by Hendrickson, Lane, Harris, Dorman
Seldom have I read a book that repeats its theme as often as Academic Leadership and Governance of Higher Education. As the author stated over and over again,
“The theme of this book is that the adoption of three essential principles contributes significantly to a college or university’s success: adherence to institutional mission, skill at adapting to environmental change, and encouragement of democratic partnerships with the constituencies being served.” 221 et al
I have served as a college president for five years and would have done myself a service by reading this work earlier. The authors cover the gamut of the intricacies, agencies, and complexities that leaders in higher education face. Divided into the five parts (listed below), the authors provide a comprehensive discussion of academic leadership suitable to facilitate greater understanding by boards, presidents, cabinet leadership, as well as faculty and staff who want to better understand how academic leadership works:
Part One: History, Politics, Globalization, and Organizational Theory In Higher Education
Part Two: External Constituencies (federal and state relationships, the courts, and supporting organizations)
Part Three: The Boundary Spanners (the role of the trustees and president relative to internal interests and external engagement)
Part Four: The Academic Core (how academic governance works)
Part Five: Implementation of the Academic Mission (student experience, planning, assessment, and budgeting)
As a president of a college, Part Three was the portion that benefited me the most, particularly as it helped me assess board responsibilities and development, and evaluate how I function in my role.
At the outset, the authors note that “Sound, authentic, creative, empowering leadership is indispensable, and it spells the difference between healthy, productive, sustainable academic institutions and programs and those that are in continual crisis, vulnerable, and failing.
A few general takeaways:
An Academic Leader’s Job: Defining, articulating, testing, promulgating, and applying these core values and a sense of mission (defined by authors as “the purpose, philosophy, and educational aspirations of a college or university” [9]) is the most fundamental job of any academic leader. xx
Trustees: Must assess the president relative to the institution’s three most critical documents: its mission statement, strategic plan, and corresponding budget. 11
Organizational Pitfalls: Academic organizations are “tailor-made” to bog down in that “the more professionalized the work force, the more likely that formalization will lead to conflict and alienation.” Professionalization is marked by (1) demand for work autonomy, (2) the tendency to have divided loyalties between one’s discipline and the institution, (3) tension between professional values and administration expectations, (4) the expectation of professionals being evaluated by their peers. 32-37. The authors note that “Higher education organizations are arguably among the most difficult organizations to administer and manage.” 46
The Morrill Act (1862): Also called the Land-Grant College Act, named after Justin Morrill of Vermont. The “act spurred the creation of some of the nation’s most productive research universities and thrust the federal government into becoming the most significant sponsor of agricultural research in the world.” It also transitioned the federal government into a more active role in higher education, and ultimately led to developing several HCBUs (second Morrill Act - 1890) to serve those excluded from admission to other colleges/universities due to race-related admissions policies. 89, 102-3
Segregation: The legality of segregation in public institutions ended with Brown v. Board of Education (1954). 140
Free Speech: The Supreme Court differentiated between speech on matters of public concern, which is protected speech by the First Amendment, and speech on matters of employee concern, which is not protected. 151
Sexual harassment: Supervisors who are aware of incidents of sexual harassment and fail to take action to stop it will put their institution in jeopardy of liability claims. 167
Amen to that! “In our litigious society, people are going to sue.” 172
Education and the U.S. Constitution: “The U.S. Constitution is silent on the matter of education, which by default refers the issue to the states.” 199
About the Academic Core: The authors note that academic governance “usually operate as organized anarchies in which organizational goals are unclear, decision-making procedures are uncertain, and participation in those procedures is fluid.” 267
The liberal arts: The focus on a broad knowledge base and exposure to a variety of topics rooted in the humanities, arts, religion, culture, and science “liberated” the mind from parochialism (limited in range or view) and came to be referred to as the liberal arts.” 356
Student Experience (living on campus): Research points to increased “artistic interest, liberalism, self-esteem, hedonistic tendencies, academic persistence, and higher achievement in extracurricular areas, but it reduces religiousness.” 365 “Living on campus was the single most consistent . . . determinant of the impact of college.” 366
Comparing colleges: “Where one attends college has less of a net impact than the net effect of not attending a college. . . . This finding is noteworthy for it debunks the myth that one necessarily benefits more from attending a more selective institution.” In short, institutional rankings are not the only true arbiter of quality. 369-70
Planning: “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower 374 Still, “design is better than drift.” (377) Design means “continuous scanning of the environment” (378), and a “‘quiet, deliberate process of’ determining what steps needed to be taken to create a desirable future.” Why? Because as Collins notes, “Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” 379
Planning tools: A 360-degree scan of an institution’s internal and external environments and focuses on any signals that may forecast a trend that could affect the institution negatively or positively.” 388 An annual budgeting and planning summit involving administration, faculty, and staff who assess and determine priorities for the coming year. 389
Board of Trustees
The Board’s Primary Responsibility: They hold in trust the financial, physical, and intellectual assets of the institution, a responsibility that cannot be delegated to another. 221
Boundary spanners: Today's board of trustees must be adept boundary spanners in the context of shared governance, responding to constant internal and external challenges to an institution's mission, direction, and fiscal viability over which trustees hold final control. 225
Inherent challenges arise due to the ambiguity of board members’ roles to exercise legal responsibility over an organization that requires expertise they often do not hold, engage with campus power structures they often do not understand, and take actions on management decisions they often do not participate in. 228
Board of Trustees — Main responsibilities: 229
Appointing the president
Supporting the president
Monitoring the president's performance
Clarifying the institution's mission
Approving long range plans
Overseeing the educational program
Ensuring financial solvency
Preserving institutional independence
Enhancing the public image
Interpreting the community to the campus
Serving as a Court of Appeal
Assessing board performance (pp. 27-46)
Board/president relationship: It is the fulcrum on which an institution's performance is ultimately hinged. Strong relationships between presidents and boards are built on communication, education, transparency, and accountability.” 229-30
Board chair/president: The chair is the primary spokesman spokesperson for and representative of the board and functions as the president's direct supervisor. Obviously, the relationship between the two is paramount and deserves time and attention. 231
Board and institutional mission: Regardless of institution type and public or private status, the definition and maintenance of institutional mission are the responsibility of the board of trustees, not the administration or the faculty. 232
Board and financial solvency: Includes approving the budget, monitoring the investment performance of the endowment (at private institutions), and establishing a strong philanthropic program. 233
Board assessment: Board assessment seeks to answer these open-ended questions:
In what ways are we performing our roles and responsibilities most effectively?
