What do we mean by leadership in an academic institution?

Turmoil in Academia

If you've been wondering why I haven't posted in a while the answer is that I have been embroiled in what amounts to palace intrigues in the hallowed halls of academia. Various of our administrators have come under increasing fire for missteps and questionable decisions that have led to a less than collegial atmosphere. These sorts of things do tend to be amplified by budgetary woes, which we have aplenty these days. The Washington state higher education budget has been slashed mercilessly by the legislature since the state revenues have been dropping off a cliff and higher ed seems to always be in the bulls eye for anyone taking aim at budget cutting to balance the situation.

Nevertheless, such crises situations is when the difference between leaders and mere managers becomes starkly clear.

I'd been thinking quite a lot about what leadership means in an academic institution. There has been a lot of rhetoric thrown around here, in particular but at many academic institutions in general, both proclaiming the value of leadership being provided (from the administrators) and complaints about the lack of leadership (from the troops). That might sound like the typical situation, and in many for-profit organizations that are limping along that is quite common (I worked for Fotomat Corp. in the days when it had passed its zenith and was headed into the ground, so I have witnessed this first hand). Since being in academia I have found that the same rhetoric pervades generally but at what seems to me to be a much lower volume level than I encountered it in commerce. I have often written the similarities off to the fact that people just need to boast and complain regardless of the institution. In academia there is less at stake in the sense that a misstep won't often lead to demise of the organization, whereas in commerce it could lead to disaster. So people in the commercial realm tend to make a little more noise than those in the academic realm. But I had assumed that the role of leadership was still essentially the same in both domains. That was a mistake on my part.

It is also a mistake made by most people I think. The lack of understanding the difference is partly to blame for the tendency to corporatize higher education. We now hire university presidents as if they were corporate CEOs paying them exorbitant salaries to attract the best 'leaders'. Sadly, we haven't taken the time to think about what leadership really entails in academia and how it might be fundamentally different from that in commercial enterprises (and even in other non-profit organizations).

Leadership Entails Followership

A basic problem in considering the meaning of leadership in an academic setting is that very few academics think of themselves as followers. Yet, by definition, leaders lead and followers follow that lead. I now suspect that the vast majority of academics think of themselves as independent contractors, especially if they have tenure. This attitude is not wrong, per se. Academics function best when they have academic freedom, but that also fosters a strong sense of independence from the possible dictates of administrators as well as from their colleagues and peers. The tradition of shared governance further complicates the issues when distinctions need to be made between managerial aspects versus general governance aspects. The former involve tactical and logistical decisions (where operational decisions are handled within each unit) that determine the general accomplishment of the educational and research missions. The latter involve strategic and tactical decisions specific to the nature of educational institutions. For example, the determination of the curriculum is generally focused within the faculty governing body (usually called the faculty senate). They determine what the course content and degree program course structures should be within each discipline. In a well working shared governance environment both faculty and administrators negotiate which degree programs will be operated and how the general administration of those programs is organized (e.g. schools and colleges). In more dysfunctional situations (which I'm beginning to think predominate these days) administrators take advantage of the fact that most faculty are junior (not tenured) and therefore reluctant to speak out, or the tenured faculty have gotten so ingrained with their own discipline that they literally don't understand much of the workings of these strategic issues. Too often I hear senior faculty proclaim (proudly!) that they are not concerned about such things, that their research and teaching are all they really care about.

So in academia one is hard pressed to find followers. How can a leader lead when there is no one to follow?

But, of course, academics do end up following the dictates of administrators and then resenting the fact. I'm not sure what motivates an academic to want to become an administrator in the first place. The general consensus seems to be that either they fell into it by circumstances and then just got stuck there, or, more often, found the academic rigor too much and decided that the next best thing was to get into management. Whatever the cause, there is a general perception that something happens to their brains, as if they were taken by the dark side of the Force. My observation is that this is not far from the truth, but what causes it is the cavalier attitude of faculty in wanting to be essentially isolated from governance issues, until, of course, their lives are impacted by decisions that came down. They wanted no part of it while the decision was being formulated, but they are very quick to complain afterward.

One of the things that happens to their brains is that once given a title with some attached authority they start to believe they are taking on the mantel of leadership. The term is thrown around very loosely as if it is interchangeable with the title of authority. To be fair, however, many faculty and staff develop expectations that just because someone has the title of provost or chancellor, or whatever, that they must be leaders, as if by definition. A better term for their roles would be coordinator. The issue, at base, is how good are they at coordinatorship?

The mission of academia has not really changed that much over many hundreds of years, though the interpretation of what education is for has. Basically you teach and do research and publish. That actually doesn't require a lot in the way of vision. Universities and colleges could generally be run like well oiled machines. Just turn the crank and out come the student products. If you don't need imagination and a vision of change you don't need leadership. You don't need followership. You just need coordinatorship.

When the Environment Changes

Leadership comes into play when something fundamental is changing in the environment and you face new threats and/or opportunities. Then the manager needs to become a strategic thinker and has to develop a vision of what could or needs to be the state of things in the future. That is when leadership and followership are needed. And the question is, what is going on in the environment of academia that would demand the emergence of leaders and followers?

