The Call for Courage
The courage to ask for help and advice is closely tied to emotional intelligence, empathy, and trustworthiness — qualities that Jorge Burmicky, an assistant professor of higher-education leadership at Howard University, had highlighted in his report, published by Academic Search, on the competencies needed for the presidency.
“It’s really important to pay close attention to the education divide that we’re seeing in this country and how leaders are building trust, particularly among those communities that are very skeptical about what they have to offer,” Burmicky says.
In the Daily Briefing item, courage was couched in terms of what higher education might be facing from the outside, like pressures from the Trump administration. College leaders always need a “dogged persistence” to get things done, says Chuck Ambrose — but maybe even more so in the next several years. And college presidents may find themselves having to defend international students, or academic free inquiry — and that will take guts.
“The current public perception, perhaps even the cultural headwinds that we’re going to face, have got to be reversed,” says Ambrose, who led Pfeiffer College and the University of Central Missouri, and is now a consultant with Husch Blackwell. “You’ve got to be willing to say things and take stands. This question about neutrality cannot be applied to the value of college and its impact on social, educational, and certainly economic mobility for the students we serve.”
But this isn’t just about facing pressure from outside. Challenges, whether they’re to the business model or to traditional modes of delivering learning, mean college leaders will need to be courageous in making changes to internal operations. That may require difficult and unpopular cuts to unproductive parts of campus operations or underenrolled academic departments. (Certainly, Ambrose had experience with that at Henderson State University, which was drowning in debt and on the verge of insolvency when he took over in November 2021.)
Courage also means getting rid of problematic middle managers who don’t play well with others — those who are undermining your reputation as a leader.
“Character matters,” says Ambrose. “When I’m looking for people around me and the things I want to instill in students, character rises up to a pretty high level.”
The qualities of emotional intelligence are also essential to servant leadership, a mode that Ambrose and others pointed to as a key approach for the role. “Try to put yourself second and those you serve first — that could be your faculty, your campus community, or most importantly, your students,” he says. Institutions are slow and siloed because leaders aren’t helping their institutions learn how to do things differently. “Leaders today need to be teachers.”
The College President as DJ
Jim Bensen has a compelling metaphor for the work of a servant leader: It’s like running a junior-high dance. The job of the president is to find the venue, play the appropriate music, and coax the shy participants out onto the dance floor. “You’ve got to know how to get people going and connected — and once they do, they find out it’s fun,” he says. “Then you keep building on that and it works.”
Bensen spent many years as a college leader in the Upper Midwest. When he was dean of the school of industry and technology at the University of Wisconsin at Stout in the 1970s and 80s, he established a technology park and business incubator connected to the institution — among the first of their kinds in the country. He later led the Dunwoody College of Technology and Bemidji State University, boosting the reputation of both colleges. Now in his late 80s, he continues to mentor business and higher-ed leaders, and is involved in revitalizing rural communities. (I met Bensen at a recent meeting at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where people are pondering how to incorporate some of the methods of my forthcoming book, Hacking College, into student advising.)
The dance-floor metaphor, he says, is mainly about identifying individual strengths, making connections and getting people on the same page, and helping them see how they could achieve shared goals. To accomplish that, a leader has to be both a strong visionary and a selfless connector — a set of skills that might seem to clash.
“It’s all on connection and it’s all on participation,” Bensen says. “Higher education does not have a lot of entrepreneurs as their presidents or chancellors.” Correcting that can be as simple as getting off campus regularly, expanding contact with local businesses and their leaders, listening to their needs, and introducing them to people on campus.
Connection has to be proactive. Bensen described being frustrated at a recent meeting at a university in Wisconsin, which was set up to discuss a new center devoted to industry and university collaboration. Halfway through the meeting, someone asked how many attendees were from industry versus from the university and the economic-development agency.
“Out of 70 or 80,” says Bensen, “there were three people from industry. Really? The meeting was for them. They completely missed it.”
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Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at scott.carlson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. Follow me on LinkedIn.
My forthcoming book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), is available for pre-order.
