Universities ‘mustn’t rush into bad decisions’ on controversies

University leaders must resist the urge to make snap judgements in a world where social media has accelerated the pace of discourse, the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit has heard.

Cheryl Regehr, provost of the University of Toronto, said university executives often felt “enormous pressure” to make decisions “after the first tweet comes out”. But they should think carefully before proceeding, she told the event, hosted by the University of Sydney.

“We need to work deliberatively to make sure that we have the information to make good decisions,” Professor Regehr said. “If we don’t gather that information, we’re going to be making a decision and then we’ll have to take that decision back.

“We’re going to have to make another decision; we’re just going to keep on changing; and we’ll lose credibility.”

She said a predecessor had warned her that things had changed when she took her current job. “‘When I was provost,’ he said, ‘I would get a letter, I would think about the letter, I would write a letter back, I’d wait a couple of weeks, somebody would write a letter back. In the meantime we were able to make a decision.’”

Professor Regehr continued: “We all know…that’s not how it operates now. We have great leaders on our boards of directors, who come from many, many sectors outside of higher ed, and they say, ‘Why can you not just get that done right away? Why are you asking all these people about it?’ Because that’s how universities operate. We operate on the basis of collegial governance. If we feel pressured to move too quickly, and we lose collegial governance…then we will have lost trust.”

Misha Schubert, chief executive of representative body Science and Technology Australia, said universities should focus on their core values in moments of crisis, and hailed the “power of a good holding statement” to buy leaders thinking time.

Simone Clarke, chief executive of gender equity champions UN Women Australia, said leaders needed to remind themselves to slow down, “take time, give time and listen to people”.

She added: “If I’m always harried and bouncing from one thing to another, that’s…the discipline that my team learn from me, and that doesn’t do any of us a service.”

THE’s chief global affairs officer, Phil Baty, cited a King’s College London humanities professor’s counterpoint to the “move quickly and break things” mantra of Silicon Valley. “Universities move slowly and fix things,” ran the professor’s epithet, he said.

Professor Regehr said it was important to remember that “not everything is an emergency”, and crisis plans needed to distinguish between genuine emergencies “versus some people are upset”.

“You need to have different strategies for different types of events, and make sure that those are clearly articulated,” she added. “Otherwise, we treat everything as a fire where people are dying.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com