How to Get Rid of a Rogue Trustee

September was a month of challenges for community colleges. No, it wasn’t just about the challenge of opening colleges and dealing with COVID-19. It was dealing with an old and continuing problem: the rogue trustee, who has surfaced in two of the nation’s flagship community colleges.

On Sept. 4, Inside Higher Ed published an article on the rogue-like behavior of a trustee on the board of the Maricopa Community College District in Arizona. And just two days earlier, the Board of Trustees at Long Beach City College in California held a closed session on an ongoing investigation into the behavior of its recently fired president and one of its trustees, whose alleged rogue-like behavior had been reported for months in local media and the student newspaper.

Like most rogue trustees, the Maricopa board member had been causing problems for some time. She reportedly had been accused of violating campaign finance law and threatening a faculty member who filed a whistle-blower protection letter. But it is her behavior regarding the search process for a new chancellor that makes her the center of attention again. Even though she signed a confidentiality agreement about the appropriate behavior for search committee members, she created a string of violations that resulted in an investigation. According to Inside Higher Ed, she is “accused of breaking the confidentiality agreement all search committee members signed. She also spoke directly to a candidate for the chancellor position and tried to persuade him or her not to apply, discussed why she didn’t support the candidate with a community member, and told the lead search consultant that she wanted to keep the person out of the applicant pool.”

The trustee from Long Beach City College also reportedly has a history of creating board disruption. A fellow trustee filed a complaint against her in 2018, contending, “She has not maintained an atmosphere of harmony and cooperation in which controversial issues may be presented fairly, nor has the dignity of each individual been respected.”

And in August 2019, the president of the college’s Board of Trustees filed a formal complaint with the superintendent-president of the college about the behavior of this trustee, noting, “Her behavior could be interpreted as creating a dangerous environment where civil discord is weaponized against individuals to silence varying viewpoints. Although we see this in the national political arena, it is wholly unacceptable to bring these bully tactics to our local district, which prides itself on diversity and inclusion. We should be mindful of her words as a trustee and the impact they will have on our students, our faculty and our staff.” The following week, the Long Beach board voted 3 to 2 to censure this trustee.

Who Are Rogue Trustees?

These two trustees exhibit strong characteristics of rogue trustees. In my 2009 study, The Rogue Trustee: The Elephant in the Room, I surveyed and interviewed 59 community college presidents from across the nation who had dealt with rogue trustees. Most had dealt with more than one; in fact, one president had dealt with five. How did I characterize a rogue trustee? In my survey of the presidents, I told them that rogue trustees have the following qualities.

Rogue trustees run roughshod over the norms and standards of behavior expected of public officials appointed or elected to office. They tend to trample over the ideas and cautions of the CEO, the trustee chair and member trustees. They place their own interests over the interests of the college. They violate written and unwritten codes of conduct. They often make inappropriate alliances with faculty, staff and other trustees. They recommend and support policies that are not in the best interests of the institution. They consume an inordinate amount of staff and meeting time. They know how to get attention, to appeal to the base elements in others and to manipulate individuals and situations to their advantage.

Most rogue trustees are quite bright and articulate; some are mentally unbalanced. They are sometimes loners, exiled from the herd, but they also create alliances with others to carry out their agenda. They are high maintenance. They tend to poison the culture of the college instead of helping to create a sense of community, collaboration, innovation and common values. They become the catalyst for increased defensiveness, paranoia, subterfuge and fear. In short, they cause enormous damage. The rogue trustee is the elephant in the room, creating an ever-widening circle of frustration and destruction for anything in its path.

As I discovered in my research, hundreds of rogue trustees are operating in community colleges; it is the rare president who has not had to deal with one. I also discovered there are very few or no established mechanisms to get rid of a rogue trustee. The president of the Maricopa district’s Faculty Association, for example, observed that to be the case “other than recalls, which are unrealistic in a large county like Maricopa.”

In my study, concerned presidents made clear that holding trustees accountable was a major challenge. A California president said, “There is no recourse in California that I was ever able to find to stem the actions of a board member who is up to no good -- unless of course they are engaging in illegal activity.” A Michigan president noted that “state law severely limits the actions that can be taken against an elected official.”

Dealing With a Rogue Trustee

Getting rid of a rogue trustee is not an easy task. A rogue trustee can violate all the norms of good behavior and become a resident curmudgeon attacking colleagues at will, disturbing meetings, spreading rumors and creating havoc without ever being confronted or chastised. Disgusted by such behavior, some trustees resign or do not run again. Presidents sometimes move on to other positions. Meanwhile, the rogue trustee can become a fixture for years and years.

