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Sara Goldrick-Rab: I want to
note that in addition to the
roster of organizations that
have sponsored the conference
overall, this particular speaker
is sponsored by the university's
Lectures Committee, and EPS was
very grateful for that support.
Michael Bastedo is an associate
professor in the Center of the
Study of Higher and
Post-Secondary Education
at the University of Michigan.
He's also an affiliated faculty
member in the Organizational
Studies and the Center for
European Studies at the European
Union Center of Excellence.
In 2005-2006, he was a Fulbright
Scholar at the Center for Higher
Education Policy Studies in the
Netherlands, and he was also an
associate for the National
Center for Public Policy in
Higher Education.
He's written widely on topics of
great importance in higher
education, including some of my
favorite work on stratification
of low income students across
institutions and over time in a
recent article called Running in
Place, and some terrific work
about the impact and influence
of those US News & World Report
rankings which we're all so
familiar with.
His respondent today, the
discussant, is Harry Peterson,
who retired as President of
Western State College
of Colorado in 2002.
He has focused throughout his
administrative career on
organizational change and
external relations.
And earlier in his career he was
an administrator at UW Green Bay
when it opened in 1969 and
became a four-year university.
And he's reported to three
chancellors at UW Madison
including Donna Shalala.
And he's been quite active in
Wisconsin in the last several
years, and several of us are
aware that he was influential in
the discussions last year about
the potential separation of
Madison from the state.
So we're going to be looking
forward to his comments.
So thanks to both of you, and
I'll hand it off to Michael.
Michael Bastedo: Hi,
everybody, good afternoon.
So, I'm going to switch, I guess
we're switching topics a little
bit to the governance side of
things.
And this is really about what it
means to be a trustee of a
public university.
What are the qualities that we
expect from those people.
Who are they.
I don't have the descriptives on
that for this presentation, but
mostly what I want to revisit
is, one, earlier in my career I
talked about governing board
activism.
I want to revisit that
discussion just briefly to talk
about what are some things that
are identified as common
problems.
I eventually transition into
talking more about trustee
independence and why I think
that's a bigger issue than
activism, and what are some of
the dynamics around trustee
independence.
I want to talk a little bit
about what are some management
strategies by which we handle
this because I think the policy
strategies are really
ineffective.
So I'll talk a little bit about
that.
And I'm really interested in
having an open discussion about
how some of these things apply
here in Wisconsin, dynamics that
you see here, and I'm really
interested in hearing Harry's
comments as well so that we can
have a rich discussion.
Okay, so I'm going to start with
a quote.
This is a former president of
the University of Michigan, and
this is what he heard from one
of his Regents.
"What you need to understand,
Jim, is that we are part-time
hunters, and you are
a full-time deer."
I think it's fairly
self-explanatory.
[LAUGHTER]
But, for a lot of presidents,
this is how they feel
in response to their governing
boards and to their trustees.
And I think they shouldn't feel
this way.
I don't think, actually, it's
the most effective way to feel
about things.
I'll talk a little bit about
that, but it is common to think
that way.
So going to go over a little bit
about what the overview of today
is going to be.
So let me talk about that.
Okay, so the conventional wisdom
about governing board activism
is that activism is a problem of
individual trustees.
So, some of you who are older,
I bet and have never heard of
this person, but if you're a
little bit older you remember a
woman named Candace de Russy.
She was a trustee of the SUNY
system, and she sort of declared
herself to be the first activist
trustee.
I'm sorry, you can't hear?
For Wisconsin Public
Television.
Gotcha.
I'm sorry,
I'm an active speaker.
[LAUGHTER]
So, she saw herself as activist,
and it was really unclear
what that meant.
So, what is activism?
Is it about being republican?
Is it about wanting to turn
higher education into a
business?
Is is about conservative or
anti-intellectual?
Is it about the transition of
ideas from business firms at a
time when they were becoming
more active in the governance of
firms?
And so, I was interested in
looking at that.
And the argument that I make is
that activism isn't so
interesting as an individual
phenomenon.
It's actually really hard to
figure out an individual level
from people who talk in the
media about what their interests
are and what they're trying to
advocate.
It's a lot more interesting as
an organizational phenomenon.
So I did a case study of a board
that many people saw as being
and activist board, which was in
Massachusetts.
