia Tech alumnus who was visiting the campus Drillfield, a central gathering place, on the weekend after the shootings. Mr. Steger, he says, exuded just such a sense of control and calm.
Although presidents’ performance as communicators-in-chief can be as important as their quick decision-making in a crisis, it can be a difficult skill to develop, say several experts on the college presidency. And media savvy is often lacking in new presidents, particularly former provosts who were promoted on the traditional career path.
Search committees are looking for leaders with charisma, in part so they will be better prepared to deal with the news media, says Mr. Bastedo, of the Michigan study center.
“That sort of external leadership model is something that search firms look for,” he says.
Jan Greenwood, who has headed an executive search firm focused on higher education since 1992, says universities hire presidents with leadership skills that could apply to emergency situations. However, search committees are not looking for candidates with any specific crisis experience or training.
In the over 600 searches she has overseen, “not one presidential search has talked about crisis management,” Ms. Greenwood says.
Center of the Storm
Several presidents say there is no way to prepare for a day when scores of satellite-TV trucks appear on a campus. And while the publicity frenzies that came to Duke and Virginia Tech may influence presidential search committees to take a longer look at candidates’ experience in dealing with the news media, experts say those qualifications have long been part of the mix in searches.
“I think we already do that. These search processes are agonizing,” says Mr. Ryan, who will step down as SUNY’s chancellor on May 31. Some candidates, he notes, are already being asked how they would have handled the Duke rape-charge affair. “What I’m looking for in a new president” when an opening occurs on one of SUNY’s 64 campuses, says Mr. Ryan, “is someone who’s authentic.”
According to Mr. Ryan and other college chiefs, authenticity and candor are crucial when calamity strikes a campus. That is the time, they say, to be open with students, faculty members, parents, and reporters.
Mr. Cowen says that he sent campuswide e-mail messages three or four times per day in Katrina’s aftermath, and that he wrote them without assistance from Tulane’s communications staff.
“My public-relations people never stopped me from doing it,” he says. “If it comes across too scripted, too prepared, it doesn’t ring true.”
Several college presidents praised Mr. Steger for being straightforward and vulnerable in his public statements after the Virginia Tech shootings.
“Candor,” says Mr. Brodie, Duke’s former president, “has the power to carry the day.”