It would be helpful if higher education had formal established qualifications for the position of a college board member that they could share with voters and those who appoint trustees. But specific qualifications for public office of almost any kind, including the president of the United States, are not the norm. Leaders in a college try to fill the gap by creating codes of ethics and guidelines for board behavior, but a rogue trustee will ignore those and echo the tactics of the current U.S. president to avoid removal, no matter how alarming or distasteful the behavior. Rogue trustees understand that if even impeachment is not sufficient to remove a U.S. president from office, there’s lots of room for behavior that violates the norm.

A survey that the League for Innovation conducted in October 2009 asked 556 community college CEOs to designate who had primary responsibility for dealing with a rogue trustee. In response, 46 percent indicated the board as a whole and 43 percent identified the board chair. Only 3 percent listed the president. But even though presidents believe it is the responsibility of the board as a whole or the board chair to deal with a rogue trustee, the president has a vested interest in the issue and becomes a significant player with the board and the board chair.

Working together, these key stakeholders can take some of the following actions to get rid of a rogue trustee.

Conduct votes of no confidence. The board as a whole can take a vote of no confidence in the rogue trustee and share that information with the employees of the college, the press and the voters in the local community. Votes of no confidence by the faculty have forced presidents to resign in numerous cases; such votes by one’s colleagues on the board may have the same effect. And if faculty engage in a vote of no confidence of a trustee, that becomes a powerful message to resign.

Highlight the damaging behavior. The damaging behavior of a rogue trustee is regularly on display. Making sure that college employees and community members see that behavior is a powerful tool. The board could agree to televise all but closed sessions and make those sessions available to college employees and members of the community. An anonymous blog or website managed by a friend of the college could share the rogue trustee’s behavior as a public service.

Encourage journalists to investigate. College leaders should encourage journalists from local newspapers and national education news media to attend board meetings and investigate the actions of rogue trustees. They should also urge student journalists for the local college newspaper and other publications to investigate and report on rogue trustees.

Appeal to accrediting commissions. More than a decade ago at one community college, a person (some say a faculty member) anonymously notified the Higher Learning Commission about the damage rogue trustees were doing to the institution. As an outcome of the appeal, the commission asked the chancellor to take some action; he asked for a review by a group of external educators, many of whom had played leading roles in the accrediting process in other colleges. The report of the consultants provided leverage for the chancellor to engage specialists in dealing with board problems to work with trustees, including rogue ones, in a series of workshops.

Mount recall campaigns. In some cases, faculty members have collaborated with citizen groups to mount a recall campaign against a rogue trustee. Even students can play a key role in recall campaigns. Reportedly, residents in a rural community in California voted overwhelmingly to recall every member of the local school board in 2009 after some high school students campaigned to unseat them.

Field an opposing candidate. Leaders astute enough to mount a recall campaign also have the skills and abilities to field an opposing candidate. Identifying and supporting an opposition candidate may be less messy than mounting a recall campaign, although many of the same political elements are involved.

Some of these suggestions are hardball strategies that presidents and trustees must weigh against the overall damage that can accrue to the college from local and national publicity about a problem that most college leaders would prefer to handle within their institutions. Several outstanding community colleges in the nation have suffered a loss of reputation when the machinations of a rogue trustee have been reported in the press, when the accrediting commission has been called in or when recall and election campaigns have taken center stage. College leaders should try to mitigate these outcomes as best they can and design strategies that do not garner such publicity. In the final analysis, however, short-term negative publicity may be less important than the long-term gain of unseating a rogue trustee.

Some rogue trustees have done enormous damage to many community colleges. They have made it impossible for other trustees to serve, and they have made it impossible for presidents to continue their leadership. It is not uncommon for a college to ante up great sums to pay off a president who has been caught in the web of a rogue trustee. Their antics can waste an enormous amount of other trustees’ and the president’s time when they should be dealing with pressing issues in the college.

Rogue trustees can also impact the culture of a community college and destroy its spirit for years, crushing the morale of the faculty and making it difficult for all employees to apply to other institutions because of the reputation the college has earned. Quality candidates for the presidency and for other positions in the college become suspicious and reluctant to apply.

Rogue trustees can damage a college more than a hurricane, an earthquake, a fatal shooting or a major financial catastrophe, which people on campuses often pull together to deal with. The damage of a rogue trustee is as insidious as COVID-19 when those it infects show no symptoms. It can percolate for a very long time in the nooks and crannies of the college, affecting how employees behave with each other, how they trust one another, whether or not they will collaborate and work in teams, whether or not they will continue to innovate and care for at-risk students, and whether or not they will move forward with the professional pride in their college as one of the leading institutions in their state.

If a college is cursed with a rogue trustee, leaders from the institution and community must take every possible step to get rid of that trustee, as in the end, it is the students who will pay the price. And as educators and concerned citizens, they should not allow that to happen.