And what I argue there, and you
can see in this table here, is
that a traditional board was
extremely regulatory.
It was focused on making sure
that policies were complied
with.
And the amount of actual new
policy making was fairly low.
And that's what people were
comfortable with.
And boards that became more
activist were not simply doing a
lot more policies, but they were
also organizing themselves
differently.
They were organizing the staff
more like a political agency,
more like the office of someone
for a federal legislature than
they were a traditional state
agency.
And that's also what was going
on here.
So I think when you want to
understand governing board
activism.
It's much more interesting to
think of it as an organizational
phenomenon than as a problem of
individuals.
Also, individuals aren't
necessarily so powerful on a
board.
They have one vote.
They may be loud, Candace de
Russy was very loud, but they
may not be powerful.
They could be quite alienated.
Most good trustees actually
don't talk to the media, by the
way, as individuals because
they're not supposed to.
So when someone actually talks
for themselves about the
university, that actually is a
problem in and of itself.
So the effects of governing
board activism, however, are not
so neutral, and so what I argue
in a later piece is that the
governing board activism that I
witnessed resulted in a much
more differentiated and
stratified institution of higher
education and that they were
drawing upon values that were
things that we accept fairly
broadly.
So the California master plan is
a fairly powerful idea in the
structure of higher education
systems.
And they were taking the ideas
that are very master plan-like
ideas and taking them to their
logical conclusion.
And that's what made people
uncomfortable.
It was okay to have this plan
that was embedded in a law that
decided how people could be
admitted, what proportion would
be admitted to certain colleges,
but when those policies become
much more elaborated, that's
when people got much more
uncomfortable.
So the policy that fell into
this that were related to more
vertical, horizontal, and
internal stratification are up
on the screen.
I'm not going to talk about them
all in depth.
But they all happened within a
five-year period.
So this was much more clearly a
set of organizational dynamics
going on here.
You have the change in the
organizational structure and
operations of the office itself,
and you have a change in the
organizing and promulgation of
policies that result from that.
And the result is more
differentiation of
stratification.
And in other kinds of talks
I talk a lot about
the stratification is itself
a policy idea.
Most of us think of
stratification as a sociological
idea that we study in sociology
class.
It's like this is what happens
to students.
It is also a policy idea,
meaning it's an ideal that
policymakers want to promote
because that's what they see as
efficient and effective.
So it's not just an isolated
idea from a sociology class.
So, I wanted a wider scope,
though.
I wanted to know more about,
outside of this individual case
study, what is going on
nationally and how can I broaden
this idea, not from just
governing board activism, but
about what are some broader
issues of trustee independence.
And so I had an opportunity to
do that.
There was a project supported by
the Mellon Foundation and the
Carnegie Corporation that
brought in presidents from all
around the country to have
workshops in fairly fabulous
locations, like Aspen, to get
them to come, mostly, and to
talk about governance issues.
And they recruited people from
NASULGC and AAC&U, which are the
organizations for land grants
and state comprehensive
colleges.
But they really didn't like
meeting with each other very
much.
They wanted to meet separately
because they viewed each other
as having separate status.
So the presidents who were
talking here are the heads of
systems and they are the heads
of individual campus from major
research one universities, but
also comprehensive colleges.
So if we were talking about this
state, it could be from the
Wisconsin system or the
chancellor at Wisconsin Madison,
or it could be from Mankato
State.
But they're all public
institutions.
By the way, it's not necessarily
them by the way.
I'm not telling you who they are
but just giving you a sense if
you only knew Wisconsin higher
ed.
Okay, so it turns out I was able
to get really great data for
this.
There were four two-day
institutes where people talked
pretty much non-stop about
issues of governing board
politics.
And I was able to take notes on
all of that, including
essentially verbatim transcripts
of what happened.
I was able collect action plans
from them.
So they were supposed to create
a plan of what they were going
to do in response to all this
discussion.
I was able to conduct
interviews.
So there were 59 college
presidents, and I was able to
subsequently interview 35 of
them, some of them a couple of
times.
And I was able to take really
good detailed verbatim notes.
So it makes it a fairly unusual
data set with college
presidents.
Most studies with college
presidents are about 10,
or 12 if you're lucky.
I was really lucky to be able to
have access to almost 60 of them
at once.
