Future college presidents will have to rapidly reinvent the institutions they lead while still respecting the often time-consuming process of building consensus across the campus, a panel of leadership experts gathered at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies said on Tuesday.
Finding administrators who can pull off such a balancing act, panelists said, is a pressing challenge that colleges may not be fully prepared to meet.
Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, kicked off the discussion with a half-joking description of what he described as the decision-making process at Columbia University, where he was executive vice provost before he moved to Arizona State, in 2002.
“The academic senate,” he said, “has considered the matter; 88 senators yes, one senator no. The matter fails, and it will be considered again in five academic years.”
Mr. Crow is a frequent critic of the pace of change in higher education, which he says is ill suited to serve today’s students, particularly low-income individuals who graduate at lower rates than do their wealthier classmates.
Throughout the forum, titled “Leadership for the Innovative University,” panelists wrestled with whether traditional academics, who still dominate college presidencies, are best suited for a job where fund raising and politicking increasingly dominate the portfolio. But William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, argued that corporate leaders and other nontraditional candidates may not be prepared for higher education’s system of shared governance, where professors are unlikely to simply fall in line with a chief executive.
“It’s not that we should just now open the doors and look carte blanche at external leadership,” said Mr. Kirwan, who rose through the ranks as a mathematics professor on Maryland’s College Park campus before taking on a series of administrative roles.
‘Going Over to the Dark Side’
Perhaps it is not necessarily true, though, that the desire for broad-based organizational buy-in is so peculiar to higher education. Benjamin C. Freakley, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who participated in the panel, said it was a “misconception” that leaders in an all-volunteer military always get their way without some charisma and even cajoling. A colonel in Afghanistan working with NATO, he said, had “better be a good consensus leader.”
Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, said that college presidents could do a better job of explicitly preparing people on the campus to step up.
“You want to groom people who are going to replace you, kick you out, and do a better job than you,” he said. “So give the signal.”
One difficulty with grooming the next generation of college leaders, however, is that many professors look askance at a faculty member who expresses interest in becoming an administrator. Jamienne S. Studley, acting under secretary in the U.S. Department of Education and a former president of Skidmore College, said that colleges were among the few places where taking a leadership position is tantamount to “going over to the dark side.”
In conjunction with Tuesday’s forum, Arizona State and Georgetown announced the formation of a joint training program for aspiring college presidents, which will begin as a pilot project in the fall. The yearlong Institute for Innovation in Higher Education Leadership will blend online seminars with four weekend sessions divided between Washington and Phoenix.
Other training programs for college presidents, including Harvard University’s popular Seminar for New Presidents, already exist. Organizers of the Georgetown-Arizona State project say the program will be distinctive in its emphasis on long-range challenges facing higher education, as opposed to the day-to-day workings of the presidency. Topics slated for discussion include designing new business models for colleges and reshaping organizational cultures.
Jeffrey J. Selingo, a professor of practice at Arizona State, has helped to organize the institute and moderated Tuesday’s forum. He is a contributing editor at The Chronicle and author of College (Un) Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
