Built for Harvard. Fatal for Most of Us & Why higher education's traditional board governance model is destroying the institutions it was designed to protect.
The title captures something I’ve been writing about in the venture context — governance models are almost always built to serve the institution that designed them, not the leaders operating inside them. In higher education it’s the Harvard legacy model. In venture-backed companies it’s the institutional capital model. The structure was designed for a specific set of incentives and constraints. When a different kind of leader enters it — a founder, a president of a smaller institution — the model doesn’t adapt. It performs. And it performs according to its original design, not the needs of the person now inside it.
What strikes me about your framing is the word “comfortable.” The lie is comfortable precisely because the governance looks right on paper. The board exists. The oversight function is present. The structure appears sound. The problem only becomes visible when conditions change and the structure reveals what it was actually built to protect.
Writing about this dynamic in the venture context at Blindspots Strategy on Substack if the parallel is useful territory.
“They can run the model. They cannot reimagine it.” That’s the sharper formulation of something I’ve been circling. The deeper problem isn’t that the model fails — it’s that the model has no internal mechanism for questioning its own design assumptions. It was built to be operated, not interrogated. And the people inside it are selected and rewarded for operational competence, not structural reimagination. Which means the pressure to rethink it almost always has to come from outside — usually after something has already broken.
Every governance model works fine while conditions hold. That is the trap. The board is real, the oversight is real, the paper is clean, and all of it keeps running smoothly right up until the ground moves. The structure was tuned for a stable market, a stable culture, an industry that performed the way it did the day the rules were written.
What makes comfortable the right word is that nothing signals the problem while things are steady. Then the market shifts, the culture changes, the original design stops matching the world, and there is no process waiting to make sense of it. Most institutions never built one. They can run the model. They cannot reimagine it.
That is the harder gap. Not the rules themselves, but the absence of any real mechanism for rewriting them, let alone rethinking who they were built for.
The board should understand their job is to WORK, not opine on various options. If big problems come up, more meetings are probably necessary.
The board must have information on school operations that do not come only from the CEO, who has a conflict of interest in reporting on problems during his or her watch.
If someone complains about anyone else they should be required in almost all cases to talk to that person first before going to the board. Any other means of handling rumors causes distrust.
Pick board members with a track record of smart decision-making.
The title captures something I’ve been writing about in the venture context — governance models are almost always built to serve the institution that designed them, not the leaders operating inside them. In higher education it’s the Harvard legacy model. In venture-backed companies it’s the institutional capital model. The structure was designed for a specific set of incentives and constraints. When a different kind of leader enters it — a founder, a president of a smaller institution — the model doesn’t adapt. It performs. And it performs according to its original design, not the needs of the person now inside it.
What strikes me about your framing is the word “comfortable.” The lie is comfortable precisely because the governance looks right on paper. The board exists. The oversight function is present. The structure appears sound. The problem only becomes visible when conditions change and the structure reveals what it was actually built to protect.
Writing about this dynamic in the venture context at Blindspots Strategy on Substack if the parallel is useful territory.
“They can run the model. They cannot reimagine it.” That’s the sharper formulation of something I’ve been circling. The deeper problem isn’t that the model fails — it’s that the model has no internal mechanism for questioning its own design assumptions. It was built to be operated, not interrogated. And the people inside it are selected and rewarded for operational competence, not structural reimagination. Which means the pressure to rethink it almost always has to come from outside — usually after something has already broken.
Every governance model works fine while conditions hold. That is the trap. The board is real, the oversight is real, the paper is clean, and all of it keeps running smoothly right up until the ground moves. The structure was tuned for a stable market, a stable culture, an industry that performed the way it did the day the rules were written.
What makes comfortable the right word is that nothing signals the problem while things are steady. Then the market shifts, the culture changes, the original design stops matching the world, and there is no process waiting to make sense of it. Most institutions never built one. They can run the model. They cannot reimagine it.
That is the harder gap. Not the rules themselves, but the absence of any real mechanism for rewriting them, let alone rethinking who they were built for.
All good. I would add:
The board should understand their job is to WORK, not opine on various options. If big problems come up, more meetings are probably necessary.
The board must have information on school operations that do not come only from the CEO, who has a conflict of interest in reporting on problems during his or her watch.
If someone complains about anyone else they should be required in almost all cases to talk to that person first before going to the board. Any other means of handling rumors causes distrust.
Pick board members with a track record of smart decision-making.