Crisis Leadership in Higher Education

Theory and Practice

Ralph A. Gigliotti, Ralph A Gigliotti

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781978801820, 9781978801837
• eBook ISBN: 9781978801844
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

There was a time when crises on college and university campuses were relatively rare. Much has changed, and it has changed quite rapidly. Rather than being isolated incidents requiring the sole attention of presidents, chancellors, or communication professionals, the proliferation of crises across campuses means that crisis leadership has now become fundamental to the work of university personnel across levels, disciplines, and institutions. Drawing upon the findings of forty interviews with senior leaders from ten major research universities across the United States and a content analysis of over one thousand articles from a variety of news outlets, Crisis Leadership in Higher Education presents a theory-informed framework for academic and administrative leaders who must navigate the institutional and environmental crises that are most germane to institutions of higher education. The perspectives offered in this book remind us that it is in the chaos and uncertainty of crisis that leadership becomes most visible and most critical.

1

The Landscape of Crisis in Higher Education

Introduction and Context

Crisis is a prominent condition of contemporary organizational life (Roitman, 2014), and this is especially true for institutions of higher education. By their very nature, crises—which are growing in magnitude, frequency, and complexity (Helsloot, Boin, Jacobs, & Comfort, 2012)—have the potential to permanently tear at the fabric of an institution. The scenes of campus crises and their aftermath leave a lasting imprint on the minds, hearts, and legacies of many, whether it be the collapse of a newly constructed 950-ton pedestrian bridge at Florida International University, the rising floodwaters of the Iowa River and the collective efforts to fill sandbags outside of the Iowa Memorial Union at the University of Iowa, or the gathering of thousands of candle-holding students, staff, and members of the community at the iconic Rotunda on the campus of the University of Virginia days after a white nationalist march. These moments of disruption and discord in the life of an organization pose extensive challenges for the many impacted victims, yet they also serve as important communicative opportunities for the emergence of leadership (Fairhurst, 2007; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996), sensemaking (Weick, 1979, 1995), and reflection (Barge, 2004; Barge & Fairhurst, 2008), and as a stimulus for organizational change, improvement, and renewal (Seeger, Ulmer, Novak, & Sellnow, 2005).

Crises are disorienting and unwieldy events for an organization and its leaders. These often senseless and complicated moments become crucible experiences for those with leadership responsibility. It is in the darkness and chaos of crisis where leadership becomes most critical, most visible, most desired. There is a well-established need for crisis prevention and management, as evidenced by the volume of books, training programs, and resources on the subject. At the same time, however, we are witness to countless cases of absent, ineffective, or counterproductive leadership in response to a wide range of crisis situations across institutions of higher education. The very uncertainty and unpredictability of these moments make the practice of crisis leadership that much more significant, complex, and critical. As college and university leaders wrestle with all that is required in the areas of crisis prevention, detection, management, and communication, these situations simultaneously provide a rich and compelling backdrop for the scholarly analysis of organizational leadership.

Leadership has become an increasingly popular topic in both scholarly literature and professional training and development (Ruben, 2012; Ruben & Gigliotti, 2016a, 2016b). As aptly noted by Fairhurst and Connaughton (2014a), “leadership is both new and old, a timeless concept that must simultaneously reflect the times yet stay ahead of them. To do so is no small feat, but it is most worthy of pursuit in contemporary organizational life” (p. 24). In many instances, the success or failure of an organization hinges upon the actions and decisions of those in leadership roles. More than a formal position or responsibility, however, leadership is understood to be a process of social influence that may be accomplished by any organizational actor. This process is shaped by verbal and nonverbal communication and co-constructed between leaders and followers, and by informal and formal leaders (Ruben, De Lisi, & Gigliotti, 2017; Ruben & Gigliotti, 2016). This conceptualization of leadership as a distributed and communicative process is especially relevant for the study of crises in higher education—situations that often demand a collective and collaborative response from multiple individuals, units, and organizations.

There was a time when “crises” on college and university campuses were relatively rare and episodic. When incidents did occur, they were usually contained within specific departments of a college or university. In addition, the management of such issues was largely the responsibility of the communication and media relations personnel within the institution. Much has changed, and at what seems like light speed. For example, I identified more than 1,000 recent articles from higher education news outlets, published between 2011 and 2015, that characterized some type of “crisis” in higher education. Rather than being isolated incidents requiring the sole attention of presidents, chancellors, or communication professionals, the proliferation of crises across campuses means that crisis leadership has now become fundamental to the work of university personnel across levels, disciplines, and institutions.

