Does Faculty Status Alone Prepare Someone to Lead?
Higher education has long operated under an assumption that makes sense historically, but may deserve reconsideration in today’s environment:
The people who lead universities should come from the faculty ranks.
There are good reasons this model developed. Faculty governance helped protect academic freedom, preserve institutional mission, and ensure that educational decisions were guided by scholars rather than outside political or commercial interests. Faculty leaders understood the culture because they lived it.
But modern higher education is no longer operating in the same environment in which this system was built.
Today’s universities are extraordinarily complex organizations. Many leadership roles now require expertise in areas such as online education, enrollment strategy, budgeting, technology, organizational management, workforce alignment, marketing, compliance, student success, and large-scale operational execution.
Yet many institutions continue to treat faculty status itself as the primary qualification for leadership positions, even when the role being filled requires deep professional expertise in areas outside traditional academic work.
To be clear, this is not an argument against faculty leadership.
Some of the best higher education leaders are former faculty members who combine academic credibility with strong administrative ability, strategic thinking, and operational expertise. Those individuals are invaluable.
The challenge is the assumption that academic accomplishment alone prepares someone to lead highly specialized administrative functions.
In practice, universities sometimes end up placing talented researchers or respected faculty members into leadership roles far outside their direct experience. In other cases, individuals step into positions not because they are the best fit, but because nobody else is willing to take on the responsibility.
That creates difficult situations for everyone involved:
Faculty may lose confidence in leadership
Staff may feel misunderstood or unsupported
Leaders themselves may feel overwhelmed or isolated
Important operational areas may stagnate or struggle to evolve
Meanwhile, higher education continues to face mounting pressure to adapt quickly in a rapidly changing world.
Perhaps the question is not whether faculty should lead, but rather how institutions define leadership qualifications in the first place.
Should universities continue to prioritize faculty lineage above all else?
Or should they begin identifying broader forms of expertise within their own faculty while also remaining open, when appropriate, to experienced leaders from outside traditional academic pathways?
Maybe the future is not abandoning shared governance, but modernizing it.
Can higher education preserve the strengths of faculty-led governance while also building leadership structures better aligned with the operational realities of today’s institutions?
That may be one of the most important governance questions higher education will face over the next decade.