Dive Brief:
- Nonacademics are being tasked with innovating at struggling institutions, with Paul Quinn College being led by a former corporate securities lawyer and crisis manager, the University of Iowa recently hiring a former IBM executive, and UNC looking to former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
- The number of outsider leaders in higher education is expected to increase as institutions look to nonacademics as those sometimes best-prepared to solve business challenges, according to the Hechinger Report.
- While these outsiders can bring new ways of thinking about problems in academia, they also often arrive to deep skepticism from faculty and students, as Bruce Harreld saw in Iowa and Spellings saw in North Carolina.
Dive Insight:
Michael Sorrell, president of Dallas' Paul Quinn College, got rid of its football team and replaced the field with a garden to serve the surrounding community. The program was costing the school too much money. Even when this is the business case, emotionally, many students and alumni are tied to such athletics programs. Sometimes it is outsiders who can best come in and take the heat.
Those who come up in academia are still the most common leaders in higher education by far, however, and many are leading thriving institutions, forging ahead with their own ideas for innovation. This is perhaps the key — trustees are looking for innovators, whether they come from inside acadame or out.