Finding New Leaders: First Things First

A difficult but unavoidable issue for current leaders is the necessity of acknowledging that they might be part of the problem. The current system has developed leaders who can be inflexible and monolithic as they deal with the shifting function of higher education.

This should not be surprising, in light of the fact that today’s leaders come largely from traditional models.  They come from an era when books and professors were the repository and disseminators of knowledge.  Now Google, Wikipedia, and others will take over the ownership of knowledge and its distribution, unless higher education takes it back.

Today’s leaders need to reboot their credibility as leaders and thus reinvigorate institutions and ultimately brand higher education as a productive sector in society.  This is done by demonstrating the relevance of leaders.  It will entail branding, marketing and differentiating leadership, and then bringing that branding to institutions and ultimately to all of higher education.

New leadership, then, is likely to look significantly different from the current ilk.  First, it is not likely to come from the ranks of the traditional academic who came up through the ranks and functions as a fundraiser, focused largely on providing a public good.  This is because the societal context for education will be radically different going forward, with a new set of expectations for leaders that previous generations of leaders were not trained or prepared for.

Nor is new leadership likely to come from the spheres of business or politics, where many leaders are without a working knowledge of higher education.  To some these sources of new leaders appear to be a simple fix—bring in someone who understands business or the regulatory landscape and let them fix things.  In fact, some 20 per cent of current U.S. college presidents come from outside of academe.  But the U.S. has suffered through a number of disasters in this way, with leaders from technology, the food industry, and politics yielding disastrous results.

  

This is because “outsiders” often assume that if they can run a business or a government agency, they can run a university.  Their failures come from their inability to grasp the fact that business is not a one size fits all thing. Treating higher education as a true business enterprise is not the same as working in the business world from which they came.  In order to succeed, they need to understand how the principles with which they are conversant apply to higher education.  It is a matter of culture, not simply aptitude.

So let’s start from scratch.  More to come.