This week's column.
What is it they say about timing?
It was purely coincidental that Guilford College President Kent Chabotar was scheduled to visit the News & Record last week for a conversation with reporters and editorial writers.
That meeting had been set up weeks in advance.
No one could know that it would happen one day before a colleague and good friend of Chabotar’s, Greensboro College President Craven Williams, suddenly would walk away from the job.
Nor could anyone have predicted that the predetermined subject of Chabotar’s session, managing money in higher education, would become so germane to that week’s headlines.
Williams, 69, resigned Tuesday after 16 mostly productive years at Greensboro College amid a severe financial crisis.
Chabotar, 63, just happens to be an expert in finance.
He has written numerous articles on the subject in such publications as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education. He also serves on the faculty of Harvard University’s Institutes for Higher Education, a boot camp for college presidents, where he leads a seminar on finances. One of his students in the next session, he said, will be UNCG Chancellor Linda Brady.
The pain and respect Chabotar felt for Williams was evident. So was Chabotar’s belief in a starkly different philosophy from Greensboro College’s, among others, when coping with financial crises.
For one thing, Chabotar said, you don’t shut down during a fiscal crisis; you open up.
“As a Quaker school, which is governed by consensus, you can’t hide the ball,” said Chabotar, who was chief financial officer at Bowdoin College before assuming the Guilford presidency seven years ago.
“Most schools tend to be closed with financial information,” he said.
“The biggest fear they have is that people won’t understand it.”
But you not only offer your staff, faculty and community the information, you also help them understand it, Chabotar said.
As for whether private schools have no obligation to share such information with the public, Chabotar disagrees. Aside from the schools’ role in their communities, he said, most also receive federal funds. With that should come some degree of accountability.
And if bad comes to worse, and he resigned or was fired, Chabotar said he would seek his trustees’ permission in whatever severance pact he agreed to tell the community why.
“Even if it’s only to say we had philosophical differences,” he said.
Neither Greensboro College’s trustees nor Williams was saying anything last week.
Not that they’re unique. Even at a public university, N.C. A&T, former Chancellor Stanley Battle has never explained his sudden resignation in February.
And from all indications, he probably never will.
As for Greensboro College, the problems had become so acute that the school struggled to pay its bills. Openness alone would not have fixed that. But it may have made a difference in how the institution handled those problems.
Williams tended to lead by the sheer force of his personality. That was his gift and maybe, in the end, it was his undoing.
He was funny and charismatic and relentlessly upbeat. But his faculty felt marginalized and uninformed.
When Williams retired on Tuesday, the faculty were in the midst of tabulating a no-confidence vote. How ironic for a man known for his confidence and his anything-is-possible approach to leadership.
When I talked with him two weeks ago he had sounded resolute, even optimistic.
“It’s very, very promising right now,” he said. The school wasn’t going anywhere, he said then, and neither was he.
Less than a week later, he was gone.
He had been at the school for 16 years, more than twice as long as the typical tenure for a college president. He had led with confidence, maybe even a hint of swagger.
On his watch the school added a football program, bought the old Central YMCA and converted it into a student center and acquired the old J.C. Price School property as a sports complex.
But his vision may have outstripped his resources.
When tough times hit, the school had no cushion and was forced to resort to layoffs and almost unheard-of 20 percent salary cuts. There was fear and anger among faculty, at Williams’ $403,000 salary, which was greater not only than Linda Brady’s at UNCG ($315,000) and Harold Martin’s at A&T ($300,000), but Barack Obama’s as well.
Faculty also complained they were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Williams vigorously denied this during an interview two weeks ago. But morale was clearly low when the campus most needed to rally as a community.
The school and its trustees may have gotten so used to him having the right answers that it wasn’t prepared to second-guess him when he didn’t.
Personal magnetism in a college leader can go a long, long way. Consider the job former Bennett College President Johnnetta Cole did in saving the school from the brink of shutting down.
But another famously charismatic local college president, Nido Qubein of High Point University, cited a flip side to the powers of a dynamic leader.
“If you’re not careful,” he said, “you could ignore the voices of wisdom that surround you.”
Give Williams credit for his confidence and his courage to think bold thoughts and reach beyond his grasp. But sometimes you can reach too far.
Or in the case of his disaffected faculty, reach out too little. Williams may have another take on what happened at Greensboro College and why — if he eventually chooses to talk about it.
As for Chabotar, he is the first to admit Guilford’s past problems and missteps. And that his way is not the only way.
But it certainly was looking good last week. One day after Williams stepped down Guilford was announcing a record fundraising year and record enrollment.
And Chabotar was receiving a four-year contract extension.
