Dear Editor,
This letter is an abridged version of a piece I wrote some time ago on reforming higher education. Governments in many countries have initiated dramatic cutbacks in higher education budgets. Budget cuts now are becoming the norm in higher education in most developing countries. Today, the public in many countries demands increasing efficiencies, greater accountability measures, and added sensitivity to stakeholder demands. In simple language, what has happened is that higher education has become vulnerable to the market dynamics of a consumer-driven economy.
One report suggests that the ‘university’ no longer holds the monopoly, controlling where students enrol and what programme offerings are made. Under these circumstances, any university must activate changes to attain sustainability levels congruent to nation-building. Given this situation, a critical issue that engulfs higher education is the requirement for effective leadership.
However, universities have always demonstrated an enormous capacity, frequently against all odds, to resist change and indeed, have been successful in accomplishing this. Today, effective leader behaviour is needed to quell this resistance to change.
The Higher Education Digest posed this question: Should traditional definitions of higher education leadership be sustained, or should they be redefined to incorporate increased campus elements in sharing social responsibility and accountability? Any redefinition of leader behaviour would require transformational leaders to identify the wide-ranging forces of change and to effect the leadership process.
The University of Wisconsin-Stout (UW-Stout) used itself as a case study to redefine its leadership. UW-Stout has 8,000 students, 1,200 employees, and 450 faculty members. It has 27 undergraduate and 17 graduate programmes.
In the 1990s, the university experienced fiscal restraint, especially when state government priorities moved from higher education to K-12 system, health, shared revenue, and corrections. The UW-Stout subsequently experienced a US$1.5 million budget reduction.
UW-Stout Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen, redefined leadership, creating systems of leader behaviour. Sorensen applied the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (MBNQA) as the framework for this action. This approach utilizes seven criteria: (1) leadership; (2) strategic planning; (3) student, stakeholder and market focus; (4) measurement, analysis and knowledge management; (5) faculty and staff focus; (6) process management; and (7) organizational performance results.
As a response to the consequences and implications of fiscal restraint, the Chancellor working collaboratively with the University Council, faculty and other campus constituent groups, speedily effected three significant changes: (1) creating a Chancellor’s Advisory Council (CAC), (2) creating open, inclusive planning, (3) creating an office of Budget, Planning and Analysis (BPA), and (4) creating the appointment of a chief information officer as part of the infrastructure for a digital campus.
A chief information officer was hired to spearhead an initiative to create a technology-intensive campus. The university is now a wired and wireless campus, producing a total digital campus. All students admitted are given a laptop computer financed through their tuition and fees. This is the e-scholar programme and all students could be in this programme by the Fall of 2005. Faculty and staff are trained on web-based teaching techniques, and there is the availability of three web designers.
This digital program has an assessment instrument to quantify the educational value to students. There already is some success with fewer students dropping classes, and increasing pass rates in introductory courses.
The IT facilitates a constant review of how efficient UW-Stout can become in delivering academic programmes. The Chancellor explained that not long ago, UW-Stout created a new School of Education without departments, solely a faculty of education. Some successes observed are greater teamwork in programme and course delivery, and an enhanced focus on the faculty of education, and not merely on an individual department. This strategy, the Chancellor noted, may help to maximize scarce resources.
Chancellor Sorensen believes that higher education requires a redefined leader behaviour, that is, a more inclusive leadership style. Sorensen made five suggestions for action: redefine leader behaviour to include all stakeholders; use team-building as an effective instrument with frequent team-building exercises to sustain trust; create priorities and methods of implementation – priorities have to be related to funding; measure performance every three months; apply a proactive approach where the MBNQA criteria are applied to determine what the university has and what the university wants.
Yours faithfully,
Prem Misir
