80 Strategic Leadership
the content and methods of the general education courses surface, and there are
numerous complaints that there are not enough financial resources to do justice
to the new program.
When the staff of the vice president for students completes their meetings, they
suggest a program to link first-year courses with new residential hall programs that
would involve the faculty members who teach general education courses. They
recommend that funds be found to support the new initiative. They send their
report to the vice president, who forwards it to the dean of arts and sciences, the
provost, and the president.
Reading about the senate committee’s response, and studying the other reports,
the president meets with the dean of arts and sciences, the vice president for
students, and the provost. He learns that several departments and the curriculum
committee in arts and sciences are still studying the problem, which leads to a
blunt expression of his rising frustration: “We have a very important problem with
retention linked to a core academic program, and no one is ready to do anything
about it. Everyone wants to shuffle the issue off to someone else and throw money
at it. I never liked the new general education program, anyway, because it was too
much of a political compromise. I said so at the time, but no one wanted to listen.
How can we get a purchase on this issue and do something about it?”
Decision Making at Flagship
This case illustrates many things, one of which is that the institution’s problems
began long before its high attrition rate. These problems are lodged in the way
the university makes decisions. It does not have a way to define and to address
educational and strategic issues that transcend a series of segmented decision-
making systems. The best it can do is to try to build linkages after the fact. Its
governance system is functioning properly, and procedures are being followed. No
one is protesting about arbitrary decisions or a failure to consult or communicate.
The operational systems are also working. Studies are being completed, meetings
are being held, and actions that move up and down the governance system are
being proposed.
The problem is that the university shows a deficient ability to anticipate stra-
tegic issues and their interconnection. In this case, the senate committee is trying
to address curricular and retention issues from a university-wide perspective but
does not have the expertise, authority, time, or resources to pursue its agenda to
completion. The dean, department chairs, and faculty in arts and sciences all
come to the problem from different directions with multiple interests, so the
discussion generates a complex mixture of conflicts over professional and academic
issues, priorities, and resources that bring to mind the garbage-can model of deci-
sion making. Administrative officers such as the provost and vice president for
students have the authority needed to review the issues, but not to implement
any proposals that require faculty action. The problem behind the problem is that
the university lacks a coherent strategic understanding of itself as an integrated