Among the greatest strengths of the American higher-education system are its openness to outsiders and its relative lack of nepotism and cronyism. American colleges hire faculty members and administrators from other institutions often and to good effect. But too much of a good thing can be bad: In recent times, many colleges have relied excessively on hiring external candidates to lead their institutions rather than adequately grooming internal candidates for leadership positions.
American colleges lack stable leadership. Not only are most presidents hired from outside, but they stay on the job for increasingly brief periods, and the chief academic officers serving under them have even shorter tenures, as recent studies by the American Council on Education have revealed. Access to academic-leadership positions has become a game of musical chairs, in which the same executives rotate from institution to institution, for shorter and shorter stays, at ever-greater rates of compensation. Some have such brief tenures that they barely accomplish anything at all. Yet they receive large salaries and abundant perks, which have expanded in recent years to create an executive-compensation bubble.
The well-paid and short-lived external-executive model works against the long-term interests of the institutions themselves, and instead favors two groups: the administrators involved and the search firms that help them get hired. Jumping from college to college in rapid succession usually results in significant increases in compensation for the candidates, while also helping them to avoid the accumulation of adversaries that would be inevitable with longer stays. Search firms, meanwhile, garner profits by constantly putting forth outside candidates. To keep the churn going, search firms, unsurprisingly, tend to disfavor internal candidates.
The system is unhealthy because it fosters superficial improvements. Quality cannot be created overnight, but the trappings of quality can, so transient executives actively pursue them by undertaking projects that offer quick, visible outcomes that are good for helping the executives land their next jobs, rather than for building quality from the ground up.
The pressure to show change may be one reason why presidents replace their chief academic officers more often than in the past: Replacing subordinates is a way to create the appearance of progress. Another way to create the illusion of progress is for presidents to engage in public-relations campaigns, in order to improve the images of their institutions and elevate their rankings.
The short-term focus in academe today reflects a mind-set similar to the one troubling corporate America. In both cases, the transient-leadership model has come with an executive-compensation bubble, as the number of itinerant executives is limited, and universities and companies compete for that small number while leaving untapped their reservoirs of internal leadership. A common justification for hiring highly paid executives is that they will help the institution obtain more dollars and thus more prestige. It’s a vicious circle: Money begets prestige, and prestige begets money. But the pursuit of prestige for its own sake is a dead end, since prestige alone cannot elevate the spirit of the university or strengthen its mission.
We must go back to basics when it comes to academic leadership, and that means universities must stop importing excessive numbers of leaders and begin to produce more of their own by developing the administrative abilities of the faculty. Cultivating the leadership potential of all faculty members would pay dividends by allowing colleges to identify those who, with appropriate encouragement and coaching, could serve as high-level administrators. Further, all faculty engaged in administrative activities—as principal administrators of grants, directors of programs, and chairs or members of committees—could profit from relevant training.
Succession-planning experts advocate dual-career ladders, allowing people to move back and forth between faculty and administrative positions. Yet there is very little back-and-forth movement of this kind in academe. Administration has become a one-way track from which one cannot take a break; a nonstop race with no opportunity for intellectual renewal. That is a fatal shortcoming of the present system, in which the same executives always occupy the top positions—they simply move from institution to institution without ever stepping down from the merry-go-round. The result is intellectual poverty.
Some universities offer administrative training to their employees, including relevant courses, personal-development plans, and coaching. Those activities, however, tend to be addressed more to the staff than to the faculty, whose administrative talents often remain untapped. That could be remedied by offering budget and personnel workshops for assistant professors, systematic exposure to important committees for associate professors, and administrative internships for full professors, in addition to intensive training for department chairs.
While we certainly want to maintain the ability to hire external administrators, we cannot continue to overlook internal talent. And we certainly cannot continue to focus on short-term results while many emerging economies around the world are devising ambitious long-term strategies for their institutions of higher learning.
Transient administrators are fond of composing ambitious-looking plans filled with glossy color photos to impress potential employers in their perpetual search for high-level positions. But transient administrators cannot engage in real planning, which requires time, commitment, and a level of thoughtfulness that their agitated lifestyles simply do not allow. This is why we must build a model of sustainable academic leadership—the sooner the better.