Boards That Went Above and Beyond

The AGB John W. Nason Award for Board Leadership is an honor reserved for institutional and foundation boards that have steered their institutions and often themselves through difficulties. The trustees of the boards of the University of Tulsa, Metropolitan State University Denver, Notre Dame of Maryland University, and the foundation boards of Northern Arizona University and Tennessee Technological University all uphold that best tradition. First presented in 1992, the award itself is named for the Swarthmore College president, John W. Nason, who in the midst of World War II, spearheaded the work of a council that helped get more than 4,000 Japanese American college students released from internment camps to resume their education on campuses across the nation. Their stories serve as an inspiration for every board helping their institutions overcome challenges.

A scathing report by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the regional accreditor, woke the board up to the need for change. “It is important to note that even after the board took significant steps to fix the situation—beginning with its own sober self-assessment and a set of board reforms—there wasn’t unanimity,” the application said. One side regarded a disciplined approach to cutting costs as paramount, while the other pushed for strategic growth.

“The ultimate success of the board’s efforts isn’t a story of one side triumphing over the other, but of the two approaches—cutting redundant and ineffective programs on the one hand and making strategic investments on the other—coming together for the greater good of the university,” it said. UT got a clean bill of health on the 2023 HLC site visit, the first since 1978. Its credit rating also bounced back up. And the board approved reinstating programs including bachelor’s degrees in religion and philosophy and PhD programs in chemistry and physics, along with the creation of an Honors College.

The size of the board shrank to 25 with a 10-person executive committee that meets monthly. “Decisions are being reached every month that are critical to the future,” said Carson. “The one-month cadence for executive committee meetings has been good, because waiting a quarter is too long to be making any kind of decisions about the future of the university. It allows us to move things forward. We can track the finances closely. We can get heads up on strategic initiatives and warned off if it’s not the right approach or people have concerns.”

“It’s about keeping the kindling in the forest at a minimum, so things don’t burst out and become a full-scale crisis,” said Carson, who was once on the faculty at UT and the University of Virginia.

“One of the things that we are proud of is that we have been able to talk about difficult things, be open about it, and work together on how we resolve it,” said MacLeod, who earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at UT.

MacLeod said that previously, the board “had a lot of people who were very dedicated to UT but would not spend the time to get to know the issues. We needed people who felt more comfortable asking tough questions, realizing that most are businesspeople, not academics. You want deep financial acumen and people who understand governance and what governance means.”

Carson invited prominent experts on the challenges facing higher education to speak with the board. It now stays on top of accreditation issues.

“We’ve been very fortunate. Applications are up. The quality of students is noticeably improved. The university is on really good footing. Having that large endowment helps a lot, but it is a tricky time,” said the president. “All lights are green, but we’re aware that they could change color at any one moment, and so we work with the board to make sure that we’re monitoring all traffic patterns.”

MacLeod has agreed to extend her term as chair by a year and intends to stay on the board afterwards. “I love this university, and it’s a love that’s existed since I graduated with my first degree. It still keeps those very special characteristics of personal attention and flexibility within degree programs and professors that care very deeply about their students, including an administration that is very available,” she said.

Rather than fielding questions about what was happening to the liberal arts at UT, Carson is now in demand to speak at education and business conferences alike about the turnaround. “If you have the board aligned with you, you can do lots of really cool things and fairly quickly,” he said.

Metropolitan State University of Denver shares a leafy, 127-acre campus in the heart of downtown with the University of Colorado Denver and the Community College of Denver, and with them it shared the challenge of dealing with what became the second longest protest in the country in April 2024 over the deaths of Palestinians in Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas in Gaza. Tents were pitched for weeks on the quad with escalating disruptions and, on one particularly difficult day, several dozen arrests.

But there was also an unusual and ultimately successful effort by President Janine Davidson and the Board of Trustees, both individually and collectively, to engage their own student protesters in a dialogue and to uphold free speech in line with a prescient Freedom of Expression policy adopted in 2019 and a further Statement on Free Expression and Inquiry three years later.

Davidson, an Air Force cargo pilot and former undersecretary of the U.S. Navy, has been immersed in public policy and diplomacy throughout her career, including as chair of the Department of Defense’s Defense Policy Board. She pushed early on for the MSU Denver board to take a strong stand in defense of free speech, partly in response to incidents of conservative speakers being shouted down on other campuses, not hers.

