For the next few days I want to take everyone through universities the way a Board of Governors sees them – or at least, the way a good governing Board should see them (some but not all of it applies to colleges as well; I’ll try to highlight both where possible), and that is through the lens of risk. It is the role of the Board of Governors (again, good ones) to ask the question, over and over, “what could go wrong? What are the threats?” The Board is there to make sure the institution is still around a hundred years from now; it has to worry about the threats.

Threats are manifold. There are threats to operations, threats to relationships, threats to reputation and, underlying it all, are threats to finances.  And none of them can be dealt with in an absolute way: in many cases, trying to deal with one set of risks may create new risks elsewhere (especially with respect to finances). We’ll talk about all of these over the course of this week, but I want first to talk about a risk that is so all-pervasive that it’s almost never talked about directly: risk to institutional prestige.

Prestige is not the same thing as reputation. Reputations can be either good or bad. Reputations are not all-encompassing: an institution can have multiple reputations (e.g. good at academics, terrible at athletics). Reputations can change quickly, especially in reaction to day-to-day news events, such as scandal or misappropriation. But prestige is different. It is unidirectional (more is good, less is bad), it sticks to everything it touches (good profs at high-prestige universities tend to have an easier time than outstanding profs at mid-prestige universities), and it changes only very slowly and almost never in relation to “stories of the day”.

(Think about the departure of UBC’s former President Arvind Gupta and events related thereto. That saga may have negatively affected the school’s reputation in a few ways – not least its reputation for being able to handle crisis communication. But it did zero to affect the institution’s prestige and the school remains one of the world’s top public universities).

Prestige may be a little on the ephemeral side, but it matters because it is the currency of academia. A more prestigious institution is one that more students want to go to, more professors want to teach at, and more governments and donors want to fund. It is, in short, a much easier institution to manage. An institution that has less prestige, or is falling in prestige, is an institution in trouble. Indeed, sometimes it can be a vicious circle: when prestige is lost, fewer good students want to come, which makes it harder to attract faculty, which either raises the cost of attracting faculty and diverts funds from other prestige-enhancing projects or puts them out of range altogether which has drives down prestige still further…

Boards have a fiduciary duty to make sure the institution is solvent. But it also has a larger duty to safeguard an institution’s prestige. And this is tricky because prestige is not an easy quality to measure. For universities with a research mission, bibliometrics can give one a sense of an institution’s prestige in terms of research (this is not perfect, but there is a pretty high correlation between things like citation indexes and academic prestige). But prestige is also usually a function of how well-known its graduates are within a community. This gives older and more established institutions a huge leg-up on more recent entrants, simply because their graduates have a longer track record. Occasionally, some prestige can be gained by striking out in a new direction and doing something novel (Waterloo is an obvious example of this; I might also point to Simon Fraser and Ryerson and in the US Arizona State). But by and large for younger universities prestige comes from imitating older universities, and that means basically churning out graduates who go on to change the world and – among larger institutions anyway – producing research which goes on to be highly-cited and influential.

Now obviously the business of research and teaching is not under the purview of the Board of Governors; quite properly, those are matters for Senate and/or administrations (in institutions which do not have Senates, like colleges). For the most part, the Board of Governors’ job is to figure out ways to fund whatever activities Senate deems it needs to do its job. But it is also the Board of Governors’ job to hold the administration – and indirectly the Senate – to account on this: at the end of the day, what does all that money that goes into academic priorities actually buy the institution in terms of prestige?

In my (admittedly limited) range of experience, Boards of Governors do not do nearly enough in this area. Administrations do provide information on the research enterprise, but it’s usually in the “look at how much grant/infrastructure money we have” rather than some cold hard facts with respect to what institutional progress looks like in comparison to some benchmark institutions. It’s not that the latter is actually very hard to do (thisblog post of mine from last November, for instance, is a pretty simple way to do it: you could get a little fancier if you wanted, but the basics are all there), it’s just that Boards are either not given it or don’t ask for it.

And on the graduates’ side? Producing graduates who contribute to their workplaces and communities is the number one job universities have. It’s the number one reason to have Board made up of community leaders, too: to provide direct feedback to institutions on precisely this issue. But though governments across the country do surveys of employers/students to see how “satisfied” they are with graduates/their own education, you never see institutions actually delving too closely into how their graduates are faring except when it comes to tapping them for donations.

What Boards should be asking is: are employers promoting our institution’s graduates to leadership positions or are they looking elsewhere? Are our grads more civically engaged, or producing more works of art/fiction/music than graduates at other institutions? Among those graduates who have gone out and made significant community contributions, how many say their experience at our institution made a difference to their career (and if so, what specifically made the difference)?

These are the things prestige is made of. And, bluntly, a Board which does not have a handle on how the labour market and the community view its graduates does not have a handle on the biggest source of risk facing an institution.

Does yours?

Tomorrow: shorter-term reputational and relationship risks.