Board Governance

ABHE’s collective understanding regarding the essence of our educational approach has become crystallized in terms of the following four concepts:  biblical, transformational, experiential, and missional. In my previous post, I asserted that when we describe education as biblical we mean that we engage intentionally and pervasively in education that involves extensive and serious study of the text of God’s eternal Word based on our conviction that the Bible is infallible, essential, authoritative, and understandable.

Board ownership In this series on good governance, I have thus far stressed the critical role governance plays in the success or failure of any college and urged that boards get serious about assessing their effectiveness. Working from the assertion that good governance requires that the board itself must own the responsibility and make provision for high functioning, we examined the essential role of written policies addressing the board’s culture, conduct, and commitments; ways to optimize board composition and continuity; and the importance of a board committee empowered to assess and improve the board’s individual and collective performance. I say again, good governance begins with board ownership.

As we continue this extended series on good governance, we have moved from considering the why and how of board ownership of its performance to considering the importance of the board’s focus on ends rather than means. In introducing this segment, I described effective board engagement with ends as follows: They screen their agendas, prioritize their engagement, allocate their time, frame their issues, craft their policies, and limit their solutions in terms of ends rather than means. What constitutes board business anyway? Not everything is board business. Not everything deserves a board’s time or can profit from its involvement. Not even everything that might appear on a board meeting agenda. True, not a few boards have a tendency to wander off the reservation and meddle. Boards need to be reigned in from time to time. A good board chair knows when and how to do that.