Episode 109: Mike Nietzel and Chuck Ambrose on Votes of No Confidence
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What causes the tensions that lead to votes of No Confidence? What are the impacts of these disconnects on student success? What can institutions do to proactively avoid these through orientation, education, communication, org design, and more? We discuss these questions with Mike Nietzel and Chuck Ambrose, authors of No Confidence: When College Faculty Turn Against Their Presidents. Available on Amazon
The modern college presidency is often described as an impossible job. In an era of shrinking budgets, shifting demographics, and intense public scrutiny, the bridge between administration and faculty has never been more fragile. A new wave of internal friction is sweeping through campus quads, manifesting in the ultimate sign of institutional breakdown: the vote of no confidence.
On a recent episode of the Connected College podcast, host Elliot Felix sat down with Mike Nietzel, former President of Missouri State University and current Forbes contributor, and Chuck Ambrose, former President of Pfeiffer University and Henderson State University. The duo discussed their definitive new book, No Confidence: When College Faculty Turn Against Their Presidents, exploring the fracturing relationship between those who lead institutions and those who teach within them.
The Rising Tide of Faculty No Confidence Votes
Institutional stability in higher education is increasingly under threat. Since the late 1980s, American colleges and universities have seen nearly 300 recorded votes of no confidence. While once considered a "nuclear option" reserved for extreme cases of personal misconduct, these votes have become a more frequent tool for faculty expressing deep-seated dissatisfaction with leadership.
The research conducted by Nietzel and Ambrose suggests that these votes are no longer outliers. By examining 75 specific case histories, they identified a clear trend: the frequency of these uprisings is increasing, often targeting newer presidents who haven't yet had the time to build the necessary rapport and trust with their campus communities.
Decoding the Causes: Beyond Personality Clashes
Why does a faculty body decide to officially turn against its leader? While every campus has its own unique ecosystem, the reasons for a no confidence vote generally fall into a specific taxonomy.
The most predominant factors include breakdowns in the traditions of shared governance and disagreements over financial priorities. When faculty feel excluded from major decisions regarding university policy or suspect financial mismanagement, the resulting friction often leads to a formal uprising. Other categories include mismanagement of personnel, dissatisfaction with crisis response (such as during the COVID-19 pandemic), and disagreements over the handling of student protests.
The Shared Governance Disconnect
At the heart of many faculty uprisings is a fundamental misunderstanding of shared governance in colleges. There is a significant perception gap: Nietzel notes that nearly half of college presidents believe their faculty do not understand the institutional challenges they face.
Shared governance is often seen as a goal in itself, but it is actually a means to an end. In a healthy institution, faculty, administration, and governing boards each have a distinct role to play in the decision-making process. When this process becomes adversarial rather than consultative, the institution stalls. Today’s fast-paced environment requires leaders to make irreversible, high-stakes decisions quickly—a reality that often clashes with the deliberate, intentional debate process traditionally valued in higher education leadership.
The Hidden Cost: Impact on Student Success
While a no confidence vote is a formal act directed at a president, the "snowball effect" of the preceding tension has a tangible impact on the student experience. In smaller, intimate campus communities, students acutely feel the stress of their faculty members.
When institutional fractures occur, resources are often diverted away from student supports. Programs may be cut, lab sections may shrink, and the overall campus culture can shift from one of growth to one of resistance. Ambrose highlights that students often have an incredible affinity for their specific programs and faculty; when those faculty members are in distress, student success inevitably suffers.
Proactive Strategies for Institutional Health
Avoiding the "nuclear option" requires a move from reactive management to proactive leadership. Nietzel and Ambrose offer ten recommendations for institutions looking to bridge the gap. Key among these is the inclusion of faculty as voting members on governing boards and a commitment to radical financial transparency.
By developing financial literacy among faculty on a regular basis—not just during a crisis—administrators can build a foundation of trust. When everyone understands the cost of instruction and the reality of the school's financial wherewithal, the "adversarial" nature of resource allocation begins to dissolve, allowing the institution to focus back on its primary mission: student success.
