BY ROBERT A. SCOTT The length of service for college and university presidents seems to be getting shorter and shorter. Almost weekly, and in some weeks more often, we read about a campus president being fired or put on leave. There are books on failed presidencies and books on leadership. Why are there failures? What…
BY HENNING SCHROEDER Woody Allen got it right, years before leadership seminars became the latest craze in higher education. In the 1971 movie Bananas his character Fielding Mellish goes on a rant after he gets dumped by his girlfriend, “Can you believe that? She says I’m not leader enough for her—who is she looking for,…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), a Washington-based private college presidents association serving more than 700 colleges, universities, and organizations, recently released an important report on what private college presidents are thinking. Chris Quintana described its implications in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “What’s on the Mind of the Private-College President?…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Higher education is misunderstood and struggling financially, but the majority of college and university presidents are increasingly confident that their institutions are financially stable. These seemingly contradictions were found in Inside Higher Education’s annual survey of 706 campus leaders. Let’s set aside the obvious political concerns among presidents about the Trump…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL One of the most unfortunate results of the overheated political rhetoric that consumed the presidential election, transition, and early days of the Trump presidency has been the unwillingness of either side to see the opportunity for reasoned intellectual debate with those with whom they disagree and perhaps don’t even respect. Protesters…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Thirty years ago, we all understood what the term “culture wars” meant. It was about Mapplethorpe vs. Helms and teaching dead white men vs. revisionist and black history. There were lines. Whichever side you were on, you knew where you stood. The battle lines changed and have morphed into something quite…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In September 2012, I began contributing to the national conversation about higher education by tackling the concept of leadership in one of my first blogs for the Huffington Post. In that first article, I suggested, “the job has evolved, but the national imperative for presidents to lead as well as govern remains…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Here we go again. Late last month, the board of trustees fired Suffolk University’s president, Margaret McKenna, for cause. She is the fifth president in five years to depart the school. The six-month saga had more thrills, spills, and missteps than the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and has become something…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL American higher education’s operational model is based on outmoded — and some (myself included) would argue, unsustainable — revenue and expense assumptions. The premise is that student-generated revenues will expand to offset increasing operational expenses of the institutions. However, the decline in per-student net tuition revenues and the backlash against higher…
It is almost impossible for those who live outside the academy to understand and appreciate how American colleges and universities govern themselves. Basically, college governance has three partners – the faculty, the administration, and the trustees. It’s commonly thought to be a kind of “three-leg” stool with each leg required to be strong enough to…