One of AGB’s special strengths is listening intently and purposefully to our members. Another is understanding and responding to what you, our members, say. AGB’s new publication, Top Strategic Issues for Boards 2024–2025 (AGB.org/TopStrategicIssues), reports what we hear as boards’ four priorities now: board independence and leadership, student success, leadership support and succession, and business model innovation and digital transformation. AGB has adopted those four issues plus governance development as its strategic priorities.
Threats against board independence are rising rapidly, and while public and private institutions and system boards have experienced the most obvious threats, foundation boards are also facing pressures. Donors, public officials, activists, and others are putting more pressure on boards to act in ways that would harm institutions, students’ education, and financial viability. At all three national AGB conferences this year, we are talking openly about it.
Public and private colleges, universities, and foundations are struggling to appease their critics and comply with anti-educational mandates. The contortions required to comply with ideology-driven mandates waste great chunks of time and money, lower educational quality, increase cost, and reduce access to higher education for all. Our critics’ charges, often false, fictional, and inflammatory, weaken public support. The situation is tenuous for the entire higher education governance landscape.
We must put a stop to it. This is not a partisan issue. It is about right and wrong.
Governing board members have a fiduciary duty to protect and advance their institution’s mission by making rational decisions in the institution’s best interest with thoughtful assessment and mitigation of risk. The most difficult decisions for board members are whether to break the law by violating fiduciary duty or by violating an inherently anti-fiduciary law. Asserting board authority protects educational access and quality, reduces leadership and faculty turnover, and preserves the resources required for business model innovation and digital transformation.
Recently, AGB updated its mission to support members’ efforts to address strategic issues through excellence in board governance and trusteeship:
AGB advances higher education as a public good by preparing college, university, and foundation governing boards to fulfill their fiduciary duties and exemplify the highest ideals of trusteeship.
Our vision follows a similar intent. AGB aims for a world where boards “empower vibrant higher education, inclusive democracy, and a flourishing society.”
For more than two centuries, citizens have entrusted higher education governance to each other—to you, although the times may require more than you signed up for. Citizen governance supports and advocates that education be based on fact, expertise, critical thinking, science, debate, and good citizenship in a democratic republic. It is astute enough to ask “why,” courageous enough to say “no,” and creative enough to recognize the best path forward. It is of, by, and for the people.
Be that trustee. Be the board that is ready to shoulder that responsibility.
AGB resources on board independence include a Board of Directors’ Statement and a toolkit published in December 2023 (https://agb.org/influences-on-board-independence-and-leadership-toolkit/). It includes a checklist to assess board readiness for fiduciary responsibilities. For example, governing boards should do the following:
- … work and act independently within a framework of legal documents and formal agreements that comport with the best long-term interests of the institution—such as the institution’s founding charter, bylaws, federal laws and regulations, state constitutions and statutes, and accreditation requirements;
- be fiduciaries of their institution, independent from their appointing authority or electorate;
- uphold the governing authority of the board and the authority of administration and faculty;
- recognize and address influences that are not aligned with strategic priorities, such as:
- any action that goes against policies or that could compromise reputation;
- encroachments on board independence, fiduciary responsibilities, or legal authority;
- influences that impact institutional autonomy and academic freedom; and
- acting collectively, make the decisions that fall within their legal authority.
Together, we can safeguard the freedom to learn by facing reality with an unflinching gaze, defining truth with unwavering resolve, and acting on our principles with courage.
This is the year we take a stand.
Ellen-Earle Chaffee, PhD, is the interim president and CEO of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB).
