A productive relationship between a university’s board of trustees or regents and a president can be of tremendous benefit to the institution and its leadership. On the other hand, a board that is engaged in infighting or unable to make key decisions can harm the university for years to come.
Here are a few ways to take the temperature of your board:
- Is your board well-informed about your university? Consider adding your trustees to key university newsletters and asking that they subscribe to the university’s social media channels. Some presidents even send a weekly or monthly update to the trustees.
- Is your board well-informed about higher education issues? Ideally, every trustee studies the materials in advance of a board meeting. In addition to this practice, signing board members up for key sources of information like University Business or The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as higher education email distribution lists, can help keep your board up to date on the important issues about which they must make decisions.
- Do members faithfully attend meetings of the board and the committees on which they serve? In the corporate world, companies must disclose in their proxy statement any director who attends fewer than 75% of meetings. Creating an expectation of attendance helps the full board develop a strong board culture.
- Does your board debate the issues? The issues that higher education faces are complex, and solutions are not easy. A robust debate on important topics will strengthen the decision that the board makes and ensure that the board is committed to that decision. Robust debate is a sign of a strong board, while a rubber-stamp culture is a sign of weakness.
- Do individual board members help the university? This help might take several forms, like hosting an event for prospective students or introducing the university’s fundraising professionals to potential donors. A helpful practice is to engage individual board members in discussion with the president on topics where those board members might have expertise. For example, a trustee who served in the state legislature for several years might help the president develop a government relations strategy.
- Do board members understand the scope of their responsibilities? The board only acts as a body. Individual board members other than the chair or someone designated by the chair may not speak on behalf of the board. The board should not interfere in internal university matters. Accrediting bodies have a “nose in, fingers out” standard. Boards should set high-level direction and ask good questions of the president and senior staff members, but should not try to do the jobs of these individuals.
- Is your board representative of your alumni, community and students? And do they represent a range of experiences? The trustees of public universities are often appointed by a state’s governor, but private university boards are self-perpetuating. A good practice is to review the attributes of the trustees to see whether, as a group, they represent key constituencies well. Another good practice is to identify the skills needed on a board and review the members to see whether any skills are lacking, or whether key trustees are term-limited. Skills might include a financial, legal, technology or marketing background, for example.
- Does your board understand its legal responsibilities? Board members should understand their duty of care, to act in good faith and with appropriate diligence. The duty of loyalty also applies to trustees, and they should act in the best interest of the university rather than their own personal interests. A duty of obedience places on trustees oversight to ensure that the university acts in compliance with the law.
- Does your board conduct an annual assessment? And do individual trustees conduct a self-assessment? A review of the board’s performance as a whole might include data points, such as the percentage of meetings attended and the percentage of trustees who gave an annual gift. It might also include qualitative matters, such as the board’s culture. The individual self-assessment would include similar metrics and might also include a prompt to evaluate the level of preparation the trustees do for each meeting.
- Has your board considered succession planning? Succession planning may be related to an anticipated retirement of a beloved president, or it might be related to an emergency, such as the untimely passing of a president. Temple University President JoAnn Epps was onstage for a memorial service for a colleague when she collapsed. She was taken to Temple University Hospital but did not recover. The board should discuss succession during a president’s annual performance evaluation. And ensure that your bylaws allow the board to take emergency action if the president passes unexpectedly or announces a resignation.
This list is designed to be of help to university presidents and board chairs. If you have not discussed these topics with your board chair, feel free to use this list as a prompt for a discussion about how to make the university you both love the best it can be.