So, what I argue in this work is
that the problems of trustee
independence are often conveyed
as what I would call using the
organization as a weapon.
This comes from work of Philip
Selznick in sociology that many
people are not that aware of
because they're more aware of
his work about TVA and the
grassroots and his work on law,
but he actually has this really
cool book about how the
Bolsheviks used party
organization to take over
certain organizations in the
Russian state and make them part
of the platform of the Bolshevik
party.
And I think that's how a lot of
people see certain kinds of
governing board activism going
on in problems of trustee
independence.
And that does happen.
There are people who are trying
to do that.
They're trying to subvert
governing boards to their own
ends.
And these become the most
prominent cases of these.
But I also argue that it's much
more common to see a process of
what I call moral seduction.
And that's a very common human
cognitive process by which we
convince ourselves that the
things we are doing are moral
even when they are not, and that
the things we're doing,
specifically in this context,
the things that we're doing are
in the best interest in the
university even though they are
actually in the best interest of
another group.
And it turns out that humans
being, some of you, I don't know
if anyone in the room has read
Dan Kahneman's recent book where
he reviews his research on this
over the past 30 or 40 years,
but there's a lot of good
evidence on this that I won't
get to in detail about, but I'd
be happy to talk about.
So what I argue is that there's
very clear sources and dynamics
going on here when you're
talking about boards.
That there are very specific
dynamics I'll go through one by
one that have political
loyalties about conflicts of
interest, about domination by
expert competencies, cliques,
and person agendas.
And each one of these comes from
being embedded in a particular
external interest, and they were
often appointed to the board
because they were embedded in
this external interest.
So it's not as if the board is
being victimized by an
unintended consequence of them
being embedded in this interest.
They're actually appointed
because of that.
So when you appoint a business
person to the board, you're
appointing them because they
have experience being in a firm,
they have experience with a
large organization that will be
helpful to you.
If you appoint someone who is in
a political party, you're
appointing them because they
gave to the governor's campaign,
or you're appointing them
because they have a certain set
of loyalties that the governor
wants you to express on the
board.
So it's not unintentional.
But it's not necessarily, again,
to the extent of what occurs to
the extent of which was
intended.
And I give you there are some
sources of the moral seduction
there, that people who feel this
way, so if they feel that they
are engaging in excess loyalty
to a political party, they view
that they have a superior
ideology than the people who are
not there.
Or when there's domination by
expert competency, they view
that they have better knowledge
and information than other
people.
So these are the sorts of
justifications that they make in
their head to make decisions
that are otherwise hard for
people to understand on the
outside.
So, for example, with political
loyalties I'll give you some
quotes here for each one.
The governor said to me, "I got
to reward these people who got
me here.
I know they're not competent,
but I will try to balance those
people out with people who are."
Another person: "We have a
high profile governor.
He wants to control the
universities.
When he came in he asked all of
the trustees to resign.
It's not selection based on
ability or predisposition, it's
loyalty to him."
I ended up spending a lot of
my time with the group who is in
power because one of the things
that is happening when governors
are increasingly political in
their choices of trustees is
that there are divided boards
because governors change.
So they don't always have
control.
They can't appoint the whole
board at once.
There are staggered terms.
So they appoint two and then
they put another two and then
they change out governorships.
And then that person switches
party and they change two more
people, and then you end up with
these really divided, hostile
boards.
That is really toxic.
We need to try to avoid that
happening.
Another example is conflicts of
interest.
A lot of people talk about
politics as conflicts of
interest.
I'm trying to talk about that a
little bit separately which are
very clearly financial
conflicts.
I have eight board members, and
I have five with conflicts of
interest.
That's really bad, by the way.
One of the trustees, after she
left the legislature, lead the
Board of Realtors, a driving
force behind reforming
government behind the price of
government model.
We are compromised by dealing
with a trustee who is a strong
supporter of that process.
I have a union rep who was named
by the governor recently.
Prior to being the union rep, he
was the person who oversaw our
prevailing wage law for all of
the unions, and he has removed
himself from overseeing that
process because, of course, the
university has to negotiate with
unions.
The governor's chief of staff
slams the governor as a trustee
of the university, and right now
one of the trustees is running
the campaign for the mayor.
This is one of, probably, the
worst case scenarios of
different conflicts of interest.
