Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Built for Harvard. Fatal for Most of Us & Why higher education’s legacy board governance model is destroying the institutions it was designed to protect
I have sat across the table from the leaders of more than twenty colleges and universities that were on the edge of closure. Not in conference rooms with catered lunches and slide decks about strategic positioning.
In conversations where people were trying to figure out whether they were going to make payroll, whether they were going to have to call their accreditor, whether they had one more semester or three. These were not conversations about vision. They were conversations about survival.
And in almost every one of them, the same thing was true. The institution had a board. The board had bylaws. The bylaws gave that board ultimate authority over the institution’s future. And the board, by the time the conversation reached me, was either paralyzed, divided, or being worked by internal factions in ways that made coherent action nearly impossible.
The institution was not going to close because its mission had failed. It was going to close because its legacy governance structure was never designed for the world it was now living in. The bylaws were a document written for a different kind of institution, in a different century, and most have never challenged the construct since.
That is what this piece is about.
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