State institution higher education board members are either elected by the public or appointed through a political process involving the governor and key legislators. Private institution board members generally are elected by a self-perpetuating board according to its own criteria, usually with fundraising as a major consideration. In neither case is governance acumen or higher education expertise a primary criterion. According to the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), about 10 percent of American college and university trustees have professional experience in higher education.1 Can anyone imagine a company such as Google or Chase declaring that only 10 percent of its board understood its business model, its competitive position and unique attributes, and its financial and personnel policies? Well, this is the case in higher education. It is helpful for boards to include members from academe who are knowledgeable of higher education’s history, context, and challenges.
During my 30 years as a college and university president, at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Adelphi University, I served on for-profit and nonprofit boards. Following my retirement from the presidency at Adelphi, I wrote my book on university governance and leadership for Johns Hopkins University Press and was elected to the board of Notre Dame of Maryland University, my wife’s alma mater. This was my first experience on the “other side of the table” as it were.
Before joining Ramapo College as president, I served as the assistant commissioner of higher education in Indiana. During one of my last meetings before departing the state for New Jersey, I asked Steve Beering, the president of Purdue University, for advice about working with a university board. I had worked with the commission, of course, but knew that a university board would be different. Steve talked with me about board composition and organization and emphasized the need for frequent communication. “No surprises,” he said. This made sense and was compatible with my leadership style.
Ramapo College of New Jersey is a public institution whose members, except for the student body-elected student trustee and trustee alternate, are appointed by the governor and subject to senatorial courtesy, or veto. I quickly learned that I had to become acquainted with the governor’s appointments counsel to have some influence over those appointed. By and large, this was a successful strategy. We wanted diversity in the fields of expertise among the board members and a diversity of backgrounds. While I wanted members who could be philanthropic, I learned the value of those with nonprofit, mission-based board experience. They brought a different sensibility than those whose experience was more oriented to money and markets.
At Adelphi, a private institution, the board is self-perpetuating, and we had the opportunity to compose the board with greater care. During my time at Ramapo, I had come to think that it would be helpful to have a senior academic on the board and at Adelphi I had the opportunity to recommend such a candidate. We were fortunate to find a senior professor who had been a dean at a noncompeting institution. A bonus to her appointment was that her reputation as a scholar was known to the campus faculty. Furthermore, she had an affinity for Adelphi, as her mother had attended.
The Benefits of Having an Academic on the Board
The benefits of having a senior academic as a full board member, not ex officio as I was, soon became apparent. At one board meeting, a trustee with a business background recommended a system of bonuses for administrators. The senior academic, who knew the troubled history of Adelphi before I arrived, pointed out why this was not a good idea given past abuses in compensation. She not only knew the history of Adelphi but also had broad knowledge of practices in higher education.
On another occasion, we elected to the board a senior academic and student services officer from a university with higher academic standing and graduation rates. She asked expert questions about our goals and strategies.
At another time, a trustee from the finance industry recommended that we cut tuition by 10 percent because another institution had done so and received extensive national press. The trustee from academe, who had done extensive consulting in higher education, asked the one proposing the cut if he knew anything about the institution in the news. He did not. So, the other trustee explained that this private university in the South was surrounded by public institutions, had an endowment many times larger than ours, and that even with a 10 percent cut its tuition would be about twice as large as Adelphi’s.
The lessons from these examples are, one, it is beneficial to have trustees who know higher education and, two, that trustees should ask questions instead of offering prescriptions. Just think, the inquiring trustee in the third example could have mentioned the news story he had read and asked for a discussion of tuition strategy; he could have asked about our tuition in terms of costs, competitive position, and admissions yield.
Lessons Learned
The first lesson, though, is equally significant. According to AGB research, about 10 percent of American college and university trustees have any professional experience in higher education.2 Yes, they generally graduated from a college; yes, they generally are donors to colleges; and yes, many have children who are attending or have attended college. But very few have been appointed or elected because of their higher education acumen. Can we imagine Google or Chase declaring that 90 percent of their directors, those who represent the shareholders and stakeholders of the corporation, have no professional experience with the mission and business model, competitive environment, and unique financial and personnel challenges they face? Yet this is the case for colleges and universities.
