Why Academic Leadership is Important

The question of whether a new President of the University of North Carolina system should or should not have an academic is currently getting attention. A recent survey of faculty across the system ranked leadership experience in education/public higher education most highly, but also placed significant emphasis on holding the terminal degree and on the person selected having a personal history of teaching and scholarship as essential. Not unrelated, the faculty selected supporting academic freedom/open-minded inquiry as first in essential philosophies, and fostering shared governance second.

People outside of the academic world often do not understand why faculty desire such leadership. Universities, particularly large public ones, resemble to many eyes complex businesses and the trend in higher education seems to be moving toward hiring people with business experience and savvy to run them.

In many cases, such decisions prove successful. For example, there is no reason why a university system (or even a single university) should not leverage its buying power, work more comprehensively to develop and maintain donors, manage its endowment more effectively, and streamline some of its practices.

But universities differ from businesses in important ways that also should carry value for decision makers (often Boards of Trustees or Boards of Governors).

First, universities exist to create, maintain, and transmit knowledge. A person with experience in doing this work understands from the inside what it takes to generate the conditions to make such efforts possible. It is more than laboratories, classrooms, and research dollars. How do you, for instance, make it clear to someone with an eye on the bottom line that faculty need time away from their normal duties to read, to mull ideas, to interact with colleagues at conferences, to be in libraries or archives or the field (sometimes thousands of miles away) in order to perform at the highest level? How do you explain that the process of learning is not a constant chain of production in terms of writing or grants, but a journey that often moves in fits and starts and demands resources to support its blind avenues and seemingly unproductive outcomes? How can you make clear that packing more students in a section sometimes detracts from the ability of faculty to create an energized learning environment and that a lack of equipment and other resources can often detract from a student's education?

Second, a CEO may have to answer to a board and, at least in some cases, to stockholders and government regulators. At least on paper, the head of a university system or a university also reports primarily to a board. A public university, however, must also be accountable to the citizens its serves, the governments that fund it, the local communities where it sits, the students it enrolls, and the alumni it graduates, among others. Moreover, while a clear chain of command might appear to exist, shared governance means that there are complex and often complicated interactions with various entities on a campus to establish policies and procedures. Even though it might not be efficient, it does ideally promote the best possible outcome and get buy-in from the people most directly affected.

Finally, holding the terminal degree and having an employment history in higher education doing scholarship and teaching means that the person in the top job possesses experience in the "industry" where they do their work. It would be hard to run a computer software company if you did not know how to write code; it would be difficult to run a financial firm without any experience in the field. The assumption that anyone can do education trivializes the enterprise. Like any other area of expertise, higher education has its own ins and outs and a person who knows that world brings a wealth of experience and understanding to the task that cannot easily be replicated by someone from the outside.

The best candidate should prevail in any search. A preference for an "insider," however, says that at least one of the groups feeling the most direct impact of such a choice ideally wants a person in place with experience in the core mission of any university.