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• Q & A with Gary Forsee
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Gary Forsee will start as the 22nd UM president on Feb. 18.

A New Plan

BY MATT HARRIS
news@ColumbiaMissourian.com

The December day Gary
Forsee was introduced as
the new University of
Missouri System president
seemed to lack pomp
and pageantry.

Outside the Reynolds
Alumni Center, the sky
was overcast and occasionally spitting snow. The MU
campus, usually humming
with activity, was shuttered
and relatively dormant
after the students left for
the holidays.

Inside, a staid coronation
took place. The only hints that a university-related event was in progress were the podium and two gold banners featuring the seal of the UM System hanging behind it.

Members of the UM System Board of Curators and the usual academic and administrative heads were in attendance. But the scene was subdued, especially given the media blitz and speculation that preceded it.

Since November, Forsee, 56, was well known as the front-runner and likely successor of Elson Floyd, whose departure for Washington State University almost a year earlier caught many by surprise. A trip to Jefferson City to meet with Gov. Matt Blunt and leaders of the General Assembly in November was an implicit confirmation of Forsee’s likely appointment. Several days earlier, he had a not-so-secret meeting with the Presidential Search Advisory Committee, a 19-member panel of faculty, staff, alumni and students, for a couple of hours in Kansas City.

Inside the alumni center, the former executive of Sprint Nextel stepped to the podium to offer his remarks. Don Walsworth, the curator from Marceline, sat to the right of Forsee, a slight smile gracing his face.

He knew the board of curators had attained the prize they sought.

“You know, somehow, the word got out,” he said jokingly. “I can’t imagine how that happened.”

Richard Brow,
University of Missouri-Rolla Engineering professor

The process to find Floyd’s replacement had already taken a couple of detours. One candidate, Terry Sutter, turned down the offer to take the position in May and instead became chief operating officer of a Florida steel company. Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Mo., briefly flirted with the notion of vacating his seat in the House and considered the job.

In contrast to Hulshof, Forsee was a relative unknown.

The Kansas City native had a 35-year career in the telecommunications industry, the last five of which were at Sprint Nextel. He resigned in October after a two-year struggle to overcome a beleaguered merger with Nextel, which saw the company hemorrhage customers and struggle with network issues.

Despite his rough departure, Forsee had many of the attributes the board of curators said it was looking for: Missouri roots, a graduate of the system’s Rolla campus, connections to legislators in the state and the nation’s capital and experience running a large multi-division corporation.

In the end, the board chose Forsee, who officially starts as the 22nd UM president on Monday. The choice rankled some faculty who worried about the implications of having a man versed in business leading an academic enterprise. The traditional path to presidency of a university or university system is marked by a rise through the ranks of various academic departments.

Yet, the curators, who ultimately had the final call on whether to hire Forsee, were committed to following a different direction. The rationale was simple: The UM System acts as a holding company in charge of overseeing operations of four campuses and needed someone capable of handling the financial, personnel and political issues associated with that role.

Forsee could apply his business experience in a way that would help formulate a long-term strategy for the system and execute it without interfering with academic autonomy.

“He obviously has experience leading large corporations at the executive level,” said Jay Dade, a member of the search advisory committee and head of the MU Alumni Association. “And when you look at the university system, at the system level, it is a very large organization that takes a person of great executive skill to run that organization in an effective manner.”

With state funding shrinking and competition driving universities to seek donations from private endowments and corporate partnerships, advisory committee members and curators said the UM System looked increasingly like a large corporate entity that was guided by chancellors and provosts rather than division heads.

Forsee’s job, the stakeholders said, is to ensure that there is a vision articulated for how the system will operate and to advocate on behalf of the campuses for resources.

“If you think about ... how much we’ve lost in support from the legislature, the funding that we had received previously was so much greater than it has been,” said Judith Haggard, the curator from Kennett. “So we’re looking at someone who has those skills so we can look at those avenues to sustain ourselves and be credible and better than we are today.”

The decision to pursue a nontraditional candidate has raised questions about the role of higher education in Missouri. Although such hires are not new — former U.S. Sens. Erksine Bowles and Dan Boren are running the University of North Carolina and University of Oklahoma, respectively — it highlights a philosophical shift regarding the role higher education plays in American life.