We also see cliques happening on
boards.
This board is dominated by two
attorneys, and no one has the
courage to stand up to them.
It is a tyranny of a minority.
Two other Regents control the
academic affairs committee and
refuse to approve any academic
programs over the past three
years just to spite them.
Or another president, some board
members are out there on their
own doing deals.
I have trustees I can't tell
important matters because
immediately they'll go out and
tell 10 more trustees.
I tried to do a weekly memo but
then they decided I couldn't do
that because it was
discoverable.
Discoverable meaning someone
get the document.
Domination by expert
competencies means that there
are people on the board who are
appointed because they're
lawyers or CEO, financial
people, who have particular
expertise, and then they use
that to dominate that issue on
the board.
So when you've got a cohesive
board and you've got people with
expertise or perceived
expertise, there's a danger of
giving up some of the board's
authority because of that
perceived expertise.
You could have a board where all
the competencies are in one
person or they could be spread
out among the members.
If your board chair is the only
person who has these
competencies, then you have an
aristocracy that has to be
controlled.
And then, finally, we have
personal agendas from people.
The university is doing
outstandingly on nearly every
measure but one board member is
focused entirely on himself, has
no allegiance to anyone but
himself, and one-fifth have
allegiance to the board chair
who has been abusive and
occasionally tries to act in the
role of the president.
The second, my board chair
changes every year.
Each person comes on with his or
her own agenda, and, by god, I'm
going to do it.
Some people are good but they
have purely personal agendas.
So, if we're seeing all of these
things happen on boards, and
they are fairly common if not
entirely pervasive, I should say
that, then what are the ways in
which and effective president
can handle these situations?
So, they talked a lot about a
number of things, let's see,
I am about 20 minutes in,
so I can talk a little bit about
these, that effective presidents
described.
And it's a little bit hard to
tease out from the data, but
it's a little bit hard to assign
qualitative data to
effectiveness.
I don't necessarily have
exactly, I don't have presidents
telling me exactly what they're
performance is.
I could tell you which one of
them were fired, and I could
talk to you about the ones who
were fired and how they talked.
And they talked differently
about how they managed these
things.
Presidents who I would describe
as ineffective talked in a
language of victimization.
They talked in a language of
these are the things that are
happening to me by my bad
trustees.
The ones who were more effective
had very similar things cropping
up on their boards, but they had
ways to handle them, and these
are some of the ways that they
described.
The first was a strategy of
socialization that they were
very active about every time a
trustee came on to the board,
they would engage in a very
explicit process to get them to
understand the nature of the
university.
They didn't just assume that
because they started to sit down
on the university board that
they knew everything that they
needed to know.
And, particularly, they didn't
necessarily have the values that
they wanted them to have.
They didn't understand the
nature of the academic
institution and what that
institution's mission was, what
it really valued.
And so they tried explicitly
to educate new trustees.
So the first quote is:
"I'd argue that some of the most
effective board members
are ex or former CEOs.
They have lots of
responsibility, they understand
dealing with complex issues,
they're very supportive of us,
but they don't understand why
you can't just tell people to do
certain things.
It have taken time where I can
get every board member to the
side in their own city, and I
can talk about the academic
culture.
It takes a lot to figure out
the learning styles of these
kinds of board members,
but they are often the most
supportive of me."
Which actually crops up again
later.
I want to talk about that.
On a public board as opposed to
a private board, who is the
keeper of the gate that
traditions the culture?
When you have a board that is
constantly changing and
politically appointed it's who
is remembering why we are here
and what the institution is
really about.
A second strategy was
communication.
Communication is really
complicated on a board because
of open meetings laws and about
discoverability.
So many presidents would love to
have conversations with trustees
outside of a board meeting, and
there are laws in states that
prevent that.
It depends how strict the law
is.
I don't know what it is here.
But there are laws in which it
is illegal for you to talk as a
president to two trustees at the
same time on the phone.
So that would be among the most
strict.
Others are not as strict.
But often they have to come up
with creative communications
strategies in order to help to
educate board members.
So one person says, "The thing
I've struggled with is that as
presidency become more complex
with labor unrest and all these
sorts of things, communication
become a more difficult process,
made all the more difficult with
open meetings laws which means
one on one phone calls,
and such."
By the way, public boards can
be fairly large.
If you're talking about one on
one phone calls, you could be
talking about calling 20-30
people about a single issue.
You can imagine how busy a
president's day is, how much
time that that would take to
actually do, which is part of
one of the problems of
communication.
Second thing, it's not so much
our communication with the board
and the board chair but the way
communication is handled with
board members.
I think it is important that the
kind of communication is okayed
by the board chair, and the
board doesn't just go out to a
vice president or an admissions
officer.
So it's not just about the
actual communication that's
happening, but controlling the
communication and where it comes
from inside of the organization,
which is very important to
presidents.
Another strategy is delegation.
Some presidents know how to
delegate particular problems to
board chairs, and other
presidents don't.
And you have to know exactly how
to handle those kinds of
situations.
Some presidents who feel more
victimized, I think, don't feel
like they have trust with the
board chair, and that's a very
crucial relationship to be able
to build.
So this person says, "I
testified in front of the House
Finance Committee.
My two board members were there.
They had never done that.
One of my members is part of the
Republican Central Committee
which is the party in my state,
and he liked the attention.
I've asked them to identify
members of the legislature to
work with, but some of the
members aren't all that
politically connected even
though they are politically
appointed.
They are happy to help, but I
have to tell them how to do
that, which okay by me because
then I have a little bit more
control over what they're doing.
You know how that is."
So, they're learning how to
delegate issues to board members
and use them as a resource as
opposed to seeing them as a
source of constraint.
So, how you view that is fairly
important.
So, they also focus, another
issue with boards is about
focusing them on the right kinds
of issues.
So if you ask most leaders what
the biggest problem with their
board is, they would say
micromanagement.
So the issue with a board
president is being able to focus
them on bigger strategic issues
that are at a higher level that
they can actually use the
resources they have on the board
to a more effective end, rather
than having them micromanage
particular small things that are
happening on the campus that
they might be more inherently
interested in, for example,
athletics.
So, there are some things that a
particular board member has an
issue with, like athletics, and
they want to micromanage that
issue, and the idea is to get
them to focus on a strategic
issue.
So I think, we'll just use the
first quote here, "I see loss of
independence and focus as
symptomatic of the board not
knowing what issues the board
has to face.
Political associations become
stronger than they should be and
the smaller the community the
worse this is."
So, they connect this
strategic focus not just to the
issue themselves, but to the
internal dynamics of the board
when you don't focus them on
strategy.
So it operates a little bit
differently than people's
intuition is.
They don't see the connection
between strategy and the
personal dynamics.
There's a couple others I'm
going to skip over to stay on
time.
So, I'd like to talk about some
of the propositions that come
from this that help to lead to
some understandings about board
dynamics that are common
questions.
And the one is that the ability
to manage boards strategically
is a key predict factor in
presidential effectiveness.
It's a significant predictor of
tenure pay and performance.
I would love to be able to study
this and be able to get good
evidence and data about this
because we don't really have it
right now, but I think that some
of this data helps to support
that proposition.
The second is that presidents
manage political dynamics in
part to maintain a degree of
managerial autonomy which may
limit trustee influence both
positive and negative.
And this is one of the main
concerns of ACTA, which are the
American Council of Trustees and
Alumni, which is sort of
building itself to be the
conservative alternative to the
AGB, which is the association of
governing boards.
And one of the things they say
is that AGB trains presidents to
train trustees not to engage in
problems, not to engage in
decision making.
And there is some degree of
truth to that.
Presidents really want to
maintain managerial autonomy.
And they manage boards to affect
that.
And, finally, managing the
present trustee leads the
presidents to want certain kinds
of trustees over others.
So, the CEOs and the lawyers who
sit on these boards often seem
to be there because they are
gubernatorial appointees, and
that's what the governor wants
because these are the people
that contribute to him or her.
Presidents want these people
too.
There are common interests here
because they see those people as
being more supportive and less
questioning.
And so I think it's a mistake
just to see this as part of the
appointment process.
I think when presidents have the
opportunity to influence these
appointments, they also support
these kinds of people being on
boards, and that leads to very
similar kinds of people being on
boards.
There's a homogeneity to the
kind of people who are on
boards, and it's not just
unidirectional in terms of the
source of that.
So, there are policy problems
related to this.
People want to have more
effective boards.
