Don’t let skilled administrators get away

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/07/2019 (1877 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is not easy to be a college president. Just ask Paul Vogt. You can be successful, a great leader, a positive influence both internally and externally in the business community, and still be told that you will not be renewed as the president of Red River College by its board of governors.

Full disclosure: I worked with Vogt while at the University of Winnipeg in the master’s in public administration program. I am a huge fan. He’s polite, self-effacing and brilliant, all at the same time. There’s no doubt that headhunters are already licking their chops, ready to pounce with job offers. He’s going to land just fine. Red River College may not do that well.

Because being a college president or a university president in these trying times is becoming increasingly difficult. It takes true leadership and political acumen. The job is no longer about patting the backs of parents and shaking the hands of students at convocation, or balancing budgets and raising funds to open new buildings — although those things are still part of the equation.

The job as a head of post-secondary institution has shifted significantly in neo-liberal times. Canada is the only G7 country in which education not is a countrywide mandate. Instead, it’s left up to the provinces, in a patchwork of programs, with funding for post-secondary research provided federally.

Under the Chrétien Liberals, research funding was enhanced and colleges such as Red River, with its applied research, suddenly found themselves the recipients of research grants that allowed for steady expansion of their programs. More recently, under Vogt, grant funding has included $1.75 million awarded in June for its culinary research kitchen and another $1.75 million in 2017 for aerospace and manufacturing.

But at the same time, provincial funding for post-secondary education hasn’t been kind. RRC, like other post-secondary institutions, has had to react to budgetary shortfalls. Under the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, Vogt has had to cut back on programming, cut staff and act aggressively on administrative costs to meet government demands.

So, Vogt also has to be a fundraiser. That’s another job that college presidents have had to take on with alacrity in the last 40 years. Time was, you could chat with a president of a post-secondary institution and the conversation would go toward topics of higher learning; now, they go toward the big ask: how much are you prepared to donate to the institution?

Vogt, as the public face of RRC, garnered one of the college’s largest-ever gifts this spring — $1.5 million from Jan den Oudsten, the founder and former president of New Flyer Industries and inventor of leading-edge transit technology, to go toward vehicle technology and research.

The role of president also requires dealing with the increased tensions regarding academic freedom, the need to improve diversity in hiring, and threats of lawsuits related to a range of issues that keep more than a few administrators awake at night. These are tumultuous times on campus, but for the most part, Manitoba has been relatively unscathed.

I recently attended the Worldviews on Media and Higher Education Conference in Toronto, where I met Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She spoke about Oberlin College in Ohio, which was ordered to pay US$11 million in a libel lawsuit after its students and professors picketed and protested a nearby bakery that had been wrongfully accused of racially profiling one of its students.

The college was deemed responsible for what its students and faculty did off-campus. The effect has left the academic community reeling and made more than a few presidents reconsider their role as administrators.

Last year, while at the Canadian Political Science Association conference in Regina, I commiserated with a colleague who, as a senior administrator, was dealing with the ongoing issue of a controversial professor’s view on immigration. The issue had become a public relations nightmare for the University of New Brunswick, as faculty members petitioned the university to remove the faculty member and as UNB became a national news story in which no one was portrayed favourably.

Closer to home, the University of Manitoba fumbled in its response to allegations that former music professor Steve Kirby had sexually assaulted a student in 2017 (that charge was later stayed). In 2018, U of M president David Barnard had to send a letter of apology to students and faculty for his administrators’ handling of allegations against Kirby, which included handing him a letter of recommendation to help secure a new position at a Boston university. Kirby’s U.S. job offer was later rescinded.

Obviously, it’s a new world for college and university presidents, who now must include crisis management and communications to their list of required skills. Ready access to legal representation is also a must in the college president’s playbook.

So when an institution has one who’s doing a superior job of it, who hasn’t dropped the ball, who has an excellent reputation both internally and externally — why in the world would it let him go?

This was a bad move by Red River. The board will regret it.

Shannon Sampert is a retired political science professor from the University of Winnipeg, where she had the honour of working with not one, but two great presidents.

s.sampert@uwinnipeg

Twitter: @paulysigh