April 2018

This timely post comes to us from Jeremy R. McClane, Associate Professor of Law and Cornelius J. Scanlon Research Scholar at the University of Connecticut School of Law.  Jeremy can be reached at jeremy.mcclane@uconn.edu. 
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Spotify, the Swedish music streaming company known for disrupting the music market might do the same thing this week to the equity capital markets. On April 3, Spotify plans to go public but in an unusual way. Instead of issuing new stock and enlisting an underwriter to build a book of orders and provide liquidity, Spotify plans to cut out the middleman and list stock held by existing shareholders directly on the New York Stock Exchange.

This will be an interesting experiment that will test some prevailing assumptions that about how firms must raise capital from the public.

The Importance of Bookbuilding. First, we will see just how important bookbuilding is to ensuring a successful IPO. When most companies go public, they hire an underwriter to market the shares in what is known as a “firm commitment” underwriting. The investment banks commit to finding buyers for all of the shares, or purchasing any unsold shares themselves if they cannot find buyers (an occurrence which never happens in practice). The process involves visiting institutional investors and building a book of orders, which are then used to gauge demand and set a price at which to float the stock. The benefit of this process is risk management – the issuing company and its underwriters try to ensure that the offering will be a success (and the price won’t plummet or experience volatile ups and downs) by setting a price at a level that they know market demand will bear, and ensuring that there are orders for all of the shares even before they are sold into the market.

Without underwriters or bookbuilding, Spotify is taking a risk that its share price will be set at the wrong level and become unstable. In Spotify’s case, however there is already relatively active trading of shares in private transactions, which gives the company some indication of what the right price should be. Nonetheless, that indication of price is volatile, in part because the securities laws limit the market for its shares by restricting the number of pre-IPO shareholders to 2,000, at least in the US. In 2017 for example, the price of Spotify’s shares traded in private transactions ranging from $37.50 to $125.00, according to the company’s Form F-1 registration statement.

In recent weeks, the Tennessee General Assembly has been wrestling with a bill (house and senate versions here and here) that changes the governing board of The University of Tennessee (UT), where I teach.  Non-controversially, the UT FOCUS Act, as it is commonly called (Focusing on Campus and University Success at UT), decreases the size of UT’s board of trustees.  Currently, the board of trustees comprises 27 members–five ex officio members and 22 appointed members.  Tenn. Code Ann. § 49-9-202.  Most would agree that 27–or even 22–is a relatively unmanageable number of board members, without good cause, for most governing boards.  But the composition requirements for the board (with this newly reduced number of trustees) are where the rubber hits the road.

The Bill Summary for the measure, as reported on the Tennessee General Assembly website, succinctly describes the current board composition, which is established by statute.  I include the relevant text from the Bill Summary here.

The ex officio members are: the governor, the commissioner of education, the commissioner of agriculture, and the president of the university, who are voting members; and the executive director of the Tennessee higher education commission (THEC), who is a nonvoting member. Of the 22 additional members: one must be appointed from each congressional district (presently there are nine congressional districts); two additional members each must reside in Knox and Shelby counties; one additional member each must reside in Weakley, Hamilton, and Davidson counties; one additional member must reside in Anderson, Bedford, Coffee, Franklin, Lincoln, Moore or Warren County; one additional member is a non-Tennessee resident; two additional members, one voting and one non-voting, must be members of the faculty of the University of Tennessee who served as faculty senate president, or the equivalent, at a University of Tennessee institution during the academic year immediately preceding appointment as a trustee, appointed according to a sequence detailed in present law; and two additional members who are students at a UT institution, one voting and one nonvoting, appointed from the various institutions on a rotating basis pursuant to present law.

Present law requires that at least one third of the appointive members be members of the principal minority political party in the state and that at least one third of the appointive members must be alumni of the University of Tennessee. All appointive members are appointed by the governor subject to confirmation by the senate, but appointments are effective until adversely acted upon by the senate. In making appointments to the board of trustees, the governor must strive to ensure that at least one person appointed to serve on the board is 60 years of age or older, and that at least one person appointed to serve on the board is a member of a racial minority. Present law requires that the membership of the board reflect the percentage of females in the population generally. Appointive members serve terms of six years beginning June 1 of the year of appointment, and members are eligible to succeed themselves.

(emphasis added)  Of particular importance for purposes of this post are the italicized portions of the description.  The UT FOCUS Act calls for no faculty or students–no state employees altogether–on the board as voting or non-voting members.  I am concerned about this aspect of the bill because of its effect on the expertise of UT’s board.  No amount of board orientation can imbue board members with the knowledge that faculty and students have.

The apparent tension here is between the value of that expertise–boots-on-the-ground knowledge of shared governance, curriculum design and execution, the role of co-curricular and extra-curricular programming, faculty/staff/student relations, and other matters unique to current participation in the university’s campus communities–and a perceived conflict of interest (since faculty and students would be effectively governing themselves).

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) agree that university governing boards generally lack knowledge of faculty affairs.  A 2017 publication of the AGB notes in this regard:

Participants in all three categories in our listening sessions (board members, presidents, and faculty) acknowledged—and indeed emphasized—that there is a huge information gap between boards and faculty. They noted that board members often have very little— if any—understanding of the nature of faculty work, of the nature of academic culture, of the real meaning of academic freedom, and of the history and importance of faculty self-governance and the faculty role in shared governance. . . .

The AAUP website features a report on a 2012 Cornell University study of faculty trustees that includes a related observation.

Discussions of “best practices” for governing boards consistently cite improved relationships with the faculty as one of the characteristics of highly effective boards. We are in an era of increasingly “activist” boards, leading to significant mutual distrust between boards and faculty members and creating an impetus for improving faculty-board relations.

As a former faculty senate president at UT Knoxville, I understand and appreciate all of this.