Episode 109 Transcript
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Mike Nietzel: There's a variety of reasons that you can find when you look at these individual cases most of them. There's a culmination of factors. Maybe not just one specific one, but a number that kind of come together and result in this official faculty uprising against the president.
Elliot Felix: That was Mike Niel and then Chuck Ambrose speaking about their new book. No confidence when college faculty turn against their presidents. We had a great conversation about the tensions or disconnects that lead to votes of no confidence. How these impact student success and what to do about it to proactively avoid them, like orientation, education, and training. Rethinking governance structures and more. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot. Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities.
Elliot Felix: Mike and Chuck, I'm so excited for our conversation about votes of No Confidence, your upcoming book and the impact this has on student success. So welcome to the Connected College podcast.
Mike Nietzel: Thank you, Elliot. Good morning.
Chuck Ambrose: It's always good, Elliot, to connect with the connected college.
Elliot Felix: Yes. Let's see how many if people have a bingo card, let's see how many times we can say connect. to three or four. This is exciting get started. Can you all introduce yourselves and give us a sense of how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today?
Mike Nietzel: I'm Mike Niel. I came to higher ed by virtue of the rescue of a faculty member. I had started in the SE program at the University of Illinois, which was aimed at. Preparing practitioners in clinical psychology. I didn't like it. I quit. I went to Fort Riley to fulfill my summer basic training for becoming a commission Second lieutenant. Because of a history of seizures, I flunked the physical a faculty member, Doug Bernstein took me back into the PhD program at Illinois and I finished it. Went on to a career in higher ed after that, the University of Kentucky for most of my life. And then at the at Missouri State University as president from 2005 to two through 2010.
Elliot Felix: And since then you've written 17,000 articles, all of which are amazing, right?
Mike Nietzel: I retired at Missouri State, I went to work for the governor as his policy advisor. I did that for six or seven years and then. Fully retired only to decide I'd write as a senior contributor for Forbes. So yeah, I do regular articles for Forbes online on higher ed. Thank you for mentioning that.
Elliot Felix: Yeah they're really a delight and you really have your finger on the pulse of things, and they're a great resource, I think, for higher ed leaders. Keeping your pulse on things shining up your crystal ball as to where they're headed, which
Mike Nietzel: Thanks.
Elliot Felix: Chuck, what about you? What's your story?
Chuck Ambrose: Elliot I went to college in 1979 and never left. So I had a hard time getting out and as Mike mentions influencers I have to think about Dr. John's, the president of Furman and the former president. Gordon Blackwell, who was actually one of the forefathers at Florida State of the modern student personnel movement who just made it look Elliot. Like it was a very fun job to be a college president. So I kinda left college thinking I wanted to be one and. Have either worked for presidents or was one for quite, quite a long time and served 12 years as president of Pfeiffer University, a small Methodist school in North Carolina, and then Mike and I's world collided in Missouri when he was president Missouri State and then governor's advisor. And it was just one of those partnerships, Elliot, where when a campus could work in a policy partnership with the governor. To accomplish what we all hoped for college that we just had a lot of fun. Mike was an all on partner on holding costs down and increasing completion and having the governor resource the things that were important and maybe use resources a little differently. And and then ended up a couple years in philanthropy a little turnaround at Henderson State. That was the foundation of some of our work. And where Mike writes three hours every morning, I talk three hours every morning. And so co-authorship for us is a high level of dependency on Mike's just incredible ability to put thoughts to paper. So it's been a lot of fun and this is just another project that we enjoyed doing together.
Elliot Felix: Yeah let's dive into the book. Tell us tell us a little bit about it. It's called No Confidence When College Faculty Turn Against Their Presidents. And tell us a little bit about how it came to be through the three hours of writing and talking every morning.
