Do Your New Trustees Have a Lot to Learn? ‘Flip’ Their Orientation

Setting strategic direction. Approving the annual budget. Holding the president accountable. Trustees are a crucial part of the success — or failure — of a college, but all too often new members are brought on board with little understanding of their institution or of the world of higher education in general.

At daylong board orientations of new trustees, “eyes glaze over after just a few hours,” said Julie E. Wollman, president of Widener University, in Chester, Pa. “The information doesn’t sink in, it’s not contextualized. That’s not a Widener University issue — it’s a general issue related to the way board orientation is conducted.”

And, she added, it doesn’t fit in with everything now known about good pedagogy.

So, a few years ago, Widener came up with the idea of modeling its new-trustee orientation on the concept of “flipped learning” — that is, having students view video lectures and study outside of class, and use classroom time to discuss the issues and work out problems with their peers and the professor.

Wollman and Katie Herschede, the university’s vice president for strategic initiatives and chief of staff, created 10 short videos of no more than 20 minutes each. The videos cover such subjects as shared governance, budgets, athletics, board committees, and how to get board materials. The videos also include five- to seven-minute modules on each school and college.

After viewing the information — which is made available, with supporting documents, in weekly installments, so no one receives a data dump — the incoming board members visit the university and meet with faculty, students, and administrators, moving around frequently so they are not stuck in one room for hours. That visit replaces the traditional campus tour.

Domenic Colasante, chief executive officer of 2X, a marketing agency, graduated from Widener in 2010 and is just starting his board term. “Sometimes you go through training programs and there is a fire hose of information, and you can’t figure out what’s important,” he said. The online courses, on the other hand, were “really snackable and insightful. It probably took me all of about 90 minutes to go through a series of six weeks.”

More-Engaged Boards

The idea of changing trustee orientation to make it more effective — and even fun — is not new, but the concept is getting a second look, said Henry Stoever, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, known as AGB.

“In the old days, hey, you join the board and you just show up, here’s your first board book, and you just learn over time,” he said. “Then probably 10 years ago, there was an emphasis — and I saw this on the corporate-board side as well — on ‘hey, let’s get people prepared before they come to the first meeting.’”

But the impetus to make those changes moved to the back burner as colleges focused most of their efforts on weathering the Great Recession. Helping trustees acclimate better to their new roles would have to wait.

That time seems to have arrived, Stoever said, and is part of a general trend in which college boards are becoming more engaged and activist.

Last year, his organization created its own self-paced, online orientation course, which covers governance, fiduciary responsibilities, and board composition and culture, among other subjects. The three-hour courses — one for public and one for private institutions — cost $399 for members and $699 for nonmembers.

Margaret M. Callahan, general counsel and secretary at Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pa., said she had been inspired to try the new model while attending an AGB workshop on the subject in August.

“Our previous sessions on familiarizing our new board members with the administration tended to be long, monotonous, and lacked structure,” Callahan said in an email.

Alison Aaron Madsen, chair of the Arcadia Board of Trustees, said in an email than when she joined the board, in 2009, the orientation consisted of a few presentations, with maybe some PowerPoint slides.

No one thought it was particularly stimulating, so a few years ago, the board added a historical perspective through a campus tour or presentations from faculty and staff members, as well as more time to get acquainted with other trustees and the university leadership.

This year, it flipped the orientation.

So did Scripps College, in Claremont, Calif., motivated by a Chronicle commentary last year in which David W. Miles, who has served on two university boards, outlined what information he wished he had been given before starting his trusteeships.

“It was a reminder of how much a trustee needs to know and what would be helpful,” said Denise Nelson Nash, vice president and secretary of Scripps’ board. “We wanted to put the big binder away and think of new ways of doing things.”

So Nelson Nash, using Widener for inspiration, helped develop six modules, a combination of videos and PowerPoints. Those, along with online resources, prepare a trustee for the on-campus orientation, which can now focus on broader issues, such as what effective trusteeship is, ethical questions, and a roundtable discussion with long-term trustees, who serve as mentors.

The program has just started, but Nelson Nash said initial feedback is good, and she can see by the view count on YouTube that the five new trustees — out of a board of 35 — have watched the modules.

A half-day orientation and campus tour is also offered to the new trustees.

‘A Collaborative Discussion’

Colasante said his on-campus orientation, including meetings with Widener’s students and faculty members, was that much more valuable because he came to it with a basic repository of information.

“It wasn’t a one-way conversation giving me data, but a collaborative discussion,” he said. “I think it really advanced the level of meaningful conversation that we were able to have — they didn’t have to go over the foundational 101 level.”

Matt Hartley, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and associate dean of academic affairs there, joined Widener’s board in 2016, before the university “flipped” its orientation. He recalled his own as sitting in a room and taking notes with little interaction.

“The greatest challenge or threat to any governing board is passivity,” Hartley said. “What you want is active engagement, and the flipped orientation models that from the very beginning.”

He said if he were to offer ideas for next steps, it would be to dive more deeply into specific issues of importance facing an institution, such as tuition dependency, and what that — or other key topics — could mean for a university.

Madsen, of Arcadia, said there is another advantage to engaging novice board members earlier — they get down to work faster. In the past, she said, new trustees would “show up at a board meeting for the first time knowing hardly anyone and feeling as if they needed to wait to become involved. The new orientation format removes those obstacles.”

Colasante agreed.

“How the board functions, how it makes decisions, and what the committees do — that was all a black box to me coming in,” he said. “The committees are where the real work gets done — [The modules] demystified that world for me and helped me learn what role I’ll play and how I’ll contribute better.”