Leading

Hi there, and welcome to Leading. We are building a community of higher-ed leaders who share insights and lessons learned. I’m glad you’re here.

Thanks for your conference feedback! Folks are headed to Achieving the Dream’s annual convening in Chicago in February and ACE’s meeting in Washington, D.C., in April. I’ll see you at ACE!

Questions or ideas for coverage? You can always reach me at laura.krantz@chronicle.com or on Twitter @laurakrantz.

Leadership Under Siege

This fall higher ed witnessed the drawn-out downfall of yet another Michigan State leader, after rifts between the board and President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. eventually forced him to resign.

The details of the situation are unique, but as we all know, toxic board relations are not. For insight on how to avoid or respond to rising tensions, I spoke with Zach Olsen, president of Infinite Global, a crisis-communications firm that works with colleges and other institutions facing big controversies.

Bottom line: Managing your personal risk as a leader begins long before accepting a new position, he said. Here are five tips from our conversation:

Develop allies before you need them. From Day 1, begin to build strong, trusting relationships with fellow administrators, board members, faculty and staff members, students, and other constituents. Communicate with people directly, frequently, and transparently, and try to be accessible and relatable, so you have rapport long before a controversy might arise.

Stanley communicated directly with the MSU community, putting out a YouTube video to explain his side of the story. But it came too late, Olsen said, after people had already lost too much faith in Stanley, and he was announcing his resignation.

Don’t wait too long to engage. Boards can be savvy about leveraging the media and their attorneys to establish a narrative and sway public opinion against a leader, Olsen said. Most controversies don’t erupt overnight, and it’s important to get ahead of them. If you wait, it can be hard to tell your story and salvage your reputation, he said.

Be ready with an answer about the past. Any leader who has confronted a prior controversy should be prepared, before questions arise, with a solid answer, he said — as should the board. Egos can lead people to believe that a crisis will never happen to them, he said, and get in the way of having an emergency plan in place.

Two cases Olsen cited:

– Trustees at Oregon State University came under pressure to fire the new president, F. King Alexander, for his handling of sexual-misconduct allegations at Louisiana State University. Alexander ultimately resigned.

– The board tried to support Joseph I. Castro as the California State University system chancellor despite allegations of mismanagement when he led the Fresno campus. Faculty and students had turned against him, and he was ultimately forced to step down.

Be realistic about your exposure. Leaders are extremely vulnerable, because as public figureheads, they are generally held accountable for everything that occurs at their institution, even if they were not directly involved. In the case of Michigan State, Olsen said, Title IX was already a particular vulnerability, and it factored into the board’s allegations against Stanley.

Have a good team behind you. Legal and public-relations counsel are crucial, Olsen said. Leaders deal with so much on many fronts that temporary tunnel vision can obscure possible threats. They need others around them whose job it is to look out for pitfalls — or for opportunities.

In Brief

The lowdown on threat-assessment teams. Last week we learned that the suspect in the shootings at the University of Virginia had come to the attention of a group there that evaluates possible threats to campus safety. Threat-assessment or behavioral-intervention teams typically meet weekly or monthly to review students who may pose a danger to themselves or others, The Chronicle reports, outlining different models for how these teams operate.

Top law schools abandon rankings. Labeling it a problematic system, Yale Law School and Harvard Law School announced last week that they will pull out of the U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings, The Chronicle reports. The departures deal a blow to the longstanding, controversial rankings system. Later in the week the University of California at Berkeley law school followed suit.

What the UC strike signals. About 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, and postdocs, some of whom make $23,000 per year, went on strike last week across the University of California’s 10 campuses as part of a labor-union push for higher wages. The strike is another reminder that universities have been historically unwilling to invest in people, and will need to make major structural changes, wrote Claire Bond Potter, a history professor at the New School for Social Research, in The Chronicle.

Opening up admissions pipelines. As tuition-dependent institutions struggle to hit enrollment goals, many are now experimenting with direct admissions, accepting students who did not apply and in some cases offering them scholarships. The practice can also help attract low-income and first-generation students, The Wall Street Journal reports.

HBCUs taking back the narrative. The media has long portrayed HBCUs as poorly run, financially struggling, and of lesser quality than predominantly white institutions, a harmful stereotype and in some cases a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s changing lately — due to PR efforts, celebrity attention, students’ role on social media, and other factors — as campuses are increasingly seen as forces for economic mobility and the apex of Black culture, The Chronicle reports.

Another state-level free-speech survey. The University of Wisconsin system released last week a free-speech survey that was delayed last spring due to political concerns, The Chronicle reports. Similar to surveys administered in Florida and North Carolina at the behest of Republican politicians, this one, funded by a center with conservative ties, now incorporates feedback from campus chancellors and shared-governance leaders.

Moves

Kenneth Long was named president of East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. The former vice president for administration and finance and interim leader since 2020, Long is the first African American to lead the institution.

In another first, trustees at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville last week named Charles F. Robinson as the next chancellor. The former provost and current interim leader, Robinson will be the first Black chancellor.

Purdue University President Mitch Daniels is stepping down in December but will remain as chair of the Purdue Research Foundation Board of Directors, the university announced last week.