Mike Nietzel: I think it was out. Growth of our recognition that no confidence votes against university presidents and chancellors were on the rise. I had covered some for Forbes and we began, to discuss the fact that these seem to be increasing in frequency, since the late 1980s, you've had somewhere between 250 to 300, no confidence votes. And we are, we have a specific definition of that Elliot, which confines it to a vote against a president or a chancellor by a faculty senate or a faculty at large or some other. Duly constituted u University governance group. And so we looked at about 75 of those case histories spanning that time period, to identify what were the trends, what were some of the common elements to them what were the fractures that led to the rise in no confidence votes. And then we attempt at the end of the book to make. Recommendations about how to avoid them. I think we were careful throughout the book to recognize that they have their place. as former university presidents, we don't like to see 'em happen, but we recognize there are situations in which it's a legitimate expression of dissatisfaction with the way a university or college is being run by its leader. So that's it in a nutshell, in an attempt to understand what led to these votes, what were the common elements and what can be done to make them as rare as possible, recognizing that there's still a legitimate exercise of faculty voice.
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Elliot Felix: It's not great when it happens, but you've done a great job of understanding when it's happened and why it's happened, it's an incredibly timely book. One of the things I wrote about in the connected college, so I think Chuck we're up to four or five, is 47% of don't believe that their faculty understand the challenges confronting the institution, which to me speaks to some of this tension that you about in the book. And I would love to pull on that thread. You called it fracturing, but I'm calling it tension between administration and faculty or other areas. Can you talk a little bit about those those disconnects, those tensions, Chuck?
Chuck Ambrose: Yeah. Elliot I love Mike's description because, many of the, these tenants or things, especially as presidents, you work every day trying to avoid, right? Conflict, dissonance angst, anxiety, fear in this environment. And I do think that this inflection point offers us an opportunity to invert the narrative , as universities we're. Very poor, right at being teaching institutions of how the institution actually works. I think in the conversations that we had with faculty leadership, Mike, we would say that maybe that 47% number by presidents is a gross under underestimate of. Really knowing. And it's a little bit Elliot of an outgrowth of Mike and i's willingness to take what was the concepts that again you work to avoid, like financial exigency or no confidence votes and educate, right? People about what they really mean what they can serve purpose with. We've jokingly said that it does eliminate you from invitations to certain cocktail parties, right? Because I actually had a board when I walked in carrying a copy of my book saying, we're not gonna talk about that, are we? Maybe you need to, so in the no confidence construct.
Elliot Felix: out not talking about uncomfortable stuff is probably not a great idea, right?
Chuck Ambrose: We've done it for decades, right? As an industry, on any number, right? So it's a little bit Elliot of a let's move from the reactive to a proactive approach to a lot of things, to educate campuses and to then engage. I think we'll get to this, engage more people in decision making and ownership of the things that really matter.
Elliot Felix: I think what struck me in the book is you did such a great job of helping people understand. This complicated, kind of situation. And you pointed out some of these like historical tensions, admin faculty or board administration or, the tension between. A college president or chancellor as more and more acknowledging that they're like running a very large and complicated business maybe a historical parliamentary procedure or the tension between being transparent, then also that sometimes that transparency can create risk. So I think you highlighted those things and I wonder , what are some of the causes of those tensions as you see them?
Mike Nietzel: We in the book Elliot looked at eight different categories of no confidence votes, and the two that were, I think the most predominant were breakdowns in the traditions of shared governance where faculty. Administration and board governing boards each have a role to play in making major decisions about university policies and practices. That was one and the second was. Disagreements over financial priorities or allegations that the President had financially mismanaged. The the institution, those are probably the two most common. the others involve personality clashes where. Just got sick of the president or chancellor and his or her kind of most dominant traits, allegations that they had mismanaged personnel decisions. Famous case at the University of Illinois over that with the Chancellor, Phyllis Wise. Decisions having to do with how to handle the pandemic was another one and actually accounted for a lot of the more recent no confidence votes. Was faculty, unhappiness about decisions that the administration made over how the campus would respond to the pandemic. we looked at. of personal misconduct. Those are relatively rare, but they almost always result in the vote of no confidence. we looked at, no confidence votes that arose out of disagreements over how to handle student protests, particularly after the war between Hamas and Israel and Gaza. We looked at just general concerns about poor planning and leadership, whether it had to do with, sagging enrollment or fundraising. There's a variety of reasons that you can find when you look at these individual cases most of them. There's a culmination of factors. Maybe not just one specific one, but a number that kind of come together and result in this official faculty uprising against the president.
