Article
Leading through higher education’s watershed moment
May 29, 2025 · Authored by Daniel Greenstein
This article offers five essential characteristics of an effective leader in today’s higher education environment. Read on to explore why it’s vital to understand your institution’s mission, set aside time for critical thinking, embrace shared governance, recognize your role as the institution’s steward and lead with humility.
Leadership matters a lot. This is not a new issue but an increasingly urgent one. Here’s why:
- Higher education needs to produce more credentialed adults. At least 60% of today’s jobs require people with some postsecondary education, but only 54% of 25-to 64-year-olds possess it. Postsecondary education is also an engine of social mobility and knowledge creation. It’s more challenging to measure these shortfalls, but if we could, the so-called talent gap would appear small by comparison.
- Credentialing more people requires postsecondary education to include individuals who don’t currently pursue an education after high school and those seeking to reskill and upskill with non-degree credentials, licenses, apprenticeships, etc. There aren’t enough “traditional” students left to fill the gaps. And because education is not a one-size-fits-all approach – where simply turning on the water hose and letting it flow will suffice – credentialing growth will require significant evolution in the performance of virtually every postsecondary function. It will require postsecondary education to evolve, change, upskill and reskill itself and its employees.
- Productivity improvement will occur amid significant headwinds. Before January 2025, these headwinds were primarily driven by demographic shifts, student affordability challenges, changing student, employer and societal needs, negative public sentiment, rapid technological advancements, hyper-inflationary cost increases, an aging postsecondary workforce that requires upskilling, growing tensions (including mutual distrust) between faculty and administration and an unfavorable political landscape. They are blowing with far greater force today.
These pressures bear down on everyone in higher education. Still, they are hardest on the CEOs – university, college and system presidents – who must lead effective responses, often requiring significant (even transformational) shifts in strategy, practice and legacy academic and business models. They need to lead these responses contending with Boards, the often-competing interests of internal (students, faculty and staff) and external (community leaders, employers, donors, alumni and elected officials) stakeholders, and slow-moving decision-making apparatuses that represent and reify decades of compromise.
Leadership is a cornerstone of higher education's future. I wrote about it last summer, emphasizing the critical importance of team building, understanding higher education as a business, data-driven decision-making and resilience. This article identifies five additional essential traits of leadership based on over 100 recent interviews with higher education leaders, focusing on their pressure points, support needs and capability gaps.
Know and advocate your institution's mission
Most, but certainly not all, postsecondary education leaders cut their teeth in enrollment and revenue growth periods (with some dips) through 2010. Leadership was all about addition – more programs, people and facilities. This drove a tendency toward isomorphism, a phenomenon where institutions within any sector (i.e., liberal arts colleges, research universities) become more alike. Today, leadership entails trade-offs, if not outright contraction. Moving into or doubling down on one thing requires dialing back on or eliminating another. Making trade-off decisions require a laser-like focus on mission – who we serve, how, and how, in making those choices, we distinguish ourselves from competitors. In an ideal world – or a start-up university – those questions would be resolved first and drive everything from curriculum design and delivery, enrollment management and student support strategies to master planning, labs, libraries and research facilities.
The world is not ideal (and there are very few start-ups), so leadership is left refining the mission and making any related shifts while operating as a going concern, and thus against a backdrop of legacy practices, policies and affinities, which can have a firm hold over stakeholders’ the hearts and minds. The potential for resistance is real. So are the risks to leadership where aggrieved stakeholder groups, such as the Board, lose their confidence in or patience with the CEO. And yet, the risks to the institution (including its longevity and impact) of not aligning investments with a distinctive mission are even more significant.
Make time to think
College, university and system leaders are consumed by the transactional aspects of everything, from management to advocacy, fundraising and community engagement. No wonder they attend industry conferences, serve on boards, join associations and engage with accreditors. Among the motivations are professional development, paying it forward and camaraderie with people facing similar challenges. Taking a break from the transactional load has got to be another motivator. Despite these heavy demands on the leader’s calendar, it is imperative to carve out time to think about the organization’s goals and how to make progress in advancing them.
Any leader can compile a list of opportunities their institution should consider. We attend conferences, have capable, connected and knowledgeable staff, speak with one another and read. And let’s face it, the palette we’re painting from doesn’t come with that many colors. The question isn’t what to do. It is what makes sense to do at this institution, given its mission, needs and circumstances. It’s about taking a known and finite list of opportunities and assessing their estimated cost, benefit and implementation risks considering local circumstances, needs, governance, culture and staff and organizational capabilities. That kind of thinking takes whole blocks of unscheduled time that will be forcibly redirected away from transactional work. Don’t fall prey to the tyranny of the unfilled calendar. Understand it as a blessing and use it wisely.
