I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, I explore how higher ed’s long-held assumptions about selecting college leaders may be changing during a fraught moment for the sector.
A Change of Approach?
The past week made clear that the federal government may regard higher education with hostility over the coming years. As a result, colleges may increasingly have to lean on local support networks — those within their cities or states — and hook into the narratives and institutional roles that those communities value.
Navigating that can be tricky. Will institutions turn to local leaders who understand an institution’s position in the local community? And will those “local leaders” come from the region’s higher-education institutions, or from the business community or political circles? Those people might be from the region, but they are often alien to the practices and values of the academic rank and file.
Or will colleges continue turning to leaders who come from an aspirational institution? Trustees and boards have long had an appetite for the “splashy” presidential hire: a leader ascending the ladder of institutions, making waves in the higher-ed media and on the conference speaking circuit, and bringing pizzazz (and debt) to a college before moving on to the next career rung. But that may be changing.
“The assumption for so long has been that external is often better unless there’s really a compelling reason to internally promote,” says Demetri L. Morgan, an associate professor of education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Presidents used to have time to go around the community, “shaking hands and kissing babies,” he says, but now leaders have to hit the ground running. “That honeymoon period isn’t realistic anymore. You need somebody who knows the institution and the stakeholders, the environment, and you don’t really have the time to hold off and let the president get settled.”
Morgan points out that there are broad pressures on higher education that apply to just about any institution — the demographic cliff, for example — which might seem to favor the experience of the itinerant leader. “But just understanding that a demographic cliff exists isn’t the same as the local knowledge of how that impacts your actual institution,” he says. Leadership with deep local ties could bring an intuitive understanding of the local market, the traditional recruitment pipelines, and the trends that might open up new opportunities for support. “That nimbleness in the local context,” Morgan says, “creates an inherent advantage.”
Robert H. Bruininks, the former president of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, had an unusual set of qualifications before he took the job: He had spent his career at the university as a scholar of educational leadership. Bruininks’ academic expertise led him to be tapped as an adviser to Mark Yudof when he became president at the university in 1997; then Bruininks worked closely with Yudof until he left to become chancellor of the University of Texas system in 2002. After that, Bruininks was appointed interim president, then was hired for the position and led the university until 2011, overseeing a range of initiatives, including more than $1 billion in capital investment.
Bruininks says his leadership “benefited enormously from the fact that we had continuity between two administrations,” and he has come to see continuity as a “bedrock” principle to innovation in leadership.
In an interview, Bruininks pulls out a quote from C.S. Lewis that has become a mantra for him: “Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.”
The Appeal of Outsiders
Insiders versus outsiders is kind of a false dichotomy, says Zachary A. Smith, the education practice leader at the executive search firm WittKieffer. “There’s usually always an openness to both types of candidates, and it just depends on what the campus needs at a given point in time,” he says. Outsiders may take longer to acclimate to the local environment, but they also arrive free of many of the personal attachments, biases, and history that can make it difficult to change an institution.
Among boards at larger institutions, Smith says, there remains a strong appetite for people with business experience and who understand university culture. More than that, most institutions are seeking experienced leadership — having sat in the role is often a requirement now. “Places are looking at more-senior level people who are maybe a little later in their career. There’s a big demand for those folks who really can provide stable, steady leadership under really difficult times.”
These days, an outsider president can mean outside of the culture of academe — leaders from the corporate world, or politicians.
“Both of those have different kinds of challenges and different opportunities,” says Jon McNaughtan, an associate professor of educational psychology, leadership, and counseling at Texas Tech University. Many outsiders initially have a hard time grasping the culture of the professoriate or the purpose of tenure and academic freedom. “But what’s interesting is that right now, legislatures are pushing back on some of those norms in higher ed,” McNaughtan says. “I don’t know that we’re going to see less of those outside presidents, because in most states, the way they hire presidents is with a board, and a lot of those people are not higher-ed people.”
The political landscape also adds a twist to the question of insiders versus outsiders: Is there a migration underway from states seen as hostile to higher education and its values to ones that tend to be more supportive? Some administrators in “blue” states note that they are getting more applicants with substantial experience, some even shooting for positions they are overqualified for, to leave certain “red” states. One search consultant noted on background that candidates are frequently avoiding jobs in certain states, like Florida, Idaho, or Wyoming.
But search consultants said they hadn’t seen definite migratory trends out there. Smith noted that WittKieffer had seen lighter candidate pools, given all the chaos and uncertainty — and that some candidates see a move to a blue state as carrying its own risks, due to the posture of the federal government. “The challenge that candidates are facing and thinking about is: Do I want to go to a state that’s going to be a target?” he says. “People are kind of staying put. They know what they’ve got. They know the issues they’re dealing with there.”
