Strategic Leadership in Context: From Academic Programs to Financial Models CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10
Strategic
Leadership in Context: From Academic Programs to Financial Models
Thus far I have described and illustrated
several of the key components of the strategy process. Ultimately each institution has to bring these
methods to bear on specific areas of organizational responsibility. The actual
content of strategic
initiatives, goals, and actions is determined by the planning that occurs
within the different spheres of each institution’s diverse activities, from
academic to financial affairs. As a result, there is no way to import detailed
strategic content from external sources. The story, vision, contextual
position, and deliberative processes of each college and university are
embedded in a unique identity, so strategic content has to be grown at home.
While giving full weight to uniqueness, it is still possible
to highlight the general features of strategic leadership as different
organizational operations and programs come to terms with the changing world
around them. In doing so, we shall examine briefly and selectively the way
strategic leadership differentially shapes the consideration of:
•
Academic programs
•
Student learning
•
General education
•
Admissions
•
Student life
•
Facilities planning
•
Financial resources
•
Fund-raising
In analyzing these areas, the goal is to answer basic contextual questions that may be on the minds of those
leading or participating in a strategy process. What difference does a
strategic orientation make in approaching issues in various contexts? What are
some of the most telling strategic challenges and opportunities facing
institutions in today’s world? Within what frameworks of thought should issue
be situated and analyzed? To anticipate some of our findings, we shall regard
the tracings of strategic leadership as an applied and integrative discipline
in the ways that it is contextual and analytical, conceptual and data-driven,
integrative and systemic, value-centered, and action-oriented, and motivational
and collaborative.
STRATEGIC
THINKING AND ACADEMIC QUALITY
For many of the reasons that we have analyzed, the
introduction of an authentic strategic perspective is an especially demanding
task in the sphere of academic specialties. Consider how we
ordinarily think about the quality of academic departments. Let us do so by
examining the profile of two history programs inspired by actual models, one in
a major university and the other in a very small college. The comprehensive
undergraduate history program at a large regional research university with a departmental
faculty of fifty-four offers five majors, eight program concentrations, and 110
courses. Its faculty is well published and many of its members are widely
recognized, two of its specialties are in the top twenty-five in graduate
program rankings, and it attracts talented doctoral students, though it is much
less selective in some fields than it would like. Most of the lower-division
courses are large lecture classes supported by teaching assistants, the courses
for majors enroll thirty to forty students, and honors students take a senior
seminar. The number and quality of its undergraduate majors have declined
moderately in the last decade, though most students perceive history to be a
popular program that makes moderate demands.
Consider next the history department at a small liberal arts
college that has a solid reputation in its region. With a faculty of five, it
offers a single major with concentrations in European or American history. Its
largest class enrolls twenty-five students, its entire faculty is a full time,
and it places a major emphasis on the use of original texts and documents in
all its classes. Its majors have always been among the most talented students
at the college, and it has a reputation for being a demanding department.
The realities of institutional mission, culture, size, and
resources have shaped two radically different history departments, even though
there are some formal parallels between them in courses and requirements. As we
compare the two programs strictly with the professional eye of a historian, we
have to judge the small college’s program to be marginal in quality and
viability. It is very weak in scope, in-depth, and in the professional
reputations of its faculty. In terms of disciplinary measures, one cannot begin
to compare the comprehensive range, depth, and prominence—that is, the
quality—of the university program with the impoverished version that exists in
the college. Yet as we turn our attention to the culture of student
learning in the small college’s department, other characteristics come to the
surface. We learn that many of the leading graduates of the college studied
history and that a disproportionate number of them, including several eminent
historians, went on to earn doctorates in the field. Whenever these graduates tell
their stories, they consistently note that their professors required them to
learn history by doing it—by studying original texts and documents, writing
countless interpretive papers, and participating constantly in discussions and
presentations in small classes. Their teachers held them to rigorous standards
but also encouraged them. Faculty members often became mentors to students and
interacted with them frequently both in and out of class. The faculty’s
narrative of academic quality concentrates on the character and depth of
student learning. They hold themselves to these values and make professional
decisions in terms of this understanding of quality.
These cases allow us to raise an impertinent question. Which
of the two undergraduate history programs is of higher quality? Which one
creates more educational value for students? The answer depends, of course, on
the values that a person privileges in his or her understanding of academic
quality. In college, the educational worth is measured by student learning as
intellectual engagement and transformation, while in the university, quality is
defined around the creation of knowledge. For most of us, the question brings
up a series of conflicts in academic purposes that can never be entirely
resolved, but that can be reconciled through effective leadership.
Although it seems deceptively basic, the strategic
articulation of principles of educational worth is a difficult task for most
disciplines. This is so because it is often carried out, as we have seen, in a
context defined by the internal criteria of an academic specialty alone or is
imposed by an external management system. When disciplinary logic encounters
managerial logic, the tensions are inescapable. Although the transition to a
broader pattern of reflection is initially challenging when a program’s the educational rationale is explicitly connected to the more inclusive aims of
liberal education and student learning, to special institutional
characteristics and capabilities, and to changing methods of the discipline and
the needs in society at large, the process becomes more strategically vital and
fruitful (Association of American Colleges and Universities 2004). As these
steps occur, the model shifts from emphasizing the requirements of management
to focus on the responsibilities of collaborative strategic leadership.
STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AND POWERFUL LEARNING
The purpose of strategic leadership is to look inside and
outside an institution simultaneously and to align the two perspectives. As it
searches for the structural trends in contemporary higher education, it finds
some markers that should rivet its attention. One of these is the intensifying
focus on student learning. Long-simmering changes in the methods of teaching and
learning have taken form as a self-conscious movement. There is a growing
preoccupation with the nature of learning itself, with what
and how students learn in ways that are motivating, enduring, and powerful
(Association of American Colleges and Universities 2002; Bok 2006; Gaff,
Ratcliff, et al. 1997; Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, et al. 2005; Levine 2006).
Engagement in Learning
Common in many expressions of the learning movement is a
focus on student engagement—on forms of teaching and learning that make a
successful claim on the interest, energy, and motivation of the student. The
emphasis is on ways the student becomes personally engaged in a process of
learning. The implied contrast is with passive learning, in which the
student receives knowledge and information from a teacher. In engaged learning,
students are agents more than observers, makers of meaning rather than
recipients of information (Morrill 2002).
Learning as the Development of Human Powers
One of the critical presuppositions of this intensified
focus on learning is that liberal education has to do with the development of
deep and enduring intellectual and personal abilities. One commonly finds that
institutions express their rationale for liberal education in terms of the
development of complex cognitive abilities such as critical, analytical, and
integrative thinking; effective communication; global and multicultural
awareness; and technological and quantitative literacy (Bok 2006). Included as
well are intellectual dispositions and values such as curiosity, mental
resilience, and imagination as well as commitments to the values of an open
society.
From the perspective of strategic leadership, more important
then these lists are the unspoken presupposition that liberal education has to
do with the development of fundamental human powers, the enhancement of the
intellectual and moral capacities through which the human project itself
unfolds. In tracing the evolution of liberal education at the University of
Chicago, Donald Levine (2006) finds and formulates the inner logic in its
concern to develop the multifaceted powers of mind. As Thomas Green suggests,
“Coming into possession of the powers that we have as human beings . . . is the
defining presence of educational worth” (1982, 182). So, engaged learning is
also, powerful learning because it intends to make a compelling difference in
the ways that humans as agents create meaning and act in the world.
Why does any of this matter for the strategy process? It
does not if strategic planning is simply a discipline of the market. To
contribute to academic leadership, the strategy has to be integral; it must
connect with the deepest purposes of the organization as it has been shaped in
response to the context in which it lives. For a college or university to
understand its differentiating characteristics, it has to know what it believes
in, what it intends its education to be, and how it can create for its time and
place the practices and conditions on which powerful student learning
depends. It has to ask itself continually what it means to be an educated
person, and in the plurality of answers to that question, it must reflect on
the center of educational gravity in its own methods and programs. It
especially has to do this in a time when liberal education is neglected and
misunderstood. Is liberal learning about information or knowledge, methods or
content, the powers of the mind or the habits of the heart, or what? How does
it relate to the unrelenting demand of society for a well-trained workforce and
of students for careers? (Bok 2006). In pursuing this inquiry, the institution
has to consider where, if anywhere, it has developed generative core
competencies that distinguish it from others and that deeply mark its programs
and its environment for learning. A review and self-assessment of the following
list of some of the components of powerful learning will help institutions see
what characteristics of learning truly set them apart and understand
strategically where they excel or should or could excel (cf. Association of
American Colleges and Universities 2002).
The Characteristics of Powerful Learning
Powerful learning is:
• Transformative: It
intends to develop human intellectual powers, moral capacities, and personal
abilities at fundamental levels and in enduring forms.
•
Intentional: It
help students become aware of the interconnected aims and results of
liberal and professional education and learn how they can design their studies
to connect in purposeful ways with their own goals.
•
Engaged: It
involves students in learning activities through collaboration, discussion,
writing, speaking, performing, doing research, leading projects and presentations,
and forming relationships with teachers who have high expectations.
•
Global: It
involves students in the study of other languages, cultures, and societies,
optimally through living and studying in another country.
•
Broad: It
requires students to master content, methods of reasoning, and ways of solving
problems in a variety of fields and disciplines.
•
Coherent: It
designs and presents programs of study with a clear rationale and goals
that connect themes, courses, and learning experiences in meaningful and
explicit patterns, both in general education and in the major.
•
Useful: It
demonstrates how cognitive powers and knowledge are deeply practical in
preparing students for employment and civic responsibilities.
•
Inclusive: It
features programs that address the diversity of human experience and
cultures as enriching educational resources.
•
Integrative: It
encourages an understanding of the relationship between fields and disciplines in
the study of intellectual, moral, and social issues and offers programs based
on interdisciplinary and integrative methods.
•
Enriched: It
draws upon a wide variety of resources, including facilities, technologies,
scientific instrumentation, books and periodicals, cultural events, and local
organizations.
•
Technological: It
uses information technology to draw on the new universe of Web-based
knowledge to develop computer literacy and to make learning and communication
continual, global, interactive, and motivating.
•
Experiential: It
uses a variety of ways to involve students in learning through experience
in-service projects, internships, and field research, closely coordinating theory
and practice.
•
Responsible: It
prepares students to understand and to act on their responsibilities in a
democratic society and fosters their commitment to its basic values.
•
Substantive: It
explores the structure, methods, languages, and content of various disciplines
and bodies of knowledge and uses landmark original texts and materials in doing
so.
•
Rigorous: It
sets exacting standards and has high expectations concerning both the
quality and the quantity of student educational achievements.
•
Assessed: It
uses a multiple set of methods to evaluate the effectiveness of learning and
feeds these results into the teaching and learning process to improve future
performance.
