Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence

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TurnaroundLeading Stressed Collegesand
Universitiesto Excellence

• A Presentation in Partial Fulfillment
• of a Sabbatical
• For Spring Semester, 2006, 2007
• Jim Martin, Professor of English

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Five Characteristics of Colleges and Universities
Making Progress Toward a Turnaround
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1. Rethink Institutional Mission

• Do not overlook the responsibility to reconsider
  the college or universities original vision

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2. Restore Financial Stability

• Turnarounds begin with mission and finance not
  admissions and marketing

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3. Complete Key Infrastructural Improvements

• Infrastructure is where decline can be seen and
  felt most easily deferred maintenance must be
  addressed to survive

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4. Avoid Accreditation Probation

• Even the sudden or unforeseen departure of the
  president places second in conveying
  institutional weakness to an announcement the
  college or the university has been placed on
  accreditation probation

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5. Achieve a New Level of Campus Engagement

• Begin with three key constituencies Students,
  faculty, and trustees
• And ask each to assume new levels of
  responsibility for the effectiveness of their own
  community --- and prepare for higher percentages
  of personnel to leave the community

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TEN LESSONS LEARNEDFROM TURNAROUND LEADERS

• (The following lessons are drawn from interviews
  and conversationswith approximately 200
  presidents, chief academic officers, board
  chairs, and faculty senate and committee chairs
  over the course of the 4-5 year project.)

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1. Be a realist

• Ask for community support and involvement but
  assume that the greatest workload for a
  turnaround will be carried by the president,
  i.e., dont take yes for an answer.

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2. Define health carefully

• Spend time initially defining what constitutes
  institutional health and secure community
  agreement on this before committing key resources
  for change.

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3. Manage the managers more closely

• Weakened colleges and universities often do not
  have the resources to hire and then to retain
  skilled financial managers.

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4. Design a new set of institutional indicators,
i.e., dashboard

• The dashboard is typically a set of easy to
  grasp, fact-driven, data points. However, many
  higher education leaders want to move away from
  older, static measures to newer kinds of
  benchmarks of success, or failure.

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5. Prepare for a campaign at high speed

• Work more quickly, and over a longer period of
  time, to achieve institutional change, i.e., 10
  years instead of 2 or 3 years.

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6. Talk Faster to Trustees

• Use technological advances to include board
  members in campus conversations more quickly and
  to a greater degree.

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7. Know the difference between late and too late

• Excellent plans for positive change will survive
  right up to the day the college closes its doors.
  Waiting too long to initiate, much less
  accomplish, major changes was one of the two or
  three most common characteristics of colleges
  that closed.

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8. Hire the right consultant

• Presidents often believe these two things The
  institution cannot afford to hire an outside
  consultant to fix its worst problems, and the
  institution does not presently have the staff or
  resources to fix its worst problems.

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9. Leverage partnerships

• New technologies have enhanced personal
  networking across campuses, and on a broader
  scale, institutional partnerships and strategic
  alliances can also be enhanced among two, three,
  or more colleges and universities initially in
  areas such as resources for faculty professional
  development, shared grant applications, and
  joint-residence halls.

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10. Refocus on students

• Students can contribute fresh perspectives to
  persistent or structural problems, and their
  voices should be incorporated into major
  decisions associated with a turnaround.