Reframing the work of the board: A case study of intentional change

New challenges in higher education are changing traditional ideas of trustee board governance. Technology, increasingly diverse and changing populations, competition, financial aid, intellectual property ownership, globalization, and campus security are just some of the challenges that have emerged as institutional priorities for colleges and universities in the past decade. These internal and external pressures are placing greater demands on boards of trustees to make effective decisions in a timely manner. In addition, traditional conceptions of governance have come under scrutiny for being slow inefficient and unresponsive to the environment. Trustees express dissatisfaction with the way in which their time and talents are being used. Presidents and boards who seek to reframe the work of the board must begin by thinking about governance as leadership. The scholarship on board governance suggests that traditional frameworks and practices are not structured to handle increasingly complex issues. Academic leaders have begun the work of evaluating board governance, but there is virtually no literature to help boards and presidents understand whether they should engage in such a change process and what some of the possible consequences might be for doing so. The purpose of this study is to understand how a college engaged in a change process to reframe the work of the board and how the change process is perceived by the president, board members-at-large, and senior managers who were affiliated with the institution before, during and after the change process. One of the major questions this study will examine is what were the intended and unintended consequences of the change process