After his acrimonious resignation as the University of Hawaii system’s president, in 2004, Evan S. Dobelle might have seemed like damaged goods. Lawmakers and members of the Board of Regents had painted Mr. Dobelle as a lavish spender who gave plum jobs to his old friends.
The charges could have been a career killer, but it took Mr. Dobelle only a few months to secure another presidency, at the New England Board of Higher Education. Members of the agency’s Board of Delegates said they were satisfied Mr. Dobelle had done nothing wrong.
Now president of Westfield State University, Mr. Dobelle is again under fire, pressed to explain the hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses that The Boston Globe reported he has racked up on limousine rides, posh hotel stays, and designer clothing.
On Thursday, Mr. Dobelle is expected to formally respond to inquiries from Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education, who says the president’s expenses, including 15 separate trips to San Francisco since 2008, warrant further explanation.
The new allegations have raised questions about whether Mr. Dobelle’s experience at Hawaii should have disqualified him from another high-profile administrative position, but there is a history of such second acts in higher education.
The results are mixed. Some presidents with a history of controversy have, like Mr. Dobelle, gone on to face similar problems at different institutions. For others, it is simply too soon to tell whether the next big job will be a story of redemption or another embarrassing chapter.
Following are some notable examples.
Susan C. Aldridge
Act I: Ms. Aldridge resigned as president of the University of Maryland University College in March 2012, a month after system leaders announced she had been placed on leave for undisclosed reasons. No official explanation was ever given for Ms. Aldridge’s leave, but her resignation was followed by a U.S. Senate review of the college’s aggressive and costly recruiting practices. University College primarily serves students online and competes directly with for-profit institutions that have come under Congressional scrutiny for recruitment tactics.
Act II: Starting on October 15, Ms. Aldridge will be Drexel University’s senior vice president for online learning and president of e-learning. In January the American Association of State Colleges and Universities named her a senior fellow.
E. Gordon Gee
Act I: Mr. Gee became chancellor of Vanderbilt University in 2000, having already served as head of four other institutions, most recently Brown University. Mr. Gee said he had left Brown because he was not a good fit for the institution, but trustees criticized his decision to resign after just two years on the job.
Before long, Mr. Gee’s expensive tastes roused concerns among Vanderbilt board members. During his tenure, the university bankrolled a $6-million renovation of Braeburn, the university-owned chancellor’s residence, and covered a $700,000 annual tab for Mr. Gee’s parties and personal chef, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Act II: In 2007, Mr. Gee was named president of Ohio State University, where he had previously served as president from 1990 through 1997. Controversies, often stemming from Mr. Gee’s bad jokes or big spending on parties and travel, abounded during his presidency. Amid criticism of jokes he made at the expense of Roman Catholics and other universities, Mr. Gee announced in June that he planned to retire. Mr. Gee, who was among the nation’s highest-paid university presidents, will make $5.8-million over five years in his new role as president emeritus at Ohio State.
Elizabeth Hoffman
Act I: Ms. Hoffman, who weathered controversies involving athletics and academic freedom, resigned as president of the University of Colorado system in 2005.
Act II: In 2007, Ms. Hoffman became provost of Iowa State University, where she had served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences before her presidency in Colorado.
Ms. Hoffman resigned as Iowa State’s provost in 2012, acknowledging her desire to seek other opportunities. She was a finalist for the presidency of the University of New Mexico, but the job went instead to Robert G. Frank, a former provost at Kent State University. Mr. Frank came to New Mexico with his own baggage, raising faculty concerns that he would be divisive as president.
Michael J. Hogan
Act I: From 2007 to 2010, Mr. Hogan was president of the University of Connecticut, where he was criticized for poor relations with the faculty and spending on office renovations, among other things. Some students and faculty members snickered when Mr. Hogan approved the purchase of life-size cardboard cutouts of himself to be placed across the campus. He left on a sour note, taking shots from the state’s governor, among other officials, for leaving after just three years.
