A bruising summer for governing boards

This piece is part of an On Leadership round table on rethinking university governance, in the wake of the U-Va. and Penn State crises.

 

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Video

In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan speaks out about her ousting by the university’s Board of Visitors in June, the tumult that followed and her eventual reinstatement.

A bruising summer for governing boards

Jack Stripling

Different as they are, the controversies at Penn State and U-Va. share a common and ironic thread.

Drawing back the curtain on a deeply flawed trustee system

William G. Little

One of those flaws can be traced back to a single number: 77 percent.

Three warning signs that university leadership is on autopilot

Jill Derby

Who’s in charge here? And weren’t there red flags these trustees should have seen?

What we have here is failure to communicate

George Cohen

The recent crisis at the University of Virginia brings to mind the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”

What a bruising summer for governing boards.

In the space of just a few weeks, the boards at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Virginia both came under fire for highly public missteps. While no one should equate the tragedy of Penn State’s sex-abuse scandal with the forced ouster and subsequent rehiring of Virginia’s president, both stories put boards on the defensive and offered lessons for trustees everywhere.

Different as they are, the controversies at Penn State and U-Va. share a common and ironic thread. In both instances, key decision makers appear to have concluded that shielding details from the public would best protect the reputations of individuals and institutions. The opposite proved true.

Penn State’s board has primarily been faulted for not asking enough hard questions. But an independent report also implied that the trustees were complicit in a culture that would use any means—even abject secrecy—to protect the reputation of the storied Nittany Lions football program. As for U-Va., the board’s decision to offer only the most oblique of rationales for ousting a popular president greatly contributed to the early backlash from faculty, students and alumni.

As a journalist who covered both controversies, I have spent the better part of the last two months talking with higher-education experts about what college governing boards can learn from Penn State and U-Va. One of the clear takeaways from those conversations is that transparency, while sometimes temporarily painful, is preferable in the long run. If these stories showed us anything, it is that the truth will come out, and a board is better positioned to deal with uncomfortable truths when they are openly confronted from the beginning.

Shortly after Teresa A. Sullivan resigned from U-Va., citing an unspecified “philosophical difference” with the board, I spoke with her predecessor over the phone. John T. Casteen III, who was U-Va.’s president for two decades, was as fired up as I’ve ever heard him. “I can put in rank order the things that concern me,” he said. “The chief concern I have is the secrecy of what is supposed to be a public process.”

I played devil’s advocate: But what is the board supposed to do? Come out in public and rake Sullivan over the coals? They have the authority to remove her. Is obscurity not the most dignified approach?

“If the choice is between the ugliness of last week and the ugliness of a meeting where the board says what their concerns are, I think if I were a board member I would take the public disclosure,” Mr. Casteen said.

There is no indication that the board was worried about some kind of malfeasance under Sullivan’s watch or other actions that could produce embarrassing headlines. Rather, it appears the board was concerned that U-Va. was not sufficiently transforming itself for the future, specifically in terms of online education. This is a discussion many universities are already having in a very public way. U-Va. endured weeks of criticism just to get the same conversation started.