Their relationships are often characterized by skepticism, mistrust, or, in the worst cases, outright antagonism.
The divide between administrators and professors is legendary in higher education, where the model of shared governance seems to fuel tensions as often as it resolves them.
Does some of the problem boil down to simple misunderstandings, or a lack of understanding? Could training help?
That’s the idea behind an annual institute for rising faculty leaders started by Richard A. Detweiler, president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and president emeritus of Hartwick College. Over a weekend, more than two dozen professors from the 13 small private colleges that make up the association attend a workshop designed to educate them about how their institutions run and what it is like to lead them. Now in its ninth year, the Academic Leadership and Innovation Institute includes briefings about how various stakeholders, including students, donors, and trustees, view a college. The participants compare their colleges’ concerns. And they go through exercises designed to better their negotiation skills so they can help their colleagues back home find common ground, whether in departmental turf wars or institutionwide crises.
For Mr. Detweiler, the goal is to increase faculty members’ effectiveness as constructive contributors to the future of their institutions. With colleges—especially small private ones—now facing daunting budget and enrollment challenges, sparring and sniping between administrators and faculty members not only create tension on campus but could also undermine a college’s efforts to solve critical problems.
At the heart of the institute’s schedule lies an exercise called “Design a College and Make It Work.” Over the course of five hours, participants are given a quick overview of how the money comes in to a college and how it goes out. They’re asked to dream up hypothetical liberal-arts institutions with distinctive missions that will appeal to students. Then they have to make their imaginary colleges work financially, with real numbers.
While administrators spend decades learning how to shape a mission, serve competing constituencies, and keep a budget out of the red, professors’ understanding of how their college works often does not go much farther than their own departments. The institute’s aim is not to persuade faculty members that administrators are always right, nor to say that it’s only professors who need to do more to see the other side. Instead, the workshops seek to give professors a better grasp of the broader workings of their institutions so they can help make them better.
The overall effect is “eye-opening,” says Michael J. Sosulski, an associate professor of German at Kalamazoo College who is now serving as associate provost. Attending the institute this fall, he says, “was like lifting the face off a Swiss timepiece and seeing how intricately the mechanics worked.”
That ‘Aha’ Moment
The Academic Leadership and Innovation Institute arose from Mr. Detweiler’s work in the early 2000s with the now-defunct Frye Leadership Institute, which was held at Emory University and sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and by Educause. The event sought to give library-science and information-technology professionals in higher education an overview of how colleges worked so that they could more effectively help their institutions work better. (Educause and CLIR run a successor program, called the Leading Change Institute, to this day.) One of the exercises, developed by Mr. Detweiler and Ellen F. Falduto, then a vice president at Hartwick, involved trying to understand college finances.
With the help of an initial grant to Great Lakes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mr. Detweiler asked Ms. Falduto to develop and refine a version of the exercise that would allow faculty members hands-on experience with real budget numbers and actual spending variables for a small liberal-arts college.
Angela L. Bos, an associate professor of political science at Wooster, started her “Design a College” exercise with high ideals. She and the four colleagues in her group at the most recent institute, in October, decided to appeal to prospective students for their start-up college with an interdisciplinary focus. Enrollment would be small—just 1,000 students—and the student-to-teacher ratio would be a cozy 10-to-1.
In addition to a brief overview of college revenues and expenses, the participants were given a modest endowment figure, derived from the actual endowment of one of the association’s member colleges, on which to base their spending. Ms. Bos’s group plugged its initial numbers into the Excel spreadsheet Ms. Falduto provided and saw the results.
“In our first year, our first stab, we were $25-million in the hole,” Ms. Bos says.
Many participants struggle to stick to their missions and balance their annual budgets, “or they finally get to it in Year 5,” says Ms. Falduto, now chief information and planning officer at the College of Wooster.
Most participants “want to have it all” at first, Ms. Falduto says, including low student-to-faculty ratios, high salaries, broad access, and high financial aid. But even the groups that end up with large endowments are rarely able to make best-case scenarios work. And there are abundant complications and pitfalls.
For example, many of the professors don’t want to spend money on athletic teams, Ms. Falduto says. “Probably a third of the students sitting in your class play varsity athletics, if you’re the typical GLCA institution,” she finds herself explaining to participants. Without athletics spending on the spreadsheet, enrollment drops over the five-year span of the exercise, as do revenue numbers.
To help make the budget work for their invented college, Ms. Bos and her colleagues opted for a larger enrollment, closer to 1,400 students, and trimmed both the number of professors and what they were paid.
In an 11th-hour twist, her institution got good news that helped the bottom line: an unexpected gift of $20-million from a grateful donor.
The last-minute surprises were not all pleasant. Another group faced a sexual-assault scandal that threatened enrollment and required increased spending on counseling and other responses.
In the years immediately after the recession, many “Design a College” participants were informed that their endowments had just lost 40 percent of their value, overturning hours of careful work.
Such twists help illustrate for professors the complex, changing, and uncertain factors administrators confront when making decisions. When energy costs go up or demographics shift, for example, it can mean the difference between solid revenues and a ledger full of red ink.
The institute is designed to facilitate “that ‘aha’ moment,” Mr. Detweiler says, and make clear to professors “that things that are normally happening in our society have these big impacts.”
The Bigger Picture
R. Richard Ray Jr., provost of Hope College and a former institute participant himself, has sent about 15 faculty colleagues to the workshop over the past five years. Many of them, he said, have since assumed faculty leadership positions, both elected and appointed.
“They’re just better at it,” Mr. Ray says, “because they’re capable of asking the kind of questions that deal with mission and purpose.” The decisions the returning participants make aren’t defined by the “isolation,” he says, of their individual disciplines and departments but based in a broader understanding of the whole college.
Those questions are particularly critical for the association’s colleges. Like other small, private liberal-arts institutions, they face enrollment and budget pressures, but the stresses are especially prominent given their location. The Upper Midwest has experienced a 7-percent drop in high-school graduates in the last five years. .
“All of us are going through a belt-tightening exercise right now,” says Mr. Sosulski, of Kalamazoo College. His new role as associate provost puts him in charge of hiring adjunct faculty. After his experience at the institute, he says, he “immediately walked back on campus and understood better how our budget functions.” That allows him to approach his staffing decisions with better context and more confidence.
Bridget L. Gourley, a professor of chemistry at DePauw University, says that what she learned at the institute three years ago helps her in a role she has since assumed: chair of the faculty. DePauw is in the midst of reconsidering its faculty governance and committee structure. The administration and the faculty share the same broad goals, she says, most importantly simplicity and cohesion. But the “healthy tension” between the two sides remains intact.
What she learned during her weekend at the institute has helped her work through difficult conversations with her peers and think strategically about overcoming the tension, Ms. Gourley says. She has been especially attentive to making sure that both sides have an opportunity to thoroughly discuss any proposals. To succeed, she says, the new plan shouldn’t “appear to come from on high when it should have come from within.”
Ms. Bos, of the College of Wooster, says she was concerned at certain points that the workshop would amount to “just an exercise for us to not complain in the future.” Now she believes all professors should go through the experience.
“We do sometimes get our faculty blinders on,” she says. “Sometimes it’s easy to just hold on to the things we think are important and to not think about the bigger picture.”
She is trying to keep the bigger picture in mind as she prepares for the likelihood of becoming a department chair next fall.