In 2019, two years into Davidson’s presidency, the nine-member board appointed by Colorado Governor Jared Polis adopted the Freedom of Expression policy and later the Statement on Free Expression and Inquiry modeled on the University of Chicago’s famed 1967 Kalven Report that committed institutions to encourage and defend vigorous, open debate while staying neutral on contentious political issues. The issue back then was the escalating war in Vietnam with protests erupting on hundreds of campuses. Now the cauldron was burning in the Middle East.

Upholding the university’s principled position was paramount, even as Davidson and an engaged, supportive board sought to calm the waters while respecting the protesters’ rights.

“The first thing was to ask ourselves, ‘What are we trying to do here?’” said Davidson, who has authored books on leadership. “It was not, ‘We’ve got to get the tents down, we’ve got to get these students off the quad.’ It’s that we had to emerge with our values and our reputation intact.”

“Our priorities in order were safety, continuity of our operations, and then free speech,” she said. “We wanted to make sure people were not doing dangerous things, being violent and disrupting our classrooms … but you can say whatever you want.”

“We were focused on how do we wrap our arms around our students and help them exercise their right to free speech? They were misinformed about a lot of things, but we weren’t going to be patronizing,” said Davidson.

The president issued frequent communiques and set up a website to keep students, faculty, and the entire community informed about what was happening. “You need to be first and fast with the truth to combat misinformation,” said Davidson.

Kristin Hultquist, chair of the board and a former senior adviser to then-U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, lauded Davidson’s adroit handling of the extended protests, including dealing with the mayor’s office and the other two institutions’ sharing the campus.

“We didn’t just have an academic leader, we had a crisis leader,” said Hultquist. Davidson, her team, and the trustees had done tabletop exercises on how to deal with a crisis before war broke out in the Middle East and they convened again a few weeks later.

Most of MSU Denver’s 17,000 undergraduates are commuters. Sixty percent are the first in their family to pursue a four-year college education. More than a third are Hispanic.

Davidson and David Fine, the university general counsel and secretary to the Board of Trustees, had twice taught a “Freedom of Speech” class on the philosophical and legal origins of free speech in America and the necessity to preserve civil discourse in an increasingly polarized society.

“It is hard to create free expression policies in the midst of a conflict,” said Fine. If done well before a conflict breaks out, “you are better able to navigate emotional issues with your community.”

Davidson and Fine personally met with protesters early on and later Hulquist and other trustees did as well. Twenty-four hours after the protest began, the president reiterated the university’s commitment to freedom of expression and pointed out the student conflict-resolution and restorative justice service already in place.

Davidson said the presence of trustees was important as a show of respect for the students’ concerns, but also to leave no doubt that “you don’t get to disrupt final exams. You don’t get to damage things. You have every right in the world to have free speech, but this is where the lines are.”

There were several dozen arrests at one heated demonstration. Eventually, students abandoned their encampment and the protest came to an end.

Hultquist, who joined the board in 2019 and became chair in 2023, said the board was well positioned to help the university through the crisis because of the strong stand it took years earlier “in protecting free expression and intellectual diversity on this campus.” Hultquist, who played a lead role in negotiating with the students, said, “We were set up well to show our values.”

In its application for the Nason Award, the board wrote: “After paying close attention to the fallout on other campuses, the trustees are proud to be able to say the protest at MSU Denver resulted in no serious injuries, no litigation, and no suspensions and expulsions—a result in part of the trustees’ preparedness and thoughtful leadership.”

Founded in 1895 as the first Catholic college in the United States to award four-year degrees to women, Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU) carried on that proud legacy well into the 21st century even as the number of female-only colleges dwindled from 230 to about 30. Even before COVID-19, its Board of Trustees and founding order, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, were facing daunting challenges: undergraduate enrollment was declining, the endowment was low, and finances were precarious. Enrollment in the Women’s College (for full-time, traditional age undergraduates) had declined from the low 600s in the early 2000s to fewer than 500 in 2019. The graduate and professional programs, which opened their doors to men decades ago, were in stronger shape, but their enrollment of 1,100 was sliding, too.

