Get MnSCU improvement plan moving again

Nearly one year ago, this page hailed the start of a promising plan at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system to produce more and better-educated graduates in a cost-effective way. Now the plan — called "Charting the Future" — has stalled, run aground by the withdrawal of two faculty unions and a series of state university faculty and student votes of "no confidence" in Chancellor Steven Rosenstone.

A moment requiring exceptional leadership from the MnSCU board of trustees has arrived. The plan that board blessed in broad outline form last November is too important to let die. Unless the board reaffirms its support for the plan, engineers its revival and sees it through to implementation, much will be lost. Not only will a prime opportunity for reform be squandered and time and money wasted, but MnSCU's very ability to function as a system will be in question. And the public's willingness to invest in an essential building block of Minnesota's prosperity will erode.

The 15-member governing board at MnSCU has never faced a challenge this critical in the nearly 20 years since the system came into being via the merger of Minnesota's technical colleges, community colleges and state universities. That merger was engineered in the state Senate out of frustration with inefficiency and uneven quality among state-funded schools. It was never universally popular. It may be no coincidence that resistance to the merger was strongest on state university campuses, which is also where Rosenstone's performance and Charting the Future have come in for their harshest criticism.

Charting the Future is not MnSCU's first effort at systemwide strategic change, but it is its most ambitious and, arguably, most needed. It seeks to prepare more Minnesotans for 21st-century careers at a price that both students and taxpayers consider fair value. Among its many goals are easier student transfer from one college to another, more opportunities to obtain certification for competencies employers seek, more support for students from underserved populations, more shared and cost-efficient back-office operations, and closer ties between colleges and the communities they serve.

Some of those goals represent the unfinished work of the merger of two decades ago. For example, if that merger were complete, students would not still experience the unwelcome surprise that class credits earned at one MnSCU institution won't count toward degree requirements at another.

Other intentions would break new and potentially nation-leading ground. Among the prospects is the invention of a new funding scheme that rewards colleges not for competing for students, as happens now, but for collaborating and improving their productivity, including graduation rates.

Since board approval last year, implementation has been the work of a steering committee and eight teams of up to 18 members each, including three faculty members per team. One could argue — as faculty representatives have — that as the people on higher education's front line of interaction with students, faculty deserve more seats at those tables.

Prominent among their complaints is something Rosenstone concedes was a blunder — a $2 million contract to assist the implementation process with national consultants McKinsey & Co. The error was Rosenstone's execution of that contract on his own authority, without consulting either faculty or board members. While board policies permit the chancellor to enter into contracts of that size, this one exacerbated faculty suspicion that their input was not valued. In response, the board is taking steps to limit the chancellor's authority to execute contracts in excess of $1 million. The faculty should see the board's move and Rosenstone's admission of error as an olive branch.

Leaders of the two leading MnSCU faculty unions, the Inter Faculty Organization of the seven state universities and the Minnesota State College Faculty of two-year colleges, say that their quarrel with Rosenstone goes beyond Charting the Future and that their objection to the strategic plan lies with its implementation rather than the substance of the plan itself.

They can demonstrate the sincerity of those words by responding favorably to an invitation by the board of trustees to enter into talks aimed at restarting the implementation process. An invitation issued Nov. 6 to mediation facilitated by the state's Office of Collaboration and Dispute Resolution met with a quick negative response because it went to the media only minutes after it was announced to faculty leaders.

That was clumsy on the administration's part, but the faculty's quick "no" was ill-considered, too. Talks are needed, and the board of trustees, not Rosenstone or well-meaning third parties, should provide their impetus and see them through. Charting the Future needs to be understood throughout the system as the board's plan, not the chancellor's. To be sure, Rosenstone was key to initiating it and has invested great personal energy in advancing it. But in any large, complex enterprise and especially in higher education, with its culture of faculty-shared governance, no CEO can produce sweeping change on his own.

Rosenstone is a gifted, visionary educator deeply committed to MnSCU's mission of ensuring all Minnesotans access to high-­quality higher education. Clearly, he is unafraid of ruffling feathers for the sake of that mission. Some of that is to be expected. As one board member said last week, "If something like this goes smoothly, you're probably not doing a lot."

That's a reassuring word from a board that ought not be hyper­sensitive to criticism as it seeks to make major changes. But ultimately, the board's role is not to be Rosenstone's cheerleader. It's to ensure that MnSCU has a chancellor capable of implementing the strategic course the board sets. That responsibility has to be on board members' minds as they meet this week to determine what they can do to bring Rosenstone and his critics together and get their promising plan back on track.