•
: It occurs in many
campus contexts and relationships both in and out of the classroom and
is strengthened by an ethos that carries, communicates, and reinforces a clear
and a strong set of consistent messages about the institution’s identity and
educational purposes and practices.
Strategic Thinking and Powerful Learning
The effort to evaluate which forms of learning are most in
evidence at an institution is a rewarding strategic task, and the preceding
list of characteristics offers a place to start. Groups of faculty and staff in
a strategy process can analyze and map their own institutions and programs by
asking several questions about each characteristic: Which most resonate with
our narrative of educational identity and quality? Where are we now, and where
would we like to be in the future? Where are we deficient, where adequate? Which
of these forms of learning are distinguishing characteristics? Are there any
that are or could become core competencies? What strategies and goals would
move us forward? The process of analysis should stir the interest of many
faculty and staff members, for it offers a systematic template for defining
issues about which they care deeply.
In the process of discussing and evaluating its culture and
characteristics, an institution begins to gain a clear sense of its own
identity and its vision as a community of learning. Its self-evaluation should
be realistic and recognize that generally no more than several of its characteristics
can become core competencies. The discussion should also be guided by all the
forms of the available evidence, such as a content analysis of its academic
programs and practices, its results on the National Survey of Student
Engagement, and other forms of assessment and strategic evaluation.
One of the important affirmations in this book is that the
character and quality of student learning are a central strategic issue. The study by George Kuh and his associates (2005), Student Success in College,
shows the intimate connection between student learning and this wider view of
strategy, even though the authors do not use that term in describing their
findings. As we have already seen, the study describes the characteristics of
twenty campuses whose graduation rates and engaged learning practices exceed
what would be expected in terms of their institutional and student profiles.
The colleges present features that bear directly on aspects of strategic
leadership because, among other things, they demonstrate: a “living” mission
and “lived” educational philosophy, an unshakeable focus on student learning,
an improvement-oriented ethos, and a sense of shared responsibility for
educational quality and student success. Moreover, they each embody a strong
culture and highly resonant identity that marks out paths for student success
and an environment that enriches student learning. The leadership of these
institutions are also focused on student learning both in terms of the actions
of those in positions of authority and as distributed in processes and
relationships throughout the organization. In our terms, the narratives,
values and visions of these colleges and universities are expressed in their
organizational cultures, programs, and collaborative practices, all of which
are sustained through a distributed process of strategic leadership.
Perhaps it is no clearer than in the sphere of student
learning that official leaders are often followers in strategic leadership.
Teachers and students take the lead in shaping the practices of engaged learning,
which those in academic leadership positions may then help to clarify,
systematize, and support. In the sphere of teaching and learning, the idea that
strategy emerges from practice is entirely apt and accurate. When The University of Richmond issued its strategy report entitled Engagement in
Learning in the mid-1990s, it chose a theme that arose from the educational
practices that were emerging in and outside its classrooms. The strategic
consciousness of those practices arose in dialogue with faculty members and
students who shared with the planning committee their uses of collaborative
learning, interactive classes, experiential learning, study abroad, service-learning, and student research. The report carried a title and explored themes
that would soon emerge prominently in the wider conversation in higher
education.
General Education
One of the places where the strategic analysis of student
learning should concentrate on is general education (cf. Gaff, Ratcliff, et al.
1997). Because it occurs at the intersection of a series of defining
organizational commitments, it is a quintessential strategic issue. To begin with,
general education typically represents a major investment of institutional
resources. Its special courses and requirements draw heavily on faculty time
and energy and require a large number of faculty positions. In most
institutions, more than half of a student’s first two years of study are
devoted to general education, so its influence on a student’s early educational
experience is often decisive. Typically a student makes some form of intellectual
connection with the campus during these years or may never do so. Thus, the
relationship to retention and enrollment is crucial. Most importantly, many
institutions explicitly define the meaning of liberal education around the
purposes of their general education programs.
In terms of the motif of powerful learning, it is often in
general education that institutions make explicit their distinguishing
characteristics, core competencies, educational values, and credos. In the course of the work on the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Greater
Expectations (2002), it became clear that institutions were increasingly
tying their general education programs to their special characteristics and
competencies. A college or a university’s distinctive academic profile in
teaching, curriculum, and research was translated into ways to engage students'
incoherent, intentional, and integrative forms of general education.
As we consider strategic leadership in the context of
student learning and general education, we see the depths to which it must
reach. It must draw on the institution’s most powerful conceptual resources to address comprehensive educational questions. In working on general
education, faculty members and academic administrators have to be encouraged
and enabled to be educators, not just field-specific experts. It may appear odd
that institutions committed to higher learning need to focus on the conceptual
foundations of programs of study, but that is a requirement of strategic
leadership. A well-founded, distinctive, and rich program of powerful learning
in general education and throughout the undergraduate curriculum and
co-curriculum brings into focus an institution’s specific educational
capacities, reflecting its story, values, and identity. It creates a sense of
common enterprise and seeks to involve students and faculty in the experience
of a true educational community. If this intense focus on learning is to be
sustained, faculty as educators need to reach periodically for the best
current literature on student learning, study model programs and continue to
think deeply and coherently about educational design and execution, all in
terms of a differentiated concept of quality (cf. Bok 2006; Levine 2006). Such
is the nature of strategic thinking in the academic sphere. As a form of
leadership, it moves through conflicts and disagreements to find the shared
values and concepts to which people are willing to make commitments.
ADMISSIONS: BRANDS OR STORIES?
