Higher Education Governance - Expert Advice for Better Leadership

The relationship between a governing board and its president is the single most important relationship in any college or university. When it works, the institution has stable, confident leadership and a board that adds real value. When it breaks down, everything else suffers—strategy stalls, talented presidents leave, and the institution turns inward. Better institutional leadership almost always traces back to a well-managed board–president partnership. Here is how effective boards build and sustain it.

Want expert help putting this into practice? Higher Education Governance can guide you through it.

Draw a clean line between governance and management

The foundation of a healthy relationship is a shared, explicit understanding of who does what. The board governs: it sets direction, approves major decisions, and holds the president accountable for results. The president manages: within the strategy and budget the board approves, the president runs the institution and directs its staff. Blurring this line is the most frequent cause of conflict.

A practical discipline is the rule that the board acts through the president, not around the president. Individual trustees do not direct staff, negotiate on the institution's behalf, or make commitments outside the board's collective decisions. When trustees have concerns about operations, they raise them with the president or the board chair, not with subordinates. Writing this expectation into a board conduct policy makes it enforceable rather than merely hoped for.

Set expectations through clear, mutual goals

Related: Higher Education Governance - Essential Steps for Institutional Success.

A president cannot lead well if the board's expectations are vague or shifting. Best practice is to establish, at the start of each year, a small set of written priorities agreed between the board and the president—typically covering strategy, finance, enrollment, advancement, and one or two institution-specific challenges. These become the shared reference point for the year and the basis for evaluation.

A worked example: rather than telling a president to "improve finances," a board and president might agree to a target of reducing the tuition discount rate by two points, growing net tuition revenue by a defined percentage, and completing a feasibility study for a new revenue program. Specific, measurable goals give the president clarity and give the board a fair basis for judging performance.

Goals should be revisited, not set in stone. Circumstances change—an enrollment shock, a regulatory shift, a leadership departure elsewhere in the institution—and a rigid goal that no longer serves the institution becomes a trap for both president and board. The stronger practice is a mid-year check-in at which the board and president review progress and, where warranted, adjust priorities explicitly and on the record. This keeps the goals honest and prevents the year-end evaluation from turning on targets that everyone quietly knew had become irrelevant months earlier. It also signals that the board wants the president to succeed at what matters now, not to hit stale numbers for their own sake.

Evaluate the president honestly and regularly

Presidential evaluation is where many boards fail, either skipping it or reducing it to vague praise. A serious annual review assesses performance against the agreed goals, gathers structured input from the board, and results in a candid conversation and a written summary. A more comprehensive review, sometimes involving broader campus input, is appropriate at longer intervals.

The purpose is developmental as much as evaluative: a good review identifies what support the president needs, clarifies priorities for the coming year, and surfaces problems while they are still solvable. Boards that avoid honest feedback often find small issues festering into crises that a candid mid-course conversation would have prevented.

Compensation should be handled as a deliberate extension of this evaluation rather than as a separate, awkward negotiation. A compensation committee that ties the president's pay to the agreed goals and to relevant benchmarks keeps the process fair, defensible, and free of the appearance of favoritism. Transparency about how compensation decisions are made—what data informs them and who approves them—protects both the president and the board from the reputational damage that opaque or excessive pay arrangements can cause. Linking reward to the same objectives used for evaluation also reinforces, rather than muddies, the signals the board sends about what it values.

Support the president in public, challenge in private

See also: Higher Education Governance - Best Practices for Effective Leadership.

Effective boards understand the difference between the boardroom and the wider world. Inside the room, trustees should challenge the president rigorously—probing assumptions, testing plans, and disagreeing openly. Outside the room, once the board has decided, trustees speak with one voice and support the president's execution. A board that airs its internal disagreements publicly, or that lets individual members undermine the president externally, cripples the leadership it depends on.

This principle also protects the president's authority with staff and stakeholders. When the campus sees a board and president aligned, the institution moves with confidence. When it sees daylight between them, every constituency exploits the gap. Confidentiality and collective responsibility are therefore not niceties but conditions of effective leadership.

Get the board chair–president dynamic right

Between full board meetings, the relationship is carried by the board chair and the president. The best chairs act as a sounding board and candid counselor to the president without crossing into co-management. They keep the president informed of board sentiment, help shape agendas around what matters, and intervene early when a trustee or a committee strays out of role.

A useful norm is a regular, scheduled conversation between chair and president—frequent enough to prevent surprises in either direction. The president shares emerging issues before they reach the board; the chair conveys concerns before they harden into votes. This channel, used well, prevents most board–president ruptures. Used badly—when a chair becomes a shadow executive—it creates them.

Guard against the predictable failure modes

Certain patterns reliably damage the relationship: a board that micromanages when times are good and abdicates when times are hard; a president who manages the board by controlling its information; trustees who pursue personal agendas; and a chair who confuses leadership of the board with leadership of the institution. Naming these failure modes openly, and revisiting them in board self-assessment, keeps them in check.

The through-line of all this advice is that leadership in higher education is a partnership requiring deliberate maintenance, and the discipline of Higher Education Governance treats the board–president relationship as something to be actively cultivated rather than assumed. This article offers general educational guidance and is not legal advice; boards facing specific contractual or employment questions regarding their president should consult qualified counsel.