As SIUC transformed from a 5000 student teacher's college to a 20,000+ student full service university. Looking back on it now I think we can hit some of the highlights of the marketing story.
- Wide open opportunities to be first, build something, a new frontier.
- Rank based on merit and leadership.
- Oriented to people and performance.
- Growth and excitement.
- Small town living, great parties, nice people.
- High standards and excellent results.
- Focus on buildings and not people.
- Rank based on royalty (sorry administration) position or one of the chosen departments and not merit.
- Management based, not leadership based.
- Spending cuts, tuition increases and uncertain results.
- Standards are secondary to retention.
- SIU graduates are no longer top tier hires.
We have heard that Glenn Poshard is this leader and maybe he is. But Poshard is still tied to the Illinois political system pretty tightly. On Monday, the BOT will approve the Saluki Way madness and that is only happening if Poshard approves it. I guess the good news is that his name will be first on the brass plaques.
4 comments:
Morris was a great leader who got a lot of great things done, but he was a dictator as well. I don't think that type of management would ever work in a modern University - especially SIU.
Read about Morris though, it will give you a different perspective about things. Mainly it will show you that we've never really had shared governance at SIU.
I don’t agree with your analysis.
First of all, times were different and what Morris did then was accepted and in general morale was very good to great at SIU in his time. The history is pretty clear on this. I’m sure that he was a polarizing figure and some people hated him too. That is a good thing and expected.
In order to lead you have to be a dictator sometimes, but need to get most of the people to buy into your vision. Morris did this. The question with shared governance isn’t about the professors running the university. The professors in general don’t want to be bothered with all those details. The professors don’t want an architect and PE teacher to turn down people for promotion based on their uneducated opinion of how good research in some engineering sub discipline (after the department, chair and dean have said it is good enough). Wendler’s problem with shared governance really comes down to problem with his understanding of the management boundaries and poorly playing the politics. If he keeps his job after this year, I would be willing to bet you that he has learned that having a whole bunch of tenured facility pissing on you in public isn’t fun and will mend fences.
I think you don’t understand about leadership yet and I’m very sure that most professors don’t. I didn’t know Morris, but his results speak for themselves. You can be a dictator if you are right and get away with it.
About not being a good leader yet - you are right, and I'll be the first to admit it.
It still seems as if we had the structure that was so centralized, and when Morris was gone, with no clear structure, it all went to pot. Morris was a very dynamic leader but he did have things fall apart at the end of his run.
On most of your points, you are correct, but Morris did not involve faculty or students much on how the University was run. We still have that vaccum where leaders fail at SIU though. I can't get past that at this point.
Always enjoy your comments. It is hard to say what was up with Morris at the end, he was losing his mind. I agree that he didn't seem to leave a successor or strong enough management team to carry the tourch after he fell and that was a mistake.
There is a book called "Built to Last" by Collins and someone that compares great companies with good companies. One of the traits of the good companies is a leader like Morris that when he leaves the company doesn't keep going. I think Jack Welch at GE got lots of credit for his management of his management team and finding a strong team to keep the company going after he was gone.
Personality cults don't do well when the personality goes. :)
Peter
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