Leadership in higher education today requires a delicate balance: a posture that prevents both knee-jerk reactions to the latest trend and flat-footed reluctance to go after real opportunities.
With economic, demographic, political, and technological forces buffeting even the strongest of institutions (see trends one through nine), that’s no simple task. Harder still: knowing the difference between the fluff and the fundamental.
“Every board is saying, ‘Higher ed is changing, and we need to change with it,’” says Carol T. Christ, a former president of Smith College who now consults with colleges and directs the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. “The president is often caught in the middle.”
For presidents as well as boards, deans, and even department chairs, that urgency for change is complicated by a growing level of scrutiny by politicians, pundits, and, on social media, the general public.
“What I continue to be shocked by is the number of people who feel perfectly entitled to give you advice on how to run your college,” says Donald R. Eastman III, president of Eckerd College and before that an administrator at Cornell University and the University of Georgia. (He got a dose of that scrutiny himself last fall, after warning Eckerd students away from overconsumption of alcohol and casual sex.)
There is no sure-fire technique for navigating in the new environment, where the only constant is change. But colleges’ willingness to experiment is on the rise, as they face continued pressures to respond to anxieties about competition, cost, relevance, openness to new technologies, and financial sustainability.
TAKEAWAY
Management Strategies for a Changing Landscape
- Collaboration is crucial, especially with organizations beyond the campus. Colleges should have personnel or systems focused on relationships with local employers, community leaders, and other groups.
- Failure is OK, as long as the culture creates a safe space for it.
- New approaches to thinking about the future—scenario planning, innovation labs, rapid prototyping, even just keeping employees up to speed on key national trends—help foster flexibility.
Meanwhile, “you have to run your old business while you’re figuring out what your new business is,” says Kathleen deLaski, a former journalist and AOL executive who served for eight years on George Mason University’s Board of Visitors. She is founder and president of the Education Design Lab, a nonprofit venture that advises colleges and other organizations.
“You see schools experimenting with different kinds of change models,” she says. For some it might mean bolstering the president’s cabinet with high-level personnel who focus specifically on innovation. For a growing number of other colleges, it could mean naming a vice president for administration or chief operating officer who can free up the president to be more strategic, says Lucy A. Leske, a consultant with the executive-search firm Witt/Kieffer.
Taking a page from manufacturing, Ms. deLaski’s design lab advocates strategies that include building capacity for “rapid prototyping.” Colleges need structures to greenlight projects, evaluate them quickly, scuttle those that don’t work, and expand those that do, she says.
That’s not typically how higher education works. It operates on the cycle of the academic year. For decades the luxury of not thinking about quarterly results, as many companies do, was an advantage; today perhaps less so.
The design lab, which is working with more than a half-dozen colleges and consortia on projects that include an experiment in the use of microcredentials known as badges, says colleges also need to think differently about staffing. “Part of your org chart is about facing out, not facing in,” says Ms. deLaski.
In Cincinnati, Xavier University says it has already embraced such an approach. In 2014 it created a Center for Innovation and began making connections with local start-up companies focused on health care, with the goal of making the university a stronger resource for them—and perhaps tapping into some revenue opportunities—while also learning about innovations that could be useful back on the campus.
Xavier has promoted a culture of innovation, sending about 100 faculty and staff members to a training program at Procter & Gamble in 2012 and an additional 135 to training sessions run by a consulting firm near Cincinnati.
While such choices might sound gimmicky, Scott Chadwick, the provost, calls them “an organized way of creative thinking” that has already paid benefits because those who have been trained “know they’re part of an innovation community.”
That was apparent, he says, when Xavier decided to develop a degree in “human-centered making” within computer science. “The speed to market for this degree was lightning fast,” he says, noting that it came about within three months. Typically it would take at least a year. Other new majors and degrees, tied to the community needs that Xavier has encountered, are also in the works.
“Part of our industry’s problem,” says Mr. Chadwick of higher education, “is that we acted as if we were a closed system for so long.”
In the Southern California region known as the Inland Empire, leaders from a cross-section of colleges are taking a similar approach on a broader scale. Along with the heads of local schools, hospitals, and other organizations, the 19 colleges have formed the Convergence Group, which is working to expand the health-care work force for the underserved region. The group has been identifying educational gaps and collectively deciding which organization will fill them. It is also working on articulation agreements to make it possible for, say, a nursing technician at a community college to more easily pursue further study at a four-year college.
“We’ve never had these kind of conversations,” says Devorah A. Lieberman, president of the University of La Verne, who helped start the group along with Deborah A. Freund, president of Claremont Graduate University. As college leaders, says Ms. Lieberman, “we have to put our egos in our back pockets.” She adds that while Convergence is focused on health care, the model has broader applicability.
Whatever the model, it’s clear that cruise-control leadership is no longer an option, even for colleges that don’t face immediate financial threats.
Oberlin College is undertaking a “scenario planning” exercise, speculating on what issues might have arisen by the time of its bicentennial, in 2033. Because it’s hypothetical and takes a long view, that approach helps sidestep the natural resistance that people sometimes display in traditional strategic planning, says Diane C. Yu, a trustee. (Her day job is as deputy president of New York University.) That could lead to more creativity, innovation, and openness.
One example: “There’s a lot of talk out there about how technology should automatically reduce the cost of education overnight,” Ms. Yu notes. Scenario planning can help produce a more sophisticated conversation,” she says. “The process itself is helping us appreciate the value of flexibility.”
Like La Verne, which brought a cadre of 15 people—including two local employers—to the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in January, Oberlin tries to keep its on-campus and off-campus constituencies up to speed. It has invited a dozen-plus experts to the campus to brief leaders on issues like diversity and the finances of higher education.
It’s all part of being ready for what’s ahead. “We’re actually pretty healthy and robust,” Ms. Yu says of Oberlin. “But we need to recognize that we don’t control all of the environment in which we function.”
