Cashing chips at Dartmouth? Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his ...]]>

An expert on the college presidency weighs on on challenges facing presidents at Dartmouth and NYU ...

Cashing chips at Dartmouth? Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his back to the wall. What had happened and so early on his watch? A quickly brewing storm was gathering as a result of the college’s recent appointment as dean of the Tucker Foundation of a high-profile African bishop who until a very recent apparent change of heart, held highly public views not only failing to condemn but arguably no doubt condoning his home nation of Malawi’s criminalization of homosexuality.

Hanlon had very little choice confronted as he was with a looming disaster. Smartly, though having to cash in a lot of chips early in his presidency, he quickly moved to pull the plug on a failed senior administrative appointment. The historically esteemed Tucker Foundation where chaplains, religious life and community service leaders are to guide the “moral and spiritual” life of the whole of the Dartmouth community was going to have as its leader a man with hefty moral and spiritual baggage. Something had to be done.

Hanlon and Dartmouth confronted the reality that it would be nearly impossible for this imported bishop, James Tengatenga to have the stature required of the foundation’s mission let alone Dartmouth’s grander principles of decency, equity and fairness. Given his strong, outspoken negative opinions about gays and lesbians, notwithstanding Tengatenga’s recent protestations of a change of heart, it is impossible to fathom how he could fulfill the role of dean. Needless to say, it is unbelievably puzzling that his appointment got this far along the chain of a search process and formal offer to serve Dartmouth in such a position of religious, moral and spiritual leadership. But indeed, he was about to assume his office.

Freshly minted college presidents, as any new leaders, have honeymoons of indefinite duration. There is a pile of chips at the ready on their desks to be played in the face of inevitable crises and problems. Hanlon acted decisively. Some may applaud the courage of his stand, ready and willing to extend his honeymoon. He has expended chips, but they may turn out to be well spent.

However, Hanlon’s honeymoon could be significantly abbreviated if the wolves decrying political correctness come to the Hanover Plain to condemn his rescinding of the bishop’s appointment. They may say, “Here you go again,” now in the form of presidential action at a college marked over three decades as the epicenter of collegiate ideological battles fought over race, women’s, gay and lesbian and other minority rights and agendas.

But Hanlon cannot be worried about how his staunchest allies and his sternest critics will line up in degrees of support and condemnation. He had to act and he had to act then.

What would this appointment have looked like if it had gone forward? Tengatenga could have tried to remain silent about gays and homosexuality, taking a when in Rome do as the Romans do approach. He could have argued for his recent change of heart. But he still would have been rightly hounded to speak out about whether his new rhetoric was simply a guise to cover long believed and argued assertions for which he is so noted in his home country and in his church community there. He is certainly entitled to believe what he believes, to feel what he feels. But the extent to which he is entitled to do this anywhere, with any audience is the question. Certainly, he is free to return to Malawi and preach to his heart’s desire in favaor of criminalization of homosexuality—or against it, if that is his new position.

The problem for Dartmouth and Hanlon was that they could not have a leader with a questionable, even if more recently mixed batch of assertions about gays and lesbians in their community. If he remained, everything that the college asserts that it stands for would be continually hoisted on a petard as nothing more than mere hypocrisy.

Dartmouth may well be assailed for being politically correct as a result of Hanlon’s decisive action. There will be those who will cloak their criticism of the president’s stand as an infringement of the bishop’s academic freedom. There will be de rigueur allegations that Dartmouth is a bastion of ultra-liberal, progressive intolerance. This despite the counter dose of political incorrectness created by the Dartmouth Review, the independent rightwing campus newspaper that for decades has sought to instill in the public mind an alternate caricature of the college. But the notable reality is that Hanlon has exhibited courageous leadership, cutting is teeth as a new president in a state of affairs that had to be confronted. In the face of those who react by condemning him as a high priest of political correctness, Hanlon can justly wear the outlandish allegations as a badge of honor.

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Sexton under siege at NYU. While Hanlon confronted presidential challenges at the very outset of his tenure, John Sexton was deep into his time at New York University when he was forced to grapple with faculty upheaval.