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Elliot Felix: I think that's a really useful taxonomy. And one of the things I find really interesting is the relationship between strategy and shared governance. On the one hand, like shared governance is the means, and sometimes it's seen as the goal and. One of the things that was startling for me in my own research was finding, I think the A UP used to have this shared governance award and I looked at who won it and gosh, quite a few of those schools, I don't recognize the names and it's 'cause they don't exist anymore. And some of them are doing great, but. If everyone's agreeing and there's great consensus, that's not necessarily ensuring success if you're agreeing on the wrong strategy, right? So everybody could be agreed that we're gonna head in the wrong direction. How do you strike that balance between strategy that might, lead to some discord or make some people uncomfortable or make some hard choices, but at the same time, embrace shared governance to get there and to execute it.
Chuck Ambrose: Yeah. Elliot, we had some key learnings ourselves. One was the growing tide of no confidence votes against newer presidents. Which, again, was underlined by a another key learning and we really tried to remove our bias as former presidents because, presidents do have a perspective about moving culture forward. And when that culture doesn't perhaps agree or it's uncomfortable but no one really teaches senior leaders and or faculty leadership what shared governance really means and how it works. So when we say shared governance, I imagine the three of us now, Mike and I have talked and worked a lot on shared governance together, but we still may have subtle differences about what that really means and what good looks like. And again, I think we, when we look forward. Retooling ourselves to have the capacity to not only know what it means, but how to do it is absolutely critical because there, there's a o obviously a growing tide of research right now that the college presidency, there's just no way you're gonna avoid making hard decisions that are gonna affect people. There's just no way.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And the idea, I think one of the other things you point out in the book, which is great, is maybe this would work in another time, but the idea that you have these three key constituencies and you have these three core responsibilities of mission, finances, and curriculum, and you can each take one is outdated, right? Because they're so intertwined, especially at a time like today we're in you're making these complex, unprecedented decisions. Many of which are irreversible and have high stakes and have never been made before about, should we merge? How should we focus? Which programs do we have to prioritize? Should we expand? If so, with who? I think we're in an interesting time.
Mike Nietzel: The those are all questions, Elliot, that shared governance when it works well. I think is a very helpful process. We tried to make a distinction between those long-term intermediate term decisions that a university had to make the ones that they need to make in a crisis, how to respond to the pandemic, how to respond to campus protests. don't lend themselves as well to the deliberate consultative aspects of the shared governance process that we're all accustomed to. And I think that's one of the reasons why we saw a burst of no confidence votes involving those kinds of disputes.
Elliot Felix: of change increased. Yeah. And the stakes increased at the.
Mike Nietzel: had to be made quickly. Yes. And it was. It was hard to make those sometimes with the faculty feeling that they'd had sufficient opportunity to participate and debate about what to do and how a university should respond.
Elliot Felix: I joke and I say this lovingly, among friends and clients and, colleagues, ed is the only place where a vote of 12 to one is a tie. and think there's such value placed on a deliberate, intentional process debate, reaching consensus. Do you think that's at odds with the pace at which need to work today? How are we gonna square that circle? If everybody's expecting a higher level of consultation than might be possible to meet the moment. How do we resolve that?
