Reframing Academic Leadership. Lee G. Bolman
were not followed. The failure was catastrophic, the coverup deadly. But the causes were dismayingly ordinary. Regardless of country or sector, leaders routinely try to protect themselves and their organizations by hiding problems in hopes of fixing them before anyone notices. They prioritize their own comfort and interests over those of their constituents and communities. They act as if they must choose between competing needs without recognizing there are options that address both. Officials in Wuhan unleashed a global disaster while trying to avoid local embarrassment. They failed to anticipate that their decisions would be catastrophic for themselves, their constituents, the globe, and, as one piece of the collateral damage, institutions of higher education.
Here's the rub: the same dynamics that produced the coverup in Wuhan – and allowed so many to deny the meaning and implications of Black Lives Matter for so long – are also endemic in academic leadership. In a later chapter on ethics (Chapter 14), we catalog examples of leaders in colleges and universities following their own versions of the Wuhan playbook. Even as we write in late 2020, academic leaders are wrestling with how to balance the financial health and even the survival of their institutions against possible health risks to faculty, staff, students, families, and local communities. At least implicitly, circumstances are asking them to put a price on human life.
Nearly 400,000 Covid‐19 infections and more than 90 college employee and student deaths were recorded across 1,800 institutions in 2020 (Ivory, Gebeloff, and Mervosh, 2020). Is this reason to celebrate the success of classroom safety measures? Are 90 deaths an acceptable sacrifice? Contact tracing and genetic analysis now confirm that community spread from students to their surrounding communities led to a higher death rate for older adults in college towns than elsewhere (Ivory, Gebeloff, and Mervosh, 2020). How far beyond campus borders do institutional responsibilities for health and welfare extend? How many constituent and community deaths should administrators risk in order to save their college and their stewardship of it? Sobering – and a strong incentive to clarify values and transcend either/or thinking.
These are indeed extraordinary times, and we have done our best to produce a volume that acknowledges the uncertainty and the possibilities in them. Returning from an unprecedented global calamity and seeking to build together a more just world, while overwhelming and disequilibrating, hold seeds for learning, innovation, and change. The world will go on and so will most – although probably not all – of our academic institutions. The wise and thoughtful will seize this transformational moment to recalibrate and to come back stronger and better. Louis Pasteur got it right: chance favors the prepared mind. Our goal for this new edition of Reframing Academic Leadership is the development of confident leaders who are prepared for the myriad opportunities and challenges they will face.
Threads of both continuity and change are woven throughout higher education's history. They continue as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, magnified by the extraordinary turning point of Covid‐19. Both are central themes in this second edition of Reframing Academic Leadership. So is our belief in the vital role of academic leaders for bringing fresh thinking to perennial concerns like access, affordability, and quality.
Interviewed in the midst of the pandemic, E. Gordon Gee – who has held more university presidencies than any other American – noted that when he began his first presidency in 1981, surveys found that 95 percent of the population believed higher education was important. Now, said Gee, it's less than 50 percent, “even though higher education is the most important element in our culture and our economy right now” (Carlson & Friga, 2020). When Covid‐19 threatened health and lives around the globe, political leaders turned to university‐educated scientists, physicians, professors, and campus‐based research centers and labs to help them understand and manage what was happening and what could be done about it. When they ignored or downplayed that expertise, they paid a price in lives and livelihoods lost. The pandemic is a particularly dramatic example of the extraordinary pace of change in our society and around the world that has put new pressures on colleges and universities to adapt and to deliver – and of the value when they do. History reminds us that innovation and change in response to radically shifting circumstances have always been key to the sector's survival and growth. Our goal in this revision is to support academic leaders as they find ways to do that again.
We are writing for an audience of readers who care deeply about colleges and universities, appreciate their strengths and imperfections, and are committed to making them better. We have worked to provide a research‐based yet pragmatic approach to academic leadership. This new volume reflects changes in higher education, in the world, and in our own understandings. Additions, revisions, and occasional excisions all contribute to a book that aims to offer guidance for today and beyond. This second edition includes four new chapters – one each on ethics and on strategy and governance, and two on understanding the changing higher education landscape. Meanwhile, many ideas and some of the cases that we used in the first edition return because they are as relevant and instructive as ever. Throughout, the emphasis is on encouraging academic leaders to understand the unique context in which they work and to build their skills and confidence so as to lead well in response to it.
There are many roads to careers in academic administration. Some leaders in student affairs, advancement, business, operations, and other nonfaculty posts bring extensive training in their fields and in higher education administration. Other administrators are scholars and educators who hope for impact in a leadership role or who have chosen a different path in response to disappointment with the pace and focus of faculty life or to an honest assessment of their interests and strengths. Then there are the many accidental leaders for whom an administrative career just seems to happen. A nudge from somewhere combines with a willingness to serve – to fill an unanticipated administrative gap, to take one's turn as a division chair, to use one's talents to salvage a program or launch a needed project. Before long, service turns into more than a temporary assignment. Many an interim becomes permanent after a year or so on the job. This sets in motion a series of choices, consequences, and rewards that can turn an initial administrative foray into a longer journey down a road with no turning back: years away from teaching require retooling for the classroom, and scholarship once put on hold gets ever harder to restart as fields march forward.
The administrative world is different from faculty life, and it offers many rewards. Academic leadership is a highly social endeavor. The collaboration and partnerships needed to get things done foster a sense of community, connection, and shared purpose often missing in the isolation of the classroom, research desk, or laboratory. Much as we may complain, a calendar filled with meetings and events has its charms. Administrative life offers a pace, rhythm, and structure that focus one's time and energy. Deadlines and academic calendars encourage discipline and closure. And there is deep excitement and satisfaction in seeing tangible and measurable outcomes from one's efforts. A new degree program, dormitory, or sports complex has a durability and sense of completeness that are not always as easy to find in teaching and research.
But along with its benefits, academic leadership brings challenges and even heartaches, particularly in times of political controversy, public doubts, technological changes, demographic shifts, mission drift, and financial crisis. In the pandemic of 2020, administrators had to solve problems they had never encountered under extraordinary pressures of time and resources. Mistakes get made in decision‐making under conditions of uncertainty and emergency, and many campuses will find in after‐action reviews that some things could have been done better. But even under the best of conditions, higher education administration is demanding work that tests the mind, soul, and stamina of all who attempt it. We know because we've been there, and we have worked with many others over the years to help them learn to do it better. We have studied the factors that make the work so difficult, written about them, and benefited from the research of colleagues. Colleges and universities constitute a special type of organization whose complex mission, dynamics, personnel structures, and values require a distinct set of understandings and skills to lead and manage well. That is what this book aims to provide: ideas, tools, and encouragement to help readers make better sense of their work and their institutions, and to become more skilled and versatile in handling the vicissitudes of daily life.
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