As we have seen, many practitioners of strategy locate the
core of the process in the way an organization differentially positions its
products and services in a competitive marketplace. In consumer products
companies, the analytical and quantitative methods of marketing have become the
queen of the business sciences and drive much of the corporation’s strategy.
Some of these same trends have migrated to the campus. In sharp contrast, we
have located the strategy process at a deeper level by rooting it in collegiate
narratives of identity and aspiration. In today’s world, the contrasts between
these two starting points often show up most vividly in the work of admissions
offices. The strategic plans of most colleges and universities
include a strategic initiative or, more aptly, an imperative concerning
admissions and enrollment. Since many private institutions are only several bad
years in admissions away from extinction, and virtually every institution
depends heavily on tuition, marketing usually has a prominent role in
collegiate strategic planning reports. As a consequence, its language and
methods are increasingly in use on campuses, no matter how distasteful most
faculty members find the terminology of markets, brands, and customers. Based
on visits to many campuses David Kirp (2003) reports that the language of
marketing is here to stay, whether we like it or not, both for good and for
ill.
Our question is similar to one that he poses: When it comes
to the use of strategic marketing, is it possible to reconcile the values of
the academic commons with the marketplace, or will colleges and universities
sell their birthrights? In considering admissions in a strategic context, we
have the test case of an issue that we have examined in several guises, and
that, as we have seen, has been the focus of many studies, including those by
Kirp (2003); Bok (2003); Newman, Couturier, and Scully (2004); and Zemsky,
Wegner, and Massy (2005). In general terms, it concerns the limits of
commercialism and market competition in higher education. In this specific
case, the question is focused on the appropriate use of the terminology and
methods of marketing in admissions.
Strategic Leadership and Marketing
We can begin to address this question by examining several
basic characteristics of integral strategic thinking that differentiate it from
a discipline of marketing. In particular, the deep strategy requires integrative
and systemic forms of thought and action. What may be invisible at an
operational level comes into full view in strategy. It reveals the
connectedness between and among academic and administrative activities and
programs.
Consider what is required to reach virtually any goal in
admissions, whether to increase applications or yield or to attract more
students with certain talents, backgrounds, or levels of family income. The
admissions program is simply the leading edge of a complex and connected
strategic system. No matter where one touches it in such a structure, that
point connects to all of the structure’s major components. A strategic system
requires faculty and administrative leaders throughout the organization to
understand its interconnections.
When seen in this light, effective admissions work begins
with the integration of several different forms of knowledge, from narratives
to data. The institution’s story and vision, its distinctive educational characteristics
and core competencies, should be woven into virtually every facet of the verbal
and visual messages that an admissions office communicates. These are drawn
from a complex set of beliefs and information about the institution that are
both discovered and validated in a process of deep strategy. Strategic thinking
brings a discipline to this process of integration and makes the creation of
the message a differentiated, authentic, and focused process.
Branding
A proponent of branding and integrated marketing claims that
“At root, a brand is the promise of an experience. Understanding and
communicating the validity of that experience to target audiences are parts of
the branding process” (Moore 2004, 57). From this, it is clear that branding and
marketing depend on a complex strategic task that precedes it, which is
“understanding . . . the validity of the experience.” The validity of soda pop,
a coffee shop, or an automobile is one thing, but the validity of an
educational experience is quite another. The word “experience” does not mean
the same thing in describing products and education. Products are experienced
through functional use and consumption, while education involves an intangible
process of intellectual and personal transformation. Products are infinitely
modifiable to meet the desires of the customer, while education sets standards
that learners can only satisfy through changes in their capacities and
knowledge, based in good measure on their own will and motivation. Especially
since branding has its origins in selling consumer products through repetitive
and sometimes deceptive mass advertising, if we omit the essential step of
discovering and articulating an institution’s authentic identity, its purposes
could be reduced to whatever the inventiveness of marketing chooses to make of
them. One of the responsibilities of strategic leadership is to ensure that
education is not reduced to commerce.
These considerations offer a clear perspective on the use of
the methods and language of marketing in higher education. The terminology that
we use matters, and not just to spare the sensitivities of the faculty.
Language conveys a system of thought and values. An authentic university
generates and conveys knowledge as a public good and is constructed around a
different set of values and purposes from those used by businesses that sell
products and services. The issue is whether the methods of thinking and
decision making used in business can fit that world of thought. Some business
practices do fit, including the methods of marketing and the tools and concepts
of strategy, as we have been at pains to show. To do so, the language and the
relevant processes of management can and should be translated into the idioms,
values, and methods that illuminate educational issues and university decision
making. If that happens successfully, then the methods of integrated strategic
marketing can bring new insights and disciplined processes to the work of
admissions and other departments. Yet some terminology, like the use of the
word “customer” for student and “brand” for identity, image, and reputation,
resists translation and cannot be made into central strategic concepts without
distorting the meaning of education.
THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Whereas admissions are often at the center of institutional
planning documents, student life is rarely at the core of the institutional
strategy. Ever since the doctrine of in loco parentis was swept away in the
late 1960s, a vacuum has existed in the articulation of the
educational purposes of student life. To be sure, many student affairs officers
have an intellectual perspective that animates their work. Most campuses try to
build linkages between residential and academic life, often through ingenious
practices and programs. Nor is campus life lacking in countless opportunities
for student learning and personal development in everything from volunteer
service to artistic programs to athletics. Yet typically there is no coherent
or compelling conceptual vision of how all these activities contribute to
student educational growth. More often than not, it seems that “edutainment” is
at the strategic center of things, with consumer satisfaction the goal.