Chuck Ambrose: Yeah. Elliot, that's a great question. There actually is, right? Because you're gonna have to push decision making and ownership of those things that drive outcomes much deeper into an institution. Let's just take academic restructuring. If you're hiring people and you're stacking 'em with overloads or stipends or you're not producing the credit hours required to, to level set the cost of instruction up against and you go through those hard decisions of balancing that. A president, A-C-F-O-A provost cannot do that by themselves, right? Deans need to understand that they need to own right. The allocations of resources that drive outcomes chairs need to own that. Now we have to incentivize that ownership, right? So if you give delegated authority to make decisions and you make good decisions, there needs to be a reward structure. You grow it, you make it, you keep it, you allocate it. After you pay the fixed overheads that drive an institution, then you start paying a little bit more attention. The fact that we may have a department with 17 tenured full faculty members and 10 majors right? Doesn't work, right? The first line of defense is to say. Oh, look, bad decisions. We can't give this up. We can't give that up. You need to be sitting on the same side of the table making those decisions. Takes training, it takes process, it takes empowerment, a new, kind of structure. And if we don't do that right, then this kind of adversarial who makes decisions basically over resources, right? Then that conflict's gonna be very difficult to resolve in this environment.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah, absolutely. And it makes me think of the, the great book teams of teams by Stanley McChrystal, and the thesis of which is you have to delegate empower people and push decision making out in order to move quickly. But the precondition for that is having already built the trust and the relationships. When the moment some, when something's on fire is not the time to. That relationship, you have to already have it in place. I think that's also part of why, I would guess that's part of why new leaders are overrepresented in your data, in your survey because they haven't had that time to build that trust and rapport to enable that kind of delegation or otherwise.
Mike Nietzel: One of the recommendations we make in the book is to develop more financial literacy among faculty and staff about an institution, but to do that. On a more regular routine basis as opposed to waiting until there's a crisis to do it when it's done only in the heat of a crisis, faculty tend to be more suspicious that they're being fed a line by administrators. As opposed to a situation where there's been a kind of open book budgeting that's gone on over the years and it's become a expectation that there's regular structures in the institution to participate in financial planning and decision making, understanding that at the end of the day, it's the president who's responsible for making that decision and the board for overseeing that and evaluating how well the job's being done.
Chuck Ambrose: And Elliot, one of the things, we would say we probably learned more from, was from the faculty leadership there was deliberation, there was angst, there was, definitely a toll taken when things got to a point where they feel as if a no confidence vote's required. I think probably Mike served as a faculty member. He served as a provost. That's perhaps an understanding he had more firsthand, but I think I learned more Mike from some of our faculty voices.
Mike Nietzel: We certainly learned from faculty voices that a no confidence vote is distressing for them as well as for the target. We heard frequently that it was an emotionally wrenching experience that there were, severe disagreements among the faculty about whether it was wise to take the vote, whether expressing no confidence was gonna hurt the institution, if they voted one way or the other, they're gonna be ostracized by their fellow faculty. I was surprised to learn not about the emotional upheaval it caused. Presidents and chancellors. I was surprised by what it the toll it took on faculty as well.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, so the message is to start building that trust organizational effectiveness. To me, so much of it is about the rhythm and the rituals and setting that cadence as to how you're reporting, how you're getting feedback to whom about what, that you're prepared and you're ready and you've built those. Relationships. And you've built those rituals around sharing results, being open with folks and doing what you can to avoid the kind of all this, where's this coming from, kind of thing. And we've been talking about. between administration and faculty and cuts and financial exigency or finance or financial distress. love to bring this down to the day-to-day student experience. How does a vote of no confidence or how do these tensions or these fractures or these disconnects, how do these show up for students? What's the impact on them?
Chuck Ambrose: Mike's earlier comment that this isn't a. Singular, catalytic kind of moment, but there's a buildup a, it's kinda like a snowstorm, right? It accumulates up to a point. And it's really the symptoms that probably has a more direct impact on students and student experience than somewhat of the. Either consequential or symbolic act of a no confidence vote. A lot of it depends on sector. A lot of it depends on size. Small private colleges are very intimate communities and students feel the stress of their faculty members. Now sometimes faculty members at times may share that stress a little bit. Openly. So sometimes they may even mobilize and at the extreme may even weaponize students to be a part of the resistance. And we could have a whole nother discussion about that because certainly within this social media environment, there's not a whole lot left to be unsaid. It's just how you say it and what it means. But on the other hand students know. They understand when resources are scarce. They understand if supports and services perhaps aren't at the level that they expect, whether that's realistic.