What functions of the institution require further understanding?
How well are we working collectively as a board?
In what ways can our meetings be more productive and substantive?
How can we improve our overall effectiveness as a board?
How can communication between and among board members improve?
How can communication between the president and the board improve?
What mechanisms exist to measure our progress as a board?
How effective are we in setting and meeting annual goals for the board?
In what ways can board leadership be enhanced?
Highly effective boards: 236
Select the right president
Select the right board chair
Empower the membership committee
Insist on a strategic vision
Set goals and assess performance
Understand and monitor academic policy
Develop future board leaders
Structure the board strategically
Embrace board education
Make trusteeship enjoyable
Are very clear as to their expectations of the new president. 262
Assess the president’s effectiveness annually (at minimum). 263
Boards become less effective when: 237
They operate as “orchestras of soloists”
They either lionize or trivialize the president — “When a board perceives a president as an indispensable, heroic leader, then trustees disengage from governance or accord the chief executive undue deference . . . , the trustees’ overestimation of presidential importance leads to over-dependence on the chief executive and underperformance by the board.” Richard Chait, Harvard (2006)
The president
The most important role of the president: to “help the institution find itself, articulate and embrace its mission and mobilize others toward that vision.” 248
What new presidents need to know: “What is often difficult for people unfamiliar with higher education’s shared governance model to understand is that no two systems of faculty or institution governance are exactly alike.” 256
The academic core: Governance, Departments, faculty
Shared Governance vs Corporate Governance: The authors acknowledged both models, but chose to focus their efforts on shared governance, which is a collaborative relationship between the institution’s board of trustees, administration, and faculty in decision-making process. This differs from a corporate model, which concentrated decision-making at the presidential level.
Academic Departments & Departmental Leaders:
Idiosyncratic nature due to variety of fields, cultures, constituencies
Applying Bolman & Deal’s organizational frames: Structural (the academic structure), Political (how the departmental chair “fits” in the politics of the institution), Human Resource (interpersonal relationships, hiring), Cultural (history & culture of institution and department), Personal (department chair’s assessment of his/her strengths and weaknesses). 295
Tenure: a contract without term, but it is not a job for life. 303, 324
The Faculty:
Four roles: Teaching, research, service, and boundary spanning. 332
The “cultures” impacting faculty work: The culture of the academic profession, the culture of the academy as an organization, the culture of the discipline, the culture of the institution type, and the culture of a particular department. 311
Faculty as boundary spanners: Faculty members work at the boundary of their institution and its external environment. They helped build relationships from the institution to the community and back. 313
Contingent faculty members: I found it interesting that as early as 2000 the authors were already identifying the importance of contingent faculty members and recognizing all that they bring. “Contingent faculty members have found to be consistently high performers” (Gappa, 2000, p. 78). 316-319 warrants a second look.
Contingent Faculty (Experienced, stable professionals who find satisfaction in teaching): Part-timers have been recognized for their teaching, but they tend to lack comfort in expressing their opinions, and they receive less institutional support than their full-time colleagues. Institutions should invest in these faculty members as a long-term asset by integrating them more effectively into the academic processes of the institution rather than isolating them as a “replaceable part.” 318
Recognizing Contingent Faculty: How do we recognize and value them? Why don’t we make it a policy to welcome them to any and every faculty gathering? Cf 319 - When full time contingent faculty teach first-and-second-year students, they should be included in curriculum development and faculty governance activities and be fully oriented to all learning resources available to students.
Hiring strategies: Rather, administrators should develop and define faculty hiring strategies for the next 10 to 15 years, taking into account (1) institutional mission, (2) adaptability to environmental change, and collaborative partnerships . . . . Including the ratio of contingent to regular faculty members 321-22
Shortfalls:
Academic Leadership and Governance of Higher Education is a comprehensive and thorough volume, a benefit to leaders in higher education; especially those newer to the field. That said, I note two shortfalls:
“Governance of the Academic Core” — Here the authors noted that their focus was on the shared governance model of the academic core rather than equal treatment on shared governance and a corporate approach. The authors were seeing the challenges of the shared governance model (e.g. slow to respond to the changing market) when the book was written; those challenges are only amplified in 2024-2025 when “pay upon graduation” and A.I. dominate headlines. It would have been helpful to treat the corporate approach.
Budgeting - The final chapter, “Planning, Assessment, and Budgeting” was lacking as to budgeting, taking an a priori approach that assumed it, but provided barely two pages of treatment to it. It would have been helpful to see a greater treatment, especially given the complexity of higher education finance.
