When I became a university president in 2016 and sought advice from current and former university presidents, one answer stood out: “It’s all about the board.” They meant that successful management of such a complex institution hinges on the partnership between the president, their leadership team, and the board of trustees. I had experience serving on external boards earlier in my academic career. This included the board of a regional hospital that appreciated and leveraged my background in bioengineering research, clinical trials, and starting two biotechnology device companies. I observed the CEO’s dynamic interaction with the board and his effective synthesis of the board’s input and direction. Board membership was a powerful experience and now, as a university president, it is helpful to have the perspective from both sides of the board table.
Three years into my presidency, our Miami University Board of Trustees received the Association of Governing Boards (AGB) of Universities and Colleges’ John W. Nason Award for Board Leadership: “Serving at the pinnacle of excellence, these are boards that go above and beyond what boards should do, and instead take board-driven measures to advance their institutions in ways that truly matter.” This validation of our board of trustees’ efforts led me to reflect deeply on the qualities that make our board and our relationship so strong. Three foundational themes emerged: trust, unity, and wisdom.
A great relationship between the president and the board of trustees is built above all on trust. The board hired me as the university’s president because they trusted my experience had prepared me for the challenges ahead. Many of them had C-suite experience and appreciated the difference between micromanaging and effective input around priority setting. They hired me to do a job, and they empowered me to do it. That trust goes both ways. I know that every board member seeks the university’s success and has its best interests at heart. All of us feel free to speak up when we have ideas, even when we disagree, so we can arrive at effective decisions together.
This trust generates an environment of respect, as well as freedom for the transformative thinking that higher education now requires. It provides an arena for the “creative abrasion” that sparks discovery, insight, and progress.1 It can bring innovative, even audacious, ideas to the table; partner with the board to refine them; and gain buy-in to implement them—even when there are clear risks and no guarantee of success. Our mutual trust releases the dynamism and agility necessary for entrepreneurial courage that industry leaders value and our students learn on campus. Together, we can act boldly for the sake of the future.
This trust unleashed one of the most significant developments on our campus during my term—a strategic plan that will ensure Miami flourishes in our challenging and constantly changing market. The plan is dynamic and adaptable in real time, different from the roadmaps of the past that were created in less volatile environments. Miami’s previous plan was completed more than a year ahead of schedule, and the board entrusted the process for a transformative plan to me and my leadership team. We kept the board regularly updated with high-level reports—with great freedom comes great accountability—but I was empowered to move fast, engage our constituents, integrate feedback, and articulate a groundbreaking plan. In turn, I empowered an inclusive committee to create the plan with a strong level of input across the campus. We engaged board members for valuable insight on issues and opportunities. My team had real ownership and executed our responsibility with serious passion, fully trusting the board would make best use of our efforts. The results confirmed to everyone the power of the approach.
With that trust comes unity, which is a challenge and a gift that one understands fully only from experience. When I joined an external board, I faced a steep learning curve. The board’s members came from diverse personal and professional backgrounds, with vested interests that might be competitive, but we worked to bring those perspectives together and speak with one voice for the good of the organization and its stakeholders.
That diversity is magnified on a university board. In addition to the usual differences in personal and professional backgrounds, board members, who are often alumni, identify deeply with particular elements of their college experience—their majors, their professors, their extracurricular activities, their sports teams. In their college days, those associations were naturally understood as a source of pride in contrast with other activities and groups. Now, in a different era with new challenges, they must be willing to subordinate those preferences for the greater good of the university and its future. Our institution must not be an aggregate of competing interests—what some call a “multi”versity—but a fully integrated unit, a “uni”versity. So must our board.
The biggest pressure on old loyalties comes during the budgeting process. Like never before, higher education must make hard choices, even eliminating popular features of the past that no longer address current student requirements. Our university made a choice to focus resources on areas with high student demand that address the compelling needs of our state and nation. We can’t do everything, but we want to be top-tier in everything we do. Savings and reallocation were the means to advance academic excellence and academic infrastructure. Our board supported this whole-heartedly—their fiduciary duty to the university transcended their individual interests. We found unity by reaffirming the unwavering priorities to uphold our mission as a student-centered university; to positively impact the lives of students and citizens of Ohio and our nation; and to maintain a broad liberal arts education founded on character and intellect.
This involved applying a core value from Miami’s Code of Love and Honor—respecting the right of others to hold and express disparate beliefs—through a process of building consensus. The board’s two major committees, the Academic and Student Affairs Committee and the Finance and Audit Committee, meet on the days before board meetings for information, dialogue, and synthesis. Across several meeting cycles, one committee focused on the academic options and the other on facilities, infrastructure, and budgeting. The plan that emerged required eliminating obsolete areas while growing existing in-demand programs and creating new ones. The budget distribution required eliminating some positions across campus and redirecting those resources to our academic mission. At the board’s review of the budget plan, it endorsed the administration’s actions “that will better serve the needs of our students and secure a promising future for our university.” The process led the board and the administration to speak with one voice.
The third pillar of our board’s success is wisdom—the wisdom that board members bring accelerates the president’s and leadership team’s ability to do the job effectively. Being president of a university is more like being mayor of a midsized city than being CEO of a manufacturing company—the breadth of stakeholders and complexity of issues is staggering. We’re a city-scale conglomerate with an education system, a restaurant franchise, a sports enterprise, a police force, a hotel chain, real estate developer, an investment fund, and on and on. Leading a tuition-dependent institution is also like being a startup entrepreneur when it comes to innovative thinking, agile action, and cash flow management, even though our budget is nearly $1 billion. Plus, we have a social mission—to elevate students’ lives—like a not-for-profit. Such an organization needs the expertise of people who actually run conglomerates, not-for-profits, startups, and other enterprises. As president, I need their wisdom to do my job.
We leveraged that wisdom to establish Boldly Creative, our $50 million academic investment fund. Much like a Venture Capital Fund, we wanted to identify game-changing investments in select priority areas such as robotics, health care, and analytics. We leveraged the diverse expertise on our board to craft how to set up and structure the fund, how to issue requests for creative proposals, how to evaluate them for sustainability, and what to expect about growing and scaling the project. Even though we were in the academic field, their C-suite, startup, and other business-world experience was vital. These different perspectives came into play for this major shift in our investment strategy. Their input was not simply data and knowledge, but real wisdom that comes from shared dedication to the institution and takes the greater good and the future into account.
Universities depend on the active expertise of board members as never before, much more like corporate boards than the more passive academic boards of the past. But we are not corporations—our board members are not shareholders seeking to maximize returns on their investment, and they don’t accept this role for the glamour and pay. They are selfless women and men with extraordinary loyalty, commitment, and service to the institution. The virtues of trust, unity, and wisdom in our dealings with each other make us the “pinnacle of excellence” that others see in our work. More importantly, they position our university to flourish no matter what the future brings.
Together, we work to fulfill the values embodied in Miami’s Code of Love and Honor: purposeful education, pursuing inclusive excellence, and elevating the wellbeing of individuals and communities around the world.
Gregory Crawford, PhD, is the president of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
1 https://www.chronicle.com/article/To-Spark-Real-Innovation/247564
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