So they want to find policy
solutions to make them more
effective.
So, one of the ones that's
brought up, I'll bring up to you
here, is merit screening, and
Harry told me he has some
experience with that in
Minnesota.
So I'll be interested to hear
what he has to say.
Merit screening would be using a
nonpartisan board to screen the
candidates for trusteeships in
that state, and then the
governor's office, when they
appoint the board members, could
select only from someone who is
a member of those things who has
been screened by the merit
committee.
And that can be useful.
I'm in favor of it.
It's not a bad idea.
But moral seduction is a human
cognitive process that can't be
screened out by a committee.
So they can screen for lots of
different kinds of things, but
they can't screen out the things
that are common to all of us,
which is our ability to justify
our immoral actions.
And so you would hope that they
could find people who might be
less likely to do this, but it's
not a panacea for all of the
problems that influence trustee
independence.
Another one is sunshine laws.
So the opening laws that I
talked about earlier about
communication.
I think a lot of people thought
these would be a kind of
panacea, that they would help to
create transparency on boards,
and that would create more
efficient, effective, and
accountable boards.
I don't think that has really
been true, and there's actually
starting to be some good
evidence about why that might
be.
So, there was a study about,
it's experimental, and it's
about individuals disclosing
their conflicts of interest in a
certain corporation.
And what they found through that
study is that individuals who
disclose their conflicts of
interest are more likely to
engage in negative or immoral
actions after disclosure than
those who did not disclose.
The ones who didn't disclose
had though?
Yes, they all have the same
issue.
Okay.
But the ones who disclose
feel this kind of absolution
through the process of
disclosure.
And so, subsequently, they're
more likely, and there's
actually some evidence of this
from New Jersey.
New Jersey was trying to get
people to disclose these
conflict and then had a huge
problem with trustee
independence where these people
had all kinds of issues related
to that.
Disclosure is not going to
necessarily solve the problem.
It actually could make it worse.
I don't think policy solutions
so far have been the answer.
I think practice solutions are
the answer.
I think it's about being able to
help train trustees not to see
themselves as the victim of
their trustees.
Did I say that right?
Presidents not to see themselves
as victims of their trustees.
And to teach them about very
specific strategies they can use
to be more effective
communicators with their boards,
and that includes a number of
the things I talked about here
today.
So, if you're interested in any
of this work, you can feel free
to download it from my website
or to send me an email.
And we'll switch over to Harry.
Down here or...
Whichever you prefer.
Okay, fine.
I'll just stay here.
I don't need to turn anything on
here?
Okay.
Well, Michael's done a very good
job at giving an oversight into
an area in which I've been a
practitioner for many years, and
I found it quite interesting he
mentioned New Jersey and
disclosure.
I think probably the governor
that was requesting disclosure
in New Jersey was the former
governor Jon Corzine.
[LAUGHTER]
You're absolutely right.
Who may well be going to jail
as we speak.
My background, Sara mentioned it
briefly, just a couple of
highlights that I think have
informed my work in this area.
One is I have lobbied in four
states.
I did for the UW Madison for
eight years, and then several
other states I have been in the
situation of explaining the
higher education enterprise
to a whole variety of people
with a variety of backgrounds.
My most intimate and trying
experience with working with
boards was in Minnesota when I
was the deputy chancellor that
helped bring together three
systems of higher education: the
community colleges, the
technical colleges, and the
state universities, and what
seemed like a good idea at the
time, and we've all said that
about our own lives, was that we
would get some of these
experienced board members from
the other boards to come and be
board members for the new
integrated board.
Well, not surprising, in
retrospect those board members
all believed that the way they
were doing it was the right way.
And so it was extremely
difficult, extremely
contentious.
Higher education has never been
nor should it ever be separate
from the larger society.
It is a part of it.
And I quote, for those of you
who confine your interest to
higher education, A. Bartlett
Giamatti, for those of you
who have broader interests,
including baseball, we call him
Bart Giamatti because he was
also the former commissioner of
baseball and he was the
president of Yale.
But Bart Giamatti said, "I've
always been amused by people who
thought the university was some
kind of a cloister.
That's the myth academics
promote in order to keep people
away from them.
I've said over and over the
university is not a sanctuary
for the rest of society but a
tributary to it because the
worst thing that can happen is
that you begin to believe your
own mythology."