Embrace faculty-shared governance
I wrote about this topic at greater length recently, so I will jump to the punchline here. Shared governance is on the critical path to growing an institution’s credentialing productivity. So, embrace it, evolve and improve it and – in partnership – engage it actively. Some practical advice and pointers to useful resources are available here.
Understand your leadership as stewardship
Higher education is caught up in the maw of partisan politics. Its value to the nation has become a battlefield on which warring political factions seek to score points against each other while solidifying their bases and expanding their voter appeal. As a result, postsecondary education leaders may find themselves contending with stakeholders who want them to take a stand on a particular position – to plant the institution’s flag in a political faction’s foxhole. It’s not pretty, pleasant or fair, but it is a feature of the leadership landscape. So, what to do? Here’s my advice:
Understand your voice, its power and reach. As the institution’s leader, you speak for your organization even when you say you’re not. That means you represent and speak for your entire faculty, staff, students, alumni and board members. So, as you contemplate taking a stand on an issue, ask yourself, “can you really speak for all of them?”
As the leader, you are also responsible for your organization's long-term health and well-being. It isn’t yours. It’s just in your care for a while. So, be intentional and consider what is right for the organization in the long-term. It’s possible that what feels right for you at a given moment concerning a particular issue is not right for the organization. If you’re ever forced to choose, choose the organization. If that’s impossible, it’s time for a courageous and personal conversation about your future.
You are also the educator-in-chief. While this role requires tact, diplomacy and considerable care, you may find that some of the politicized issues impacting your organizational shores and roiling your constituents create educational opportunities. You don’t need to choose sides to deepen a general understanding of the issues at play, people's passions toward them, their role and recurrence in American history and to explore possible paths to resolution today.
Juliette Kayyem (formerly of Homeland Security and now at the Kennedy School) provided the best advice on this topic during a panel discussion. Paraphrasing, she advised leaders contending with a steady stream of crise du jour to consider three questions before reaching for a keyboard or phone.
- “What?” What is the issue at hand?
- “So what?” Why and how does it matter to your organization’s current and future success and well-being, regardless of your personal feelings about it?
- Finally, and depending on where you get to with question two: “Now what?” What do you do about it? How do you respond?
This advice will contribute to being a more effective and less distracted leader – focused on what really matters.
Lead with humility
Higher education feels under attack. And while we mobilize to defend and push back so that we can continue our historic missions in service to the nation, we need to ask: What happened? More specifically…
- How did we lose the public’s trust to a point where it is possible to mobilize what feels like a full-frontal assault?
- Are there issues we need to attend to?
- Are there cultural issues at many of our universities and colleges that we could do more to address so that universities and colleges are genuinely as well as rhetorically inclusive?
- Are there actions we can take – such as exploring different business and education models at the institutional level – to mitigate the cost increases that place upward pressure on student tuition and fees?
- Is there more we can do to ensure that the students who enroll using hard-won give and scarce dollars have a far greater chance of leaving our institutions with a credential that will return on that investment?
I could add more bullets, and so could you, but you get the point. The answer to these questions and others like them – is yes.
This is a serious matter for today’s leaders, who, while defending their institutions and the national importance of higher education, must also address known and serious weaknesses that may have contributed to the hostility we are facing.
This is where humility comes in. It entails pushing back strongly against funding and policy assaults that would hinder universities and colleges in their service while speaking openly about the industry’s challenges and how those challenges have contributed to this difficult watershed moment.
A few are even beginning to discuss the opportunity available in this moment of tremendous adversity to address those challenges seriously and in a lasting manner. One or two are beginning to articulate concrete steps.
That, to me, is courageous leadership. It is courageous in its humility. It is courageous in its willingness to embrace and learn from dissent, to engage in dialogue, listen, learn, admit to weakness and course-correct.
In summary
Leadership is hard. It is also isolating. This is true in any industry, but it is particularly pronounced in residential universities and colleges, given their communal nature.
Still, leaders are not alone. At least you don’t need to be. Here are some tips and tricks, which are likely familiar:
- Find people you trust and invite them to give you honest and critical feedback. In Dare to Lead, Brenee Brown offers exceptional, practical and implementable advice on this topic (as on so many others related to leadership)
- Build a “kitchen cabinet” of peers with whom you can share lessons learned and from whom you can seek guidance
- Don’t be shy to ask for help. You can’t be expected to have all the answers – at least, you can’t be expected to have the information and insights you need to arrive at all the answers. Additionally, asking for help demonstrates strength even though it takes courage
Last thought (and I’ve offered it before): lead with strength, humanity and courage. Above all, find joy and optimism in the work because frustration, cynicism and anger will sideline your efforts, and we need all hands on deck.
Please note: All views and opinions expressed are my own.
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