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A year of accountability

2008 is bound to be a watershed year for higher ed accountability. Momentum has been growing for years, and in recent months the pressure on colleges and universities to document that they are ensuring educational quality and fiscal oversight has grown intense. And much of that pressure centers on governing boards, which hold the ultimate fiduciary responsibility for the institutions in their care.

In 2005, ACTA published a comprehensive report on the University of North Carolina governance system. Centered on accountability, the report recommended streamlining measures that would both concentrate and decentralize authority in appropriate and necessary ways.

The sixteen-campus UNC system, the report argued, should maintain a governing board of no more than 15 members (UNC's board has 32 members). "A smaller board would facilitate a focus on central issues, allow thorough discussion and increase each member's accountability," the report stated. The trustees of individual campuses should, in turn, have more authority to make local decisions.

Similarly, the report recommended that the governor should be the one who appoints people to the system-wide Board of Governors--and not North Carolina's General Assembly. "Essentially, it's an issue of accountability," ACTA president Anne Neal said. "The governor is essentially not at the table. ... The power to appoint is the power to lead. This (would allow) one person to set the agenda and take responsibility."

At once a set of specific recommendations to UNC and a statement about best practices, the study attracted strong media attention--and charted a clear, reasonable course of change.

Real change is slow, of course, and substantive recommendations can take some time to assimilate into existing systems. But it does happen.

So it is encouraging--but not ultimately surprising--to see an editorial in South Carolina's Columbia State calling for changes very like those ACTA urged North Carolina to undertake. "Single Board of Regents Should Control Colleges" is simple and to the point:

On the University of South Carolina's "Bridge" program, Dec. 22: We thought it was pretty cool a couple of years ago when Clemson announced it would let students who barely missed being admitted instead spend their freshman year in a special program at a local technical college and then automatically transfer to the university as sophomores.

The invitation-only "Bridge" program gave students access to academic programs and resources from Trident Tech and Clemson in order to provide the seamless transition to the university that is too often an elusive goal for technical- and community-college students. ...

About the only thing we can think of that would be better still is if we didn't have to be surprised and delighted by such news, if the idea of all of our state's 33 colleges and universities working together as a system to meet the needs of students and of the state were something we could take for granted. Although we're fortunate, for the first time ever, to have leaders at several of our colleges who embrace that idea, that could change in a flash when those leaders leave.

The best way we can think to prevent the return of the notion of colleges as independent fiefdoms that exist solely to serve themselves is to turn our higher education system into an actual system--one controlled by a single board of regents, preferably answerable to the governor.

Indeed. South Carolina's Board of Trustees should be looking hard at ACTA's report--and listening closely to the reasonable demands of citizens.

Worth noting: the State's call for a restructuring of university governance was reproduced in the Charlotte Observer--where it will undoubtedly draw the attention of North Carolinian taxpayers, legislators, trustees, students, and parents.

These are good signs for the coming year.

Posted by acta online on January 04, 2008 at 02:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack