The path to financial sustainability in an era of declining enrollments, declining state support, and increased costs is a holy grail. For universities experiencing an existential crisis, there is a palpable urgency in pursuing it. What follows are lessons learned about change leadership by a loaned CEO parachuted into PennWest University 20 months ago to lead its urgent turnaround. While there is a great deal more to do, enrollments are stabilized and a structural deficit that once ballooned to $54 million has been reduced to a manageable $10 million. Because change leadership is now so important across all of higher education, these lessons are valuable to leaders who need to pivot irrespective of whether their institution is in existential crisis. I offer them with profound humility, having witnessed the unwavering commitment of hundreds of faculty and staff who continue to work with grit and determination to make PennWest into a thriving new institution and to serve the students of western Pennsylvania.

On July 1, 2022, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), comprising Pennsylvania’s only state-owned universities, reduced its total number of universities from 14 to 10. As part of that effort, California, Edinboro, and Clarion universities integrated into Pennsylvania Western University (PennWest). Integrations were part of a broader system redesign that focused on achieving financial sustainability as a prelude to growing the System’s credentialing productivity in response to the state’s urgent workforce demands (redesign lessons are available at digreenstein.com). At PennWest, integration execution issues resulted in a precipitous enrollment decline which had catastrophic impacts on the university’s budget, resulting in my arrival there on loan from West Chester University (WCU)—another PASSHE university—initially as executive vice president and chief operating officer and ultimately as interim president.

At the center of the turnaround was an unwavering focus on enrollment, not just stabilizing it but linking the realities of actual enrollment to the university budget, the employee complement, the academic program array, the physical plant, and every other aspect of the university. After completing assessments of all the divisions/units of the new university in the first 90 days, I worked with the leadership teams in place at the institution as well as a small team of experts from my home institution to develop a blueprint for action with a clear focus on achieving financial sustainability.  

Lesson 1

Everyone is Tired, But the Work Has Only Just Begun: The Value of Planning for Help

The integration planning process was long and arduous, involving both outside consultants and dozens of management team members, faculty, and staff contributing thousands of person hours over nearly two years. Creating one unified university without sacrificing the identity of its three constituent campuses added layers of complexity to the planning process (even more in execution). And throughout, all university employees were doing the full-time work of educating students. For everyone involved, the launch felt like summiting a mountain only to realize they were now standing at the base of an even bigger mountain and would have no time to celebrate progress made or take some much-needed time to recharge.

Leading change in this context requires recognizing that managers, like faculty and staff generally, are running on fumes and may not have the energy or ability to execute on the plans that were developed. Rather than waiting to see if some help might be needed, it is better to build it into the post-launch plan and normalize this with the management team. Needing some help, some relief pitching, isn’t a sign of failure and doesn’t mean that the team did something wrong. It is simply a recognition that the work of implementing a complex change is extremely difficult on the best day, and even harder when people are already exhausted. And with respect to sustaining change in the long-term, it is important to ensure that cross-training occurs and is valued rather than simply lionizing the heroic work of individual contributors.

Additionally, it is important to ensure that the right help is available. In planning a major organizational transformation, external national firms can bring a level of project management and data analysis that most institutions don’t have internally. That type of consulting help may not be as useful in execution. Those of us who work in systems can benefit from the expertise of talent at sister institutions, and having some embedded consultants serving as temporary management team members (staff augmentation) as part of the new institution can provide a shortcut to significant progress for the goals to be achieved. In this case, a small team of colleagues from WCU, most of whom were providing 10 hours per week to the senior management team at PennWest, helped to create in less than a year an enrollment projection model with 104 variables that has predicted enrollment for the past two semesters to within one percentage point, a financial aid optimization model, a facilities master plan, and a thorough refinement of budget processes/practices. The total cost to the university for these embedded consultants is much less than what personnel hires or an outside firm would require, and there is no commitment of ongoing funding once the work is completed. Even institutions that are not part of systems can benefit from this strategy. There is also nothing like measurable progress in a short amount of time to help an exhausted team find their second wind.

Lesson 2 

Strategy Cannot Overcome Culture and Team Capacity: The Importance of Preparing for Difficult Personnel Decisions  

There is a debate about who coined the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” but regardless, most of us have experienced the incredible power of culture, for better or for worse. The habits/practices of the institution and the capacity/willingness of team members to engage in implementation can overwhelm strategies created in the change-planning process. This lesson underscores the difference between designing a transformational strategy, even with the best shared governance and project management, and executing it in the face of years of past practice, institutional culture, and habits of the heart. Even though the integrated universities were part of the same system, there were striking differences in how they handled basic university functions and rationalized their structures/workflows.