Sexton was in the middle of the transition as president New York University (NYU) from appointment to inauguration when the September 11^th 2001 attacks rained a horror and debris over the university. There could be no more inauspicious moment to start a university presidency. Over a decade later and in his 12th year in office, Sexton confronts a rising tide of rancor from his faculty and its vote of no confidence in his leadership. What is to become of Sexton’s presidency? Have his grand, some argue overreaching, visions for NYU created a wake so large that the community can no longer follow his lead?

Sexton’s personal style is impossible to miss for anyone who meets him or even follows his life and career from afar. He can be summed up in a word: passion. He is passionate about life, about NYU, about the academy, about teaching and learning, and when he meets you, about you. He is a fascinatingly high-energy, enthusiastic and epic figure. The tales of his way of doing a presidency are legion. He teaches a remarkable load for a college president, in most semesters between one to three courses. There are other college presidents who teach but not to this degree. Sexton holds open office hours and town meetings on the campus with students and faculty. He dedicates many Saturdays to morning and afternoon sessions meeting individually and in groups with professors about their research, about the issues and problems they confront in teaching, and about who they are as people.

However, despite Sexton’s passion and dedication, yet maybe because of it, all is not well at NYU. If Sexton once looked like he brought about Camelot, harsh reactions from constituents rubbed the wrong way now cast a shadow on Sexton’s future. His plans for the university have always been grand, to his critics, grandiose. The result is a severe test of Sexton’s leadership; fearful faculty arguing that NYU’s over-the-top plans are fashioned by the grandiosity of its president.

The foremost contention is “Framework 2031,” a two-decade plan unveiled five years ago that sets the university’s future sails and now moves into its construction stage. It calls for a gigantic expansion of NYU’s footprint in its already-cramped confines in Greenwich Village that would spread even further to surrounding parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. This shape-shifting strategy already includes Sexton’s highly touted launch of not a mere satellite campus, but truly NYU in Abu Dhabi. To underscore his personal commitment to this venture and how much this piece of Middle East desert no different than NYU in Washington Park, Sexton flies there regularly to lead, to meet, to greet, and to teach courses. But this too only confirms his critics’ contention that he and the university are spread way beyond reality.

Represented by enough of its leaders to create a fuss, NYU faculty have heaved their bodies in Sexton’s path saying, “enough is enough.” The result: a no confidence vote by a large but not overwhelming majority. The hugger-in-chief, the open and engaging Sexton is now viewed as arrogant, detached at least from faculty interests, a CEO having to tolerate his minions, mounding up too many frequent-flyer miles. But in their actions, ironies pile on ironies. Throughout the landscape of our colleges and universities many, joined no doubt by significant numbers of NYU faculty, mourn the passing of the colossal college president of old. “Why can’t we have leaders like that?” is the all-too-frequent cry. We need activist presidents in- and outside the gates of the campus to move us, move our colleges to ever-greater heights and visibility, move our hearts, speak out in the public square.

Ironically John Sexton is one of those titanic figures. Of course, beware what you wish for. When we confront a contemporary giant, especially up close as the leader of our university, then we don’t want them. However, Sexton can take cold comfort because many of these larger-than-life presidents of yore—Nicholas Butler at Columbia, James Conant at Harvard, Robert Hutchins at Chicago--swooned over in many quarters today, were frequently reviled in their day.

Sexton too is a force to be reckoned, a 21st century university president who embraces the classical ideals of the academy, is willing to fight to preserve its best interests and principles and embraces the bully pulpit. He has relentlessly criticized political correctness. He insists on a university that can stand for the social and cultural discourse that we must have in a democracy. He decries the shouting inanities of the masses at the gates and on cable television, not to mention among our elected leaders. And he wants to be remembered as the president who built the NYU of today into what it will be in the future. That is a leader with large visions and intent on generating a legacy.

Sexton is a giant. Maybe with sufficient giant-killers around his feet, he will be brought down. However here the NYU faculty must be careful about what they wish for. They could be left with a much lesser light as Sexton’s successor.

