The Room Where It Happens

Meeting the Challenges of the Open Meetings Laws

The writer is a current president

Perhaps the most difficult relationships to manage are boards and all that goes with managing them, including open meetings, individual agendas, and personal goals as well as wildly differing perceptions of their responsibilities. These individuals often lack experience in management, higher education, strategy, budgets, accreditation, and even working as a team.

Trusteeship is a revolving door of personalities and perceptions of the “job.” Most want to “do more” to help run the operations. Most presidents just want them to understand that they have not been elected to run the college.

One new trustee insisted on adhering to Robert’s Rules, which now runs to more than 800 pages. We had to engage an attorney to sort through technicalities, although most issues remained issues. Board members spent several meetings arguing over rules that had little consequence. They argued about the process of setting agenda items, establishing board goals, and measuring their achievements—at the expense of listening to experienced administrators on important college matters.

And since the meetings are open to the public, “citizens” show up to not only hear the proceedings but to use their three minutes of comment time to try to influence board members. The folks who show up are almost always employees who think trustees run the college. They share grievances, which are often self-serving and one-sided.

It seems to always be the same people with the same issues who are reluctant to go to the department or person who might be able to help them. The board usually cannot fix their problems and then I am tasked with defending our position.

Open meetings laws are meant to foster transparency. That is good, but it often does the opposite. We refrain from talking about issues of substance because it’s difficult to hold meaningful conversations with trustees at meetings where employees are present. And sometimes, when there are, shall we say, difficult board members.

The work-around for me has been taking advantage of a loophole. Three or fewer trustees can meet without the obligatory public notification of a meeting. I suspect other presidents use this method to meet and discuss issues without an audience. But it only works if a trustee in the smaller group can be trusted with information. In my experience, most want to understand and work with the president, but there are always those who recklessly share their “inside” information with employees and others in the community.

We need to be able to speak openly to trustees about real issues like programs that have outlived their usefulness and outdated and harmful sections in a student handbook that should be eliminated but can’t because they would meet with faculty objections. We need to speak about the threat of a cyber ransom or how we anticipate handling a crisis. The board needs to know about these things in order to their job, but not in a public meeting.

When people wonder why college institutions are not as successful as they should be or are not responding quickly to the changing environment, maybe look to this small example as a difficult hurdle.

Your Responses to Our Questions About the Survey of Presidents

We know you're not on crack.

A Sandbox reader who loves me enough to give honest feedback said she got whiplash after our second issue. Our mission statement claimed we wanted to help leaders do their jobs. The first thing we did, she said, is slap y'all upside the head for not giving nuanced answers to complicated issues on a survey.

We all rely on people who will tell us the truth and try not to surround ourselves with those who have only learned their cliches. A former president wrote me, after I solicited an opinion, "I don’t think presidents need unconditional love. They don’t need tough love, either. And they don’t need a touchy-feely support group. They need peers who are willing to be honest rather than posture, a place to brainstorm that is safe, and ideas that are designed to educate rather than lobby them. They need a safe place to talk, explore, vent, and perhaps discover some new ideas."

That's the goal here. We're hoping that if we build it, they will come.

From a current president

I did not respond to the survey because it felt too dangerous. I am not concerned about our financial sustainability because for many years I have insisted on financial practices that minimize our institutional risk.

Several years ago, accreditors commended us on our financial practices. We have almost equal numbers of tenured and non-tenured faculty. Non-tenured faculty are funded entirely or mostly by grants and contracts. Unlike tenured faculty, they must be renewed every year. Tenured faculty are fully funded by state allocation and student tuition. The faculty union would like non-tenured faculty to have the same security and protections as tenured faculty.

As the grants and contracts are reduced or sunset, the college would be forced to reduce our non-tenured faculty and programs. Many of our tenured faculty would also be reduced due to lost tuition from students displaced from the classes taught by the former non-tenured faculty. Then we would lose more than half of our students and programs.

This volatile situation illustrates the dangers for college leaders to do the right thing to secure financial sustainability at their institutions. As a seasoned president, I have a lot of support from my board and community. I suspect there would be no way for a less experienced president to survive false allegations, the lack of understanding of financial realities, and public turmoil.

From a current president

At my community college there are concrete reasons for hope: additional public support to address workforce shortages in the region, low college attainment rates (lots of opportunity), proven models to improve student success and thus enhance enrollment, partnerships with employers that revitalize the institution.

Could these turn out to be not enough? Sure. Earlier in my career I tried to scare faculty and staff into the change needed by showing them the reality. It badly backfired. People withdraw when they are afraid. We need them to be bold and innovate. And they already know things are tough. So, work with them to develop a plan you all think is feasible and if enough goes well, will actually work. If the president doesn't believe it will work, they won't believe it. Could it fail? Yes, but it's far more likely to fail if they think all is lost.

Given conditions, presidents should be up in the middle of the night. I know I am. But that's the role. If there is reason to believe things will be okay financially, nothing wrong with saying that in a survey. Presidents have to be optimists. The CFOs are paid to be realists: their answer to the survey may be more realistic but even two thirds of them feel okay.

From a former president, stepped down 2023

I was president of a moderately sized (5,000 - 10,000 students) institution with a moderate endowment ($300m to $750m) and often felt that while we may have been struggling, we were still better off than smaller, far lesser endowed, tuition-dependent institutions in our immediate geographic area—those that are one to two small freshman classes away from closing.

We had resources for course corrections (restructuring, reducing non-academic staff, growing liquidity ratios, reducing the cost to produce a credit hour, launching new academic programs, raising their endowments, etc.). This, coupled with scale, may have created more runway for success.

Many presidents of smaller institutions nearby would speak privately to me about the severity of their institution’s fiscal health and remark how close they were to potential closure. So, my concerns about the health of my institution were, in part, mitigated by action and scale but also by seeing what was happening to my neighbors, reminding me that the grass is sometimes greener underneath your feet than it is a few steps away.

The Sandbox

Meeting the Challenges of the Open Meetings Laws

Tell Us About Your Board Relations

Your Responses to Our Questions About the Survey of Presidents

The Litter Box

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