“Before I came on the board,” says Lee D. Ardell, a trustee at Austin College, “I thought, It can’t be that hard.”
She soon realized her mistake.
Although she’s a 1974 graduate of Austin, in Sherman, Tex., Ms. Ardell found she knew little about the nuts and bolts of the 1,300-student college’s operations. “You think there’s a formula — if we have so many students and charge this much and discount this much and raise this much. But it’s such a complicated picture for a small college, and you work on such small margins.”
Now, as chair of the board’s financial-health committee, she’s acutely aware of those margins. She keeps a close watch on the latest numbers from the college’s admissions office, because if accepted students’ deposits don’t match expectations, her committee will have to consider adjustments in next year’s budget. “With what happened to Sweet Briar,” she says, “you’re really trying to know as much as you can.”
Indeed, the decision by Sweet Briar College’s Board of Directors to close the institution this summer has cast a rare spotlight on small-college board members, who typically go unnoticed except in commencement processions and when they can afford to give enough money to have buildings named for them. But small colleges’ presidents and experts in college governance say sharp, well-informed trustees are increasingly invaluable to small institutions — and for far more than just their donations.
Given the challenges now facing small colleges, many rely more and more on trustees for expertise that the college doesn’t have in house — on investments, legal matters, and construction projects, for instance. Just as importantly, trustees serve as a check on the president and vice presidents if something seems to be going off course. “You’ve got a lot of really smart people helping you with problems,” says Scott Bierman, president of Beloit College.
“If a small college makes the wrong bet on, say, distance education or what seems like a new hot field, a wrong guess can be very consequential,” says Richard P. Chait, an emeritus professor of education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education who has long studied college governance. “The margin for error is much smaller, and therefore boards have to be more attentive, more engaged, more diligent.”
Fortunately, says Mr. Chait, the people most small colleges enlist as trustees — successful alumni and local business leaders — often bring “enormous devotion” to their tasks. And while a small college’s board may have no high-profile names, that can be an advantage, he says. “With smaller egos, they may be more amenable to information and less likely to err on the side of overconfidence.”
Trustees also regularly serve as sounding boards for small-college presidents — a role that’s not new but is as important as ever. “I have a great amount of respect for the expertise and engagement of our trustees,” says Beverly A. Wharton, president of Briar Cliff University, a 1,174-student college in Sioux City, Iowa, “And I feel comfortable calling them and talking with them about an issue of concern or a strategic proposal for the future.”
Filling Staff Gaps
Marjorie Hass, Austin’s president, credits trustees with overhauling the institution’s investment strategy after taking a well-informed look at the college’s needs, as well as with proposing a clever financing model for new student housing it added recently.
“I don’t have a chief investment officer on staff, and our trustees help fill in that gap,” says Ms. Hass. Another trustee — “a business consultant for Fortune 500 companies,” she says — helped create a “dashboard” on which board members can see graphical representations of critical data about how well the college is doing, both from year to year and in relation to competing institutions and those it aspires to compete with. “We got management expertise we could never have afforded to hire,” Ms. Hass says.
Ms. Ardell is a regular user of the dashboard, and a good example of an engaged trustee. “I’ve gotten more interested in the admissions process and in how in the world do we ever come up with a class,” she says. “It’s developed into such a scientific thing, and frankly that’s where we all live and die. That’s the number I look at the most.”
“Sweet Briar frightens me,” she adds, “although I know there were reasons why Sweet Briar happened. As a board member, it makes you think. What is it that you should do in that situation?”
“It’s so important that board members understand the context in which they’re working these days,” says Douglas Orr, a former president of Warren Wilson College who is now a consultant for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. “This is a totally different environment, and board members need to fully understand the megatrends” — including, he says, demographic shifts, worries over college affordability, and “the whole online phenomenon.”
Historically, trustee meetings have brought a parade of vice presidents to deliver reports, and boards have been “rather passive,” says Mr. Orr. “We encourage them to be more issue-driven, interactive, and nimble. You can’t afford to take forever to talk through issues today.”
Getting new board members up to speed on a college’s issues isn’t always easy, but Mr. Orr and others say it is essential if trustees are going to backstop administrators. Many colleges start new trustees off with a full-day orientation that involves meetings with the president, all of the vice presidents, and the board chair.