Stephen J. Nelson is associate professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. His most recent book is Decades of Chaos and Revolution: Showdowns for College Presidents. A new work, College Presidents Reflect: Life In and Out of the Ivory Tower, will be released later this year

Most books on the college presidency are either autobiographies or prescriptions for success. We avoid autopsies, diagnoses of leadership collapses and college president resignations/terminations. Usually no one wants to ...]]>

Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It; Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Gerald B. Kauvar, and E. Grady Bogue; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2013.

Most books on the college presidency are either autobiographies or prescriptions for success. We avoid autopsies, diagnoses of leadership collapses and college president resignations/terminations. Usually no one wants to be the coroner or public health officer. This is too bad, because there are a few dozen serious presidential breakdowns each year.

This book summarizes 16 cases where the new president did not complete the initial contract, resigning or fired oftentimes by the second year. Two “derailed” presidents tell their side of the story, and there are three chapters on the lessons learned from administrative train wrecks.

The book delivers more than the subtitle promises, providing separate chapters with cases at community colleges, private liberal arts colleges, master’s degree universities and research universities. There is no one cause, but many instances of bad judgment by presidents and their boards, alienation of faculty or community leadership, and a few cases of overspending, inappropriate relationships, deception and ethical violations.

Trachtenberg knows the presidency. He was a dean and vice president for John Silber at Boston University, then president first of the University of Hartford and later of George Washington University (GW). He chairs the higher education search practice for Korn Ferry, and has written a candid article for NEJHE on the pitfalls facing search committees. This new volume repeats some of those useful insights. Gerald Kauvar has served as an assistant at GW and elsewhere. Grady Bogue has been chancellor of two southern universities. Several University of Tennessee doctoral students completed relevant analyses of short-term presidencies.

There were too many examples of difficulties created by corporate board members who favored top-down leadership in contrast to an open and participatory leadership style. To make a university “run like a business” runs the risk of sneering at shared governance, tenure and a strong role for faculty members and deans who provide the intellectual content that makes colleges and universities great. Those attitudes can be fatal for a college president.

The remedies include smaller search committees, carefully planned transitions and board support including annual evaluations of presidents, and the use of dashboards with the most important data displayed for all to see. This book should be read by presidential search committees and purchased by vice presidents worried about their president’s success. It provides great cases for discussion in higher education leadership programs. Higher education organizations in Washington D.C., especially the Association of Governing Boards, should recommend this book to members. Trachtenberg remains positive about trustees who share their wisdom and wealth and can be even more supportive of campus values and of new presidents.

Joseph M. Cronin is director of the college consulting company EDVISORS and former president of Bentley University.

Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies associate director Paul E. Harrington moved to Philadelphia-based Drexel University. Harrington has been a frequent contributor to NEJHE and to NEBHE events

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Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., will also leave leave Boston for Philly, departing as dean of Boston College's Lynch School of Education to become ...]]>

Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies associate director Paul E. Harrington moved to Philadelphia-based Drexel University. Harrington has been a frequent contributor to NEJHE and to NEBHE events

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Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., will also leave leave Boston for Philly, departing as dean of Boston College's Lynch School of Education to become the 27th president of Saint Joseph's University, starting May 18.

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Jamshed Bharucha, provost and senior vice president of Tufts University, was elected the 12th president of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, effective July 1, succeeding George Campell Jr.

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Bryant University hired Robert Shea as the college's director of faculty development. Shea previously served as director of the Office of Student Learning, Outcomes Assessment and Accreditation and assistant director of the Instructional Development Program at the University of Rhode Island.

Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., announced he will be step down as the 31st president of the College of the Holy Cross once a successor is in place.

A computer scientist with an interest in the intersection of technology and ethics, McFarland was named president of the Worcester, Mass., Jesuit college in 2000. Before that, ...]]>

Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., announced he will be step down as the 31st president of the College of the Holy Cross once a successor is in place.

A computer scientist with an interest in the intersection of technology and ethics, McFarland was named president of the Worcester, Mass., Jesuit college in 2000. Before that, he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash.

