University of the Pacific campus.

"We must start making changes now, if we want to keep our educational institutions the best in the world."
                     -James F. Carlin

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University of the Pacific campus.

With this issue, the Bulletin initiates guest articles as a way of stimulating dialogue on higher education issues. Robert Benedetti is Dean of the College of the Pacific at the University of the Pacific.

"We must start making changes now, if we want to keep our educational institutions the best in the world. Trustees and administrators must provide bold, innovative solutions in spite of faculty members' objections, and even if, in the short term, those changes run contrary to the faculty's economic interests."
-- James F. Carlin, Past Chairman, Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 5, 1999.

While admitting the international reputation of America's colleges and universities, critics perpetually warn of a crisis around the corner. Citing a litany of problems, Carlin and others call for strong leadership and bold initiatives in face of what they perceive to be a lack of focus and mismanagement. The real problem, Carlin asserts, is that "presidents rarely are able to take charge" particularly of "academic matters, which are the faculty's turf." In other words, governance shared between faculty and administrators has failed. Colleges and universities need an energized presidency and teams of managers capable of averting impending crises.

Models for such leadership come from business and from politics. Much has been made of conceptualizing higher education as a corporation and adapting corporate models to the academic workplace. The virtue of this analogy is said to be its focus on the student as customer and its attention to internal efficiencies. If the bottom line is accepted as a primary focus, the hope is that colleges and universities will be responsive to the market and to calls for increased productivity. Like modern corporations, then, institutions of higher learning need a chief executive officer with a loyal staff to monitor the balance sheet.

However, the model for the presidency in higher education is more than a deduction from corporate practice. Since the collective weight of the challenges faced may be of crisis proportions, a particularly strong leader will be needed. In his book, Leadership, James MacGregor Burns describes two types of political leaders, transactional and transformational. The former responds to the needs of constituents where the latter reforms public opinion and constituent desires so that they conform to his vision of the future. Burns finds that most American political leaders are transactional; only such political heroes as Napoleon and Lenin are transformational. Those writing on the presidency for colleges and universities favor the transformational model, implying that higher education needs the revolutionary change that these leaders brought their societies. Presidents need to change faculty minds, not just accommodate existing perspectives. The academy needs conversion as well as attention to the balance sheet.

Unfortunately, those who favor leaders appropriate to academic corporations and capable of revolutionary change often fail to appreciate the oligarchic tendencies of such models. Inadvertently, the call for strong leadership may put presidents in an impossible situation where they are expected to create miracles, but are isolated from the very people and information needed to resolve problems. What is forgotten is that no president can act alone and, without independent ties to his constituencies, a president may not know when his/her cadre is acting in the institution's best interest. Teams of advisers often protect presidents from open communication and, ultimately, from reality.

In isolation from the shop floor, decisions may be made on the advice of recently hired councilors who too easily follow the whim of the market and maximize the short-range advantages that make such councilors look good. Attention to the mission of colleges and universities may suffer even as the budgets improve. Auxiliary services, including admissions, public relations, fund raising, student affairs, technology, and athletics, may receive attention at the expense of the classroom because of their close relationship to student and parent satisfaction and because they provide team members safe havens. The line between strong leadership and elite rule is a thin one, and a failure to appreciate the distinction can cause a crisis in morale, particularly among the best faculty. Top-down management has its costs, particularly for presidents who would do good.

This is not to say that critics are wrong to find fault with governance in higher education. It is not clear that faculty should be autonomous even when it comes to curriculum or presidents in regard to support services. Faculty need to recognize that they do not have absolute power over what is taught nor do they have the privilege to ignore practical details like budgets. Further, Carlin is right to observe that parents, students, taxpayers, and elective officials have a stake in what happens behind ivy-covered walls and that they need increasingly to concern themselves with college and university policy. However, to encourage a strong presidency and the retinue that often results without further reflection is facile and risky.

The underlying problem with academic governance is that it has become fragmented. It is not simply that presidents and faculties deadlock over policies because of the separation of powers between them, but that other stakeholders (students, staff, alumni, and members of the community) are marginalized. The solution, then, requires a reexamination of the distribution of power within colleges and universities and of the systems of representation they employ. Rather than strong presidential establishments, the academy needs constitution builders.

An alternative way to conceptualize the college and university is as a town or city, with different constituencies. Academic departments and schools are natural "neighborhoods" and central administrations provide urban services. The largest of cities have found a strong unitary executive useful, but they are careful to institutionalize checks on executive power and on the power of those who act in the executive's name. Others have preferred a model where the chief executive officer is a professional administrator hired by a representative body, namely a city manager. However, for such a selection to be legitimate, the hiring board would need to be more representative than boards of trustees currently are.

Furthermore, the units represented on such a reconstituted board would need to be democratically organized, to include students, alumni, staff, and community as well as faculty "citizens." These "school" neighborhoods could have a degree of autonomy similar to that suggested by the responsibility-centered management model. This fiscal system has proved beneficial at a number of larger institutions, including the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania, providing schools control over their financial destinies, while at the same time holding them accountable to balance income (from tuition, grants, etc.) with costs. However, following the city analogy proposed here, units would also be responsible in a political sense to all stakeholders within their unit, not just to faculty and administrators. In this model, the President and Chief Educational Officer rule by providing subventions and services differentially to the schools, much as a mayor and city manager might do in distributing benefits to neighborhoods. They are the agents for the common good, tutored by the deliberations of a representative board.

During the waves of reform in the 1930's and 1960's, governance was always on the agenda, but the preferred resolution was participatory democracy. When town meetings overburdened the faculty, students, alumni, and staff who were asked to participate, these systems were dropped in favor of a separation of powers between administration and faculty. Student interest waned and the staff turned to unions; alumni and community stakeholders exercised limited power through their fund donations and boards of trustees. Thus campus dialogue over policy declined. To bring the academic community together, new forms of deliberative democracy are needed and urban governments may provide useful models. The advantage of such reform would be better governance and an opportunity for colleges and universities to fulfill their mission as a training ground for citizens, i.e., to become true republics in miniature.