AGB-CHEA Joint Advisory Statement on Accreditation & Governing Boards

You may not have previously read this four-page advisory statement (PDF). It's succinct and useful checklist of issues and considerations around boards of trustees and their relationship to (and awareness of) the accreditation cycle of an institution. 

Governing boards, working in collaboration with institutional leadership, are obligated to ensure mission achievement and institutional fiscal integrity as part of their fundamental fiduciary responsibility. Accordingly, understanding accreditation and its relevance to educational quality is extremely important. Governing boards need to be appropriately engaged in the accreditation process, respecting the leadership of the chief executive officer, the chief academic officer, and the faculty; acknowledging the importance of accreditation to serving students; and understanding that board engagement, awareness, and follow-up are fundamental to their fiduciary responsibilities.

AGB's Trusteeship Magazine: Several Articles

Nonmembers of AGB can no longer access the entire contents of this great magazine. Here is the current Table of Contents, though. (PDF) The lead article in the current, July/August 2009 issue is titled "The Gremlins of Governance: by Richard Chait, and its description reads: "Many college boards wrestle with 'three gremlins of governance.' None haunts every campus to the same degree, and yet all are familiar and problematic." Other articles of interest in this issue include: "Your Institution in a Global Economy" by William Freund; "Getting By Isn't Good Enough for Higher Education" by Geanie Morrison and Denise Merrill; and "Presidential Transition Teams: Fostering a Collaborative Process," by Rochard B. Artman and Mark Franz.

The Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB) has recently published a new report titled, "The AGB Survey of Higher Education Governance." Its executive summary and introduction is available at no cost here. (PDF) Description: "A wide-ranging study of best practices and policies for higher education governance reveals that while many important policies and practices are in place to guide the work of college and university governing boards, there is also room for improvement. Covering issues such as assessment of individual trustees to presidential compensation, the report, based on a survey of 700 respondents, is the first comprehensive and focused look at higher education governance: how well boards are meeting their responsibilities, what issues are at the top of their agendas, and which policies and good practices guide their work." The full report can be purchased here.

Few Boards Do Sophisticated Financial Planning, Experts Say

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Related, A concurrent session at SCUP–44, July 18–22: From Operating Revenues to Capital Funding and Beyond–New Tools for Financial Planning and Policy

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Paul Fain reports, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, on an AGB presentation by SCUPer Tom Longin, executive editor of Planning for Higher Education. We thank the Chronicle for providing us a nonprotected link to the article.

[T]he yearly budget exercise can give trustees a misperception of their institutions' fiscal health, said Thomas C. Longin, one of the presenters and a longtime consultant for colleges and the association. That's because many colleges have become adept at just surviving year to year, without conducting longer-term strategic financial planning.

"If we get fixated on balancing the budget, we will never have any control of costs," and that will lead to higher tuition and deteriorating academic quality, Mr. Longin told trustees. "If you simply focus on getting out of the hole you're in, you'll just get in deeper."

The solution, said Mr. Longin and his co-presenter, Richard Staisloff, vice president for finance and administration at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, is for boards to shift their financial attention to strategic monitoring of how their institutions invest "time, talent, and treasure" over the next three to five years.

Big Man on Campus: An Interview with Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

This interview is available both as streaming audio and in transcript form. Trachtenberg was president of George Washington University for 19 years. Prior to that he served as president of the University of Hartford for 11 years. His latest book is titled Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out on Higher Education. When asked about his comments in the book that he hoped the GW board would treat his successor more humanely, he replied:

Well, I was being slightly tongue in cheek of course. What I meant was that college presidents, and my successor is no exception in this regard, are being driven to raise more and more funds in order to feed the institution. And this is daunting and I anticipated that with a new president coming in, the university would have ambitions and would want to take the institution to the next level. That's why we bring in new presidents—to help us focus on the future, to help us define where we want to go, and to write the next chapter of the institutional history. And I had just left office—during my tenure, we had gone from $200 million in endowment to about a billion four hundred million dollars in endowment. And, this gives people appetite. And I thought, my goodness, they need to have a certain amount of compassion for this new man coming in not knowing his constituencies, not yet having a vision for the institution. They had to work with him, and understand he was not a magician.

Several from AGB's "Trusteeship" for March/April 2008

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) has a bimonthly magazine, Trusteeship, which is widely read by college and university trustees—probably including yours. It's only available to members of AGB in print, but AGB publishes the entire issue, not separated out into articles, as a PDF which can be downloaded (for now) by anyone. You can find the latest here (PDF). It includes, among other items of interest, the following articles:

• Do Rankings Reward Poor Institutional Decisionmaking?; 
  
• Moving a Board to High Performance; 
  
• Balancing Sports Spending With Campus Values; 
  
• Email Risks for Boards and Presidents; and
  
• Trustee's Roles in "Green" Campuses.