Needless to say, that created quite a stir in the campus community and public and exposed the presidential search as a manipulative, power-wielding maneuver by a board that by nature should be independent and open. In the meantime, steps have been taken to direct the board towards more independence with Silber leaving the board, term limits for the board set, a new chairman elected and conflict-of-interest rules for trustees scrutinized and tightened. These governance changes by the board of trustees (term limits, outside review, tightened conflict-of-interest rules, moving the office of the former president into another building, asking trustees who had resigned back on the board) have been favorably commented upon by the community and it seems that the crisis has brought together the academic, administrative and local community in an effort to insure trust and restore Boston University’s image. Talk of a ‘new era’ and a ‘new freedom’ on campus is tentative but on the rise. Yet are these changes sufficient? Are more changes needed and coming? The new chairman of the board Alan Leventhal seems to think so: “The board made the right decision that Dan Goldin not take the position. The important thing was that we used that as an important opportunity to move forward.” (Rimer).
ACCOUNTABILITY
The Role of the President and Board of Trustees
What had gone wrong? First of all, a look at Silber’s Board of Trustees reveals several unusual factors. One was its large size, which diluted the power of individuals or groups against Silber’s large group of supporters of whom many had served more than 20 years. Generally, there is no specific term limit, yet it is unusual for university trustees to serve such a long time. Then there were issues of conflict-of-interest. Even though trustees serve without pay there can be other ways to profit from being a board member. For example, Gerald Cassidy, a Washington lobbyist, who had secured millions of research dollars for the university received for his firm $806,218 in 2001 alone for services by Boston University. It is difficult to know whether this transaction was in the interest of Cassidy or the university. Another unorthodox fact was that Silber served on the 21-member presidential search committee – also a rather large size - and the committee’s chairman, Earle Cooley was a close ally of Silber. Looking at usual procedures for search committees, to have the former president as a member obviously creates problems in discussions of the university’s past and future and generally has been unheard of.
The role of the president is ambiguous and Richard Chait defines good leadership as “not [being] controlled by the center”. He emphasizes visionary organizations with “a strong internal culture” (Richard Chait 41) over visionary leaders who rule autocratically. The emphasis is on shared leadership with the president functioning as one part of a whole. The increasingly complex dynamics of organizational leadership “emphasizes that leadership involves interdependencies between roles and that roles change over time.” (Birnbaum 119). A good president often works behind the scenes and relies heavily on his ‘followers’. In higher education these followers are the faculty and staff who believe in the importance of what their institution does. Often they lead themselves, for example as department chairs, and know how to take initiative, have high performance standards and are effective as followers as well as leaders. Followers who take initiatives and effectively carry them out do much of the work at a university. Increased diversity of leadership that is dispersed leadership on an interdependent level that involves people who passionately pool ideas and create solutions is seen as a successful model in the academic environment.
Boston University’s outgoing president John Silber was a successful visionary who “transformed what had been a commuter school into the nation’s fourth-largest university” (Sara Rimer) yet his style was autocratic, which alienated a large part of the campus community. Thus, in his 25 years as president, Silber built Boston University into a nationally prominent institution yet over time consolidated the kind of power and influence that became synonymous for “the controlling center”. A president is in the ambiguous position of having to please various factions on opposing ends. Silber it seems was out of touch with his faculty and ignored the growing dissatisfaction of the campus community. He steered towards consolidating power within the business community represented by the Board of Trustees and disregarded his closest followers, the faculty. The notion that a board “should be the source of all wisdom” (Jacobson) has become an accepted norm and in the last decade, “the managerial ethos that has seeped over from business into higher education prefers a kind of hierarchy in decision making, which board trustees have accepted” (Jacobson). The Boston University crisis is a sign that the decision making process in the corporate world might not work in academic organizations who are people-processing (Julius) and a board out-of-touch with the people whose interests it is supposed to represent eventually fails.
The Role of the Faculty
The American Association of University Professors has found that faculty members have only marginal influence in presidential searches and the website the faculty of Boston University created records opinions and frustrations over a search where faculty members were not represented. Faculty claims they know better than any businessperson what the university is and needs and are calling for more inclusion as well as control in the search. The website created by Boston University’s faculty, the “Faculty Committee for the Future of Boston University” (FCFBU) has recently been transformed into “BU Watch”. It serves as a voice for alumni, staff, faculty, students and parents and its goals are to provide up-to-date information on the presidential search, the Board of Trustees especially concerning their fiduciary responsibility as well as the business dealings with trustee-related companies.
When looking at the role of the president, the role of the Board of Trustees is equally important since it is responsible for hiring and supervising a president. Boston University’s Board of Trustees has opened Pandora’s box resulting in a review of the relationship of the board and president by many academic institutions. At Auburn University, for example, the Board of Trustees appointed a president without faculty involvement nor a presidential search and the University Senate promptly voted to censure the board. Bates College, Bridgewater State College, University of South Carolina and Arizona State University on the other hand are examples where faculty was represented and consulted and thus felt more included in the process. Boston University’s crisis shows that a well-balanced search committee consisting of faculty, corporate board members, trustees, and alumni is a step towards a fair and competitive search.
