Trusteeship - May/June 2020 - 33

cent drop in applications and 23 percent drop in enrollment from
its peak in 2010-2011. The university found itself at the center of a
nationally charged debate over whether religiously affiliated institutions could remove "elective" abortion coverage from employee
health plans. Unexpectedly, for unrelated personal reasons, both the
president in his fifth year and the board chair chose to step down.
The board in 2015 found the new president, Timothy Law Snyder, at a sister Jesuit institution, Loyola University Maryland, where
Snyder was vice president for academic affairs. He came with a
sense that despite its strengths, LMU was "the best kept secret in
Los Angeles." Snyder, a mathematician and computer scientist,
was also keen on LMU's securing a place in the exciting, high-tech
development taking place in Playa Vista right beneath its 142-acre
campus on the bluff.
"Our board approached these challenges by first looking inward,
committing themselves to a board culture of systematic self-assessment and self-improvement," said Snyder. It instituted an annual
self-study "to encourage an ethos of collective introspection and
transparent decision-making" and brought an AGB consultant to its
biannual retreat to absorb best practices for effective governance.
When Paul Viviano, president and
CEO of Children's Hospital Los Angeles,
joined the board 10 years ago, there was
no governance committee. He chaired a
newly created committee then in 2016
became chair of the full board. Viviano
is a prominent figure in California's
health care world, a former CEO of
its University of California San Diego
Health Systems and associate vice chancellor. Children's is a teaching hospital as
well, with a $1.3 billion annual budget.
He tackled the governance challenge
with alacrity.
Item one was bringing greater ethnic
and gender diversity to the board, but
also diversity of professional experiences. "We don't want all lawyers or all
doctors or all professors," Viviano said.
"You want a blending of professional
experiences and expertise to bring to
bear in the boardroom" along with the
voices of more women and underrepresented groups.
"This is the art and science of governance," said Viviano. "At the end of the
day you still need a board that's highly
functioning because we have responsibilities of supporting management, of
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oversight, that blend of making sure we are providing the resources
necessary to our leaders but also holding them accountable for the
performance." Members' philanthropic capacity is a consideration,
but that "is not by any stretch the most important one."
The increased diversity of the 42-member board, which
includes a dozen members of the sponsoring religious organization, "is important to us, not just so we better represent society
but because it clearly impacts the quality of our work," said Snyder.
"We see diversity as the fount of creativity. The more diverse we
are, the more likely we are to come up with solutions to some of
society's vexing problems. As we work to diversify our student
body and staff, the diversity of the board itself is important with its
being front and center in terms of visibility."
Snyder, the university's second lay president, credits Viviano
with retooling board meetings to spotlight the committees' functions and "allow members to participate more directly and share
their wisdom and experience more intentionally." They instituted
a "deep dive" reporting format at each quarterly meeting where a
committee is given a chance to explain and explore issues under
its purview, from information security to new programs at the law
school to investment strategies for the $500 million endowment.
The deep dive discussions include dividing into small groups
and throwing ideas around before reassembling and bringing the
best before the full board.
Snyder said for the endowment exercise, "we put $500 million
in fake money onto each table, with beautifully decorated cans representing various type investments into which they could put the
money. It got board members talking about risk in ways they might
not have considered before."
"Our board has also begun to play a more active role in largescale university strategic decision-making and goal setting," said
Snyder. He credits the board with pushing the administration to "go
big" on the Playa Vista initiative and "waving us away from strategies
unlikely to be successful," including the idea of purchasing a large
hotel complex on the periphery of Silicon Beach, and instead making
connections that "helped us obtain a best deal" on its 50,000-square
foot Playa Vista campus. Now, in addition to the film school, LMU is
landing internships with tech firms that abound in Playa Vista.
The board endorsed a creative plan to resolve the health
insurance crisis by providing a third-party option for alternative
coverage for employees' seeking abortion coverage. The board's
fingerprints are also on a new branding initiative. Undergraduate
applications reached an all-time high, the law school began new
programs, the university was granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter,
and it moved two steps up in the Carnegie classifications to a R2
"high research activity" institution.
Snyder said his board models "what higher education boards
should be doing across the country: engaging in discernment about
their institutional aims and commitments, clarifying their roles
MAY. JUN. 2020 TRUSTEESHIP 33

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