As I mentioned above, our society is changing its interpretation of what education is for. Once higher education and liberal education were the same basic concept. As professional jobs like being lawyers and engineers became more complicated and required more schooling in the trades professional schools with the equivalence of a baccalaureate were created to fulfill this expanded need. Many professions started developing more theoretical models of what and why they did things the way they did. This lent the aura of academic and intellectual legitimacy to awarding baccalaureate degrees to the professions. Over the last hundred years or so, particularly in the western world, the notion of higher education was colonized by professional and quasi-professional schools. The result was a shift in thinking about college as no longer being a place where an elite few would go to learn how to think. But rather it became an extended job training requirement. Today when someone asks you why you would want to go to college the standard answer is 'to get a better job'. High school counselors tell students that they need to go to college to get a better job. Parents tell their children that they need to go to college to get a good job (a high paying job preferably). That is the social milieu for education today.

It is hard to put a value judgment on this attitude. But I will be the first to claim that there has been an unintended tradeoff in this milieu. The emphasis on learning a trade has shifted the energy from learning how to think (critically) to learning skills and domain-specific knowledge in the name of efficiency. That has resulted in a decline in emphasis on thinking skills as fundamental. Students are taught how to think about facts and relations, but only within the domain of specialization of their 'major'. My own call on this tradeoff is that it has damaged our humanity, possibly irrevocably.

As a result of these pressures, higher education has come increasingly under the gun to adapt to those larger societal changes. Hence the need for leadership. And hence the turn to CEO-like attributes for university presidents.

Personally I think this has been exactly the wrong response for higher ed. We are now deeply embroiled in pursuing the business model of managing universities and colleges and expecting our CEOs to be great marketers, pursuing customers (students, parents, donors, businesses, etc.) Higher education institutions have become competitive enterprises. And the emphasis on leadership modeled on corporate America has pervaded the milieu. We are in trouble.

Leadership in Academia

The environment is, indeed, changing. That cannot be denied. But not for the good, unfortunately.

Universities have been the bedrock of knowledge discovery and learning. This is for a really good reason as far as society is concerned. Frankly I find it pathetic that the smartest people on earth, supposedly, cannot sustain a deep self-reflection to see that there are fundamental principles to be stood for. Of course, if you are a long time reader you will know that my feelings are based on the discovery that smart does not equal wise. Today PhDs are awarded to all the smart people. It is too bad that we don't award those degrees for demonstration of wisdom.

Leadership in academia is becoming a nearly impossible endeavor. Smart people do not like to be followers. Wise people, on the other hand, are able to apprehend visions even when they are not directly parties to the formation of those visions. They have the good judgment to apply to decisions. The wise are not really followers, but participants when the leaders are perceived as wise. The pursuit of a goal becomes a shared effort.

Today, academic leaders are going to need to face the realities of a world in which wealth generation is on the decline. They will need to formulate visions of the future that are realistic in a shrinking energy world. They cannot continue to build visions based on history, a history in which energy flows were increasing and wealth was being expanded. The whole world has changed and the new reality poses new challenges to academic leaders, or those who would be leaders. Of course, what we will see is increasing focus on budget fights! Competition will more likely be the modus operandi.

What about followers? Academics are still very much focused on their disciplines without much concern for the changes in the environment that will ultimately impact their capacities to simply study their fields of expertise. They are essentially oblivious to those changes. Like our armies they are geared to fight yesterday's battles. The leaders of academia today have a daunting task ahead of them to get the academics to grasp the real vision of tomorrow. Education should be fought for. It should be a priority of humanity. But the education of the future takes on a very different face from what we are doing today. We must turn our efforts to teaching students how to think and be adaptive. The jobs we are currently so intent on training them for will most likely not exist ten years from now! They need to be learning fundamental thinking skills that are transferable to a wide range of endeavors, including (especially) the capacity to form self-sufficient communities capable of raising their own food. The new university model is the University of Noesis. The new curriculum is geared toward a completely different vision of what the world will need. This will be the challenge for real leaders in academia in the years ahead.

Too bad today's crop of academic 'leaders' don't get this.

Comments

[Shoudaknown]

I've been studying why everyone builds "ivory towers" with "academic walls" separating their little huddled clusters of ambitious people, separating them from everyone else... I think it's a natural pot hole in the fields of brain work, a work hazard handicapping nearly everyone .

We seem to arrange knowledge in a cellular fashion, and mistake it for reality! We can only see our own points of view, and then huddle together with others that give us a feeling of affirmation. It's locally quite productive but globally quite destructive. That’s particularly the case in an increasingly complex world with ever multiplying perspectives.

That's where the external reality seems to stick it's drippy nose under the tent flaps, to sneeze all over us, letting us know our little convenient clusters of self-agreement have gotten too disconnected from each other. We just completely lose track of the common external reality we are immersed in. Today we're immersed in a common external reality of ever exploding physical complexity, for example. That’s a remarkably simple and observable fact, but an external reality *in-between* our subjects, and I've yet to find a single ivory tower with gate keepers allowing the range of intriguing questions it raises in the door.

I have a short series of even shorter essays on how we make and are misled by packaging our ideas of reality in bubbles of self-agreement, cellular design with dangerous consequences, What wandering minds need to know" fyi.

[bob]

to (perceptually) summarize: the continued narrowing of expert status within established and influential communities (of thought/action) as well as the branching into new fields with few available capable of filling new 'expert' roles creates a sea of infighting regarding value perceived at all levels to enhance one's credibility and influence within meta-issues such as general finance (almost read as: lifestyle financing, rather than academic) of all the activities perceived to be under one's influence as a 'leader'...

somewhere along the way our vocabulary and reality divorced from each other and became highly distanced, without the alimony.

[George Mobus]

Shouldaknown (Phil),

Thanks for the notification. I've added your blog site to the blog roll on the left. Folks interested in these ideas should visit Synapse9 - Called Explorations..

Bob,

Perhaps we passed some threshold of complexity that then exceeds our mental capacities to integrate.

George