Increasingly, business principles and leaders have been adopted by higher education as a means to improve financial prospects and prepare graduates to enter the workforce. The change, though, is fairly recent.

“If you were to look at higher education 30 years ago and you were to use the word ‘consumer’ to refer to students and ‘product’ or ‘management’ to teaching, it would have been deeply distressing to faculty,” said Judith McLaughlin, a Harvard professor who specializes in higher education leadership.

The curators were not looking to break new ground as they went about their search. Instead, hiring a nontraditional candidate seemed to be a matter of necessity.

The UM System has seen a decline in total appropriations from the state over the past six years. In fiscal year 2008, the state sent $461 million to the system, roughly $15 million less than it had in 2001, according to the state Department of Higher Education. During the same time period, the system has raised tuition rates by 47 percent for in-state students and 23 percent for out-of-state students. Two weeks ago, the board of curators proposed a 4.1 percent tuition increase for the 2008-09 academic year.

Increasingly, the system has become more reliant on other sources of funding, including partnerships with corporations. Members of the advisory committee and the board of curators said they were looking for a candidate that could help the system streamline the process of finding other avenues for funding.

With Forsee, there were ready-made contacts in business and politics that he could tap into for greater appropriations, corporate partnerships and further donations to endowments and fundraising campaigns.

Until he was appointed, Forsee was heading up an effort on the part of the Rolla campus to raise $200 million by 2010.

Richard Brow, an engineering professor at the Rolla campus and advisory committee member, said that Forsee’s ties throughout the state and around the country convinced him that the former executive could handle the task of expanding the sources of funding for the UM System.

“The guy’s got connections,” Brow said. “He understands Missouri. He understands Washington. He’s been a salesman for his company for a long time, and that’s what the university president needs to be.”

“I think there’s always a fear, understandably, that someone who doesn’t understand, appreciate or value the traditional mission of higher education may try and make it into a business.”

Joan Dean,
University of Missouri-Kansas City English professor

Aside from an ability to fill coffers, Forsee was seen as someone who could get his arms around running a diverse university system.

The St. Louis and Kansas City campuses act as a support apparatus for their urban centers. Rolla is tucked away in the Missouri hills and serves as a haven for the empirical and scientific method. Meanwhile, the Columbia campus is billed as the major research and land-grant institution. Each are home to groups of faculty and staff who, while part of a system, strive to maintain their sense of autonomy.

Although the president is at the top of the organizational chart, there are checks on his or her control. Each campus is run by its own chancellor and provost. Any action on the part of the president that is viewed by faculty and staff as meddlesome has the potential to generate ire.

“The chancellors each have a certain degree of autonomy at their campus, and they are the chief academic officer at each of those campuses,” said Warren Erdman, the curator from Kansas City. “We didn’t hire Gary Forsee to be a fifth chancellor. We hired a president who can make our chancellors more successful.”

For their part, faculty members on the advisory committee said they think that Forsee has a high degree of respect for their academic inquiry and freedom. They added that Forsee acknowledged he faced a learning curve in terms of understanding the ins and outs of higher education.

“My sense is that he has no intention of being a chief academic officer,” said Joan Dean, an English professor at the Kansas City campus.

McLaughlin said Forsee needs to assure those around him that he is not trying to make the system in his own image.

“I think there’s always a fear, understandably, that someone who doesn’t understand, appreciate or value the traditional mission of higher education may try and make it into a business,” she said.

Forsee has stressed that he will not carry out his work with a heavy hand or in a Draconian fashion. He has acknowledged that he must familiarize himself with specific tasks and roles of faculty.

He will have help, though. Forsee asked Gordon Lamb, the interim system president, to stay on as executive vice president to help him work through his first year on the job.

Brow’s assessment said faculty can sometimes forget that the president’s job is an administrative position, not an academic one.

“It’s not pedagogical,” Brow said. “This is probably part of the concerns on the part of faculty. We care about pedagogical things, about academic curriculum. That’s not the president’s job.”

Meanwhile, Dean said she would not be surprised if Forsee received a chilly reception if faculty are offered a forum to voice their views.

