78 Strategic Leadership
clumsiness and occasional dysfunction of the system should not, however, lead
us to think that academic organizations could somehow circumvent or dismantle
the collegial model. Academic expertise has to drive the core mission of the
organization.
From the perspective of strategic leadership, the fundamental problem is not
shared academic governance, but the way it is typically practiced. Strategically, its
central weaknesses are its structural fragmentation and its complexity. The issue
is not so much what the system sometimes fails to do, but what it cannot do as
normally constructed. Both classical and current studies focus on these perennial
problems (Duryea 1991; Tierney 2004; Tierney and Lechuga 2004).
Since it lacks mechanisms of integrative decision making, shared governance as
normally practiced is not able to address systematically and coherently the whole
institution and the demands on it. Whereas the strategic identity of a college or
university is lodged in a pattern of interconnected relationships with the wider
world, the mechanisms of shared governance deal with issues through fractured
and time-consuming processes of decision making. The issues are sliced into pieces
and handed out to different faculty and administrative committees. One group
deals with general education, another with retention, others with educational
policies, another with teaching and learning, and yet others with financial aid, the
budget, and so on. Increasingly, too, important decisions are made at the margin
or outside of the faculty governance system in research institutes, centers, and
programs that control substantial resources but may only be loosely tied to the
academic core of the institution (Mallon 2004). The strategic whole is hidden by
partial points of view and complicated procedures. The normal mechanisms of
academic decision making frustrate rather than enable effective leadership.
With horizontal fragmentation comes vertical complexity. Decisions about
academic matters travel slowly up and down a cumbersome series of reviews that
include departments, divisions, schools, colleges, and the university, with an array
of committees and academic officers involved in the process. Operational deci-
sions often run smoothly in the system. Yet when issues of strategic and academic
change have to be confronted, the system is not able to respond coherently or
quickly because its systems of decision making are splintered, cumbersome, and
time consuming.
CASE STUDY: RETENTION AND GENERAL EDUCATION
AT FLAGSHIP UNIVERSITY
Let us illustrate the issues of academic decision making with a case study that
draws directly from my own experience in several contexts. Flagship University
is a prominent comprehensive university of 24,000 students that offers a full
array of undergraduate and graduate degrees and sponsors a large number of suc-
cessful programs, institutes, and centers in basic and applied research. Through a
recently completed study, the university has learned that its attrition rate among
first- and second-year students is significantly higher than is predicted by the