There are 64 squares on a chessboard. Sixty-four is the atomic number of gadolinium, a rare earth element named for the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin. It is apparently the maximum “item stack size” (whatever that means) in the game Minecraft, which, I am told, is popular. It appears in the title of a bouncy Paul McCartney song on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Sixty-four is also the number of members on the Board of Trustees of my alma mater, Cornell University. That, put simply, is ridiculous.
Cornell’s board is considerably larger than average, but it is not much of an outlier. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Corporation” — what certain institutions in Cambridge call their boards — has a remarkable 75 members, making it the same size as the Rhode Island House of Representatives. The University of Pennsylvania board has 50 members, as does the board of New York University. Brown University checks in at 52.
Most private nonprofit college and university boards do in truth have fewer members than a professional football team, but they tend to be much larger than boards for other kinds of organizations. According to the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, the average size of a private nonprofit college or university board is 28 (larger than a major-league baseball roster), though boards of elite colleges tend to skew even larger: closer to 40, according to a study done by McKinsey.
By way of comparison, the average size of the board of directors of a publicly traded company in the United States is nine. If that seems too “corporate,” consider that the average size of the board of a nonprofit health-care institution is 13, and the average size for nonprofit institutions more broadly is 17, a number surely elevated by the inclusion of so many large university boards. Most governance experts view these numbers to be on the high end of the optimal range. A study done by Bain Capital puts the ideal size of a board for the purposes of decision-making at seven and estimates that each member beyond that number results in a 10-percent decline in effectiveness — a questionably precise claim, which, if true, would put the effectiveness of university boards somewhere in the neighborhood of “what are we doing here anyway?”
Getting 12 people to spend significant time studying serious challenges and then reaching consensus about how to tackle those challenges is a heavy lift. Doing this with 25 or 35 or 45 people is close to impossible.
I should note that the boards of public institutions and systems tend to be much smaller, but these board members are politically appointed or elected and create their own distinctive form of dysfunction. And a small board is no guarantee of sound decision-making, of course, as the 12-member Harvard Corporation has satisfactorily demonstrated.
Still, anyone who studies organizational effectiveness would tell you that college and university boards are much too large, as would almost any college or university president when speaking off the record. Getting 12 people to spend significant time studying serious challenges and then reaching consensus about how to tackle those challenges is a heavy lift. Doing this with 25 or 35 or 45 people is close to impossible.
Oversized boards inevitably lead to a series of problems that interfere with good governance: widely varied levels of engagement and interest; large amounts of administrative time devoted to educating and maintaining relationships with individual trustees; the creation of divisive factions; even the practical difficulty of bringing so many people together at the same time. Most boards have term limits, so in any given year, there might be a sizable group of board members who are in effect starting their learning process from scratch.
The need to make reasonably timely decisions means that most large boards have, formally or informally, a smaller subset — a group within the group — that works closely with the administration. This is unavoidable but often comes with a cost: Those not included among the insiders can become disenchanted, disengaged, or even rebellious. For a president, managing these tensions is, at best, a headache and, at worst, a time-consuming train wreck.
Oversized boards have resulted not from any careful thinking about good governance, but from two longstanding features of higher education. One is the prioritization of participation over effectiveness. Some boards have dedicated spots for students or faculty members or young alumni; most try to represent in some form the many constituencies that make up a college or university. Doing so contributes to the enlargement of these boards and, maybe worse, leads some board members to think of themselves more as representatives of a particular group than as stewards of the institution. The more closely a board resembles a legislature, the less likely it is to think and act strategically.
The second and more-problematic feature is the conflation of governance and fund raising. College and university boards are large because board seats are treated as rewards for large donors or incentives for prospective large donors.
Fund raising is a critically important activity in nonprofit higher education and essential to the survival of many institutions. And board members tend to be admirably generous, often contributing 30 or 40 percent of a capital campaign. But fund raising and governance are different activities whose conflation within boards of trustees has led to prioritizing the first at the expense of the second. And so boards have become too large — the more philanthropic capacity, the better — and constructed less on the basis of preparedness to govern than preparedness to give.
A healthy board in any industry should bring together people with a deep knowledge of that industry and people with the perspectives of thoughtful outsiders. Because college and university boards are built around fund raising, they are heavily skewed toward outsiders. Good luck finding a university board with as many members from the world of higher education as from the worlds of finance, law, or technology. Good luck finding one in which the numbers are even close.
Since the majority of donors to colleges are alumni, the majority of board members are also alumni. This is a mixed blessing: Alumni have a natural devotion to and (sometimes) understanding of the institution, but too often they are focused more on the past than on the future — on the college as they experienced it rather than on the different version of the college that needs to be built. Frequently their strongest emotional attachment is to a specific department or sports team or Greek organization and not to an administration whose members they barely know. It is easy to point to the resistance to change among faculty. Many presidents would say that resistance among alumni on the board is a problem as large or larger.
It is impossible to separate the unwieldy nature of college boards from the shrinking tenure of college presidents. Leaders within industries facing multiple internal and external pressures need to operate within a sound and supportive governance structure. Too often, at too many institutions, this is not the case. And when things are not going well, it is far easier to replace the president than to replace the board, even if the latter is the larger and more persistent problem.
I don’t expect boards to shrink, since the only group empowered to alter the size and composition of the board of a college is … the board of a college. The Chronicle’s Jack Stripling wrote a comprehensive piece on the overstuffing of college boards a dozen years ago, and while a few institutions have done some downsizing, the predilection for large boards remains. But at a moment when more and more institutions are facing critical and even existential strategic challenges, and when the fundamental nature of higher education is being called into question, it seems fair to ask whether ineffective governance is a wise choice, even if reform means coming up with new and creative ways to inspire and acknowledge donors that do not include giving them a seat on a governing board. Should this not at least be a topic of discussion?
I continue to believe that those institutions willing to examine, challenge, and, when necessary, change outdated and ineffective practices will be most likely to survive and thrive during a period of radical disruption, when even the most wealthy and selective colleges are facing unprecedented political and reputational challenges and when many colleges are just hoping to make it to next year. Thoughtful courage is no guarantee of success when the headwinds are so strong, but a refusal to change will be, for many, pretty much a guarantee of failure.
Why not begin with the governing board?
