Wisconsin Public Television University Place Future of Public Higher Education  Governing Board Activism in the Public University  March 30, 2012 UP710   >> And 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. >> 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 the -- 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 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 -- 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 detail verbatim notes. So it makes it a fairly unusual data set with college presidents. Most study 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 fell 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 could -- a document and get it. 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 has 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 on to 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 And 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]