INTERCONNECTIONS
A Look to the Future and Steps to Ensure Fair Searches
The case of Boston University has opened debates on many campuses about leadership issues, conflict-of-interest, faculty involvement and governance. The relationship between faculty and president as well as the board of trustees is crucial. Traditionally, there is little interaction between faculty and the trustees, a fact that has created major strains in campus communities. Even though faculty dissent does not necessarily result in immediate action, it is a warning sign for the community. When the faculty of Mississippi University for Women, for example, expressed no confidence in their leader in 1999, the board nevertheless renewed her contract after an investigation. She resigned in 2001. Another example is the no confidence vote of the faculty at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee towards their president in 1997 whom the board kept supporting despite the discontent. He left two years later. In 1989 and again in 1995 the faculty called for the resignation of their president at Adelphi University in New York. He eventually left when many of his supporting trustees were asked to resign. And in 1976 the faculty of Boston University had expressed their no confidence vote in Silber five years after he became president and tried to oust him in 1979 but the Board of Trustees stood by his outspoken and autocratic style until he resigned in 2003.
The lack of communication and understanding between the trustees and faculty seems to be a major deterrent for an institution to offer a meaningful and productive academic environment and working relationship. Old stereotypical conflicts between freedom of thought in academia and corporate values are persistent and boards tend to support a president in disregard of an elemental fact, namely that “leadership is defined not only by what leaders do but also and even more importantly by the ways in which potential followers think about leadership, interpret a leader’s behavior, and come over time to develop shared explanations for the causes and outcomes of ambiguous events” (Cohen 3).
Increasingly over the years, commercial search firms have been employed who help the committee look for the best candidate. The Bulletin of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) has posted an article on “How to Improve Presidential Searches.” The author points to the fact that due to substantial changes in the procedures and practices for presidential searches over the last two decades, commercial search firms are used by an estimated 85 to 90 percent of academic institutions. Weaknesses and strengths are listed in using an outside firm and tips are given for search committees. One such advice is to increase faculty involvement since faculty and staff members “not only have a major stake in the outcome, they also have institutional memory, knowledge, and the perspective necessary to make good choices” (Freed 4). Another very important step “to improve the process and lead to more apt selection of college presidents” (Freed 3) is to build in protection for search committee members against dominant members who tend to enlist supporters and polarize the committee.
A look at present presidential searches shows the increasing popularity of using the Web as a tool to inform the public and campus community. The growing trend to create special Web sites is not welcomed by all since it can create problems for candidates who do not want their home institution to know about their application and fear they might be seen as disloyal. Some think that losing secrecy can have the impact of losing good candidates. Opinions differ, however, and the example of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has proven to be very positive. Their website is interactive, posting the names of the search committee members and presidential applicants, asking the public for nominations and suggestions, listing the outline of the search plan and posting additional information as it becomes available.
Whether or not presidential searches should be secret, partially secret or public, in the case of Boston University it is safe to say that an open search could have lessened the disastrous and costly result.
CONCLUSION
What might be the most obvious outcome of the scandal is that it points to the significance and importance of an independent board and that recent scandals in the corporate world are reflected also in the academic world, which is not immune to the problems of cronyism and exaggerated ‘executive salaries’. There is a positive force taking shape presently that examines the various control mechanisms that have been bypassed by the board at Boston University. Looking at Julius’ “Rules and Tactics for the ‘Change-Oriented’”, building a committee to oversee a university’s political process is desirable in order to end confusion among faculty and administrators. The website of the faculty, which is open to the public, is a positive a step in the direction of interdependence. If administrators join and add information - thus interconnect - Boston University has a chance to ‘reform’ itself into an independent, well-run university.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Birnbaum, Robert. “The Dilemma of Presidential Leadership.” In American Higher
Education in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. P. Altbach, R. Berdahl, and P. Gumport. Baltimore, MD: UP Johns Hopkins, 1999. 323-344.
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The Boston Globe (various articles)
Chait, Richard. “Illusions of a Leadership.” In Change. January/February 1998. 39-41.
Cohen, Michael D. and James G. March. Leadership and Ambiguity. UP Harvard.
Boston, MA: 1974.
Free, DeBow. “How to Improve Presidential Searches” in AAHE Bulletin.com. March
2003.
Jacobson, Jennifer. “Professors on Presidential Search Committees.” The Chronicle of
Higher Education. July 31, 2002.
Julius, Daniel, Victor Baldridge and Jeffrey Pfeffer. “A Memo from Machiavelli.” In
The Journal of Higher Education. Vol. 70, No.2: March/April, 1999.
Rimer, Sara. “Boston University Trustees Regrouping After Turmoil Over Presidency.”
NY Times, April 16, 2004.