Recent Posts: Books Holy Cross etc_SU99

When a university, or any organization, and its recruiting firm set out to find a new leader, they usually begin and end in a delusion. They declare their intention to find the best person for the job and, once all the sorting and sifting are done, they announce that they have indeed found the best ...]]>

When a university, or any organization, and its recruiting firm set out to find a new leader, they usually begin and end in a delusion. They declare their intention to find the best person for the job and, once all the sorting and sifting are done, they announce that they have indeed found the best person for the job. The odds are they have done no such thing—and, more to the point, there is no way of knowing how good the last man or woman left standing after the interrogations, checking, and hazing really is. That is something the client and possibly the recruiter learn much later.

It would be more reasonable to look for—and then announce that we have found—a very good person, an excellent fit, a president or dean of wonderful potential. Of course, this sounds like hedging because, also of course, it is. It would be even better to say that we have found the best person available to us, we think. No one will want to say this. Everyone should. I know something about this.

When I applied for the presidency of The George Washington University, I was the committee’s second choice. The first turned them down, so I got the job. By their standards, I was not the best, but evidently the best available—or willing. No one knows or ever will know if over 19 years, I did the best job anyone could have done for GWU at that time. I grew the endowment and didn’t sink the ship. Considering the multiple presidents who have come and gone in recent years at Trinity College in Hartford and the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, not to mention the roster of distinguished administrators who lasted only a year or two as presidents at Cornell, Case Western Reserve, Colgate and the University of Hawaii, the GWU committee may conclude they chose well. They should also consider that they were lucky.

Luck is not the product of reason or of academic acuity. Yet it seems to me that, given the process by which new leaders in the Academy are chosen and the skewed, if not fully delusional, expectations erected around the process, getting the right person is the happenstance of a spin of the wheel of fortune. Let me offer some evidence.

Item A: A candidate’s curriculum vitæ is more or less a tombstone, a list of past accomplishments, while the client and the recruiter are looking toward the institution’s future. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to demur that a list of eminent publications and lectures does not reveal how the candidate will go about fundraising or making peace between warring factions of faculty or dealing with stupefyingly drunken students. Even a candidate who has had experience as a senior administrator has been the executor, or at times the executioner, of a policy, not the creator of the policy. Yet the past is assumed to certify the future.

Item B: The process of winnowing candidates through the phases of broad search, screening, and final selection is by no means objective or guaranteed to be rational. Consider some examples. Through advertising, collegial recommendations, self-nomination and active recruitment, a pool of some 100 candidates materializes. Let us agree that 50 of them had no business applying for the job and are easy to dispose of. Then what? I was sitting in a screening session when a credible candidate’s papers were brought up. A member of the committee told us that a friend of his who works on the same campus as the candidate thinks he’s rather nasty and temperamental—and out he went. On hearsay, mind you, on a report no one else could substantiate and, worse, no one cared to substantiate. The reason for this is the bonding that goes on in such committees. We are doing this together, we want to be collegial, so better to accept hearsay than provoke an argument. Bonding has just trumped reason and equity.

Item C: Still in the screening phase, a member of the committee says we should disregard a candidate with admirable credentials because she has not attached a list of her publications. No matter that she is a chemist, and no one on the committee is a chemist and could reasonably judge the value of her scholarship. In this case, reason prevailed; a list of publications was produced—and no one read any of them or had anything to say on the subject.

Item D: The members of the committee are earnest and put in long hours evaluating the candidates on paper and in person. But they probably have never done anything like this before and will probably never do it again. They are amateurs, however well-meaning. (This effect is multiplied, or perhaps caricatured, when students, who have never worked, are given full-voice membership on the committee.) Yet they do not see themselves as amateurs—or perhaps adjuncts—and in many cases believe they are acting rationally and professionally while suspecting the recruiting firm of not really understanding what is at stake in the search. Recruiters like Korn/Ferry, where I am a partner, have various questions that are useful to ask from the earliest stages of the search through the final interviews: They have been devised and tested to reveal the qualities the search committee has said it wants or the absence of them. Academics, by and large, distrust such instruments, however, sensing a whiff of the social sciences when what they want is humanism, even though these two categories are artificial and do not speak to the value or the disability of the questionnaires. I confess I often had such suspicions.

