Read the interview:
What does it mean to lead a university today? Philip Cotton offers a multidimensional view of higher education leadership — one grounded in love, trust, and belief in the potential of students. He explains how leaders must both “let things happen” and “help things happen,” while protecting institutional integrity and building external partnerships. Whether navigating government relationships or public perception, Cotton insists that a university’s leader must always uphold the promise made to students and their communities.
I think a leader needs to be both an academic but also an executive administrator, and that's quite difficult to to realize. So, you know, some of the greatest university leaders come from professional backgrounds, where they've had to run businesses or operate as a professional. For example, in law, and have managed to run an academic career in parallel and have gone through their higher degree. So understand how systems work. But I think, you know, there's a number of things. One as I say, is love. The other is the ability to let things happen. And the other is leveraging on the energy of the people within your network, and your network of networks and your connections. You know, you've got to be able to love the institution, the message of the institution, the vision. You've got to be able to love the people who work there. You've got to be able to love the people who come through the institution. You've got to be able to love the the ecosystem and the nation and the future of the nation and believe in that. And so with love, there comes this very clear call to believe in the power of people, and young people who come into the institution their potential, and their potential to change, of course. And then as a leader, you know, whether you're a a big picture leader or you're a detailed leader, and you know, there's lots of definitions of what constitutes the best kind of leader for a university. You've got to be able to let things happen. So, you've got to work with teams of people so that you've got people on your team who can help things happen, and people on your team who can make things happen. If as a leader you're in the situation of making things happen, then you've probably got a failing institution, you've got a team of people who are not respected, who are not valued, who are not honored, and certainly don't feel any of those things. And if you're having to help things happen, then you probably haven't explained, you probably haven't achieved understanding across the institution. But you know letting things happen is difficult because you have to trust people, and again you have to believe that they'll follow through. So being able to let things happen, within that that that vision and the context and the messaging. The other thing is to be able to leverage on energy because any change just drains people. And so, how do you keep up the energy levels? How do you engage with people in your network to get their positive engagement from the word "Go"? You don't go to people saying, "I've got a disaster on my hands." You go to people saying, "There's something really amazing that's about to emerge here and I need you to walk with me. Are you prepared to do that?" So, those would be some of the key things that I think are needed in leadership besides the other things like patience, you know. And yeah, maybe you'd expect me to say, well, you know, got to be a strategist. I think those things come and those things are part of the the team that you surround yourself with. But you are the person who holds dear the promise, the promise that is made by the nation, by the university, to the young people who come to that place, to the community that use all of their resources to send their young person, their young people to that place and expect you to return them as different transformed human beings who can make a difference within in those communities, and that's the promise that you hold.
It's critical, isn't it? You know, that you are the brand of the institution. You market the institution, you represent the institution. I think where again, we were very fortunate when we created the University of Rwanda, was the high levels of respect that people had for one another, you know, so whether you had to work with the Ministry of Public Service and Labor, or the Ministry of House, there were huge, huge high levels of trust and respect that people had for one another. And yet, there was still times when people would test you out, and check that what we were doing together was taking us in the the right direction. But an external facing task of a vice chancellor is to keep building the institution, as positively as possible. You know, you don't gain anything by diminishing your institution. In fact, the one thing that I think in all of the change that we encountered worried me the most was people who for no real reason might criticize either the change, or the process, or the institution that we were becoming without considering that the people who could hear them voice that were the young people in the institution. And the minute you begin to undermine the confidence of young people, then you destroy the potential that you ever thought you might be able to develop within them. And you know, one of our key tasks was to build the collective confidence of this next generation of young leaders, to build the collective competence of this next generation of young people. And so, one of the tasks in working externally is sometimes to challenge the criticism. Sometimes just to quieten it down. Sometimes to go into a side meeting and say, "Help me understand." But never ever to undermine the confidence of the young people.