All is different six years later. President Marylou Yam and the Board of Trustees and the university have the financial health in order with bold steps, from admitting the first men to the freshman class to acquiring a university for integrative or alternative healthcare to launching new graduate programs. It blew past the $45 million goal of a capital campaign and boosted the endowment by almost half.

There was never a fear that the doors might close, said Yam. “The potential was there. Our mission was strong, and the location was good. But we knew we needed to move forward,” she said.

Sister Patricia McLaughlin, the board chair, an alumna and former dean of students, said the 2022 decision to admit men “came as a shock to the whole campus and especially the alums—a small amount, not everybody. But they got over that pretty quickly.” The 28-member board itself was unanimous in support of the move.

“We’ve been very fortunate. The trustees have been very strong, strategic thought partners. They continue to embrace new ideas, explore ways to utilize the campus, grow our academic programs and also to engage in new, unique partnerships,” said Yam, a former St. Peter’s University provost and nursing dean who took the helm in 2014.

The president and board members participated in a year-long series of campus-wide listening sessions with faculty, staff, students, and alumni. McLaughlin sat on the steering committee for the move to coeducation.

No one anticipated how successful the switch would bolster the university’s finances. Yam said they canvassed a dozen similar women’s colleges that admitted men and found on average they attracted 39 more students. But NDMU in September 2023 attracted the second largest incoming class in its history with 95 additional students, including the first 50 men.

“The selling point was our mission, which remains the same, to educate leaders to transform the world and that mission resonates with both those who identify as male and those who identify as female,” said the president. The college sits on a 60-acre campus five miles north of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and adjacent to Loyola University Maryland. Students are drawn by “the opportunities for internships that the city and the surrounding area have to offer.” Division III sports is a draw, too, and now in addition to nine varsity teams for women, it fields men’s soccer, basketball, and baseball teams, with men’s lacrosse coming in 2026.

Alumnae now are sending daughters and sons—legacy students—to their alma mater in record numbers.

The university took other steps to improve the financial picture, guided by Going Beyond: Vision 2025, the strategic plan the board approved in 2020. The graduate and professional schools offered a new doctorate in occupational therapy and master’s degrees for physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Maryland is renowned for its hospitals and healthcare industry but is also facing a chronic shortage of healthcare workers.

Many undergraduates are the first generation in their families to attend college and a majority are members of ethnic minority groups. More than half receive federal, need-based Pell Grants. The trustees made increasing the college’s own financial aid a principal target of the fundraising, which boosted the endowment from $34 million in 2019 to $54 million by 2024.

NDMU found ways to increase non-tuition sources of revenues. It saved almost $1 million a year by refinancing $33 million in bonds floated a decade earlier for campus building projects. It was able to stop drawing on an $8 million line of credit that it had almost tapped out.

It acquired a partner, the Maryland University of Integrative Health, a primarily online institution with 600 students offering graduate degrees in nutrition, health promotion, yoga therapy, and related fields. The acquisition, awaiting final regulatory approval, will make NDMU the first comprehensive university in the country with an integrative health school.

On a sylvan campus with ample open space, it also forged an agreement with a developer to build a 170-unit senior living housing complex that opens in 2026, filling both a need in the city and providing experiential learning and job opportunities for students.

By going co-ed, Yam said, NDMU “is uniquely positioned to deliver on its mission and strategic goal to advance inclusive and transformational education to more women and men.”

McLaughlin, who first came to the college’s preparatory school at age 14 and joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame midway through college, said, “The board has a wonderful, remarkable partnership with the president.”

McLaughlin, now retired from running a workforce development program for low-income women in Baltimore, added, “What happens in the classroom and on the campus are what motivates the board. It’s very mutual and exciting.”

The Northern Arizona University (NAU) Foundation Board of Directors weathered several years of change in its leadership and stewardship of NAU’s endowment, including both the CEO and chief financial officer positions. But under a new vice president of advancement and foundation CEO, it has tripled annual fundraising, doubled the endowment to $350 million, and made changes to the foundation’s governance structure that have enabled it to become, in its own words, “a force multiplier” for the university’s strategic priorities.

The university, which celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2024, attracted 10,000 donors to its record capital campaign under President José Luis Cruz Rivera, who in 2021 came to NAU as its 17th president. The main campus in Flagstaff is framed by the San Francisco Peaks mountains, 75 miles south of the Grand Canyon and near Arizona’s expansive Native American lands. Some 120 tribal nations are represented in NAU’s student body of 28,000.

