When campuses choose leaders

Somewhere in the Philippines right now, a university community is quietly asking a question that can change its next several years: Who gets the keys? Not simply the keys to the president’s office, the service vehicle, or the executive conference room, but to decisions involving thousands of students, hundreds of employees, public money, academic programs, research priorities, buildings, partnerships, and the institutional culture people must live with long after the selection committee has packed away its folders.

Several higher education institutions are approaching presidential or chancellorship searches, renewals, or leadership transitions. These occasions rarely attract the public attention of elections, but perhaps they deserve more of it. A university president may serve only a few years, yet decisions made during that period can outlive the administration. A program opened today may educate students for decades. A poorly conceived building may burden future budgets. One courageous hiring decision can strengthen an academic department for a generation.

I have lately been reading more closely the rules governing leadership selection and evaluation in state universities and colleges, partly through conversations with people who know this terrain far better than I do. One useful reference is CHED Memorandum Order No. 7, series of 2022, the revised implementing rules of the Higher Education Modernization Act. For first-term SUC presidents seeking another term, the rules expressly provide for evaluation under prescribed standards.

What struck me was how unromantic good leadership looks when translated into an evaluation sheet. Strip away the speeches, tarpaulins, motorcades, Facebook posts, and ceremonial handshakes, and fairly ordinary questions remain. Did academic programs improve? Did research become stronger? Did extension work reach communities? Did students progress? Was governance efficient? Were faculty and staff developed? Were partnerships productive? Did infrastructure improve? Were resources generated and public funds managed responsibly? The working instrument in my reference materials groups these concerns broadly around academic leadership, institutional leadership, and resource mobilization.

A president can deliver a magnificent anniversary speech and still preside over programs struggling with compliance. Another may be less gifted at working a room but quietly professionalize procurement, clean up audit findings, help faculty finish doctorates, strengthen research, secure grants, complete long-delayed buildings, and leave the university substantially better than the one inherited. Leadership evaluation should be capable of seeing the second person clearly. The governing principle in the material I reviewed asks essentially this: given the institution inherited, what did the leader actually accomplish, correct, complete, professionalize, institutionalize, accelerate, or improve?

That question becomes especially important when presidents inherit unfinished business. Universities are relay races disguised as individual administrations. A laboratory inaugurated under President B may have been proposed under President A, funded after years of lobbying by several officials, and completed by people whose names never appear on the marker. Fair evaluation therefore requires intellectual honesty. An inherited project should not magically become the incumbent’s personal accomplishment. Neither should a president be denied credit when his or her administration rescued a stalled project, secured missing requirements, found funding, corrected deficiencies, or finally brought it across the finish line. The reference framework wisely distinguishes inherited, substantially advanced, and genuinely new initiatives.

The same caution should apply when choosing the next leader. Universities should be wary of the candidate who arrives with an impressive vocabulary but a thin trail of results. “Internationalization,” “innovation,” “digital transformation,” and “sustainability” sound splendid during public forums. Ask the second question: Where have you actually done it? Then ask the third: What changed because you did? A memorandum of agreement that slept peacefully in a filing cabinet for three years is not quite a partnership. A policy nobody implemented is stationery. A groundbreaking ceremony is not a building.

This is why evidence matters. The framework I encountered favors things that can actually be checked: CHED issuances, accreditation results, audit records, approved policies, financial statements, grant agreements, infrastructure completion documents, intellectual-property records, faculty data, and other authoritative institutional records. The point is not to drown candidates or incumbents beneath boxes of paper. In fact, the better principle is the opposite: enough credible evidence to establish an accomplishment, rather than the largest possible pile of attachments.

Numbers, however, cannot decide everything. Universities are human communities. A president may hit targets while leaving people exhausted, frightened, or unheard. Another may be personally popular while allowing standards to slip. Neither extreme is particularly attractive. Good leadership requires the harder combination: standards with humanity, ambition with prudence, decisiveness with consultation, and enough humility to recognize that the university existed before one’s term and should remain healthy after it. The best president is not necessarily the person who makes the institution revolve around the president.

So when the next university search begins and the résumés become thicker, the endorsements louder, and the presentations shinier, perhaps one simple question should follow every promise: Show us what became better because you led. Not who applauded, not how many photographs were posted, and not how grand the vision sounded. Show the people improved, systems strengthened, problems solved, resources protected, opportunities created, and institutions left more capable than before.

Because universities do not merely need someone who wants the keys. They need someone worthy of what those keys open.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.