But nonetheless, boards are
designed, really, to provide a
buffer between the immediate day
to day political activities that
go on around us in the
legislature and to free up
people in higher education so
that they can do their work.
In my view, the greatest threat
to politicizing this university
came not from the outside, but
from the inside.
A year ago we were talking about
this very thing, in fact, in
this room.
When then-Chancellor Martin,
together with Governor Scott
Walker, agreed on a proposal to
break away the UW Madison from
the UW system which was in
itself a contentious and
difficult issue to deal with,
but what got less attention was
the fact that included in that
proposal was the creation of a
new board for the UW Madison.
21 members, 11 of whom would be
appointed by the governor.
Our current terms are seven
years.
Under this proposal, the terms
would be three years, the
shortest of any board terms in
the US that I've been able to
find.
In addition, there would be no
senate confirmation.
They would go straight onto the
board.
So if that proposal had passed,
and it really did not come close
to passing, today we would be
governed, this institution would
be run independently from the
rest of the system with 11
people appointed by our current
governor without senate
confirmation.
I should add with some dismay,
that last spring our faculty
senate endorsed this proposal
at the UW Madison.
It shouldn't be a surprise to us
that boards are increasingly
contentious.
This is what's happening
throughout our cultural and
political life in general.
There used to be a consensus
about funding public higher
education among the part of
liberals and conservatives.
Liberals believe in access and
social mobility.
Conservatives believe in a
meritocracy and in higher
education's role in implementing
it.
And, of course, I think
everybody in this room believes
in both of those things.
They're really not incompatible.
They're a different focus.
So, the democrats focus on
social benefits from higher
education and access, especially
recently.
Conservatives have been focusing
on the individual benefit to the
people who undertake higher
education become college
graduates.
It should not come as a surprise
to us that what they are doing,
board members are doing, they
believe is for the common and
the public good, what Michael
called moral seduction.
I would argue that board members
not only come to believe that as
board members they are pursuing
the common good, they believe
that before they became board
members, just like the rest of
us, and they believe they are
doing the right thing.
And we shouldn't assume that
people who do not share our
values are evil or hypocrites or
worse.
They may simply view the world
differently than we do.
There's another reason why
higher education is having a
tough time and increasingly
contentious boards.
Increasingly, state government,
of which higher education is a
part, is increasingly responsive
to governors.
There used to be a lot of boards
in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
There are fewer and fewer of
them now.
The only significant board
remaining in Wisconsin is the
Department of Natural Resources.
That board, for the last 10
years, has not had the authority
to appoint their CEO, their
secretary.
So higher education is
increasingly standing alone.
And this makes an enormous
difference.
In addition, there are few real
public citizens in any given
state who can command the
respect of people in that state
and that other leaders in that
state and speak for them, which
is what you would hope that
board members would do.
Obviously, another reason is
that the increase competition
for dollars has brought out the
worst in a great many people and
it makes it difficult.
So, we live in difficult times.
Michael suggested several things
for presidents to do with their
boards which can be effective.
I agree with all of those, and I
will emphasize one and add a few
others.
He mentioned communications.
Board members do better when
they communicate, I mean
presidents do better when they
communicate with their boards
all of the time, even when
they're not needing to ask the
board to make a decision on
something but other matters as
well.
This establishes an atmosphere
of trust, and it makes it more
easy to do their job because if
you do not do that and something
comes up and the board members
did not know if you withheld
information, this starts a cycle
of mistrust and this is very bad
for board members and for the
universities.
Michael mentioned conflict of
interest among board members.
It is also extremely important
that university presidents
behave themselves in a very
ethical way and avoid conflicts
of interest themselves.
And, alas, as we know of causal
reading the Chronicle, this is
not always the case.
He talked, also, about boards
developing cliques within the
board.
Presidents often get willing or
unwilling seduced into being
part of a clique.
That can be quite constructive.
The clique that is dominate
today may not be dominate
tomorrow.
The role of education is of
great importance for presidents.
Presidents should think of
themselves as educators even
though they are no longer on the
faculty.
Every occasion that I used I
talked with presidents about
what the higher education
enterprise was about because it
was so dramatically different
from their lives.
Every time I would bring, in my
small college, a group of
faculty to be up for tenure and
I was recommending that they
receive tenure from the board, I
would always say this is the
class of '96, we started out
with 10 faculty members that
fall, three left.