Ripon College, in Wisconsin, even assigns each new trustee a seasoned board member as a mentor. But it may still take some time before a new trustee has a full understanding of the challenges facing the institution. “It took me at least a year to find out what all the moving parts are and how they work,” says Ronald R. Peterson, a 13-year veteran of the Ripon board who is now the board’s chair.
Some small-college boards are moving to a continuing-education model for board members. Beloit’s trustees hold their February meeting in Florida, where some board members spend the winter anyway, and in place of the usual committee reports, “we’ll take on an issue or two of interest to Beloit or higher education,” says Mr. Bierman, Beloit’s president.
“We generate a set of questions and then literally run this as a type of seminar, with full participation from the board,” he says. For the first such seminar board members were assigned to read Why Does College Cost So Much?
Some issues are easier for trustees to get a grip on than others. Mr. Bierman cites “the complicated pricing strategies that colleges use” as being especially difficult to explain. “They get it at the 10,000-foot level, but they don’t really know how to think about it in the weeds. I go back and forth on whether they should understand the details or is that crossing over a line into management?”
That said, Mr. Bierman and others insist that a board can only be as good as the information it gets. He was fortunate, he says, in that he “hired a CFO who was adamant that no bad news ever be held back from the board.”
“You build trust by letting them know anything that you know,” says Mary-Linda Merriam Armacost, a former president of Wilson College and the Moore College of Art & Design who is now an adjunct faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where she teaches about small colleges. “I used to tell trustees, ‘This is what’s waking me up at 3 in the morning.’ Then I used to leave the board alone to discuss anything they wanted.”
Ms. Hass, of Austin, says she goes out of her way to make it clear to board members that “I am not offended or insulted when you ask a tough question. We want the tough questions to be asked on the floor of the meeting, not off to the side.”
One concept that regularly provokes questions from new board members is shared governance, which can exasperate even veteran trustees trying to deal with what they see as a problem in need of immediate attention. “It’s a conundrum, an enigma, for board members,” says Susan W. Johnston, executive vice president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. “The nature of faculty work is also puzzling, and that’s not insignificant, because faculty are an important part of how an institution delivers its mission.”
How the Sausage Is Made
For trustees who are alumni, it can also be hard to update their thinking about the institution they attended 25 or 30 years ago. “They were 18 to 22, and everything was hunky-dory,” says Zach P. Messitte, president of Ripon. “They didn’t see how the sausage was made, so to speak. Now they’re seeing a different perspective on the college.”
But once trustees are up to speed, they can bring a lot to the table. “We’ve had a couple of trustees who come from the business world who’ve really pushed us on developing goals and metrics,” Mr. Messitte says. He also relies on trustees to pass on concerns that his staff might not. “I tell them, you oughta go have lunch in the cafeteria and talk to students,” he says. “Recently a couple of trustees did, and they got an earful about our Wi-Fi. They came back and let me have it.”
Mr. Messitte’s board chair, Mr. Peterson, is an Illinois lawyer and an alumnus. He says he tells new trustees they can contribute “green paper, gray matter, and brown shoe leather.”
With new members, “we spend a lot of time on admissions and finance,” he says, because figuring out how to fill the college’s beds remains a top priority when demographics show “we’re fighting for a smaller and smaller pool of potential students.” But he’s also gotten the board involved in issues like risk management — in chemistry laboratories and on playing fields — even as he says he warns board members that “they’re not there to micromanage.”
Ms. Armacost says that “nearly all boards have room for improvement,” and that no matter how busy a president is, “allocating a substantial amount of time to building your board” is essential. But she also cautions that problems can crop up, “especially if you have a rich, vocal board member who tries to take control.”
Mr. Bierman says Beloit’s trustees have, among other things, “provoked us to be more intentional and generate a deeper understanding of retention issues among our students.” And they kept the administration on a short leash during a period when enrollment wasn’t as strong as he and others had hoped.
“We went to the board to ask about a three-year loan against the endowment,” he says. “They said, ‘We’ll give you a one-year loan.’ I got what they were saying. So we did the hard work, and we solved the problem within the year. It was a great piece of advice from the board.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