“I think the academics are going to be very upset,” Dean said. “Most faculty I’ve talked to are very pessimistic.”

Although the overwhelming sentiment among those who were a part of the search was positive, the process and the result leave room for questions.

The search advisory committee was convened to allow representatives of the system’s stakeholders to meet with potential candidates and share their thoughts.

But the search advisory committee had no formal recommendation power to the curators, and its members could only formulate their questions and submit their responses on an individual basis. Committee members said the group did not generate a list of issues or questions to be presented to each candidate.

The advisory committee met with Forsee only once for a couple of hours in Kansas City. It did not receive a formal resume, list of references or comments from the board of curators. Instead, it was sent a one-page biography that briefly described Forsee’s career.

The curators’ meetings regarding the search and with all candidates were closed to the public. Because the process is a personnel matter, almost none of the documents is a public record.

The process, though, is not unusual in the search for a president. The common theory is that qualified candidates will be hesitant to apply out of a fear that they might incur the wrath of their current employer.

Despite a lack of prior knowledge about Forsee, most members said they were able to get a good sense of his personality and that they received the same amount of information about each candidate.

“It wasn’t that different with any other candidates in the first round” of interviews, Brow said. “I don’t think Forsee was treated any differently by the committee, from my perspective, than any of the other candidates.”

Despite these circumstances, only Dean expressed displeasure with how the search was conducted.

“I will never serve on a committee like that again,” she said. “The faculty don’t have a say. So, that they formed any committee, that they talked to any faculty, is probably a good sign. But it was all cut up into tiny little pieces and put into a box.”

“The days of the president who sort of exists but you don’t really hear from him or her are gone. We’re in an age of advocacy, where you need to be an advocate for your institution.”

Jay Dade,
member of search advisory committee, head of MU Alumni Association

As the advisory committee met with Forsee, one concern seemed to bubble up repeatedly: the possibility that the former executive could be lured back to corporate America.

The transition from business to academia is a stark change in terms of duties and compensation.

Upon his departure from Sprint, Forsee received a $55.5 million severance package. While employed with the company, his annual salary was $21.3 million, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The pay as president is far more modest: The base salary is $400,000 annually with the possibility of a $100,000 bonus.

Dean said she asked Forsee how long he intended to stay.

“You know, I said to him, ‘You probably have better job prospects than a lot of us,’” Dean said. “He said that he would know in three to five years if he was making a contribution.”

Curators have been unequivocal in their belief that Forsee is fully committed to the system and not just waiting for the next board chairmanship or executive position to open up.

“You know with anybody you get, you don’t always know how things are going to work out,” Haggard said. “But I perceive this man to have a lot of energy and a lot of integrity.”

Perhaps heightening concerns for some faculty and administrators was Forsee’s departure from Sprint.

His struggles at the company were not lost on the committee. Yet they said those facts needed to be placed into context.

Overall, the curators and advisory committee members said there is a stark difference in the environment of corporate America and the one awaiting Forsee at the UM System. The time frame in which decisions and results are judged tends to be far narrower — quarterly or yearly — in the business community. In contrast, the policy process at a university is more deliberate.

“In that case (with Sprint Nextel), it was just certain investor groups that became impatient,” Erdman said. “In fact, I had Sprint board members call me and tell me they thought Gary would make an outstanding president.”

One of those Sprint board members was Irv Hockaday. In an interview, he said that although Forsee had a rough end to his time at Sprint, it should not be a barometer of his ability to run the UM System.

“The short-term pressures that exist in the corporate sector are hopefully less relevant in the educational sector,” Hockaday said. “I think Gary’s strengths align with the longer time horizon that allow you to build and execute a strategy.”

System leaders said the hesitation of some stakeholders may be a sign of hesitation in confronting the unknown.

“The days of the president who sort of exists but you don’t really hear from him or her are gone,” Dade said. “We’re in an age of advocacy, where you need to be an advocate for your institution.”

For Dean, the hiring of Forsee is a move to convince residents and politicians that higher education is worth the investment.

“They view the expense the state has for the university as a drain,” Dean said. “I think he may be able to sway them that the university does good things for the state, and I think that he believes that.”