There is unsurprising consensus among college trustees that declining resources are a serious and immediate problem for higher education, but most board members are disinclined to challenge the assumptions of their presidents or to advocate for radical changes in campus operations, a new study finds.
A report based on the study, “Still on the Sidelines: What Role Will Trustees Play in Higher Education Reform?”, was released Wednesday by Public Agenda, a public-policy research group, with support from the Lumina Foundation for Education.
Based on anonymous interviews with 39 college trustees, the study finds that only a minority of board members view standard educational models as obsolete and in need of a fundamental overhaul. More common is the view that colleges faced with fiscal challenges will have to increase class sizes and rely more heavily on adjunct professors to respond to financial shortfalls.
The trustees interviewed for the study represent two- and four-year colleges, and all but six came from public institutions.
The report comes at a time when a growing number of policy makers and scholars are questioning whether colleges’ teaching and business models need to be revamped in order to serve more students with fewer dollars. There is little indication, however, that a significant number of trustees are leading such conversations in their boardrooms, said John Immerwahr, the report’s lead author and a senior research fellow at Public Agenda.
Board members, for instance, are unlikely to propose fundamental changes, like replacing “seat time” in classes for self-paced individualized learning, the report states. They also seem largely unfamiliar with controversial efforts to assess faculty productivity in states such as Texas.
“For those who believe that trustees are really going to be the leading edge of pushing their institutions into a new direction, you’d have to conclude from this study that, at least from the ones we’ve talked to, that message hasn’t gotten out widely yet,” said Mr. Immerwahr, a philosophy professor at Villanova University.
Reactive Not Proactive
If trustees largely defer to the expertise of their presidents, as the report suggests, that is likely to be a welcome finding for faculty who fear micromanagement from board members with little firsthand experience in academe. But that lack of expertise, some trustees said, is precisely part of the problem for boards, which tend to be more reactive than proactive.
One trustee, who was identified as a member of a system-level board for public research institutions, suggested that college boards are simply not built to question the assumptions that inform many of the proposals they approve.
“It’s an honor to be on the public board, but it’s an honor that tends to accrue to people in the later stages of life, after they’ve already achieved some kind of prominence at some usually unrelated discipline,” the trustee said. “Trustees don’t really want to spend the substantial time it takes to get up to speed on issues to the point where they can actually debate with an officer at the college.”
A board member for a public comprehensive institution went a step further, suggesting that trustees are really drawn to the job for the promise of personal prestige.
“University trusteeships are sought-after positions because there are benefits that go along with it, and you’ve got people there for all the wrong reasons,” the board member said. “You don’t have people sitting on these boards who are really interested and engaged in making change.”
Trustees who criticized fellow board members were heavily in the minority, Mr. Immerwahr said, and few described reluctance to change as a major problem on their campuses. The report does not define how few trustees constituted a “minority,” but Mr. Immerwahr said “way less than half” of those interviewed expressed such critical views.
The majority of trustees interviewed for the report expressed a yearning to better serve their regions with qualified graduates and to improve access, particularly for low-income students. Trustees at community colleges particularly emphasized the job-training function of their institutions.
While the majority of trustees said presidents were their primary sources of information, a minority sounded especially keyed in to a national dialogue about whether colleges are really providing students with the tools they need to succeed.
“We’re really not taking care of the customer,” said the trustee of a system-level board of public comprehensive institutions. “We don’t say, ‘What do they need?’ We say, ‘Here’s what we sell. They’re Model T’s, and they’re all black.’”
