Two years ago, Mun Y. Choi, chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia, was handed a blistering performance review by faculty members on his campus. Now, if the numbers from a fresh review are any indication, Choi has engineered a turnaround.
In a spring 2022 review, just 26 percent of Mizzou faculty members surveyed by the campus’s Faculty Council supported keeping Choi as the chancellor, a job he holds in addition to the presidency of the University of Missouri system. But by spring 2024, 64 percent of respondents said they favored retaining him. Choi’s scores improved in every area measured on the survey, from fiscal management to interpersonal relationships.
The results don’t mean that Choi is universally beloved at Mizzou. But at a time when college leaders are often facing shorter tenures and constant crises, it’s notable that he managed to go from someone most professors wanted to boot from the job to a chancellor with majority approval from the faculty. It’s also worth asking what lessons there are for other administrators struggling to win over a dissatisfied campus.
In the latest survey, faculty respondents gave Choi an average performance rating of 3.45 on a five-point scale, compared with 2.26 in 2022. This year, the chancellor received high marks for his relationships with external stakeholders, support for research, and vision for the campus.
Many critiques of Choi from the 2022 survey centered on his communication and leadership style, with one faculty respondent writing that he had “irreparably damaged” morale and another saying he “fostered a general culture of helplessness and submission.” The same year, Choi came under fire for his emphasis on faculty performance and productivity. Months before the 2022 Faculty Council survey, overwhelming margins of voting faculty members approved resolutions critical of Choi — one saying there was a crisis of shared governance at the institution and another calling for Choi to rescind a new policy that allowed tenured professors’ salaries to be reduced by up to 25 percent based on their productivity.
“It could be very tough to dig oneself out of” such a hole, said Raquel M. Rall, an associate professor at the University of California at Riverside who studies higher-education leadership and governance. “That’s oftentimes when we see that vote of no confidence.” No-confidence votes, which have become more common across academe in recent years, can act as a death knell for a presidency: A 2022 Chronicle analysis found that, about 51 percent of the time, a president on the receiving end of one winds up leaving office within a year. A second Chronicle project found that 13 percent of presidential resignations in the past five years were linked to a no-confidence vote.
The 2022 Mizzou survey was not a no-confidence vote, nor did Choi see it as an insurmountable obstacle. “Working in higher ed, one has to be an optimist,” he told The Chronicle this month. While reading the results “wasn’t pleasant,” he said, “it did open my eyes about how faculty members were feeling. It doesn’t mean that I would not have made the same difficult decisions that I made, but I would have approached the decision-making process and the communications of those decisions very differently.”
In the past two years, he’s tried to do just that, getting in much more face-to-face time with faculty members by attending more events and meeting with members of each department (an effort that, he notes, was helped by the return of in-person gatherings after the pandemic).
That sort of visibility can go a long way, Rall said. “Even if people don’t agree, they feel like they’ve been heard.”
Other Factors
There are other factors that may have led to Choi’s improved scores, among them an increased response rate for the survey. About a quarter of eligible faculty members participated in 2022, while nearly a third did so this year. That may be a sign that professors saw the 2022 survey as productive or were more comfortable with the process than they were in 2023, said Carolyn M. Orbann, who as vice chair of the Faculty Council oversaw the 2024 review process. (While the Faculty Council has historically evaluated the campus’s chancellor and other administrators, it had not done so in around a decade before 2022, Orbann said.) The fatigue many faculty members felt at the height of the pandemic may have also receded, making them more likely to sit down with a survey.
And with the average tenure of a university president continuing to decline — that duration stands at 5.9 years, according to 2023 data from the American Council on Education — it stands to reason that around the five-year mark, a leader might “get into their stride,” according to Rall: “They have now learned the job. They’ve also learned the campus. They’ve learned the people, they’ve learned what people want, and all that takes a lot of time.”
Areas For Improvement
The three areas in which Choi scored lowest this year measured his ability to “display leadership policies rooted in shared decision-making principles,” “solicit faculty input,” and “demonstrate commitment to shared governance.” He fared the worst in the same categories in 2022, which Stephen Karian, the president of the Mizzou chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said indicates a clear need for Choi to continue to focus on relationships with faculty members.
“It seems to me if one were to get a report card, you can be happy with the areas where improvement is being shown, but you’d want to zero in very, very closely on the areas where the problems continue to be identified,” Karian said. While Karian said Choi “has made a better effort in terms of his general tenor,” he’d like to see the chancellor rescind the policy allowing tenured-professor pay to be reduced, which he said was adopted without faculty input. Karian added that Choi could improve his standing with the local AAUP chapter by taking action to reverse the national AAUP’s 2016 censure of Mizzou (which, he acknowledged, predated Choi’s arrival).
Moving forward, Choi said, he’ll continue his biweekly meetings with Faculty Council leaders and his cadence of regular communication with faculty members. He said he sees this year’s positive review “as a vote of confidence moving into the future, but always recognizing that, with evaluations that come every two years, things can go in the other direction pretty quickly — just as fast as it increased over the past two years.”
