“H ere lies the era of the nontraditional college president, taken before its time at Mount St. Mary’s University, 2016.”
Don’t carve that epitaph into the marble quite yet.
I am no more aware of the circumstances that led to Simon P. Newman’s ignominious departure as president of Mount St. Mary’s University of Maryland than any other reader of this publication. What my fellow search consultants and I do know, however, is how that controversy is affecting governing boards and search committees as they seek new presidents and chancellors. The impact is very likely different from what most faculties and other internal constituencies might expect.
The early returns are in, and boards are definitely approaching their interest in nontraditional candidates with much more caution in the immediate aftermath of Newman’s resignation. Discussion of such candidates is less confident, less assertive than it had been. Confidence in the idea of hiring an outsider is shaken. At the same time, there seems to be an eagerness to separate strategy from performance in considering the lessons of the Mount St. Mary’s story — to draw distinctions between what was being done there and how it was being done.
Trustees seem to be taking the lessons of Mount St. Mary’s very seriously in terms of style and approach. It will be a long time before people in higher education stop referring to drowning bunnies and putting Glocks to the heads of struggling students; those utterances are now part of the lexicon. The controversy has been valuable in focusing the attention of boards and search committees on a candidate’s ability to communicate effectively and to advocate successfully across the cultural barriers between higher education and the commercial sector. That heightened attention may reduce the inevitable frictions that arise between boards and faculties (or other campus groups) in these turbulent times.
But don’t assume that trustees are conflating style with substance, or discourse with strategy. A great many boards simply believe that the traditional business model of higher education is irretrievably broken and must be fundamentally changed. Trained and conditioned in their day jobs to respond quickly and agilely to market pressures, board members simply cannot fathom how a business (a college or university) cannot be responsive to the desires of its customers (students).
Pragmatic to the core, trustees frequently seek to impose a response to market pressures on the institution for which they bear fiduciary responsibility. On more and more campuses, like Mount St. Mary’s, that response has been to put one of their own in the chief executive role, rather than promote another provost. The theory is that a president or chancellor with “business experience” will directly and immediately create change in the institution’s behaviors and operations.
That it has seldom worked that way doesn’t seem to shake trustees’ confidence that it will — in their case.
Faculties and other campus groups very often react to nontraditional appointments by entrenching in opposition. Regardless of the motivations, intentions, or strategies of the new, nontraditional leader, these critics immediately take the other side. The more foreign the president or chancellor looks and sounds to this opposition, the more vehement their enmity becomes.
In some ways, that is the lesson of Mount St. Mary’s that does generate consensus: Expression matters. Certainly, many would have objected just as strenuously to the president’s ideas and plans had he expressed them in a more palatable way, but there might have been a more robust discussion of their merits. Instead, the colorful — nay, violent — metaphors that he used became dispositive in the debate not only over his leadership style but over his ideas. Conspicuously absent in the subsequent Sturm und Drang was any substantive and rational discussion of those ideas — i.e., that both regulatory protocols and national rankings encourage admitting students and then sending some of them home before a certain date.
No, the Mount St. Mary’s story is not going to have the long-term effect of dampening board members’ enthusiasm for outsiders as presidential candidates. Likewise, campus traditions such as shared governance and tenure will continue to be foreign constructs to such leaders. But with any luck, this flap will encourage trustees to choose leaders better able to communicate and more sensitive to the culture of the institutions whose fortunes they will guide.
Beyond sensitivity to both the tone and the content of presidential expression, are there other lessons to be learned from Mount St. Mary’s experience?
Certainly the incident underscores an adage frequently attributed to Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Newman’s remarks represent more than injudicious word choices or even dramatization for effect; they reflect a complete misunderstanding of (or, perhaps, utter lack of regard for) the culture of the college or of higher education in general. Outsiders (and some insiders) may think what they will of academic culture, but as long as it exists in roughly its current form it will be a significant factor — perhaps the most significant factor — in developing and executing institutional strategy.
And I don’t see that changing any time soon at most institutions.
The incident has also reinforced the power of the faculty and other campus groups to have a direct impact on institutional leadership. The faculty emerged from the story as the champions of the college’s and higher education’s values and thus occupied the moral high ground in its showdown with the president. Boards have thus been reminded, unmistakably, that the faculty is a force with which to be reckoned in any effort to promote change on a campus.
I would suggest, however, that professors be cautious about their calibration of that power. The Mount St. Mary’s incident does not alter the fundamental market forces disrupting higher education, and it certainly provides few if any lessons in how to deal with those forces. Boards will absolutely continue to seek to accommodate what they are hearing from the marketplace, and they will continue to seek leaders — including nonacademics — who can institute and manage change. If faculties believe that boards are chastened in their desire for a more nimble, responsive, market-relevant institutional environment, they are very badly mistaken.
Let us hope that both boards and campus communities — and faculty members in particular — take home from the Mount St. Mary’s story the clear message that culture and values must be at the forefront of decision-making, particularly when those decisions portend major institutional change. Let us further hope that boards, faculties, and the presidents or chancellors who live at the nexus between the two find a common language with which to discuss the nature, extent, and speed of change. And above all, let us hope that all the stakeholders find a way to come together to discern the appropriate balance between adherence to the tried-and-true and market responsiveness.
Should the Mount St. Mary’s story result in a more substantive and civilized conversation among all parties — regardless of the professional background of the president — it may be the birth, rather than the death, of an era.
