I spent last weekend reading Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works, the sequel (of a sort) to his earlier, simply brilliant, book How Asia Works. Both are works of political and economic history, trying to work out how various countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan in one case; Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda in the other) came to be regional leaders in development. According to Studwell, examining the keys to success through the lens of democracy vs. dictatorship is not particularly helpful. What tends to matter, rather, is the presence of what he calls a “developmental coalition”, by which he means a wide, ethnically/regionally inclusive alliance of individuals committed single-mindedly to an agenda of economic development in a way that endures for decades, beyond individual leaders or even political parties.
Now, I tend to read everything with an eye towards higher education. It occurred to me while reading this that when we discuss the fate/trajectory of higher education institutions, we almost never mention coalitions (let alone developmental ones) as a means to promote fundamental institutional change. And yet, I think I would argue that, in practice, internal coalition-building is in fact the only way that change occurs at universities.
This might sound weird because in North America, at least, there is a tendency to treat university Presidents as the sole source of institutional change, to make equivalencies with corporate CEOs and assume that hard-charging charismatic leaders at the top can drag reluctant companies into change. The analogy holds at first glance because to a considerable extent both CEOs and Presidents at least to some extent use persuasion to create “buy-in” for change among their employees. But the fact that corporate CEOs run much more hierarchical organizations with a much higher degree of control over staffing means that their appeals to buy-in come with a bit more steel attached to it.
The term “buy-in”, I think, is key to this question, because there is more than one way to achieve it. There is certainly a model in which a President and their team come up with a particular strategy or initiative and “sells” it to the staff. That’s basically how change is achieved in the charismatic leadership model. The alternative, of course, is to find ways that leadership and staff can “co-create” a vision and principles for the institution and then let the administration execute. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one. In the latter case, the major players in an organization – and I mean here the people whose voices actually carry weight among staff, not just those who are in administrative positions – all understand how the institution is going to develop, understand the trade-offs and hard work involved in doing so, and then just get on with it in their respective jobs. No “selling”, no “command and control”. Just a common belief in what a better future looks like.
Now, we actually do have some data on how well this kind of explicit coalition-building works. In much of Europe, as well as at Université Laval and Université Sherbrooke in Québec, university Presidents are elected. Candidates put out platforms prior to the election, they spend months talking about what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it, and – crucially – they amend those positions as they go along to attract support from enough voters to win the election. Simply put, Presidents at these institutions must be capable of winning coalitions as a condition of holding their job. Presidents at anglosphere universities, on the other hand, do not. That doesn’t mean that Presidents at anglosphere universities are incapable of building coalitions; many of them are pretty good at it. It just means that coalition-building skills are not what gets them the job.
I think many people in the anglosphere, when they hear about university communities electing Presidents, immediately assume that the result is something like what happened when Yugoslavia turned all firms into co-ops: people will always vote for short-termism and the easy status quo rather than make difficult long-term choices or face up to new political/technological realities and so such universities are doomed to stagnation (turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving, etc.). And certainly, that is one possible outcome.
However, there are also clearly some universities where this is not the case. Laval, obviously, is one such case: in practical terms I am not sure I can see the difference between the way Laval and most U-15s are managed. And, of course, many European universities with elected Presidencies (ETH Zurich, for instance, or Utrecht University in the Netherlands) have managed to maintain or improve their global position over the past couple of decades. And I would argue that where this has happened, it has done so because university leaders at those institutions have managed to create “developmental” coalitions; that is to say, broad support within their communities for the kinds of things that make modern universities run well. That includes articulating a differentiated mission for an institution (as well as taking concrete steps to live that mission), creating the conditions for governments and donors to provide transformative funding (particularly in STEM fields), and not letting non-academic costs get out of control.
Where this occurs, you tend to get similar people running the university from one presidential “term” to the next. It’s not that there are political “parties” exactly, but you do get similar kinds of people who run the place from one academic term to the next, with similar values and styles. Where those values and styles are strongly forward-looking as opposed to being mainly defensive in nature – that’s the exact equivalent of Studwell’s “developmental coalition”.
Let me add one other data point to this discussion. It is rare that universities ever select someone who is not a professional academic to be President. Two standout exceptions to this rule in Canada over the last couple of decades were Lloyd Axworthy (University of Winnipeg) and Allan Rock (University of Ottawa), both of whom I would have pegged as having had above-average tenures as Presidents. Why did they succeed? I submit that, to some extent, it is because they understood their jobs as being political rather than technocratic in nature and were constantly building up alliances and coalitions to further their institutions. Now, that said, Axworthy’s coalitions were arguably more external to the university than internal to it, so I am not sure this entirely supports my argument. But the larger point here is that many successful politicians – people for whom engaging with multiple stakeholders on a daily basis is second nature – probably have what it takes to be pretty good university Presidents.
(I’ll reserve judgement on Cape Breton University’s David Dingwall until his term is finished, but whatever his successes and failures, my understanding is that his leadership style is somewhat less consensual than that of Rock and Axworthy, so this too may fly against my thesis).
Anyways, none of this is meant to suggest that having elected Presidents is a sufficient condition to creating a developmental coalition at a university (for instance, the University of Oslo campaign last year was very much a defeat for the forward-looking team Harbo) or that non-elected Presidents are incapable of developing a broad, campus-wide consensus on an institution’s “direction of travel” (if I had to name a couple of standouts on this front, I would probably pick Martha Piper at UBC and David Naylor at the University of Toronto). It is, however, meant to suggest that real, durable change that lasts beyond a single mandate can only come from leadership that constantly and deliberately builds campus-wide coalitions in favour of a particular vision of an institution.
And, perhaps as a corollary, Presidential hiring committees should think more deeply about what questions they ask of their candidates. Not: “what would you change”, or “how would you lead change”. But rather: “how do you build coalitions for change” and “how can you ensure change lasts beyond a single presidency”?
