When I look across higher education right now, I see institutions facing a difficult combination of pressures.
Enrollment challenges. Rising costs. Questions about the value of a degree. Uncertainty around international students. And AI changing expectations about what universities should deliver.
Every institution has to respond. But responding to pressure and actually changing an institution are two very different things.
That’s what made this conversation with Nariman Farvardin, President of Stevens Institute of Technology, so important.
Since taking the role in 2011, Nariman has led a period of significant institutional growth. Undergraduate enrollment increased by 70%, applications rose by 221%, and externally sponsored research awards grew by 240%.
Those numbers are impressive. But what interested me most wasn’t the growth itself.
It was the discipline behind it.
Because Stevens didn’t get there simply by setting ambitious goals. It got there by connecting strategy to execution, making difficult decisions about resources, and holding itself accountable for progress.
And that distinction matters for every institution trying to navigate what comes next.
A Strategic Plan Is Only the Starting Point
Most universities know how to develop a strategic plan.
They bring people together, identify priorities, establish goals, and publish a document that describes where the institution wants to go.
But what happens after the plan is approved?
That’s where the real work begins.
Nariman’s approach at Stevens centers on translating institutional priorities into annual objectives and measuring progress against them. Strategy doesn’t remain an abstract vision discussed at leadership meetings. It becomes a set of commitments the institution must work toward and report on.
That creates a different kind of accountability.
The question stops being whether the institution has a strategy. It becomes whether the institution is doing what it said it would do.
And whether anyone can see the difference.
Transparency Makes Accountability Real
One of the important ideas in this conversation is the role of transparency in execution.
It’s easy for institutions to celebrate progress when the numbers look good. The harder test is being equally willing to acknowledge where progress hasn’t happened.
Nariman emphasizes the importance of reporting against institutional objectives and making that progress visible.
That matters because a strategy cannot guide an institution if nobody knows whether it’s working.
Transparent reporting gives leaders a clearer picture of what’s moving forward, what is falling behind, and where decisions need to change. It also creates a shared understanding of progress beyond the people responsible for individual initiatives.
Without that visibility, accountability becomes difficult to sustain.
And a strategic plan can quietly become a document everyone remembers at the beginning of the year and forgets when the real work begins.
Execution Means Deciding What Not to Do
Every university has more ideas than it has resources to pursue.
There are new programs to consider, research opportunities to support, technologies to implement, and competing demands from departments across the institution.
The temptation is to keep adding.
But every new priority requires time, money, attention, and people. Treating every worthwhile idea as an institutional priority eventually spreads those resources too thin.
Nariman’s experience points to a more difficult part of leadership: using strategy to make choices about where resources belong.
A strategic plan should help an institution decide not only what deserves investment, but also what doesn’t.
That requires leaders to confront trade-offs rather than avoid them.
Because when priorities aren’t connected to resource allocation, the institution ends up funding its history instead of executing its strategy.
Culture Doesn’t Change Because Leaders Announce It
Institutional transformation is often discussed in terms of new structures, policies, and strategic initiatives.
But those things don’t automatically change how people work together.
Nariman speaks to the importance of building a leadership team around shared values, a commitment to excellence, and a willingness to put the institution ahead of individual interests.
That kind of cultural change takes time. It also requires difficult decisions about who leads and how leadership operates.
The people responsible for carrying out a strategy cannot be disconnected from the values behind it.
Otherwise, the institution may have agreement on paper without the shared commitment needed to move forward.
Culture isn’t separate from execution. It influences whether execution is possible in the first place.
Higher Education Is Facing More Than One Disruption at a Time
The pressures facing universities aren’t arriving in isolation.
Demographic changes are affecting enrollment. Affordability is shaping conversations about the value of a degree. Public confidence and international student enrollment create additional uncertainty. And institutions are trying to understand what AI means for teaching, learning, and the future of work.
Each challenge has implications for institutional strategy. Together, they make disciplined execution even more important.
The answer isn’t to launch a separate initiative for every new pressure.
It’s to understand which changes matter most, how they connect to institutional priorities, and whether the university has the leadership and operating discipline to respond.
That requires more than being aware of what’s changing.
It requires making decisions about what the institution will actually do about it.
AI Will Change More Than How Professors Teach
Much of the conversation about AI in higher education focuses on what happens in the classroom.
But Nariman raises a bigger question about the role of the professor as AI changes how knowledge is accessed and transferred.
If students can increasingly obtain information and explanations through AI, what becomes more important about the human role in education?
The answer may lie in capabilities that go beyond delivering information: leadership, ethics, motivation, and inspiration.
These are not incidental additions to education. They are part of what helps students learn to think, make judgments, work with others, and navigate difficult situations.
For universities, this creates a challenge that cannot be solved simply by adopting new tools.
Institutions must think carefully about what education should accomplish when access to knowledge itself is changing.
And that question has implications for academic priorities, institutional strategy, and how universities define their value.
The Real Measure of Leadership Is What Changes
What stands out in Nariman’s experience at Stevens isn’t just the scale of its growth.
It’s the connection between long-term direction and the decisions required to make that direction real.
Clear priorities matter. So does accountability. So does culture. And none of them works in isolation.
A strategy without measurable commitments is an aspiration. Accountability without transparency is difficult to sustain. And priorities without resource allocation are just competing requests.
The work of leadership is connecting all of them. That is the discipline behind Strategic Portfolio Management.
A Final Thought
Higher education is entering a period where institutions will face more pressure to adapt while having less room for wasted effort.
The instinct may be to produce another plan, announce another initiative, or respond to every new development with a fresh priority.
But the experience at Stevens points to a different question.
Not: What else should we be doing?
But: Are we executing the things we’ve already decided matter?
Because the institutions that move forward won’t necessarily be the ones with the most ambitious plans.
They’ll be the ones that turn priorities into commitments, commitments into action, and action into measurable progress.
Strategy sets the direction.
Execution determines whether the institution gets there.
- Wayne
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