When institutional board members do not know the history and heritage of higher education and substitute the practices of corporate culture for academic values, there are several consequences worthy of note. One of the consequences is that campus presidents take seriously the title of chief executive officer (CEO), and words matter. Consider the meaning of the title.
A CEO focuses on scale and scope, delegation of responsibilities, brand, students as customers, markets and money, faculty as employees, and the short term.
Instead, the campus leader should, in my view, serve as the chief mission (or purpose) officer (CMO). As CMO, the campus president focuses on mission and purpose, students as learners, learning as the primary goal and graduation as the reward, faculty as partners in shared governance, academic freedom as a foundational value, and the long term. To quote the late sociologist David Riesman, the role of the board is to protect the university of the future from the actions of the present. Of course, money is essential, but the mission or purpose of the institution should guide the management and spending of the money.
The CMO and the well-informed board will strive to provide training for faculty in the responsibilities of governance and the requirements of leadership. Together in shared governance, the board, the president, and the faculty can collegially monitor and examine the elements of campus planning. These elements of alignment are mission and vision, goals, strategies, resource allocations, rewards, and results. They can examine whether the results are what are intended in the mission statement. They can consider whether the reward structure supports the encouragement of goal attainment. In too many cases there is a lack of alignment of these elements.
I did not become a college president with these values in mind. I developed them over the years as my boards and I considered a variety of strategic issues and learned to ask, “What can we learn from this?” We learned the truth of the writer James Baldwin that answers often hide questions just as solutions can mask problems.
Having one or two senior academics on the board can help answer this question. We often had two to three, each of whom was elected through the normal nominating process. As academics, they knew about the role of campus culture, the norms of compensation, the range of student behaviors, the pathways of academic careers, the challenges of teaching, and the best uses of instructional technology. They know when students need both a “sage on the stage,” whether a visiting expert, a link to another institution’s graduate program, or a video event, and when they need a “guide on the side” in the classroom with eye contact.
Some boards have a minimum annual contribution required of members. An academic may not be able to afford it, just as board members from social work or nursing may not. In these cases, it is wise to use the ideal of the three “W’s”: work, wealth, or wisdom, any two of the three in a balanced board.
While faculty from the board’s campus may have the experience to provide these forms of expertise, they would be viewed as representatives of a constituent group, something no trustee should be or do. For the board member, the institution and its future are the constituency, even for a board member elected by the alumni or selected to reflect the experience of young alumni.
Conclusion
The role of higher education is complex and not easy to understand. Not only do colleges and universities challenge what is known through research, scholarship, and other creative endeavors, they also serve as creators of new knowledge, preparers of new professionals and citizens, and sponsors of new services for the public. They also act as the curator of the past, the archivist of heritage. They challenge students to think critically and become open to other points of view. Higher education institutions bridge the past and the future by preparing graduates for the challenges of careers and commerce as well as of citizenship. Their mission is to prepare students to learn almost anything even if they cannot promise to teach students everything.
As academics, the trustees I helped add to Adelphi’s board, and now I, can provide the perspective needed for longer-term decisions and explain higher education history and trajectories. I can talk with the president between meetings and be an experienced sounding board. Just as my academic board members at Adelphi could help other trustees understand the context of an issue, I can add to my current board’s deliberations.
Trustees hold their institutions in trust and should know this history, these values, and these purposes of higher education if they are to fulfill the publicly approved charter of the campus. As a college trustee myself now, I know even more the value of being informed about the total enterprise, not just my campus. I know more about the context in which my campus is facing instructional, enrollment, public health, financial, and community issues, which helps me fulfill my role as a partner in governance with my president and other board members.
Robert A. Scott, PhD, is a president emeritus and university professor emeritus, of Adelphi University; a president emeritus and professor emeritus of Ramapo College of New Jersey; and a trustee and vice chair of the board at Notre Dame of Maryland University. He is also the author of How University Boards Work.
Endnotes
- AGB, Policies, Practices, and Composition of Governing and Foundation Boards 2016, 20–21.
- Ibid.
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