Controversial leadership decisions at Penn State and the University of California at Davis dominated headlines over the past month, yet the damage may extend well beyond those two institutions. Both crises have raised broader questions about the moral credibility of college leaders, adding weight to the nation’s brewing discontent with higher education at the very time when public disaffection for banks, government, and other institutions is also on the rise.
“It’s not a good time to lose credibility in America,” says Daniel Yankelovich, a pollster and scholar of public opinion. And “this just adds to the credibility problem” for colleges.
At another time, the public attention to Penn State’s mishandling of an alleged child-sex-abuse scandal, and a decision that led to the much-videoed November 18 pepper-spraying of peacefully protesting students in California, would be bad enough, says Mr. Yankelovich. But today, with so much skepticism about the cost and value of college, such higher-education scandals only reinforce pre-existing concerns that administrators are not acting in good faith, he says.
What’s more, the Penn State and Davis controversies are “examples of institutions that seem to be concerned with themselves rather than their students. That’s the rap against the banks,” Mr. Yankelovich said.
The rancor of today’s political discourse, coupled with the power of social and traditional media to quickly amplify controversies, further complicates the challenges, says Robert M. O’Neil, an emeritus professor of law and former president of the University of Virginia.
Mr. O’Neil taught law at the University of California at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s and later helped investigate the role of the police in the shootings of students on the campuses of Kent State and Jackson State Universities in the early 1970s. Still, as he watches the scrutiny enveloping Penn State and the University of California, he says the problems college leaders face now are “vastly more difficult.” Today the “pressures are drastically more stressful, more contentious, and much more immediate.”
In the 1960s, he recalls, UC’s then-president, Clark Kerr, was able to take a few months to ease out a controversial Berkeley chancellor and replace him with another. At Penn State, the trustees fired Graham B. Spanier within a few days of learning that the president and other administrators had failed to report allegations of sexual abuse made against a former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky. In the eyes of some alumni and national observers, however, the board’s comparatively swift action was still too slow.
‘In the Cross Hairs’
California at Davis joined Penn State in the national spotlight after its chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, called in campus police in riot gear to clear out the tents and protesters of an Occupy-UC-Davis encampment. As seen in several amateur videos that have since become an Internet sensation, one of the officers methodically pepper-sprayed about 20 of the sitting students.
Ms. Katehi has put two of the police officers and the police chief on administrative leave and called for outside investigations by the county district attorney and the state. Amid demands for her resignation from many students and faculty members—a call she has rebuffed—she’s met several times with students over the past week to discuss her actions. She also appeared before thousands of students at a campus rally three days after the incident, declaring “I’m here to apologize.”
Ms. Katehi has been criticized for acting too forcefully to break up protesters (she says she explicitly directed the police to avoid violence), while Mr. Spanier has been accused of failing to act aggressively enough to protect children. The extreme nature of the allegations at Penn State has provoked an understandably more visceral public reaction, but both cases point toward the enormous backlash that leadership missteps can engender in the age of 24-hour news cycles and social media.
“Presidents are in the cross hairs” in a way they have not been before, says Suzanne E. Estler, associate professor emerita of higher education at the University of Maine at Orono. While that makes the job more difficult, the public is justified in holding college leaders to a higher standard, she said.
James J. Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, says even beyond the Penn State situation, which he calls a once-in-a-generation meltdown, presidents and other college leaders need to recognize the stakes.
“Penn State creates a public awareness of things happening on campuses that is much more intense than it has been for many years,” he says. “It creates an environment in which everything involving higher education is being questioned.”
Back when campus protests were more prevalent, he says, governing boards were used to them. Now, he says, “We’ve got to relearn how to handle them.”
College presidents have spent the last several years defending the value of higher education, and they are “weary” from the fight, says Andrew K. Benton, president of Pepperdine University. Presidents who feel constantly under attack may become hardened and dismissive of critics, he said, but college leaders cannot afford to ignore that their decisions will be held up to immense public scrutiny.
“We are politicians, like it or not,” Mr. Benton says. “We’ve got to be very acutely aware of legal obligations and moral obligations, and have a 360 view of how our decisions are going to affect the lives of our students.”
And while presidents are held to higher standards, there should be a recognition that they are fallible, said John V. Lombardi, president of the Louisiana State University system.
“We do many things right, but we can do things badly,” Mr. Lombardi wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle last week. “We have an endless context of conflicting constituencies, and sometimes we navigate them well, and sometimes we run aground. When we fail, we can’t and shouldn’t escape the consequences any more than other leaders of significant enterprises who also fail.
“Most of my colleagues are doing admirable things under difficult conditions, and we all draw lessons from the problems that a few of us encounter that make the news.”
