Challenges in Higher Education Leadership

Practical and Scholarly Solutions

James Soto Antony, Ana Mari Cauce, Donna E. Shalala, James Soto Antony, Ana Mari Cauce, Donna E. Shalala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317505211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this important resource, experienced higher education presidents and senior leaders come together with respected scholars to tackle the most important and timely issues facing leaders in colleges and universities today. Challenges in Higher Education Leadership advances critical leadership and management skills across a broad array of topics, including student learning, access and affordability, racism, fundraising, athletics, and new technology. Chapters strike a balance between theory and practical advice while promoting the notion that all leaders can learn lessons from one another that can be useful in their own specific contexts. This book poses strategic questions readers should answer, along with advice about how to effectively address today's challenges, providing leaders with the skills and perspectives necessary to respond to higher education students' needs.

CHAPTER 1
Avatars of Learning

The Heart and Purpose of Presidential Leadership

William Scott Green and Donna E. Shalala

[T]he essence of a university lies in its multiplicity of voices: those of its faculty, its students, its researchers, and its staff.

(Jonathan Cole¹)

University presidents now face difficulties of a kind unknown to the legendary figures of yesteryear. They have far less power than their predecessors.

(Derek Bok²)

University presidents encounter increasing and unprecedented challenges in their work. Issues such as diversity, fundraising, budgeting, fraternities, athletics, personnel, and sexual assault—to name some of the most obvious and recent—crowd their days, evenings, and weekends. Calls for accountability and efficiency in educational management and a persisting national discourse of doubt and skepticism about the value of college education³—including the concerns of legislators, government agencies, parents, about educational and vocational outcomes, and the unease of some commentators about universities’ responses to and management of recent student unrest or uncertainty about schools’ redressing problematic symbols and figures in their past⁴—add additional complexity to the position. All this underscores Jonathan Cole’s observation that universities are inherently multilingual. Trustees, faculty, staff, students, parents, community leaders, devotees of athletics, alumni, and legislators all have discrete concerns and interests. As those voices multiply and grow stronger, Derek Bok suggests, the president’s power is perhaps weaker than ever before. Unlike corporate CEOs, university presidents rarely, if ever, can simply and directly impose their will on an institution. Their leadership requires the voluntary consent of the university’s stakeholders. In addition, institutional pressures have intensified. A 2000 American Council on Education (ACE) survey of how university presidents use their time showed that “academic affairs ranked last in a set of six familiar types of activity.”⁵ A more recent ACE report suggests that “The most important institutional activities for presidents are budgeting, and financial management, strategic planning, board relations, and personnel.”⁶ A January 2015 survey of 400 presidents of four-year colleges found that “Two-thirds of college and university presidents feel that American higher education is going in the wrong direction.” Such issues as sufficient financing, student outcomes and preparation for employment, and federal government rankings of institutions are major concerns.⁷ The expanding range of problems presidents confront can be distracting and enervating. More important, it can obscure the fundamental purpose of American higher learning and its place at the core of presidential leadership.

American research university presidents are an incomparable group. Collectively, they can affect the character and destiny of our nation. Through their leadership, they can guide, inform, and influence the goals, values, capacities, skills, and worldviews of talented, accomplished, and ambitious young people who will build the nation’s and perhaps the world’s future. No other group in society plays this role.⁸

To understand the mantle of leadership that contemporary research university presidents carry requires clarity about the heart of the job. In our view, university presidents are uniquely responsible to viscerally understand and advance the fundamental aims of American higher learning: the creation of knowledge and the acquisition, assessment, and application of knowledge. Everything else they and their universities do supports these basic goals. This kind of American education aspires to provoke and intensify the use of reason to empirically and critically assess conventional verities; make sense of the strange, unfamiliar, and unexpected; identify and solve complex problems; and devise novel enhancements to the quality of life. For students to investigate and discover, to interrogate and create, to imagine and to innovate, they must be able to learn on their own and think and reason for themselves. A research-based education aims to strengthen these capacities.