Act II: Mr. Hogan served as president of the University of Illinois system for less than two years, before resigning under pressure in 2012. At Illinois he quickly earned a reputation as a top-down manager, whom some faculty members derisively referred to as “Hogan the Shogun.”
Mr. Hogan is now a distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois at Springfield, where he earns $298,799 a year. He is teaching two courses this semester.
Roy J. Nirschel
Act I: Mr. Nirschel, who was named president of Roger Williams University in 2001, abruptly resigned in 2010, following a whistle-blower complaint that accused him of sexual harassment.
Act II: Mr. Nirschel is now president of the American University of Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City.
H. Holden Thorp
Act I: After four years as president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mr. Thorp announced in 2012 that he would resign. Mr. Thorp presided over an uncommon number of controversies during his relatively short tenure at Chapel Hill, including charges of improper payments from sports agents to football players and academic fraud in the department of African and Afro-American studies.
Act II: In February, Washington University in St. Louis tapped Mr. Thorp as provost. Mr. Thorp is widely viewed as a contender for the presidency, as Mark S. Wrighton, Washington’s longtime leader, has said he expects to resign by 2018.
Career Enders
For all of the examples of college presidents who have been afforded second chances, there are plenty of boards who refuse to hire well-credentialed people based on the baggage they would bring.
“They want a candidate they can celebrate, not have to explain,” said Jan Greenwood, an executive-search consultant with Greenwood/Asher & Associates Inc.
In the corporate world there is evidence that a significant number of scandal-tainted chief executives never return to leadership positions. An analysis of 450 chief-executive successions, published in 2007, determined that only 35 percent of ousted business leaders returned to executive posts within two years, while 43 percent of them effectively saw their careers end. The findings were published in Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters (Harvard Business School Publishing Company, 2007).
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a co-author of Firing Back and senior associate dean of the Yale School of Management, said it would be a mistake for colleges to disqualify potential leaders purely because of professional setbacks.
“Organizations of all types want somebody who they think has not ever had their armor dented, so they are looking for the shiny knight, and that’s naïve,” Mr. Sonnenfeld said. “You get somebody who lacks experience. Being tempered is much better.”
Leaders who rebound from professional setbacks typically do so early in their careers, Mr. Sonnenfeld said. A late-career scandal, by contrast, often marks the end.
Benjamin Ladner was 63 when, in 2005, he resigned as president of American University. An audit of his expenses, commissioned by the university’s board, determined that he had improperly charged personal expenses to the university and failed to report nearly $400,000 in other charges as part of his taxable income. Mr. Ladner vigorously denied wrongdoing but nonetheless became synonymous with excess in the college presidency. His case is often cited among the reasons that compensation-disclosure requirements were added to tax forms for nonprofit groups, including private colleges.
In a settlement with American University, Mr. Ladner received a severance payment of $950,000 and $2.75-million in deferred compensation.
Today, Mr. Ladner leads a laid-back life. He was approached about other college presidencies after his resignation, he said, but never pursued them. Instead, Mr. Ladner and his wife settled in Greenville, S.C., where the erstwhile president is principally a grandfather. He writes often about “what’s important in life” and relaxes on his porch with his two dogs, a white Labrador retriever and a Weimaraner.
“We just made a dramatic shift in the way we kind of spend our time,” said Mr. Ladner, 71. “It is entirely different now. It’s a very pleasant life here.”
Had Mr. Ladner resigned from American University as a younger man, he said he might have considered another presidency. Now a resident of a state where a tarnished former governor, Mark Sanford, was recently elected to Congress despite an adulterous affair that made national headlines, Mr. Ladner said he did not have to look far for evidence of people’s capacity to forgive. There are few indiscretions, he said, that forever disqualify a person from leadership.
“We just elected the guy who went on the Appalachian Trail,” said Mr. Ladner, referring to the widely lampooned excuse that aides to Mr. Sanford, then governor of South Carolina, gave during his days-long disappearance from the state. He was actually visiting his mistress in Argentina, but, notes Mr. Ladner, “he’s back in Congress.”