‘Everything Is a Business’

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

Scott C. Beardsley doesn’t make an ominous first impression, but he is of a sort that unsettles many academics: the so-called nontraditional leader. Before becoming dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, he spent 26 years at the management-consulting firm McKinsey. Mr. Beardsley has more company on campuses these days, as detailed in his new book, Higher Calling: The Rise of Nontraditional Leaders in Academia (University of Virginia Press).

Presidents without a Ph.D. are nothing new, but the recent influx of executives like J. Bruce Harreld, at the University of Iowa, has stoked fears of the corporatization of higher education. As of 2014, about a third of the 250 colleges checked by Mr. Beardsley had hired a president who was never a tenure-track professor (his definition of nontraditional), but less than 2 percent of those hires came straight from the business world.

Mr. Beardsley expects the trend toward nontraditional college leadership to continue. His book even offers advice to unlikely candidates who may want to interview for a president’s job. He stopped by The Chronicle last week to chat.

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The corporate outsider as college president has become a faculty boogeyman. Why?

As with anything, conversations tend to get polarized when the truth is often shades of gray in between. No matter what setting you’re in, people are subject to some kind of unconscious bias.

The fear of the stereotypical business leader is that they’re going to be a top-down dirigiste who imposes a set of capitalistic market-force values upon a not-for-profit institution with no regard for history or tradition or culture. But everyone’s got a different story. Just because you’ve worked in business or just because you’ve worked in academia does not mean you’re all the same. There’s usually a grain of truth to stereotypes and generalizations — but the averages always, always lie.

Do most faculty or board members have a good sense of what “nontraditional candidate” even means?

A lot of people have a sense of what they believe it means. But the definition of “nontraditional” varies dramatically from one person to another.

I have found it amusing that some people cannot agree on whether I am now a traditional or nontraditional leader. Everybody could agree when I came into the role that I was nontraditional. But now that I’m a dean, I teach courses, I do research, I publish books, I run a tenure process. Some people say, “Now you’re traditional.” I’m the same person. I haven’t changed.

I looked to the literature and asked search firms that do this every day, and I did not get a common definition. So having a conversation about “traditional” or “nontraditional” is no longer the right question.

What is?

What are the challenges facing my institution, and what type of leadership characteristics are needed to meet them?

What are search committees looking for?

Every search committee has a set of ideas about what problems they want solved, or what type of leader does well in their environment.

Why do search committees look for people that have experience in higher education? Because your chance of success is much higher. Any leader needs to understand the context in which they’re going to lead. That’s why complete strangers to academe, who have no doctorate, no research, no experience related to education, have never taught an adjunct course, those are unusual candidates.

Many of the great leaders in higher-education history have come through the faculty ranks, right through the provost’s office, and those people will continue to be very attractive candidates. But the context is changing, and there are institutions out there with wildly different challenges. If you’re leading a very large, complex university with 50,000 students and multiple schools and campuses and so forth, that may be quite different than leading a small liberal-arts college. The leadership challenges, accordingly, would be very different.

Can you talk a bit about women leaders?

Nontraditional leaders tend to be disproportionately men. I believe it has to do with the pipeline from the executive ranks. There’s still a lot of work to be done on that.

The macro picture is there are just not enough women leaders in higher education overall. That mirrors some of the challenges of corporate America. But higher education is more successful at finding women leaders from within than it is from the outside.

How have governing boards affected the influx of nontraditional presidents?

It’s hard to determine the causality, but clearly the boards have chosen the presidents. They’ve opened the aperture on the type of candidate they’re willing to consider.

I think boards see that the context is changing. They see it when they have to write the job description of some of these roles and when they see the budgets they have to pass. Or the state is cutting back on its funding, or you have a crisis on the campus.

To complicate matters, a number of the very qualified candidates that have come up through the faculty ranks to the provost’s office don’t want the president’s role anymore. So boards are faced with how to source that talent.

In the book, you join the chorus saying the job of college president has become almost forbiddingly demanding. Does the role need to be redefined?

There’s no doubt that the leadership role is getting more difficult, whether it’s a president or a dean. I had to work fairly hard at McKinsey, but I feel like I work harder now. I travel a little bit less, but the overall demand of the job is higher, and that’s saying quite a lot. But I love the mission.

Does the presidency need to be redefined? Some institutions need to think carefully about how they organize their leadership team. Any leader in higher education has to be able to put together a top team with a credible set of complementary skills to face the diverse challenges. The idea that the president alone can solve all the problems is way outdated.

How does a leader strike a balance between bringing an outsider’s perspective and skills but not confirming people’s biases and making them wary?

If you’re a nontraditional candidate, you need to in a very open way say, Look, I understand that I’m one of these rare birds. That helps establish an honest dialogue.

Somebody that has business experience or knows how to run a complex organization or raise money, I don’t believe that’s a disadvantage in any way. On the flip side, having no understanding of higher education, the values and norms of the institution, the culture, that’s singularly not helpful. I think it’s up to the candidate to articulate how their experience maps to the challenges the institution faces — to say, These are the problems I see you have, and this is how I think my experience could be relevant.

You make a case for more and better business leaders at a time when, frankly, a lot of faculty feel like their institutions are being overtaken by their business schools and other professional disciplines. Why?

Higher education just needs great leadership, period. The way I view it, almost everything is a business, whether for-profit or not. Save the Children is a business. So is National Geographic. Higher education is just another form of organization. And the challenges it faces are not getting easier.

Let’s recognize that there are thousands and thousands of universities, and if you add deanships into the mix, you’re talking about, I don’t know, 10,000 leadership roles in the U.S. that need great leaders to address difficult problems. Some of those people are going to have to come from outside of the tenure track, which is shrinking.

What do universities do well that the business world might learn from?

Mission matters a lot, and higher education understands that better than many businesses. A lot of people are intrinsically motivated and not purely extrinsically motivated. I’m a big believer in the power of intrinsic motivation. In other words, noble purpose, raison d’être, doing things for the right reasons. Sometimes business can forget that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.