Nick Lobejko took charge of advancement at NAU in 2022 after a dozen years of success as a top fundraiser for Colorado State University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He sat down with each of the 50 people engaged in fundraising, including nine on the foundation board’s own staff, and solicited their ideas for improving the operation.

Perhaps more importantly, the 28-member foundation board went through a rigorous self-examination and wound up making far-reaching changes in its committee structure and approach to governance. To increase trustee engagement, it eliminated two committees and concentrated more on the big four: audit, finance, investment, and the executive committee.

“My perception is there was a lot of good work being done (in those four committees), but we had a bunch of others that were meeting just to meet,” Lobejko said. “We really evaluated was that the best time and resources for both our staff and the directors.”

Victoria E. Fimea, a veteran insurance industry executive and attorney who joined the board in 2014 and became chair in 2023, said, “We stepped up and doubled down. We said, ‘We’re going to sit down and do what we need to do.’”

Both Lobejko and Fimea said they relied on valuable advice from Mike Goodwin, a retired president and CEO of the Oregon State University Foundation and an AGB senior consultant, on reshaping how the NAU board discharged its fiduciary duties and made the best use of trustees’ talents and expertise.

“Many are former CEOs or C-suite folks. They don’t want to come to a meeting to hear reports. They want to do something. So, we looked at ways to streamline (the structure) and be more facile,” said Fimea.

One solution was to stand up short-term task forces pairing trustees with university administrators to deal with matters that needed immediate attention. “We thought, ‘Let’s do this. We’ll keep those four core committees that do such important work, then we’ll have this task force mechanism and get directors together who are interested in doing something that needs to be done’ right away,” she said.

Meanwhile, the advancement office was hitting on all cylinders. “We looked at every aspect of how we did business, roles and responsibilities and how to roll out and implement change,” said Lobejko. “Now we have the team in place.”

After reviewing the practices of 30 other university advancement offices, it settled on applying five percent administration fee on gifts to NAU as well as instituting a performance incentive plan for both individual fundraisers and division teams. It provided $10 million to the university in seed money for what is akin to an early-stage venture capital fund. This Equitable Value Venture Fund enabled President Cruz Rivera to secure $20 million from the Arizona Board of Regents for college access and workforce development as well as nearly $10 million in grants from major foundations to help students, including community college transfers, enroll, persist, and graduate. The list was topped by a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation that the board matched for NAU’s Seven Generations Signature Initiative to elevate scholarship on Indigenous peoples, forge partnerships with tribal leaders, artists, and others, and expand the 150-student Indigenous People’s Living-Learning Community.

The board also developed a Lumberjack Link Program that puts them directly in touch with the advancement office’s top campaign prospects. The university is in the quiet phase of a major comprehensive campaign, the first since a $100 million drive that ended in 2016. The rapid turnover in foundation leadership and COVID-19 both delayed the launch of a new campaign. Now “there’s a lot of excitement and momentum, both at the university with a dynamic president with high expectations, and within the board and our staff,” he said. Cruz Rivera came to NAU from New York where he was president of the City University of New York’s Lehman College and executive vice chancellor of the 25-college CUNY system, the world’s largest urban university.

In a statement, Cruz Rivera said the foundation board’s “visionary leadership has catalyzed transformative philanthropic support and partnerships that are advancing NAU’s strategic priorities and ensuring we are among the nation’s preeminent engines of opportunity in public higher education.”

Fimea’s advice to other foundation directors is to seek ways to become more agile and helpful, as the NAU board did. “You need to spend money to make money, which is also kind of a private sector concept,” said the chair.

“Don’t weigh yourself down with unnecessary steps just for the sake of having the steps. Just figure out a way that you can get your directors to be more participatory, and every once in a while, take the temperature of your board. ‘Are you happy that you’re on the board? Do you feel like you’re helping the university?’ It’s important to do that periodically,” said Fimea. “We’re excited about the progress we’ve made.”