Item E: The idea of a committee itself is subject to question. If the object is to find the best person and it turns out we haven’t, the blame—if there is any reason to blame and I’m not sure there is—is diffused, just as a bookie diffuses his risk by laying off bets. No one failed, but maybe the committee was laboring under impossibly contradictory instructions. The members of the committee may also agree that they want to find the best person, but their understandings of the best may have little in common. Some want a weak president, others a strong one, still others someone who will simply leave them alone or, most interesting of all, someone who will leave them alone and raise heaps of money for them and their programs. The larger the committee, the more abundant the agendas and the deeper the confusion.

Item F: The composition of a committee is likely to produce the right demographic optics, but not necessarily adequate experience in hiring. If the different academic disciplines, administrators, trustees, staff, students, alumni and neighbors all must be represented, the representation will look broad, but quite probably be shallow. This is akin to identity politics, not expertise.

Item G: Here I am repeating something I have said before about the interviewing phase. A candidate may be interviewed seriatim by various members of the committee or face a group. He or she may also give a presentation or several presentations to different campus constituencies. Whatever the permutation, the result is rather formal, fairly brief, and both the candidate and the committee want to make a good impression. They are on dating manners, and no one wants to rub anyone the wrong way. Yet a candidate—once chosen, installed and launched as a president or senior administrator—is going to be rubbed the wrong way every other day. Knowing how someone reacts to irritants is important information and could be revealed by a longer sojourn on campus rather than a parachute interview.

Enough evidence, and anyway I am sure that anyone who has been on either side of a search can add more. I hope I have made my case that the way we choose new leaders is full of unreasonable behavior in the face of unreasonable expectations of the best while the most likely and perfectly satisfactory outcome of a search is to find the best person available at the time to the institution—that is, the person who somehow meets the consensus expectation of the various members of the search committee, no matter how well or badly the search is conducted. This consensus must disregard (and usually doesn’t even contemplate) the strong possibility that the person best suited to the job never applied. Or the person the committee considered the best did not want the job, as it was in my case at GWU.

This is no cause for melancholy. First, an opening for a president or dean at a successful university will always attract good applicants and, at an unsuccessful one, at least a handful of buccaneers and high-wire artists willing to go up against the odds. Talent is available.

Second, before the first ad appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the institution needs to confer with the recruitment firm it has hired, give the recruiter a frank assessment of the school’s condition and aspirations, then listen to what these outsiders—who have no stake and own no turf—suggest. I emphasize this point not merely because I have gone over to the other side, but no less because someone outside the family is more likely to be objective and untrammeled by habit, prejudice or agenda. For this function alone, recruiters can earn their fee.

Third, trying to make the search committee broadly representative, as I have just characterized it, is looking for trouble. I propose engaging members of the university who have had experience in hiring and in interviewing. A committee with a disproportionate number of engineers or poets, but more experience in personnel, is preferable to a committee of the inexperienced that represents every imaginable constituency.

Fourth, and this seems obvious, the committee should be small.

Fifth, the search committee must keep in mind that it will finally be hiring a person it needs to trust, who is going to be the institution’s leader, but will also be a colleague, even if primus inter pares. They should not expect to find someone who will walk on water before breakfast—or whom they can walk all over at will. Sixth, if all goes well, the new leader will be around for at least 10 years. In my view, hiring a president for a shorter period is wasteful and will turn out to be disruptive. With this in mind, the committee members need to understand that the person they choose may outlast them on campus and will be dealing with realities—some of them unpleasant—that no one has foreseen or could.

Nothing here is complex or hard to grasp, and still it’s a tall order. Members of the search committee and the recruitment firm need to shed the Panglossian notion that they will find the best of all possible presidents for this best of all possible universities: They probably won’t. With a more rational process in hand, the work of finding the new leader should flow more smoothly and with greater mental comfort for everyone involved if only because the unreasonable expectations of the perfect, or the best, arising out of a necessarily imperfect activity can be put aside. The search will still be a great deal of work and perhaps never be completely satisfactory—some things are inevitable—but it will be better than it would have been otherwise. And if done well and right, there is a bonus: The members of the committee will not have to do it again.

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Stephen J. Trachtenberg is president emeritus of The George Washington University and former president of the University of Hartford, now works with Korn/Ferry International.