Rarely, in particular, do faculty members show much interest
in or understanding of the ways that campus or residential life might be an
an important part of the institution’s educational mission. More typically, the
the prevailing sentiment is an annoyance at the coarseness of student social life and
the way it distracts from the pursuits of learning.
Then there is the dark side of student life, which is itself
a strategic issue, as troubling realities from the wider culture invade the
campus and shape its character. Levels of alcohol and substance abuse are high
and inexorably give rise to instances of violence, vandalism, and sexual
exploitation. Virtually every contemporary campus has developed special
programs and interventions to address binge drinking and its effects on
students.
Strategy and Campus Life
Over against this challenging picture are strategic
opportunities for distinctive educational achievement through the campus
experience. Probably more than in any other national educational culture in the
world, American institutions have made the campus experience an important part
of what it means to go to college. The investment of resources in staff,
programs, athletics, facilities, and campus events is massive. Yet in most
institutions, the educational purpose of it all is neither conscious nor
articulated.
At a strategic moment that makes late adolescence a
challenging time in personal growth and sees technological forms of distance
education rising dramatically in popularity, the educational meaning of student
life on campus is a neglected conceptual and strategic theme. It requires a new
articulation by the institution’s academic leaders, especially the ideas and
voices of the faculty. Ironically, before long, the campus experience may
become one of the primary differentiating competencies of colleges and
universities. What does it contribute that cannot be found at a computer
terminal?
Intellectual Leadership and Student Life
If this strategic challenge and opportunity are to be
seized, higher education needs to use the available theoretical, conceptual,
and empirical resources to understand and enact its student life programs. The
insights and the findings
are there, as for example, in the
voluminous research and publications by Alexander Astin (1977, 1993), or more
recently in the work of George Kuh and his associates (1991, 2005). The
developmental theories of writers such as Arthur Chickering (1969), Douglas
Heath (1968), and William Perry (1970) have enlightened both past and present
generations of theorists and practitioners. Pascarella and Terinzini (1991, 2005)
have analyzed many studies over the years of the impact of the college
experience on students. Working within the same Harvard context as William
Perry before him, Richard Light offers these conclusions from his decade-long
work in the Harvard Assessment Seminars: “I assumed that most important and
memorable academic learning goes on inside the classroom, while outside
activities provide a useful but modest supplement. The evidence shows that the
opposite is true. . . . When we asked students to think of a specific, critical
incident or moment that had changed them profoundly, four-fifths of them chose
a situation or event outside of the classroom” (2001, 123).
These scholars and many others provide conceptual frameworks
and touch-stones that give rich educational meaning to the encompassing forms
of students’ intellectual and personal development. In doing so, they reveal
some of the cultural infrastructure and patterns of campus life that accelerate
and facilitate a student’s successful engagement in higher learning. Terms that
one often finds in mission statements or hears on campus, like “personal
growth,” “intellectual maturity,” “responsibility,” “commitment,” “autonomy,”
“democratic citizenship,” “leadership,” and “community,” are made intelligible
and actionable as they are connected to coherent models of human development
that interpret education as the unfolding of fundamental human powers and
possibilities. They provide the integrative perspectives that are needed to
make powerful learning an institution-wide commitment and strategic priority.
Once again, the strategy process becomes a form of
leadership. It does so as it urges connection among the parts of a system, and
as it reaches for the conceptual resources that can do justice to the richness
and variety of education as a form of human empowerment within an intentional
community. As Ernest Boyer put it when issuing the influential report Campus
Life: In Search of Community, “We believe the six principles [of
campus life] highlighted in this report—purposefulness, openness,
justice, discipline, caring, and celebration—can form the foundation on which a
vital community of learning can be built. Now, more than ever, colleges and
universities should be guided by a larger vision” (1990a).
STRATEGY AND FACILITIES
Under most accreditation standards, institutions are
required to have a campus master plan. A plan that defines the location of
future buildings and the use of campus space would seem to be a classic
exercise in long-range planning, not strategic thinking. After all, the major
variables are spaces and physical masses that are under the
control of the designers and the design. They can be reduced to precise
drawings and blueprints, whatever the driving forces of the surrounding world
may be.
Strategic Space
Yet at the level of strategic reflection, it is clear that
campus and building plans are part of a system of beliefs and distinctive
educational purposes. The plans of today’s colleges and universities display a
sharp consciousness of how the goals of an engaged educational community should
determine the places, shapes, and forms where learning takes place. Campus
spaces are configured to facilitate collaborative learning in small groups, to
create places where people can interact, to connect to technology, to allow for
the placement of laboratories so that faculty and students can do research
together. Physical space increasingly has become transparent to the educational
goals that it serves.\
A Sense of Place
Strategic plans and similar studies of campus life also
reveal that the campus is lived space, so it is often lodged in memory
and in personal experience as a major theme in the institution’s story.
A sense of place is commonly a defining element in the shared values of a
community, and many students, staff, and graduates develop intimate connections
to the campus, its landmarks, and special natural and architectural features.
Places carry meanings that contribute to the larger purposes of education.
