BOARD GOVERNANCE

Since our position statements were limited to 250 words I chose to make the failure of Board Governance the essence of my statement. You can have a great resume and great ideas but if you do not understand and practice good board governance, disaster can strike like it did last fall. I applaud the Board for setting up a Governance committee recently, it was long overdue, however they failed to understand that a board should not be run by an Executive Committee. An Executive Committee has a role to play in all boards but that role should be limited. All Board members should be "hands on" regarding the oversight of the University.

I have over 100 years of Board experience from a medical board to a financial board, from for-profit boards to non-profit boards. There is no college major called Board Governance. You learn about governance two ways: the hard way, by serving on good, well run, boards, and by serving on badly run boards and by studying the current thinking as to what constitutes "best practices" in board governance. I have had the fortunate or unfortunate experience of learning through both methods.

Each person who ends up being elected will have the same problem, how do you convince the majority of the board to move in a new direction. That is why I proposed that I would push for the Board to hire an expert to study how the Board is currently being run and make suggestions that would lead the Board to adopt "best practices". It will be hard for the board not to adopt these recommendations which I believe will be the start of moving the board in a new direction.