Roles and responsibilities of governing boards from three different institutional settings offering nursing education programs

Nursing education programs are found in three types of institutional settings: the traditional college or university, the corporate college, and the hospital. Each type of institutional setting is governed by a board of trustees. Trends in higher education argue that the roles and responsibilities governing boards play in the future will be increasingly significant and prominent. The purpose of the study was to determine if the perceived roles and responsibilities of boards of trustees differ among the three institutional settings and to ascertain the actual involvement of these governing boards on selected issues. A stratified sample of chairmen or chairwomen of governing boards from traditional colleges and universities, corporate colleges and hospitals located in thirteen states comprised the sample. Ten roles and responsibilities of trusteeship were investigated: mission, administration, finance, fund-raising, academic affairs, external relations, student affairs, physical facilities, court of appeal, and long range planning. The survey instrument was a multiple item questionnaire. A one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the ten hypotheses. The Scheffee Post Hoc Procedure was applied when the F-ratio of the ANOVA was found to be statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Two of the ten governance responsibilities studied, academic affairs and student affairs, were found to be perceived significantly different by chairmen and chairwomen of boards of trustees from the three institutional settings. Traditional college and university trustees perceived that their role in issues related to academic affairs was to maintain the overall educational process and to affirm the role of the faculty in curriculum decisions. Responsibility for academic affairs by corporate college trustees was unclear and hospital governing boards indicated that issues related to academic affairs would not come before them. Trustees from all three institutional settings responded that they had very little involvement with student affairs. In eight of the responsibilities studied---mission, administration, finance, fund-raising, external relations, physical facilities, court of appeal, and long range planning---governing boards from the three types of institutional settings offering nursing education do not perceive their roles and responsibilities to be different