U. of Akron Chief’s Resignation Ends a Rocky Presidency

Karen Farkas, Cleveland.com

Advocates of infusing university presidencies with hard-nosed, business-oriented leadership suffered a setback on Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of Scott L. Scarborough at the University of Akron.

Mr. Scarborough and Akron’s trustees mutually agreed on his departure, effective immediately, less than two years after he took office and two weeks after he met with faculty members who had voted repeatedly and overwhelmingly to express no confidence in him.

Given the widespread sentiment against Mr. Scarborough, the outcome had seemed inevitable for a while, said John F. Zipp, a professor of sociology and president of the University of Akron chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

“There’s a sense of relief that we can now turn the page and try to come together as a community and as a campus,” Mr. Zipp said.

Mr. Scarborough had always faced an uphill battle. His professional background is largely in higher education, though with a clear affinity for solutions from the corporate world. He upset professors at his previous institution, the University of Toledo, by proposing the use of private “academic coaches” to supplement faculty teaching, and then encountered similar opposition to the idea in Akron.

He gave a May 2015 speech to the Cleveland City Club promising to emphasize his plans for a career-focused program at Akron. His suggestion of branding Akron as “Ohio’s Polytechnic University” solidified faculty suspicion of Mr. Scarborough as a leader more interested in job training than a broad education. His failure to stem declining enrollment and donations, accompanied by staff layoffs at Akron, further hardened the opposition.

Neither Mr. Scarborough nor Akron’s trustees responded on Tuesday in detail to the complaints, instead issuing brief statements that simply acknowledged the need for new leadership. The agreement gives Mr. Scarborough the option of becoming a faculty member in the business college or accepting a buyout worth a year’s salary, of about $450,000.

On the Akron campus, the emerging lesson of the Scarborough era appears to be a clear rejection of the idea — growing slowly across academe — that outside corporate experience might help higher education at a time of growing financial pressures.

Business leaders hired as college presidents in recent years include Clayton S. Rose at Bowdoin College, John I. Williams at Muhlenberg College, and J. Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa. They have sometimes drawn fierce opposition from faculty members, as Mr. Harreld experienced even before he took office at Iowa, and as Simon P. Newman felt during his short-lived presidency at Mount St. Mary’s University, in Maryland.

Mr. Zipp said he hoped Akron would not join the ranks of colleges that have looked to the business world for help as it works to find Mr. Scarborough’s replacement. Faculty members want “an internal candidate from the academic side, who has risen up through the academic ranks, who understands academics, who also has the necessary skill set to work with people in the community,” Mr. Zipp said.

Guy V. Bordo, a professor of music who wrote an opinion article in the Akron Beacon Journal just a few days ago calling on Mr. Scarborough to leave, firmly agreed. “The trend of hiring people with business experience to run a university was a significant failure in this case,” Mr. Bordo said on Tuesday. “A university is not a business.”

But outside Akron, Mr. Scarborough’s troubles were more often regarded as a failure of his particular leadership style, rather than an indictment of business-focused leadership in general.

A good leader, regardless of the specific type of business, needs to understand the nature of the enterprise and have the ability to handle the associated personalities, said Trace Urdan, a higher-education research analyst at Credit Suisse. “It just seemed like he was particularly bad at it,” Mr. Urdan said of Mr. Scarborough.

One critic of Mr. Scarborough from his days at the University of Toledo, Leigh Chiarelott, said he agreed. A professor of education, Mr. Chiarelott chafed when Mr. Scarborough, a former provost and chief financial officer at Toledo, tried to bring in private outside instructional help.

But at least Mr. Scarborough wasn’t president of Toledo, Mr. Chiarelott said, meaning others could still override him when necessary. “The problem is that when you’re a provost, you still have filters that are around you” that can keep you from making mistakes, Mr. Chiarelott said.

Muhlenberg’s Mr. Williams said the whole issue of business backgrounds seems overrated. Whether leading a university or some other enterprise, a president or chief executive these days cannot “just throw his or her weight around and do whatever they want,” said Mr. Williams, a former executive at American Express and chief executive of Biztravel.com.

“That is an issue that doesn’t respect whether you have this kind of background or that kind of background,” he said. “It matters how you behave as a leader with regard to the values of the institution and what its possibilities are and what its constraints are.” In his case, Mr. Williams said, his corporate experience was accompanied by 32 years of board service at his alma mater, Amherst College, giving him an appreciation for the mission and internal workings of a liberal-arts college.

And rather than universities’ consider adopting business models, Mr. Zipp said, perhaps businesses should consider adopting the more inclusive governing structures of universities. Higher education, after all, is one of the few remaining areas where the United States remains the world’s unquestioned leader, he said. “Historically we’ve done something very right here.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.

Correction (6/1/2016, 8:45 a.m.): This article originally cited Neil D. Theobald of Temple University as an example of a business leader turned university president. In fact, his background is in academe. The reference has been removed.