The Tennessee Technological University Foundation Board has undergone a 10-year transformation that began years into the presidency of Philip B. Oldham and got into gear after Kevin H. Braswell came on as vice president for university advancement and executive director of the board. “I charged Kevin with making the foundation into a professionally run organization where we had a strong sense of governance, took a fresh look at our bylaws, and expanded the membership of the board,” said Oldham, who was previously provost of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Braswell, who had played key roles in raising tens of millions of dollars for universities in Arkansas, walked into a situation where the prevailing practice had been to draw up the agenda for the board’s spring and fall meetings the night before and where few members had made philanthropic gifts to the foundation. “One of my early tasks was to go out around the state and across the country and visit individually with board members” to shape a new vision for its role, Braswell said. Some chose to step down, but an enthusiastic cadre stayed, joined by new, more diverse members. “What I found was that in response to clear expectations and a statement of purpose and vision, they were quite enthusiastic and ready to get to work. And that’s precisely what we did,” he said.

Tennessee changed the governance structure of its universities in 2017, with Governor Bill Haslam shifting responsibility from the statewide Board of Regents to new, individual boards for the six public universities. “That turned out to be a positive thing for the foundation board as well,” said Oldham, a onetime analytical chemistry professor who holds two patents and has published extensively in scientific journals. (Forty percent of Tennessee Tech’s 9,200 undergraduates major in engineering and sciences, with mechanical engineering and computer science as the top two majors.)

While sharing the advice-and-counsel role now with the 10-member Board of Trustees (most of them appointed by the governor), the new vision for the foundation board placed equal emphasis on its philanthropic partnership role and its fiduciary duties. The membership, Oldham said, today “is a much more realistic and accurate representation of our students and alumni than it was before, in the most meaningful of ways. It’s a great group of individuals, very successful in their own right, and very passionate about their alma mater.”

Alfonzo Alexander ‘91, recently elevated to board chairman, has witnessed and welcomed the board becoming more diverse, strategic and engaged. “We’re talking about things that are going to be important in the future, not just, ‘What are we doing today?’” said Alexander, who credits his success in the business world to lessons learned playing football for the Golden Eagles. He also chairs the PhD Project, which promotes diversity.

Tennessee Tech had raised $60 million in a 2014–2019 capital campaign and has already raised $72 million toward its goal of $125 million current campaign. The endowment now stands at $103 million. A foundation board member and his wife donated a farm that had been in the family more than 200 years and was valued at upwards of $10 million.

M. Dianne Murphy ’72 and ’73, a longtime board member and Alexander’s predecessor as chair, credits Tennessee Tech with changing her life. “I was not a good student in high school, and the faculty embraced me, and people embraced me, and that’s what we do here,” said Murphy, a three-sport athlete with a PhD in physical education and administration who served as athletic director at the University of Denver and Columbia University for almost two decades.

“Everything we do as a board is about leadership. It’s about understanding the core values of the institution and what the expectations are, making a commitment of your time, talent, and treasure to support the university—and staying in your lane,” she said.

When Alexander earned his MBA at Lipscomb University, two days later he got his first solicitation from the alumni association. It surprised him that Tennessee Tech had never asked him to contribute, but as soon as it did, he began writing monthly checks, first to the College of Business, then to the university.

Alexander, who majored in what was then called personnel and labor relations, said he learned life lessons on a football team that struggled to win half its games, including “how to overcome adversity, how to communicate, how to operate within a team environment, how to set a goal and achieve it.” But Tennessee Tech also afforded him leadership opportunities in the academic arena and social arena that “really made it an enjoyable and enriching time period for me.”

Murphy, too, sees today’s students receiving the same personal attention and inspiration that she received. “We make it very personal from the time a young person decides where to go to college, making sure that we have excellent customer service to our students and then the faculty.”

That philosophy extends to the advancement and foundation office as well.

Back in the late 2000s, Braswell took a two-and-a-half-year break from his career raising millions for five colleges and universities to fill in as senior minister at a church in Missouri after the unexpected resignation of its pastor. He sees a connection between his ministry and philanthropic calling. Weekly sermons “had to resonate with a diverse audience. Similarly, in the fundraising profession, I’m telling Tech’s story in compelling ways to diverse audiences and listening carefully to donors’ passions and interests,” he said.

“In fundraising, despite the technological innovations that augment the way the work is done, there is still no substitute for sitting down with a constituent and conducting a conversation predicated on listening and making connections between the institutions and donors’ passions,” he said.

Christopher Connell is a higher education writer based in Washington, D.C. and a frequent contributor to Trusteeship.