Salem College and a Sense of Place
Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is located
in the restored Moravian village of Old Salem, whose roots reach back to the
mid-1700s when German-speaking Moravian settlers arrived in Salem from
Pennsylvania to create an intentional community of faith and labor. The sense
of historic identity of the village is interwoven with the college and the
neighboring academy, which grew from a school for girls that the Moravians
started before the American Revolution. College and village also share a common
architectural signature defined by simple geometric forms, pitched tile roofs,
arched windows, brick structures in Flemish bond, rhythmic green spaces, and
pathways of worn brick. The campus leads off the large village square into
intimate quadrangles created by buildings that largely conform to the style of
the eighteenth-century town beyond. Historic artifacts are everywhere, from
antique furniture to embroidered samplers created by young women over 150 years
ago. A sense of intimacy and community, of historic fabric and authenticity,
defines the place. These very values shape the human transactions and
relationships of those who dwell there as students, deepening bonds between
them as responsible members of a historic community of women, and marking their
experience for life. Countless campuses have similar stories that give the campus
a voice in its narrative of identity. So master plans and decisions about major
renovations also are crucial parts of educational strategies for the future. A
building has an impact on its human community and the natural environment,
which is itself a vital issue in contemporary decisions about facilities. Its
physical fabric and infrastructure are critical considerations for efficiency,
effectiveness, and sustainability but also for the meanings that it carries.
Campus designs and buildings ground the identity and the heritage of a
community. In all these ways campus space and architecture are parts of an
integrated strategy that moves the organization toward the vision it has defined
for itself.
STRATEGY AND FINANCIAL RESOURCES
Those who study collegiate strategic planning reports and
documents soon come to a surprising realization. Many plans do not include
either a financial model to test the cost of the initiatives being proposed or
a method to fund them within a designated period. This is more than a
little odd since strategic planning has precisely to do with creating goals
and allocating resources to translate them into reality. Without a sense of
financial capacity, many of the goals in a strategic plan become what its
critics complain that they are anyway, either wish lists or a safe place to
store the excess baggage of campus opinion and desire. Without financial
feasibility, a strategy compromises its credibility and loses an effective
mechanism of decision making and leadership.
Many institutions are diffident to define their financial
capacities and priorities because there can be political risks in doing so. To
signal that some units or programs may have a higher priority than others is
dangerous. In adversarial contexts, the setting of priorities may unleash a
torrent of conflict. Yet these challenges should not prevent us from exploring
the possibilities of an optimal process, even if its application may have to be
tailored to a variety of circumstances.
Financial Models
A fundamental requirement for effective strategic planning
is the use of an analytical financial model. The model can be quite simple but
should capture the key points of leverage that determine the institution’s
financial position. Effective decision making requires that these leverage
points be deeply understood and carefully charted, including the key ratios
that indicate financial position. Our suggested dashboard of strategic
indicators in chapter 5 shows data that should be included in a model or in an
accompanying analysis of the financial position. Key ratios and indicators such as
debt to assets, debt payments to revenues, net tuition after discounts, and
unrestricted net income have to be understood both operationally and
strategically. Most accounting firms can provide a set of analytical and
comparative ratios for colleges and universities, and bond agencies create
powerful sets of metrics in issuing ratings. Strategic thinkers and leaders focus
on these comparative trends and ratios and attend particularly to both marginal
income and expense and to the danger zones in their financial metrics (cf.
Townsley 2007). Every institution’s financial engine drives results precisely
through the interaction of its most important variables in revenue and expense,
assets, and liabilities. Strategic leaders are often skilled in relating the
dynamics of the engine to the critical success factors in the educational
program (Collins 2001, 2005). Although most of the revenue and expense streams
have differing rates of increase and decrease, they can be translated into an
analytical and quantitative model that can test the financial
consequences of various strategic decisions and economic trends.
Each of the major task forces and groups developing
strategies should use the model to test the financial results of its proposals
and should highlight these as part of its report. The SPC will select options
for further consideration and implementation with a clear sense of the
resources that they will require, and the steps they will take under adverse
circumstances, such as high inflation or serious recession. Without a clear
window into the inner workings of its own financial world, it cannot meet these
responsibilities.
Transparency and Financial Information
A financial model can project plausible scenarios for the
future, but the institution’s basic financial position has to be communicated
clearly as well. As we noted in our discussion of SPCs, governing boards and
presidents do well to disclose all the basic financial information that is
relevant to the work of strategy. Although it can be difficult if the
institution is in a weak position, or an especially strong one, it is far
better in the long run that these issues be shared rather than hidden. The
tendency of some faculty members to deflect hard financial choices to
administrators, and for administrators to keep problematic financial facts from
the faculty, is part of the same unhealthy syndrome. A credible process
requires both shared information and shared responsibility. An ability to deal
honestly with limits and possibilities as defined by context is one of the
characteristics of effective leadership. MacTaggart (2007a) makes this point
repeatedly in discussing institutions that began their academic turnarounds by
becoming transparent about their often-precarious financial positions.
Strategic Priorities
In an environment in which resources for higher education
have become perpetually strained and erratic, each institution will also have
to reconfigure continuously the relationships between its resources and its
goals. As a matter of course, institutions will use their strategy processes to
redefine many of the assumptions about what programs they offer, to whom, and
how. The criteria for priorities in the operating budget will have to become
more transparent and consistently strategic. For some time now, collegiate
institutions have used criteria, often tacitly, that weighs programs in terms of
variables such as (1) quality, (2) centrality, (3) demand, and (4) cost (Dill 1997, Ferren
and Stanton 2004). The more systematic use of criteria of this kind should
become an explicit part of strategic plans and their implementation. They have
to become the constant canons of decision making that keep an institution in
strategic balance both within itself and with the environmental forces that
affect it. In developing a useful series of detailed procedures to achieve
ongoing strategic balance, Robert Dickeson notes that “Balance can be defined
as ‘bringing into proper proportion,’ and such is the nature of the ultimate
task of institutional leadership” (1999, 121). The effort to think and act
responsively and responsibly in all aspects of decision making, from the
cost-effective design of each course and program to the best combination of all
programs, has to become a new center of strategic gravity.
