J. Bruce Harreld, the new president of the University of Iowa, has faced fierce opposition from faculty members and others who view his résumé as too light on higher-education experience for a campus chief. But he certainly isn’t the first business leader to ascend to a university’s top job.
In recent years, more colleges have picked, or at least considered, nontraditional candidates for leadership positions. In many cases, those choices have led to an outcry by campus groups who fear that a leader with a corporate or nonacademic background could disregard key principles of higher education, like shared governance.
Those presidents arrive knowing they’ll have to win over the faculty, as Mr. Harreld will certainly need to. How do they accomplish that task, and what must they do to learn about their new campuses? The Chronicle spoke to three sitting college presidents who came from private industry about the transition to higher-education leadership. Their experiences demonstrate that, when it comes to the challenges of making that move, no two campuses are alike.
Simon Newman: A Popular Pick at a Small College
Simon P. Newman became president of Mount St. Mary’s University, in Emmitsburg, Md., in March, after serving as managing director of a private-equity fund and president of an investment-consulting firm.
Unlike Mr. Harreld, Mr. Newman was a popular pick among faculty members. He didn’t have to overcome major concerns about his appointment.
“There was definitely a sense of curiosity and a little concern about hiring a nonacademic, but I also felt there was a sense of excitement, too,” says Peter Dorsey, a professor of English. Mr. Newman struck most professors as a “really smart guy who had a keen, analytical mind,” the professor says.
At the small, liberal-arts institution, the thinking was that a businessman might be a good steward of the institution’s financial future, says Ralph Frasca, chair of the communication-studies department. “We thought it was a good thing to have a business whiz come in with the ideas to find ways for us to save money and make money,” Mr. Frasca says.
College presidents need to have a wide range of skills, Mr. Newman says, but at Mount St. Mary’s, being engaged in day-to-day academic decision making wasn’t one of the main requirements for the job.
Instead, as president he has been able to focus on tasks he performed successfully throughout his business career: fund raising, strategic planning, fiscal management, and enrollment planning — which is similar to direct marketing, Mr. Newman says.
Academe “is a world that desperately needs help,” Mr. Newman says. But its leaders “haven’t reached out to the appropriate people for that help.”
Despite the relatively positive reception, Mr. Newman says continued buy-in from groups around the campus remains essential to reaching his goal of making the university more efficient. He’s been meeting with faculty and staff members individually and in small groups.
One lesson he has learned: Speaking the language of higher education is important. In a business meeting Mr. Newman might express a need to be “market-focused,” but in higher education he finds it more effective to talk about being “student focused” or “outcome focused.”
Robert Mong: A Newspaper Editor’s Campus Crash Course
Robert Mong is six weeks into leading the University of North Texas at Dallas, an appointment that happened quickly and shook some faculty members on the campus. Lee Jackson, chancellor of the North Texas system, invited Mr. Mong to lunch after seeing an article about his retirement from The Dallas Morning News, where he had been a longtime editor. Before long, Mr. Mong was the only finalist for the presidency.
Mr. Mong says his newspaper experience gave him connections around the area and helped him to better understand the institution’s bordering south Dallas neighborhood.
He was not entirely new to higher education: Mr. Mong had led the Board of Visitors at the Manship School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge since 2000. And while he was editor of the Morning News, Mr. Mong says, his newspaper developed relationships with colleges — for example, arranging journalism fellowships for students from the University of Texas at Austin. That involvement taught him a great deal about how higher education functions, he says.
Still, Mr. Mong acknowledges that he faces a steep learning curve as president. He says he’s leaned on the provost, Lois Becker, to give him a crash course in topics like tenure and promotion. One of his initial goals is to attract more students from surrounding neighborhoods, which have low college-enrollment rates.
Like Mr. Newman, Mr. Mong says that he is getting to know faculty and staff members in one-on-one settings and that he’s reaching out to the leaders of nearby colleges to learn from their experiences. “I’m sort of listening to their perceptions of the school and how involved the school is in the community and vice versa,” he says.
“It’s very clear that an academic environment is more about shared governance, really, than a traditional business,” he adds. “If you don’t understand that going into it, you can run into trouble pretty quickly.”
Bruce Benson: Winning Support Through a Budget Battle
Bruce D. Benson took the reins at the University of Colorado system more than seven years ago over the objections of faculty members who decried his business background and his Republican political connections. He had made his fortune in the oil and gas business.
Mr. Benson, however, pointed to his service on university boards and his work as chairman of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education as evidence that he was prepared to lead the system. He’d also worked with and knew well politicians in the state, whom he hasn’t always sided with during his presidential tenure.
Still, during his appointment process, the Faculty Assembly at Colorado’s Boulder campus voted 40 to 4 against Mr. Benson, citing his lack of “academic credentials.”
“Within a month I went to the faculty and sat down and talked to all of them,” he says. “We started laying out an agenda with nothing that was harmful to them.”
As state funding for higher education dropped in Colorado, Mr. Benson won over many critics by fighting for the university’s interests and bringing in more donations to offset losses.
Mr. Benson says he’s focused on making the campuses more efficient, a term that is popular among nonacademic presidents but often questioned by faculty members. But he agrees that a president can’t be successful without honoring shared governance.
“You’ve just got to get everybody involved in these things,” Mr. Benson says. “In corporate America, it’s just different. I think everybody thought that’s the way I would be.”
