At Hyatt-Fennell Executive Search, we have long believed that the higher education community rises together when its leaders are willing to think out loud with one another. The pressures reshaping our colleges and universities today are not problems any single leader can solve behind a closed office door—they demand the kind of honest, experienced, peer-to-peer conversation that this series was created to foster. Welcome to the second installment of our Let’s Talk Series, where we pose a question worth sitting with and invite the higher education leaders in our community to share what they have learned, observed, and come to believe through years of service at the highest levels of academic leadership.
This week’s question is one that invites both imagination and hard-won wisdom:
If you could redesign the leadership structure of a university from scratch, what would you change?
Would you flatten the hierarchy between academic affairs and student success? Rethink the relationship between the board and the president’s cabinet? Create entirely new roles to address the realities of enrollment management, technology, or community engagement that traditional org charts simply were not built for? Or perhaps you would change something more fundamental—the culture of decision-making, the pace of shared governance, or the way institutions develop and promote leaders from within?
There are no wrong answers here, only honest ones. Share your thinking in the comments, reply directly to this post, or reach out to us directly. The leaders who will shape higher education’s next chapter are paying attention—and your perspective matters more than you may realize. Let’s talk.