Learning on your own and thinking for yourself are acts of will and purpose. People rarely do either by accident. To build their own institutions around these goals, presidents must be effective educational as well as administrative leaders of their campuses. A critical presidential calling is to articulate, promote, demonstrate, strengthen, and defend the foundational purpose and practices of American learning. To do this within their universities, presidents ineluctably become quintessential generalists, who understand and respect the legitimate interests and concerns of their institution’s multiple stakeholders but appraise and prioritize those interests and concerns in terms of the enduring aim of higher education. As personifications of their university and living symbols of its crucial mission, university presidents are avatars of learning.

It is customary at commencements for presidents to welcome new graduates to the “company of educated women and men.” But what does it mean to be educated? To apprehend the consequence of education, university constituencies need more than words. They need models. But—particularly for students—our models of, and for, learning are at best variable, at worst, non-existent. So much of K-12 education is driven by external requirements and examinations that American students rarely—if ever—experience the authentic autonomous learning that college represents and offers. And much of what they encounter in college centers around discrete disciplines, certificates, and other credentials rather than education comprehensively construed.

Distinctively and concretely, presidents can show their constituencies what it means to be educated. This is more than expressing values, though that is important. Rather, it entails walking the talk, persistently displaying the vitality and stakes in learning, and concomitantly resisting what Hunter Rawlings⁹ calls the “commodification” of education. Faculty fulfill this role but partially because they typically do not, and for good reasons cannot, see students’ learning whole. Their focus legitimately centers on one or two problems, areas, or fields. Likewise, deans, who necessarily rely on the faculty’s advice, tend to work on strengthening disciplines. Faculty senates focus more on governance issues than on student learning. Although student affairs professionals may shape and guide the community life in which students learn, they are largely removed from the university’s core academic work. Provosts typically devote their energy to faculty, budgetary, accreditation, and administrative matters. Uniquely, presidents inhabit and unite into common purpose the multiple and varied realms—particularly those of students and faculty—that comprise a complex university. Presidents can make concrete, visible, and personal the substance of education. They can incarnate learning.

For higher education to shape and propel an American future, university presidents increasingly will need to represent and advance the American educational values of unfettered inquiry and research; discovery, innovation, and creativity; authentic critical understanding; intellectual and artistic achievement; empirical, rational, and civil argument and assessment; humility about knowledge; and learning for its own sake as a means of human growth. We need presidents who model all aspects of learning and make them real for their constituencies.

Higher education is humanity’s primary enabler, our principal path to curing diseases, advancing technology, enhancing communication, creating decent communities, making transportation safer, and even predicting the weather. It also is the process through which we come to appreciate beauty; are inspired by creativity; understand our past; discern the consequences of our politics; comprehend, respect, and transcend difference; make sense of our emotions; and assess our values. By making the world and ourselves increasingly comprehensible and thereby manageable, higher education establishes a foundation for human growth, creativity, fulfillment, and progress. Nothing else we do affects our lives so comprehensively. Ignorance, unclarity, and confusion make us victims. Only through the hard work of learning can we demystify the world and “de-victimize” ourselves. We study, learn, and teach in order to understand how the world works and how we work. We study, learn, and teach in order not to be afraid of nature, or of one another, or of ourselves. This is what universities are for.

Presidents uniquely can bring the creation, acquisition, and application of knowledge alive for their varied constituencies through at least three kinds of activity: vigorously promoting the significance of basic research, regularly engaging in undergraduate teaching, and creating inclusive communities of learning.

THE PRIMACY OF RESEARCH

The values, practices, and outcomes of basic research undergird, inform, and animate all university learning. When learning stands still, understanding cannot advance. The PhD, in which “philosophy” holds its classical meaning of love of knowledge, represents not only expertise in a particular field—as do the J.D., M.D., Ed.D., D.N.P., and other professional degrees—but also discovery, innovation, creativity, and intellectual autonomy. Because American higher learning is research-based and research-driven, it values and is grounded in free inquiry, independent thinking, intellectual passion, and originality. Absent these virtues and the scholarship that manifests them, learning can lapse into mere training or ideology. Stephen Toulmin¹⁰ trenchantly observes that we humans are the only species that knows, and “is conscious” that it knows; to which we may add, and knows how it knows. This is why the capacity to discover on our own how the world works and how we work—to demystify and “de-victimize”—is a defining aim of an American education. These virtues sound abstract and idealistic, and they hardly are easy to measure and assess, but they are essential to a free modern society and a robust economy. Edmund Phelps explains that “It is mainly a culture protecting and inspiring individuality, imagination, understanding, and self-expression that drives a nation’s indigenous innovation.”¹¹ Research exhibits all these virtues and thus has practical benefits as well. As Nicholas Dirks points out, “Research skills and experience are likely to be of as much importance as critical reading, writing, and numeracy for any sustained career in rapidly expanding knowledge industries.”¹²