Against this background, it is critical to distinguish among managers who are resisting change because it is hard or because of their ingrained habits/cultures, and those who are not able to adjust to the “new normal.” Depending on their criticality to the organization’s success, they may not be the ones best suited to implement the change even if they were part of team that developed the strategy. Of course, everyone should be given a chance to adapt, but if they cannot or will not, it is important to be prepared to transition them out of the organization, despite the inevitable churn that already exists due to the change underway. This is perhaps the hardest lesson, because as leaders we generally know what the right decision is, but decisions involve people we care about, and ultimately our job as presidents is to prioritize the interests of our institutions and our students.

Lesson 3 

Brutal Honesty is Not Necessarily the Enemy of Building Buy-in: The Power of Hope 

The eventual buy-in of the majority of those involved to take the steps needed to ensure that PennWest not only survives but thrives was both humbling and inspiring. But it did not occur spontaneously. When I arrived at PennWest, rumors were rampant that my primary mission was to retrench (furlough) faculty, slash budgets, and eliminate programs. As part of the initial assessment, I listened to faculty, staff, and students, and an important theme emerged: the need for complete transparency about the financial realities and what it would take to put the integrated institution on the path to financial sustainability that would maintain each of its three campuses. And most importantly, whatever benchmarks for progress were set had to be reliable and could only be adjusted when changes in critical elements, such as enrollment, demanded it.

In response, I worked with the PennWest and WCU teams to develop a series of educational modules, dubbed Budget 101, that started with the basics of university budgeting and grew in complexity, and we presented those in shared governance settings and campus town halls. We also shared the university’s budget documents and answered questions about the impact of the decisions that had to be made over the next three years to get the university on a firm path of financial sustainability. These decisions included reducing the number of faculty (without retrenchment), sharing the academic program array across campuses to increase both efficiency and student choice, and making data-informed reductions to operating budgets. Importantly, we did all of this in the context of what enrollment could support and welcomed other interpretations of the math if anyone could find a less painful path that was still sustainable.

Then something critical happened: the narrative started to change and faculty leaders, student leaders, managers, and staff began to ask, “How can we help?” rather than just asking, “How can we go back to where we were?” This shift to rolling up their sleeves and being part of the solution was born not just of fear, but of hope—hope that even though the path would not be easy, the future of PennWest and its three campuses could be firmly established, building on strong shared governance relationships with those willing to work together for a sustainable PennWest. If there is one theme that I have heard from the community of educators I have had the privilege of serving at PennWest, it is that sharing all the numbers, being transparent about what the changes would have to be, and ensuring that we would navigate the path to sustainability together is what planted the seeds of hope that are now beginning to flourish.

A Lesson Under Development

On July 1, 2024, I returned to my home institution—WCU—as its president. I have often been asked what lessons I brought back with me. WCU is very different. It is thriving on many counts and not in need of the kind of crisis management or turnaround support so essential at PennWest. Certainly, each of the lessons outlined above will stay with me (especially continued shared governance and transparency), as leading change is an inevitable role for university presidents, but there are some additional lessons I am exploring. Facing an existential crisis made leading change at PennWest in some ways easier than for an institution that may need to pivot without that motivating factor. But I am realizing that even for “healthy” institutions, our universities and our own leadership can be strengthened by paying greater attention even where there is not a crisis clearly looming. Here I am reminded of Dan Heath’s Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen and how that approach could be leveraged to engage in institutional change before a crisis point is reached.¹ I am also now keenly aware that it is a privilege to have the time to debate approaches and strategies for the major decisions we make at healthy institutions, and I have benefited from that privilege (perhaps with the exception of COVID) for most of my professional career. Striking a balance between the privilege of having time and yet not squandering time that could be better spent solving problems upstream, before they become crises, is a skill I will continue to hone at WCU. The one thing that seems constant in higher education is change, and our ability to see impending problems/crises early enough to pivot or change course may be just as important, if not more important, than our ability to respond.

¹ Heath, Dan. 2020. Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. New York, Avid Reader Press. 

Many thanks to the colleagues who both helped me identify lessons learned and refine this piece: Dr. Daniel Greenstein, Chancellor, PASSHE; Dr. Sarah Freed, Vice President for Strategic Enrollment Management at PennWest (Interim) and executive on loan from WCU; and Dr. Scott Heinerichs, Special Assistant to the President at PennWest (Interim) and executive on loan from WCU.