From Corporate Leader to Flagship President? A Finalist at the U. of Iowa Sparks Faculty Worries

When the last of four finalists in the search for the University of Iowa’s next president visits the campus on Tuesday, some professors will be on edge.

J. Bruce Harreld, a business executive turned consultant, will be the fourth prospective president to visit the institution. The three candidates who preceded him — Michael A. Bernstein, provost of Tulane University; Joseph E. Steinmetz, provost of Ohio State University; and Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College — are cut from fairly traditional presidential cloth.

But Mr. Harreld’s résumé is highlighted by executive positions in the corporate world: He was a senior vice president at IBM for 13 years, president and a member of the board of the Boston Market Company for two years, and chief information officer at Kraft General Foods, where he led the frozen-foods unit. He is now the managing principal at his own consulting firm, Executing Strategy LLC.

His may be an impressive track record, some professors said, but it is light on higher-education experience. Mr. Harreld’s academic career includes a year as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University and faculty appointments at the Harvard Business School from 2008 to 2014. Faculty members tend to value and expect a president whose career is similar to their own.

Fears that Mr. Harreld’s background isn’t enough preparation to lead a university have added to faculty concerns about the search process itself. The search committee was disbanded after submitting the names of final candidates to the Iowa Board of Regents, rather than remaining involved through the campus-interview stage of the search.

Mr. Harreld will have a chance to address concerns about his qualifications on Tuesday afternoon during a public forum on the Iowa City campus. The university announced that Mr. Harreld was a finalist on Monday, about 24 hours before his scheduled arrival on the campus, as it had done for the other candidates. The Iowa Board of Regents is scheduled to meet on Thursday to make its presidential selection.

Unlikely Paths

Katherine H. Tachau, a history professor and member of the Faculty Senate, said rumors that a nonacademic was being considered for the top post had been floating around for a couple of weeks.

“I’ve already been hearing from colleagues that they’re shocked and outraged by the idea that this would be somebody who’s got the skills for a major, Research I university,” she said. His teaching experience alone won’t have “prepared him for the challenges he would face at a research university,” she added.

The hesitancy toward an administrator who has not followed a traditional academic path is to be expected — especially at a state flagship that has been a member of the Association of American Universities for more than a century. Professors want a university leader to value shared governance and tenure, and often fear that a business executive who has overseen an organization with more of a top-down structure will leave them out of decision making.

Michael W. O’Hara, a psychology professor and former president of the Faculty Senate, said faculty members were concerned that a corporate model might be introduced to the university. The state’s Board of Regents recently commissioned a study by consultants, who have recommended ways to make each of Iowa’s three public universities more efficient.

“It’s not inconceivable that someone without an academic background could be president, but I think long experience has taught us that we want academics who understand what it is we’re doing,” Mr. O’Hara said.

Mr. Harreld is not the only candidate who doesn’t hold a traditional résumé for a college leader. Much of Mr. Krislov’s early career was spent in government work: He served in the Office of Counsel to the President and at the U.S. Department of Labor before becoming vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he also served as an adjunct professor.

But Mr. Krislov has led Oberlin College since 2007. Mr. O’Hara said that while Mr. Krislov certainly had a different profile, he had spent much of his professional life in academe, which helped alleviate potential faculty concerns.

Searching Outside of Academe

But the idea that nonacademic candidates should raise red flags may be outdated, said Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California who is an expert in governance and leadership at universities.

For many decades, she said, nonacademics were natural choices to lead colleges; only in the last 80 or so years has it become tradition for them to come out of the faculty.

Nonacademic hires put more responsibility on boards to acclimate those picks to the campus context, Ms. Kezar said. “What is the responsibility they have to come up with new and different approaches to training or socializing?” she asked. “What direction do they give these presidents?”

Different sectors, like corporations and law firms, may be becoming more similar to academe, Ms. Kezar said, as they increasingly adopt more team-based approaches.

Searching outside of academe for university leaders has become more necessary as more provosts have viewed the position of academic chief as their final goal, said Anne Coyle, a vice president at the executive-search firm Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates. Depending on the specific challenges a college is facing at a given time, the institution may be more likely to take a risk and select someone with business experience. In other situations, a college might instead seek someone who would quickly gain the trust of the faculty.

In the past decade, William Funk said he had seen an increasing number of colleges ask his search firm, R. William Funk & Associates, to bring in nontraditional candidates. “There’s a growing sense on the part of boards that this is a big business,” he said. “Our budgets are over a billion dollars at some of these major research universities. Someone who’s come from a corporate leader — maybe some of those same skills would be well applied in higher education.”

But many nonacademics who have assumed leadership of a college in recent years have come from the political realm. There are reasons for that. For one, politicians are seen as able to build strong relationships with regents and trustees. For another, public universities are subject to the same transparency regulations that government leaders are used to. Those obligations can be a major change for corporate leaders. And in both politics and higher education, things move more slowly than in the corporate world, Mr. Funk said.

It’s still noteworthy, though, when a nonacademic becomes a college president. According to the American Council on Education’s most recent survey, 20.3 percent of presidents had worked outside of higher education immediately before taking office.

“People keep talking about it, but we still don’t see many” presidents from the corporate world, Mr. Funk said. “I just don’t think it’s happening with any greater frequency than it has over the years.”

Correction (9/1/2015, 11:30 a.m.): Because of an error in the original version of a survey by the American Council on Education, this article initially misstated the percentage of college presidents who had worked outside of higher education immediately before taking office. The council later corrected that figure, which is 20.3 percent, not 11.4 percent. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.