In a climate of increased privatization of higher education and intensified focus on instrumental and vocational outcomes, the centrality of basic research may be less obvious then it once was. Philip Altbach suggests that “There is no other institution that can undertake basic research, but the consensus that has supported university-based basic research has weakened.”¹³ Against this background, a key part of the president’s mission is to bring the value and meaning of research alive by justifying and protecting the freedom that research represents and requires, supporting the processes that safeguard quality in discovery and creativity, and translating the substance and importance of research to their various constituencies and stakeholders.

Research is an irreducible form of freedom. This is why it finds such a congenial home in the American educational setting. As Jonathan Cole notes:

The free expression of ideas lies at the heart of what the United States stands for and represents the potential triumph of democracy, where the value of discordant ideas can be presented, defended, accepted, or rejected on the basis of rational argument and evidence.¹⁴

Researchers cannot work if their questions are constrained or their results predetermined. Research is first and foremost a professional activity that requires an extensive knowledge base. The quality of research depends on the investigator’s ability to frame and pursue independent questions. Research is a way of learning; as such, it is intensely personal and demands diligence, persistence, and self-confidence, particularly in the face of the inevitable disappointment when an experiment or line of inquiry goes wrong or is badly received by peers. For professional and personal reasons, therefore, the freedom researchers need requires protection. A fundamental guarantor of the freedom essential to research is tenure.

In 1994 Congress prohibited mandatory retirement for tenured faculty as part of legislation against age discrimination. The decision was based in part on a 1991 National Research Council prediction that “‘At most colleges and universities, few tenured faculty would continue working past age 70 if mandatory retirement is eliminated.’”¹⁵ Greater longevity, the emergence of technology, and the pressures of the persistent economic downturn on universities have prompted ongoing discussions in the past several years about the value of tenure.¹⁶ Recent events¹⁷ and the dynamics of a presidential election¹⁸ have intensified the debate. In our experience, tenure matters for two reasons. The first and most familiar is that tenure protects faculty from corporate, governmental, administrative, donor, or public pressure to shape or inhibit their research and its outcomes. Tenure enables researchers to ask difficult, even provocative, questions and do what is necessary to find the answers, without fear of dismissal. Tenure serves a purpose inside the university as well. It protects the excellent from the good. By its nature, research is a competitive activity, and professors, like all other humans, are not immune to envy. Tenure diminishes the possibility that some faculty may constrain or ostracize the higher achievers in their group and thereby helps insure researchers’ ability to do their best work with minimal internal disruption. The public defense of tenure’s role in protecting intellectual freedom is an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Avatars of Learning: The Heart and Purpose of Presidential Leadership
• 2 Leading the Call for Improving Student Learning Goals and Outcomes
• 3 The Leadership Challenges for Higher Education’s Digital Future
• 4 Leading Higher Education Redesign
• 5 Access and Affordability in Selective, Private Non-Profit Colleges and Universities
• 6 Serving the Public Good by Utilizing Scientific Patents to Incentivize Economic Growth
• 7 Fundraising and the Future of Colleges and Universities: Lessons from Paul Quinn College
• 8 Racially Responsive Leadership: Addressing the Longstanding Problem of Racism in Higher Education Shaun R. Harper
• 9 The Evolving Social Contract for Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Serving the Public Good While Incentivizing Economic Growth
• 10 Improving the Experience of Women in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Professoriate: The Institutional Imperative for Building Inclusive Campus Communities
• 11 Queer-Spectrum and Trans-Spectrum People Out of the Shadows
• 12 Leading Toward an Alignment between Athletics and the Academic Mission
• Conclusion
• Index