In the fall of 2023, six of the eight Ivy League universities had women as presidents. It was a milestone signaling that perhaps higher education’s glass ceiling was beginning to crack.
But the past year has shown the glass ceiling to be predictably resilient. On Wednesday, Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, the first woman to lead Columbia University in its 270-year history, resigned suddenly — becoming the fourth of those six women to step down in just nine months. Three of the women were replaced by white men.
In December, M. Elizabeth Magill left her position as president of the University of Pennsylvania. A month later, Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned. Cornell University’s president, Martha Pollack, announced her departure in early May. Magill and Gay, like Shafik, had their presidencies cut short; Pollack retired after a seven-year tenure.
What happens at Ivy League universities represents a minuscule sliver of higher ed, but like it or not, those developments can ripple across the sector and into public discourse.
Experts on college leadership say the resignations are a frustrating sign that efforts to create more gender and racial equity at the top have taken a step backward. Women make up just 29 percent of presidents at research universities, according to data from the American Council of Education, and 33 percent of presidents across all of higher education.
“I’m disheartened to see another woman fall on the wayside from her leadership,” said Gloria D. Thomas, president of HERS, a nonprofit organization that seeks to help women advance in campus leadership.
Shafik, like the other three women who recently stepped down, had come under intense scrutiny and political pressure for her handling of campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
Gay, Magill, and Shafik also had been grilled by members of the U.S. House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce, who questioned whether the presidents had tolerated antisemitic threats from pro-Palestinian protesters and protected certain voices at the expense of other students’ safety.
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At the House committee’s third hearing featuring college presidents in May, three men also came under harsh questioning. Michael H. Schill, the president of Northwestern University, faced particularly loud calls to resign from Republican lawmakers over an agreement he struck with protesters to disband their encampment. Those demands quickly petered out and Schill did not step aside.
Also facing criticism alongside Schill was Gene D. Block, chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, but he had already announced a year ago his plan to retire this summer.
Beyond the Ivy League and the halls of Congress, fallout from antiwar protests last academic year has prompted a number of college presidents to leave their roles.
Mike Lee, president of Sonoma State University, was pressured to resign by the California State University system after negotiating an agreement with protesters that had not been approved by the system leadership. At California State Polytechnic University-Humboldt, Tom Jackson announced his resignation in July after protesters occupied two buildings and forced Jackson to close the campus for the last two weeks of the semester.
But the vitriol directed at women in higher-ed leadership this spring stands apart, as do the overt claims that they were not competent to lead their institutions, said L. Song Richardson, the former president of Colorado College and a legal expert on implicit bias.
At Harvard, for example, conservative activists questioned Gay’s scholarship and attacked her for weeks amid accusations of plagiarism.
Richardson, too, has said she was the target of racist and sexist backlash as president of Colorado College, and assumptions that her actions were the result of her political motivations rather than strategic decisions to improve the institution.
The stresses and strains of the presidency have increased, and the amount of grace we give to leaders has decreased.
Enthusiasm among women to take on leadership roles is falling, said Thomas, of the HERS organization. The solution is to better educate governing boards, which tend to be far less diverse than the colleges they oversee and have little understanding of the different perspectives that a woman or person of color brings to the position.
Most importantly, Thomas said, governing boards need to think about whether outside pressure to take action against a president is in the best interest of students, rather than the ideological goals of influential donors.
Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, said governing boards need to ensure that presidents have the time to build relationships with constituents and that they afford new leaders some patience.
“The stresses and strains of the presidency have increased,” Hass said, “and the amount of grace we give to leaders has decreased.” That’s especially true, she said, when the very identity of that president signals a change just by being the first of their gender or race to hold that position.
Despite the challenges, Hass and others say they are still encouraging women to seek leadership in higher education, as long as those people understand the difficulties and have the right motivations.
“If you don’t know your purpose in wanting to become a leader, then don’t do it, because it shouldn’t be because of some perceived prestige or the money you might get or whatever,” said Richardson. “Those two things will not allow you to survive.”
Progress might be slow in diversifying the college presidency, but it’s inching along: In May, Maurie McInnis was tapped as the first woman to lead Yale University.
