Carl Amrhein, provost, University of Alberta

May 1, 2010  

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Leading by Consensus

The ability to do my job is defined by the extent to which the community accepts that I can do my job.
- Carl Amrhein

One thing Carl Amrhein loves about his job is its complexity. That’s lucky – for him and for the University of Alberta for which he has served, essentially, as chief operating officer since 2003. Owing to a $20-million cut in government funding, being provost of Alberta’s largest educational institution recently reached an unprecedented level of complication. Facing angry students and nervous staff, Amrhein made a plan: Keep listening and – using humour, honesty and, whenever possible, racquet sports – stay focused on the preservation of a century-old economic and educational institution.

I’ve heard you start each day by checking the price of natural gas. Why?
As goes the price of natural gas, so goes the surplus; so goes the surplus, so goes the Alberta government’s ability to invest in universities. When I’m talking to faculty, staff or students, explaining why the province in such a very short period of time had such a dramatic change in its financial fortunes is very complicated. Perhaps it’s a little overly simplistic, but I reduced it to the price of natural gas. When natural gas was at $9 or $10, the university had annual increases in its budgets, and when the price of natural gas was at $4 and $3, the government flat-lined our budget. You can then explain a whole bunch of pressures by reference to a set of conditions that depressed natural gas.

You’re a liaison between stakeholder groups. How do you do it?
One of the most important characteristics any provost has to have is a sense of humour. The provost of a big university sits among a set of really important communities: government, business, governors of the university, professors and staff and then the students. These groups… see the world through different sets of lenses. Sometimes two of them will be saying virtually the same thing, except they’re using different words and they think that they’re disagreeing and they’re not. That’s a good day. Other times, they might be using the same words and think they’re agreeing and in fact they’re not. And that’s a bad day. See? You’re laughing now. You have to have a sense of humour.

How do you assess such a complicated environment?
I like the complexity. That’s what brings me to work every morning. And I love the academy. We can safely debate issues that different groups find deeply disturbing…. We give people the opportunity to try out ideas and the most important thing we do is educate, largely young people. But we also do this engine-of-the-economy activity by allowing that research environment to produce unexpected and exciting new ideas. So that combination, that living on the edge of sometimes unknown activity but working on behalf of society and students and faculty, that’s a pretty exciting place to be.

How do we do it? I listen very carefully and I consult extensively. But then you have to decide. That’s not always easy. You hope to get most of [those decisions] right. You get some of them wrong, and when you do the most important thing is to admit it, be transparent, honest and say, “Let’s try again.”

Has that happened?
In one of my first few years. One of the most difficult debates for the university is the tuition debate. I took a set of advice and constructed a tuition proposal for international graduate students that I thought made a lot of sense and [took it to] the academic planning committee. People were being really polite and deferential to the new provost but it was clear to me that this was not a good idea. So I talked to our vice-president of finance and we adjourned the meeting. We went out into the hallway and we rewrote the proposal – right in the middle of the meeting – and we brought it back and it passed. It was a much lower number. I could have been intransigent. Who knows, I might have even convinced enough votes to pass. But it would have been the wrong thing to do and it would have degraded the sense of shared collegial governance on which the institution is based…. It’s intensely collaborative. The ability to do my job is defined by the extent to which the community accepts that I can do my job. I need the consent of the community. I have to keep renewing that consent on an ongoing basis.

What was your initial reaction to the recent funding shortfall?
My first reaction was I wasn’t sure I had understood what I’d heard, so there were followup conversations. It took a little while for all the implications to sink in. So it was concern, it was frustration and then we got to work.

How tough are the decisions around the funding cuts going to be?
The decisions this year are the most difficult I’ve made as an academic leader. We cannot alleviate the budget pressure without involuntary layoffs. The university is an institution that values the relationships between faculty, staff and students…. Layoffs disrupt that collegial community in ways that nothing else can.

How do you keep spirits up?
It’s important for me to leave the corner office and sit and listen to the faculty, staff and students.

Do you find your role stressful?
Oh my God, yes! [laughs]

How do you manage that?
Squash, skiing, a lot of walking and efforts to sleep.

How do you draw creative solutions from stakeholders in tough times?
We have five designated constituency groups on campus: undergraduates, graduates, post-doctoral fellow, the academic staff and the non-academic staff. Each one has a designated leadership structure. I spend an enormous amount of time with the two student groups and the academic staff. We maintain the relations and the president has overall responsibility for the direction of the institution.

When we decided that we had the budget gap that had to be filled, we divided it into three parts and one part became the student piece, one part became the employee piece and one part became the administrative efficiency piece. We start talking to those communities. My team and I have met something like 45 or 50 times with the student groups, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for four hours. We keep in touch, we make proposals, they react, they respond. We’ve reached a state where I guess it’s fair to say everybody wishes we didn’t have to do this. On the other hand, we’ve lived for a century as a university and the more of our community we retain intact the better positioned we will be when gas is at $10. There. I used it. See how it works?

Born: 1956
Education: B.Sc., geography (Pennsylvania State University, 1978); PhD, geography (State University of New York at Buffalo, 1984)
Key to leadership: Sense of humour; admit to mistakes; don’t take bad days personally
Model leader: Adel Sedra (dean of engineering, University of Waterloo)

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