‘The Turkeyen Campus, for the academic year 2007/2008, enrolled 2,578 (48.5%) students in the Faculty of Social Sciences; 864 (16.2%) students in the School of Education and Humanities; and 669 (12.6% ) students in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. And the Faculties of Technology, Health Sciences, Agriculture and Forestry and the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences enrolled 570 (10.7%); 436 (8.2%); 120 (2.2%), and 71 (1.3%), correspondingly. Given this situation, a critical issue that engulfs higher education is the requirement for effective leadership’

ALL IS not well at the University of Guyana (UG). The Government of Guyana heavily funds the UG. Governments in many countries have initiated dramatic cutbacks in higher education budgets. Budget cuts now are becoming the norm in higher education in most developing countries. Today, the public in many countries demand increasing efficiencies, greater accountability measures, and added sensitivity to stakeholder demands. In simple language, what has happened is that higher education has become vulnerable to the market dynamics of a consumer-driven economy.

Effective leadership
One report suggests that the ‘university’ no longer holds the monopoly, controlling where students enroll and what programme offerings are made.

Under these circumstances, any university must activate changes to attain sustainability levels congruent to nation building. The process of nation building requires an incisive focus on the offering of students at the University of Guyana.

The Turkeyen Campus, for the academic year 2007/2008, enrolled 2,578 (48.5%) students in the Faculty of Social Sciences; 864 (16.2%) students in the School of Education and Humanities; and 669 (12.6% ) students in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. And the Faculties of Technology, Health Sciences, Agriculture and Forestry and the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences enrolled 570 (10.7%); 436 (8.2%); 120 (2.2%), and 71 (1.3%), correspondingly. Given this situation, a critical issue that engulfs higher education is the requirement for effective leadership.

However, universities have always demonstrated an enormous capacity. And frequently against all odds to resist change and, indeed, have been successful in accomplishing this. Today, effective leader behaviour is needed to quell this resistance to change. The Perspectives in 1996 said:

“It is no longer a question of whether institutions must change, but who will do the recasting,” those currently in charge “or an increasingly competitive market…that holds little sympathy for institutional tradition.”

The Higher Education Digest posed this question: Should traditional definitions of higher education leadership be sustained, or should it be redefined to incorporate increased campus elements in sharing social responsibility and accountability?

Any redefinition of leader behaviour would require transformational leaders to identify the wide-ranging forces of change, and to effect the leadership process.

The Baldridge Model
The University of Wisconsin-Stout (UW-Stout) used itself as a case study to redefine its leadership. UW-Stout has 8,000 students, 1,200 employees, and 450 faculty members. It has 27 undergraduate and 17 graduate programmes. In the 1990s, the University experienced fiscal restraint, especially when State government priorities moved from higher education to K-12 system, health, shared revenue, and corrections. The UW-Stout subsequently experienced a US$1.5 million budget reduction.

I want to now review how UW-Stout Chancellor, Charles W Sorensen, redefined leadership, creating systems of leader behaviour. Sorensen applied the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (MBNQA) as the framework for this action. This approach utilises seven criteria: (1) Leadership (2) strategic planning (3) student, stakeholder and market focus (4) measurement, analysis and knowledge management (5) faculty and staff focus (6) process management and (7) organisational performance results. In this piece, only the ‘leadership’ criterion would be briefly addressed.

As a response to the consequences and implications of fiscal restraint, the Chancellor, working collaboratively with the University Council, faculty and other campus constituent groups, speedily effected three significant changes: (1) Creating a Chancellor’s Advisory Council (CAC); (2) creating open, inclusive planning; (3) creating an office of Budget, Planning and Analysis (BPA); and (4) creating the appointment of a chief information officer as part of the infrastructure for a digital campus.

CAC
The CAC is a 21-member body that includes every constituent campus group. This body meets bi-weekly to consider planning, budget matters, issue recommendations, and to communicate campus information.

In fact, this group is concerned with establishing and evaluating values and strategic guidelines.

The CAC gives each stakeholder an opportunity to influence campus decision, creating systems of leadership shared among all campus constituents. They all agree that shared governance is shared accountability.

The CAC’s success depends on team building to produce trust, and a behavioural code of ethics. Team building exercises are administered every 4-6 weeks. Each meeting is evaluated, accompanied by an annual evaluation.

Budget, Planning & Analysis
The BPA unit brings into line institutional research, strategic planning, support campus budget process, and capital planning. In short, the BPA has aligned the UW-Stout’s vision, mission, priorities, and budget. The Chancellor pointed out that they do not generate an official priority without a budget for that priority. Ever since 1996, UW-Stout identified and funded 45 priorities: 81% to academic affairs, 18% to IT, and 1% to administrative affairs. The Chancellor noted that these statistics show their commitment to the educational mission.

The BPA also manages an open and participative strategic planning process. For instance, each year, nine facilitated group sessions, comprising of 30% faculty and staff. Students are allowed in these sessions, but a special session is also conducted for the student body. Ideas from all these sessions are recorded and presented to the CAC. The CAC annually reviews the BPA’s data to measure progress on short and long-term goals, and applies these quantifications into priorities to enhance UW-Stout’s performance.

A digital campus
A chief information officer was hired to spearhead an initiative to create a technology-intensive campus. The University is now a wired and wireless campus, producing a total digital campus. All students admitted are given a laptop computer, financed through their tuition and fees. This is the e-scholar programme, and all students could be in this programme by the Fall of 2005.

Faculty and staff are trained on web-based teaching techniques, and there is the availability of three web designers.

This digital programme has an assessment instrument to quantify the educational value to students. There already is some success with fewer students dropping classes, and increasing pass rates in introductory courses.

The IT facilitates a constant review of how efficient UW-Stout can become in delivering academic programmes. The Chancellor explained that not long ago, UW-Stout created a new School of Education without departments, solely a faculty of education. Some successes observed are: Greater teamwork in programme and course delivery, and an enhanced focus on the faculty of education, and not merely on an individual department. This strategy, the Chancellor noted, may help to maximise scarce resources.

Suggestions for action
Chancellor Sorensen believes that higher education requires a redefined leader behavior; that is, a more inclusive leadership style. Sorensen made five suggestions for action: Redefine leader behaviour to include all stakeholders; use team building as an effective instrument with frequent team building exercises to sustain trust; create priorities and methods of implementation — priorities have to be related to funding; measuring performance every three months; apply a proactive approach where the MBNQA criteria are applied to determine what the university has and what the university wants.

The UW-Stout, in 2001, was the first university to win the MBNQA in the United States. I started off by saying all is not well at UG. Understanding how the UW-Stout addressed its fiscal restraint and the impact of the 21st Century demands on higher education governance, indeed, may be quite instructive for UG. UG’s problems include, but are not restricted to, organisational design issues for administration and academic affairs, no real application of an operational strategic plan, minimal impact of research on national development, negligible effective frameworks for managing quality and standards, inter alia.

The changes initiated at UW-Stout demonstrated a remarkable impact in only three years. This impact happened mainly through transformational leader behaviour and systems of leadership. The Chancellor at UW-Stout remarked that it had to take a crisis to initiate the changes and to capture the enviable Baldridge Award. The University of Guyana has a clear choice to act now!!