This book explores the nature of crisis in higher education—a context in which conflicts of various kinds across a diverse array of stakeholders are common, and where their occurrence often challenges core institutional values. The list of relatively recent examples of high-profile events in higher education that were labeled “crises” is overwhelming, and includes, but is not limited to, a sweeping college admissions bribery scandal impacting a number of prominent institutions; acts of violence triggered by white nationalist rallies at the University of Virginia; ISIS-inspired terrorist activity at Ohio State University; the child abuse scandal at Penn State University and the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal at Michigan State University; the discovery of academic fraud at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the alleged falsification of data by the Fox School of Business at Temple University in an effort to increase and maintain its national rankings in U.S. News and World Report; the student occupation of the administration building at Duke University; heightened racial tensions and campus unrest at the University of Missouri and Yale University; a cyberattack on the computer network at Rutgers University; allegations of widespread abuse by athletic coaches at the University of Maryland and the death of freshman offensive lineman Jordan McNair due to heatstroke suffered during a football workout; racist behavior within the Greek systems at the University of Oklahoma and Syracuse University and toward visiting high school students at Texas A&M University; evidence of Harvard University’s men’s soccer team ranking freshmen women by their appearance; allegations of widespread sexual assault at the University of Montana; and the investigation of eighty-five colleges and universities by the U.S. Department of Education for possible violations of Title IX (a federal antidiscrimination law protecting such victims). In addition to these specific incidents, multiple natural disasters and acts of campus violence have impacted colleges and universities across the country. This list merely scratches the surface of the types of incidents that have become crises of significance in recent years that are most relevant to colleges and universities, as will be discussed in the pages ahead.

In response to the frequency and complexity of crisis situations on college and university campuses, the American Council on Education (ACE) convened a roundtable in 2012 with presidential leaders, media experts, and attorneys on the topic “Leading in Times of Crises.” The results of this meeting led to an article (Bataille, Billings, & Nellum, 2012) and a subsequent book (Bataille & Cordova, 2014) on the subject. This topic remains a top priority for college and university leaders for many reasons. First, events or situations that are characterized as crises tend to have a dramatic impact on a wide array of organizational stakeholders. Next, these situations often influence the operations or finances of an organization, in addition to threatening the reputation of the institution. For example, based on recent research by Luca, Rooney, and Smith (2016), high-profile campus scandals led to approximately a 10 percent decline in student applications the following year. Two years after the high-profile racial protests at the University of Missouri, enrollment declined more than 35 percent, and budget cuts have forced the temporary closure of seven residence halls and the elimination of 400 staff positions (Hartocollis, 2017). A report on the sexual molestation case at Penn State indicated that the university and its insurers have spent $250 million—and counting—on fees related to the crisis, with $5.3 million spent on crisis communications and outside consultants alone (Mondics, 2017). Or consider the staggering $500 million settlement by Michigan State to the 332 survivors of sexual abuse committed by longtime university physician Larry Nassar (Smith & Hartocollis, 2018). In addition to the impact that crises have on stakeholders and the operations, finances, and reputation of the institution, crises have the potential to divert focus from the core educational mission of a college or university, as addressing them demands a great deal of time and energy from the leaders of the organization. As acknowledged by Rollo and Zdziarski (2007), “The impact of crises on the facilities and the institutions’ ability to accomplish their educational mission must be addressed, but it is the human side of the equation that begs our attention as educators committed to serving our communities” (p. 3). These multifaceted consequences make organizational crises relevant moments for learning and development as leaders in higher education respond to, navigate, and learn from these events.

Crisis leadership in higher education is the subject of recent documentaries, such as The Hunting Ground (Ziering & Dick, 2015), and dissertations (Agnew, 2014; Garcia, 2015; Gill, 2012; Jacobsen, 2010; Menghini, 2014; Muffet-Willett, 2010). Despite the prevalence of crisis situations within the context of American colleges and universities, the scholarly literature in this area remains scarce, and the response to organizational crises is often the subject of widespread criticism. As suggested by Genshaft (2014), “higher education is particularly primed for poor handling of crises,” in part due to lack of preparation, a decentralized governance structure, and an ongoing preoccupation with excellence that can prevent institutions from taking responsibility for these difficult situations (p. 10). This is consistent with the survey findings of Mitroff, Diamond, and Alpaslan (2006), which reveal a growing desire for improved understanding and practice as it relates to crisis leadership in higher education, particularly the need to identify and develop competencies and practices found to be most useful for effectively leading colleges and universities during these challenging and critical moments. The convergence of widespread public attention and inadequate preparation highlights the need for additional research in this area, one that this book may begin to fulfill.

