It is better to be wrong conventionally than to be right unconventionally.
The culture of education creates a unique leadership challenge. One that it is uniquely unprepared to solve.
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education hit close to home last week. “When taking one for the team leaves a permanent mark” examines the impact of making hard, unpopular decisions on the careers of administrators. I have a few of those scars myself. Why does higher education in the US and UK consistently eat it’s own?
I’ve been involved in higher education for a long time now. Aside from taking a year off to write a novel, I’ve been working in or with higher education for 20 years. I’ve worked with administrators in IT, academic affairs, and finance. Most of them were bright, dedicated people. Bright, dedicated people all set up to fail. Few of them had the tools and experience necessary to engage in strategic leadership. In an era of dramatic shifts in higher education, the need for practical, decisive leadership that can adapt to changing economic, demographic, and technological environments is critical.
The problem begins with recruitment. As ASU president Michael Crow said, “the standard model for turning out higher education leaders — let’s have the academic become the chair, become the dean, become the president — no longer works for most places.” Most administrators get recruited from within the faculty, a profession uniquely unsuited to developing managerial expertise. The vast majority of job notices for HE admin positions require previous HE experience. Promotion from within is the typical route. On the academic side, faculty members become chairs, then deans, then vice-presidents, presidents, chancellors, etc. Outside of finance, IT, and HR, most positions are filled by former faculty, who moved directly from the classroom to the management office. In operations, the HR, IT, and finance requirements for management and administrators almost always require higher education experience. It’s difficult for non-education managers to be considered to make the switch. In 2016, just 3.8% of presidents came from outside of academia. 62% were either president at other institutions, chief academic officers, or deans, which means the majority of their experience comes from within the academy. Add in other academic VPs (student services, and college VP’s), and a full 81% of chief executives at higher education institutions start in the faculty.
In a more stable time, recruiting from within might work, although it is arguable. But in times of rapid change, organizations need a wide range of perspectives, expertise, and experience to understand the road ahead. By recruiting nearly exclusively from within the academy, institutions limit their ability to adapt. Worse, they don’t understand the depth of the problem. If you have been a scientist or a historian for the last twenty years, can you read a financial statement and understand the implications?
The closed culture rarely exposes higher education leaders to thoughtful perspectives from other fields. So they don’t understand the ways of thinking others use to address the challenges of the new era. Bringing my experience as a business leader back to educational leadership was a revelation. Most of my fellow leaders had no knowledge or understanding of basic operational concepts like process and project management, operational improvement frameworks, or financial literacy.
Even if a former faculty member should take a leadership role, they do not get nearly enough training and support. What qualifies a member of the faculty, trained to be an expert and researcher in their discipline, to lead one of the most sophisticated institutions through a period of economic pressure, demographic shifts, and technological revolution? Do they receive extensive training in strategy, organizational theory, management techniques, change leadership, and financial management? Promoting from within guarantees the only experience leaders have in these areas is from a higher education perspective. How many academic leaders are trained to read a financial statement? Or have the process improvement tools developed in manufacturing and medicine? Or have you been exposed to even the last generation of computing tools and perspectives to improve efficiency and drive performance?
Finally, the faculty’s lack of respect for the work of higher education administration is probably the most disturbing. Most faculty are ignorant of the complexity and constraints faced by administrators. Take the example from the Chronicle article:
“Bold action was needed to secure the institution’s future, so the new president led a broad campus process to come up with a firm-but-fair plan of action, guided by shared-governance procedures. However, once the president started to execute the plan, the university’s faculty balked and voted no confidence, leading to the president’s resignation.”
I am always astounded by the number of otherwise intelligent, educated people who regularly denigrate the work of administrators whose jobs they don’t understand. Faculty frequently severely underestimate the lack of discretion most administrators have over budget or staffing decisions. A policy made for the good of the organization is derided and often ignored, by faculty who don’t agree or don’t and won’t take the time to understand. So administrators, promoted from within and lacking skills and experience, end up becoming caretakers. They rarely challenge the status quo, and only if they believe they can gain a majority of the faculty.
But we live in a time when bold action is required. Student tuition can’t increase forever. In most developed countries, school age populations are falling. The digital revolution will challenge your model whether you want it to or not. We have to make hard choices about our current activities and make bets about the future. Making investments that may or may not yield the expected results is difficult.
“Prediction is hard, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra.
In education, administrators who have come up through the ranks of teaching suddenly need to make new types of decisions. But now they need to make investments in people, process and (hopefully) technologies, to improve their organization’s performance and enable student success. These sorts of decisions are difficult enough in the corporate sector. But if the faculty and board second-guess every hard decision, then we end up with leaders afraid to take action.
Without a clear theory and support, educational leaders are susceptible to the whims of fashion. As Simon Wardley says, “Imagine asking a general why they are bombarding a hill. They reply they have seen other successful generals bombard hills, so they are bombarding a hill as well.” If they did not have a strategic and tactical plan, and the support of both their superiors and their followers, they would quickly lose. Such a general would not last long. But we expect our educational leaders to improve organizations without a map, strategic doctrine, or tactical support.
The crisis of leadership, brought about by the structural faults in the higher education system, will create more chaos, cost, and hardship for students, faculty, and staff. There is a coming near-perfect storm for higher education, especially in the G8 countries. Demographic change, economic pressure, and technological change threatens the very nature of higher education. In the next decade, these changes will shake the foundation of the ivory tower. To adapt, we need a new vision of leadership. We need leaders who have a broad perspective, the conceptual tools, and the support of their institutions to help navigate the coming storm.