They were having struggles in
the classroom.
Two, it became clear, they
weren't going to get tenure and
they left.
So I'm down to four, but don't
think that all of the people who
came in that class of '96 is
being suggested for tenure
because it's not true.
Another thing that presidents
should do is never focus on
themselves.
Always try to focus on the
institution.
Try to not make it personal.
And then I found that focusing
on the larger goal is always a
good idea, whatever job that we
have.
A little bit about Wisconsin in
context.
A lot of states are
traditionally tumultuous and
difficult politically.
They tend to be diverse
politically, and some of them
are undergoing rapid demographic
changes upsetting the status
quo.
Even if one party is in control
of those states, sometimes the
conflicts within that party can
be as difficult and as
destructive as the conflicts
between that party.
A couple of states were a lot
has gone on in higher education
in the last 10 years or so are
Massachusetts and Florida.
Gordon Davies, a very respected
person in higher education, now
retired, when he became the
director of the West Virginia
Commission on Higher Education
he was taken aside and he was
told in West Virginia everything
is political except politics,
that's personal.
[LAUGHTER]
So one of the strengths of
Wisconsin over the last 40 years
has been its relative calm,
at least until last year, but
there is something, I think,
important that we can learn
from this and reflect on it.
When Professor Bill Cronon
complained about the Wisconsin
legislature and a national group
that was trying to influence
legislation in Wisconsin,
legislators asked for copies of
his emails.
This was unusual in Wisconsin,
perhaps unprecedented.
It got a great deal of national
attention both in Wisconsin and
elsewhere.
What did not get very much
attention was a resolution
passed by the Board of Regents
after that incident in firm
support of academic freedom.
If it was reported in the press,
it was very brief and I did not
see it.
It received no attention because
it was not news.
It was not news because the
University of Wisconsin has
consistently supported academic
freedom.
It was done so in the last
40 years since merger, and its
predecessor board going back to
the early 20th century did the
same thing in Wisconsin.
While there have been board
members in Wisconsin who,
other board members, and perhaps
university administrators if
they could speak candidly and
publicly, and they can't
but they speak privately to me,
they would call difficult.
Those have generally been in the
minority.
There's been a core that keeps
the enterprise going.
There have been frustrations on
the part of board members for
their inability to make changes
with 17 other board members with
whom they are serving.
One board member, in fact, in
the 1980s published a book after
his tenure entitled Turning a >
Battleship With My Bare Hands,
which I suggested, I think now
the statue of limitations has
expired, I can tell you that at
that time I suggested to my
friends that we might call this,
Sinking a Battleship
With My Bare Hands.
Professor Bastedo and I have
identified some ways that
presidents can work with
difficult boards.
I will conclude with a couple of
ideas on how presidents in
higher education can be helped
in the way board members are
chosen and the lengths of their
term.
There are a variety of ways that
board members are chosen.
Some are elected, as in
Michigan.
Some are appointed by the
governor, some with legislative
confirmation, some appointed
directly.
The most common route is
nomination by the governor and
confirmation by the senate.
That's how we do it in
Wisconsin.
Seven-year terms.
When governors make appointments
knowing their nominees will have
to receive public scrutiny
though legislative hearings,
they're more apt to appoint
obviously competent individuals
because these people will
receive public scrutiny at
hearings, confirmation hearings,
and the press will be there.
That is helpful not only to
university presidents, but the
universities those presidents
lead.
It is also helpful to have
relatively long terms.
In Wisconsin the terms are seven
years.
This assures some continuity and
it helps make it much more
likely that board members will
have several years of service
before they assume leadership
positions.
And then to the consternation at
times of the governors, by the
time they do, their appointees
have become acculturated into
understanding of what higher
education is all about.
They tend to support things like
tenure and other things that are
hard to explain.
So the time the governor gets to
"take over" the board, he has
lost the slavish support of some
of the board members he
appointed early.
So, Wisconsin is very fortunate
in this regard, and I need to
add obviously we're very
unfortunate with regard to our
funding.
It's been devastating.
We have lost over a half a
billion dollars in funding
in the last 10 years
under two different governors
of two different parties.
Thank you.
I will take questions
and talk to one another.
[APPLAUSE]