BY ERIC SANDGREN
The following was published as an op-ed column on December 27 in the Wisconsin State Journal and is reposted with permission. The original column may be found here. Eric Sandgren is Professor of Experimental Pathology at UW Madison and vice-president of the Wisconsin state conference of the AAUP.
The next University of Wisconsin System president should have a background in academia. But some members of the UW Board of Regents, including Michael Grebe, who chairs the search committee for a new president, aren’t convinced such experience is important.
Here’s why it matters:
The job of UW System president is described in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which was jointly developed by the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards. Here’s the description:
The president should be equally qualified to serve both as the executive officer of the governing board and as the chief academic officer of the institution and the faculty. The president’s dual role requires an ability to interpret to board and faculty the educational views and concepts of institutional government of the other. The president should have the confidence of the board and the faculty.
Think about that. How does one serve as the “chief academic officer” with little or no experience in academia? Ask yourself: Would you hire an academician to run a manufacturing or service industry? If you answered “no,” then neither should you hire in the other direction, for the same reasons.
If you answered “yes” — and certainly good leadership is a quality that crops up in more than one setting — then the person in question would need to follow two guidelines to be successful. First, the person would have to rely on the stakeholders in the organization to provide him or her with all the necessary context needed to make good decisions. No shooting from the hip. Second, the person would need to recognize that he or she was (in the academic context) appointed to be a “servant” of all stakeholders — the Board of Regents and academicians. This gets back to the role of president as interpreter-in-chief.
Individuals from outside academia — for example, William McRaven at the University of Texas — can be successful presidents if they follow those guidelines. But there have been disasters, including Tim Wolfe at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Sam Olens at Kennesaw State University. Less dramatic but still shaky outcomes came from hiring Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa and Janet Napolitano at the University of California System.
See for yourself online. For specific reasons why things can go wrong in cases like these, read “College Presidents Should Come from Academia” by Benjamin Ginsberg. Why would we, in our search, want to saddle UW System and its campuses with this risk?
Finally, let’s return to confidence. How in the world can students, staff, faculty and most administrators have any confidence in someone hired by a process that lacked their expert counsel during the detailed evaluation of each candidate’s qualifications? The current search strategy renders the selection illegitimate in the eyes of many who must answer to this person.
Moreover, the composition of the search committee is an acknowledgement that the UW Board of Regents doesn’t understand how a university system needs to be managed. Why should stakeholders trust that board to make a sound decision at the end of this search?
The Board of Regents should put missing stakeholders — including faculty — on the committee that’s searching for a new UW System president to replace Ray Cross. This would allow the System to move beyond the damaging approach the Regents created, and to hire a president who is qualified and will be more broadly accepted.
Same problem at a private institution in the Northwest which I cannot identify because critical faculty have already been targeted. A failed presidential search ended with the appointment of a CFO without academic credentials. As the university becomes more corporatized, our academic vision gets lost in the dust. Why would students and their parents want to pay for that?
Appreciate the author’s informed perspective. Thanks.