The Chronicle reported a couple of weeks ago that “Colleges lag behind corporations when it comes to having the information they need to pick their top leaders.” The author, Peter Schmidt, then described the processes businesses use to select CEO’s and compared them favorably to the processes used by colleges and universities. It is hard to know where to start on this subject. My first reaction is that this is an odd moment in the history of the United States to praise the selection of business leaders. Every day on television we see business executives explaining why their firms have failed, despite the talents of their wildly overcompensated leaders. I could say quite a lot, negatively, about business leadership these days. But that is not my subject.

I have been concerned for many years about the processes used by colleges and universities to select their presidents, and it seems to me that the problem deepens with every year that passes. It is a truism to say that the most important responsibilities of the board of any nonprofit are to review the performance of the current CEO and to select his or her successor. My impression, based on long, but distant, observation is that boards are not in fact competent to carry out these tasks adequately. (Confession: I have only served on one university board of trustees.)

Why not? I think the major problem is that most members of higher-education boards are chosen for reasons other than their knowledge of research and teaching — for their generosity, for their financial-investment experience, for their loyalty to the sitting president, for reasons of identity politics, and so forth. Many trustees have management experience, of course, but almost none of them has experience in managing (especially educational) nonprofit institutions. Very few trustees have sufficient knowledge of our “business” to make informed judgments as to how well the institution is performing in achieving its goals. Trustees are expected to be boosters (and supporters of the CEO) rather than critics, when it is informed criticism that most nonprofits, and certainly universities, need.

This incapacity makes it especially difficult for trustees to make informed judgments concerning the qualifications and likely performance of prospective CEO’s. What they know about university leadership is ordinarily derived solely from their ongoing experience on the board and with the current CEO. Too often, therefore, the temptation is for the board to try to replicate the incumbent’s qualities, even when future institutional needs may require an altogether different sort of leader. Further, board members are almost by definition unacquainted with most potential candidates. This means that they have to turn to search firms, and to rely upon the standard institutional Rolodexes relied upon by those firms. The right names may or may not be on those lists, but even if they are, the board has few qualifications to discriminate among them.

The problem is not the lack of the sort of information Schmidt describes as available to business firms. It is that the board ordinarily does not understand its own business well enough to specify the terms of a presidential search, or to scrutinize potential candidates in a discriminating manner. I think, therefore, higher education has a serious problem in managing presidential transitions intelligently.