Selective Excellence at Yale University
An example will help to illustrate these points. Although
institutions often have used phrases like “selective excellence” to describe
their efforts to target their resources, their decisions have not always
produced either excellence or clarity. Does selective excellence mean that we
will be good at some things and mediocre at others, or just what? In describing
Yale’s University’s future several years in advance of its three hundredth
anniversary, President Richard Levin offered an illuminating strategic
interpretation of the phrase. Yale, he said, would strive for excellence in
everything it does while concentrating on its demonstrated strengths. In some
fields, like the humanities and the arts, Yale could aspire to comprehensive
excellence across most specialties. In other fields, however, such as the
physical sciences and engineering, it would have to choose several specialties
and concentrate its resources on a few distinguished faculty groups. “The range
of human knowledge is so vast and so rich in variation that not even a great
university can aspire to comprehensive coverage of every subject worthy of
study” (Levin 1996, 10).
The special features of strategic thinking are placed in
sharp relief in financial decisions. The analytical, integrative, and systemic
characteristics of strategy as a discipline have to confront the continual
tendency to think of budgets in strictly operational or political terms.
Lacking a strategic perspective, financial decisions are driven by a grab bag
of urgencies. With effective strategic thinking comes the ability to integrate
purposes and meanings with facts and numbers. Either annual budgets are
integrated into strategic priorities and plans, or the institution loses its
purposefulness. Since leadership is all about purpose, it has to make its
guiding presence known in responsible and coherent financial decisions.
Financial Equilibrium
A strategic orientation offers not only a framework for
thinking about financial issues, but it insists on content as well. One of the
goals of an effective strategy are the achievement of long-term
financial stability for the organization. For most colleges and universities,
this means achieving financial equilibrium, the characteristics of which can
most easily be illustrated for independent colleges and universities but that
increasingly have direct parallels at state-sponsored institutions as well.
Being in equilibrium involves (1) maintaining a balanced operating budget; (2)
keeping the rates of increase in expenditures and in revenues in line with one
another while accounting for discounts in financial aid; (3) making annual
provisions for the depreciation of the physical plant and equipment that should
eventually, reach 2 percent of replacement value; (4) creating annual budgetary
flexibility by building in contingencies for enrollment variations and other factors,
and using any proceeds to create funds for new initiatives and reserves up to
designated levels; and (5) safeguarding the purchasing power of the endowment
while providing for a steadily enlarging stream of endowment income.
Financial equilibrium sets a rigorous standard that many
institutions can only aspire to as a model. Nonetheless, the concept
illustrates the structural depths that strategy must reach to be an
effective method of leadership. To achieve equilibrium, all the options and tools
of policy and decision making are on the table within a long-term horizon of
aspiration. Every choice and issue, from increasing tuition to the
effectiveness of the financial leadership of the president and board, is part
of the strategic equation of financial equilibrium.
The task is to build a financial engine that can meet the
test of sustainability by operating in perpetuity at the highest levels of
effectiveness and efficiency. The engine will always need more fuel, but it has
to be built so that it can operate under adverse conditions, switch to
resilient strategies when fuel supplies run low, and continuously replenish
some of its own resources from within. From a strategic perspective, the goal
is constant: to create a financially self-renewing organization that can
dominate its environment by exercising choice about its future.
Affordability: Hitting the Wall
As our environmental scan has suggested, the challenge of
creating financial equilibrium has intensified for almost all institutions over
the past decade because of structural shifts in the affordability of higher
education. Strategic thinking and the goal of financial sustainability are
strict taskmasters in the current environment. Years of tuition increases
beyond rates of inflation have lifted college prices well beyond the growth in
average family incomes. The average price for a room, board, and tuition at major
private universities in 2007 was only a few thousand dollars less than the
median family income before taxes. Many public universities face parallel
challenges as they cope with declining state subsidies from an incoherent trend
toward privatization that results in escalating tuition charges.
Colleges have responded by discounting their charges based
on need and merit aid, creating a vicious fiscal cycle in which higher charges
produce lower marginal new revenues as more and more families become eligible
for discounts. As a result, countless colleges have begun to “hit the wall”
financially because the price of tuition has reached
a structural limit in families’ financial capacities. If the trends continue,
it is just a matter of time before students from all but the top 5 percent in
family income will receive ever-enlarging discounts, progressively diminishing
net tuition income and slowing starving many institutions.
Many institutions with the right locations, programs, and
innovative capacity have responded strategically and creatively to the new
limits by finding new revenue streams that build on existing administrative and
faculty overhead. They create professionally-oriented graduate programs, open
centers for adult education around the region, and expand offerings and
enrollment in low-cost fields with a practical turn, often using distance
learning to expand their reach. In many cases, these programs produce income on
which the academic core of the institution has come to depend, even as the core
itself shrinks in size. The situation is not unlike the patterns in large
research universities, where undergraduate tuition, research overhead, and
programs with high net revenues fund the research and teaching in the arts and
the humanities (cf. Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy 2005).
