Colleges and universities looking to recruit leaders from within the faculty ranks will face more and more difficulty.
From our respective positions—as a provost (Janel) and a search consultant (Dennis)—we often hear senior executives in higher education say that building a new generation of faculty leaders will be a major challenge in the next decade. We hear the same thing from trustees and members of search committees seeking college and university leaders. At stake is the effective governance of the academy.
Not long ago, each of us wrote in these pages about provosts as leaders. Janel wrote of her journey from the faculty into the senior levels of administration and what she learned along the way. Dennis focused on the plight of provosts in recent presidential searches. The juxtaposition of our two articles led to an extended exchange between us about the state of leadership emerging from the faculty and how to face that challenge. Here is what we concluded.
Institutional and faculty culture work against leadership development. All too often in academe, taking an appointment as department chair is seen as a demotion or simply a temporary term of service. Those who do become chairs are thought to besacrificing what they want for what the institution decides it needs. At the same time, academic culture tends to be suspicious of faculty members who desire administrative responsibility.