Included in this volume is a research-informed crisis leadership framework that may be valuable for academic and administrative leaders in navigating crises that are most germane to institutions of higher education, highlighting the need to understand the core values of an institution, the historical context, and the types of leadership behaviors that preceded the crisis itself. Additional findings that will be presented include a taxonomy of crisis types that are most applicable to colleges and universities, a continuum for thinking through communication during crisis situations in higher education, and a scorecard of skills, values, and competencies required for effective crisis leadership.

Exploring Crises in Higher Education

Four research questions serve as a guide for this work:

1. What events/situations are characterized as crises in higher education?
2. How do these events/situations become defined and labeled as crises?
3. What are the prominent characteristics of the discourse around crisis and crisis leadership in higher education?
4. What skills, values, and competencies are important for the work of crisis leaders in higher education?

Answering these questions is critical to advancing our knowledge of the dynamics of crisis and the ways in which they are handled by leaders in higher education. Furthermore, these questions lead us to disentangle terms and labels that are often used interchangeably, such as crisis prevention, crisis management, and crisis leadership, in a way that can more adequately prepare aspiring and current leaders for the multifaceted practice of preventing, managing, and leading throughout the multiple stages of a crisis.

Before exploring the dynamics of leadership made prominent in crisis situations, it is important to first gain a clear understanding of the specific types of events that are characterized as crises in higher education. I sought to identify these types of events through a content analysis of higher education news outlets, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, and a smaller sample of articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. This search was limited to news articles published from 2011 to 2015 that included the word “crisis” or “crises” within the text, resulting in 489 articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and 494 articles in Inside Higher Ed. Given the lack of a controlled vocabulary and the broader scope of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I reviewed a much smaller sample of the most recent fifty articles from these outlets using Factiva (2018), a global news database that would allow for a systematic search of the terms “crisis” or “crises” within higher education. The content analysis did not include articles unrelated to the specific topic of crisis in higher education.¹

The remaining research questions interrogate the practice of crisis leadership and the ways in which leaders identify, characterize, and describe crises of significance facing institutions of higher education. In order to answer these questions, the second phase of this study consisted of semistructured interviews with thirty-seven senior university leaders representing a diversity of units from Association of American Universities (AAU) member institutions, which were selected for four primary reasons. First, the sixty-two institutions admitted into the AAU are recognized as leading public and private research institutions—those where one might expect to find well-developed best practices in the areas of crisis leadership preparation, expertise, and training and development opportunities, all of which might have an impact on the preparation and effectiveness of the leaders at these institutions. The scope of research, teaching, clinical, and outreach activities, including athletics, at these institutions gives rise to a broad range of potential crisis situations. Furthermore, because of their status as leaders of higher education, these institutions attract a great deal of media attention when crises occur and are subject to a great deal of scrutiny by a wide array of internal and external stakeholders. Finally, AAU member institutions serve as models for higher education across the country—and in some instances, the world—and in many respects, their rich history of academic excellence positions the universities as exemplars for other colleges and universities with similar research ambitions.

Each of the institutions included in this work had recently experienced a situation or event that was characterized as a crisis in the content analysis. Summarized in greater detail in chapter 4, these crises involve the areas of academics, athletics, clinical, technology, campus facilities, finance/business, human resources, leadership/governance, natural disasters, public safety, racial/identity conflict, or student affairs. In many instances, I also selected institutions where it was possible to draw upon existing relationships with colleagues in order to gain access to senior leaders who would be willing to participate in a study of this potentially sensitive topic. Finally, geographically close institutions were selected with the goal of conducting as many interviews as possible in person.²

In order to qualify for participation, respondents had to meet one of the following criteria:

• Serve as the senior leader(s) and administrator(s) most directly involved with the crisis at the institutional level
• Serve as the senior communication represe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. The Landscape of Crisis in Higher Education: Introduction and Context
• 2. The Social Construction of Crisis in Higher Education: The Perception of Crisis, the Reality of Crisis
• 3. The Process of Defining and Labeling Phenomena as Crises
• 4. The Characterization and Categorization of Crises in Higher Education
• 5. Centrality of Communication in the Theory and Practice of Crisis Leadership
• 6. Crisis Adaptation of Leadership Competencies Scorecard for Leaders in Higher Education
• 7. Implications for Effective Crisis Leadership in Higher Education
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author