In some cases, however, the new financial engine will not be
sustainable, since it is subject to intense competition from other institutions
and low-cost educational providers, and rapid shifts in demographic and
economic trends. Strategic leadership forces these issues into the open and
tests financial models for their staying power and durability. The “brutal
truths” and structural vulnerabilities have to be confronted before the best
options can be chosen. It will make changes in structural elements, not just
budget reallocations, to address these issues. Options such as the three-year
degree, collaborations between community colleges and four-year institutions,
alternating work and study programs, new educational services for a growing
retirement population, and more educational alliances with organizations in
workforce education and management development are examples that change the
financial model in more structural terms. Also, the ever-present need
for new capital to initiate and sustain programs and scholarship budgets has to
be filled through large doses of philanthropy, which brings us to our next
topic.
FUND-RAISING
No matter how successfully a campus implements a system of
strategic priorities to manage its expenditures, it will constantly need to
enlarge its resources. Inflationary pressures in salaries and benefits can only
the increase over time and cost increases for facilities and financial aid are
inexorable, especially in the highly competitive world we live in today.
As new strategic needs and goals are developed and approved,
they will always require funding. When these priorities are formulated
according to the disciplined processes of strategic planning, they connect
directly to the institution’s capacities to generate large sums of capital and
operating funds from sponsors and donors. This capacity is a defining element
in the institution’s strategic position and aspirations, and
both public and independent colleges and universities increasingly need to make
it a core competency.
Gift Capacity
One of the most critical strategic indicators of an
institution’s ability to meet its goals is its capacity to generate gift and
grant income. Consider, for instance, the amount of gift and grant revenues for
all purposes (excluding contract research) per student than an institution
receives per year over ten years compared with a group of similar
institutions. If the institution cannot generate comparable cash gifts per
student, over time it will eventually lose its competitive position unless it
can generate resources from other sources, such as tuition, the management of physical
assets, or endowment returns (or state subsidies for public institutions.)
Assume that institution A, with 3,000 students and a
moderate level of gift capacity, receives $5,000 per year per student for ten
years, or $15,000,000 annually to total $150 million for the decade. Compare
those figures with those of institution B, which also enrolls 3,000 students
but has a superior gift capability of $15,000 per student annually. These
projections are based on actual gifts received by twelve colleges and
universities from 1998 to 2001 (University of Richmond 2003). Over the decade, institution B receives $45 million annually and $450 million in
total. Unless balanced by other sources, institution B has a $300 million
resource advantage over institution A, and the differences will only increase
over time. Gift and grant income obviously influences decisively the most
fundamental form of strategic and competitive capacity, which is the ability to
generate resources.
Telling the Story
The strategy sets the fundraising agenda in a variety of ways.
It helps to sort out projects that are candidates for support from different
sources, such as government, corporations, foundations, alumni, and major
donors. In doing so, it also differentiates the organization’s capacities in staff
and expertise to be successful in these different domains. Most importantly,
the strategy offers a systematic rationale for the programs that the
institution intends to support. The strategy document should pass into the
hands of the development staff and be regarded as a storehouse of ideas that
help to frame and even to compose a large number of proposals for support.
Often the completion of an intensive strategy process can
and should be timed to coincide with the planning of a capital campaign or
similar long-term development program. As this occurs, a well-crafted planning
document offers the central arguments and defines the major elements of a case
statement. Donors want to hear cogent reasons why the projects they are asked
to support really matter in setting the course for the future. A good strategic
plan shows precisely how the project will make a difference
both in itself and in the synergies that it will create to fulfill the
institution’s larger vision.
Charitable giving depends on many things, including good
ideas, reliable information, personal relationships, and a well-organized
staff, as well as a motivated group of volunteers. But it is also driven by the
values that people claim and the causes in which they believe. The pride and
loyalty of friends, trustees, and former students are strategic assets that
have to be galvanized into personal financial support and a commitment to
secure contributions from others. When an organization integrates its story and
vision into a persuasive strategic argument, it creates a powerful source of
motivation. An elegant strategy can inspire generosity, both by persuading the
mind and lifting the spirit. It represents a form of personal address to all
those who participate in the organization’s narrative of identity and believe
in the values on which it rests. It calls on them to take responsibility for
the well-being of an organization that has been entwined in their lives and
that serves vital human needs. Knowing and telling the story are among the
central tasks of strategic leadership in the advancement work of colleges and
universities.
Strategy as a Conceptual and Integrative Leadership
I have argued that there is more to a strategy process than
meets the eye. Even when it may not be conscious of its own depths and
possibilities, strategic thinking embraces immediate concerns but reaches
beyond them. As it deals with specific issues and decisions, a strategy also
carries presuppositions, forges connections, and builds a foundation for action
that has wide significance as a form of leadership. We have traced these
dimensions of leadership in the establishment of a contextual mindset for
considering academic decisions and as integrated forms of reflection that fuse
the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of issues. At critical points, we
also have found that strategy becomes leadership as it offers unifying
conceptual perspectives that provide resources for the development of
educational programs and practices.
Strategy as leadership also creates a disposition to connect
decision-makers to action, because it reveals the systemic relationships among
various projects and programs. The cycles of connection tie various academic
and administrative strategies and actions to one another, showing patterns of
interdependence that operational thinking alone does not perceive. Through the
goals that define strategic initiatives, a sense of possibility is given form,
and motivation is made concrete. As information is made transparent and hard choices
appear in every priority, strategy becomes credible. For all those reasons, it
is appropriate to designate strategy an applied discipline of reciprocal
leadership. If it is to fulfill this demanding possibility, it must be able not
only to make decisions but to execute them. So now we turn to the agenda for
the implementation of the strategy.
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