Elliot Felix: gets cut or whatever it might be. Yeah.
Chuck Ambrose: y'all, when you go to eliminating or reducing offerings. Yes. That's where and I think it's there's a lot of conversation today about the value of the major. But students have in incredible affinity and loyalty to their programs, mainly because they have incredible loyalty and affection for their faculty. Perhaps sometimes more than we even measure at times. And I in my current role get to, to counsel a lot of campuses that are struggling. But I always tell senior leaders that students can be the best part of your solution. They need to be engaged. They need to know. Going through the worst of it at Henderson did a town hall with students and sat in a circle, and one young lady raised her hand and said, Hey, Dr. Ambrose, I know what you're talking about. It's hard sitting in a lab section of one when you're the only student, nobody else is there to answer questions, right? I would've expected that I would've had a lab partner. So you're you're having to make adjustments on under-enrolled courses or programs that students know, I think that students and student success is an absolute critical element of the equation of shared governance. That they have as much awareness and engagement and perhaps even ownership in. How we allocate resources and what they go to as any other stakeholder on campus. And that can change the narrative. And the one pull through that Mike and I have found through a diverse set of voices that are included within the book is structure and culture. And through your work you're trying to connect structure to change culture. Would that be.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.
Chuck Ambrose: And this shared governance conversation and somewhat of how to deal with difficult questions and how to engage a campus and being an outcomes focused student, success driven campus. It, it has elements of and many of the strife is culture screaming out, saying let's do something different, right? Because what we're doing right now is not working.
Elliot Felix: I think we've already heard some great solutions, but you have some great recommendations in the book. So far you've talked about better orientation and we've talked about shared governance and involving students. But you have 10 recommendations in the book, which. I think is a great place to end. So give us a sense of how people can proactively, avoid votes, these tensions, these fractures, these disconnects.
Mike Nietzel: We put 'em in three categories Elliot one has to do with the composition and the functioning of governing boards. And one of the specific recommendations we make in that category is to have faculty be voting members of governing boards. Some institutions have that already. A larger number have students as voting members on their governing boards, but there's been a hesitancy to put faculty on them because of the concern that they'll, vote too often just to support their self-interests.
Elliot Felix: Or they may be unionized, which can create in that structure. Yeah.
Mike Nietzel: correct. we recognize those issues, but we think that it's better to have them participate in governing decisions than to protest those efficiently later on through a no confidence vote. Second category is one we've already talked about, and that is to improve the campus. Understanding of its academic and financial performance so that it's well versed in what it costs to educate a student and what the future looks like in terms of the financial wherewithal of the school. And then the third category is a recommitment to shared governance and a kind of ongoing evaluation of how it's working. And we make some specific suggestions under that category as well.
Elliot Felix: I hope folks check this out. I think it's so timely, it's so important and it's so insightful. Where can folks find the book?
Chuck Ambrose: Readily available. Obviously on Amazon Elliot, you know how that works. And also at Hopkins Press, they were a good partner throughout this process. And, at the same time we really value what people think. Always willing to engage Elliot, just in thinking forward about where we are and how to make higher ed better. And the Amazon engines built on reviews and so leave one, right? Whether you like it or don't or disagree. It's always good to, that's probably as much.
Elliot Felix: help.
Chuck Ambrose: They really do. Yeah.
Elliot Felix: They help not, they help more people see it, but they also help those people understand whether it's a fit. So I hope folks not only read it but review it. I certainly will.
Mike Nietzel: Official publication. Date is today, Elliot. So the book is available for order either through Amazon or other online outlets, or through Johns Hopkins University Press itself.
Elliot Felix: Great stuff. Mike. Chuck, thanks so much.
Mike Nietzel: Yeah. Thank you.
Elliot Felix: Nice. I think we at least got to double digits, so that was good.
Mike Nietzel: Alright, see you Chuck.
Elliot Felix: both.
Chuck Ambrose: See you.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliot felix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.