The Age of Interims

During the 10 months in which the University of Illinois at Chicago’s faculty union was negotiating its current contract, the administration sustained a cascade of departures and appointments, resulting in an interim chancellor, an interim provost, and a vacancy in the position of vice provost for faculty affairs. The university’s employee- and labor-relations lawyer, also new, joined the bargaining sessions months into the negotiations.

The experience was frustrating for union leaders, who found it tough to get traction negotiating with an ever-shifting cast. With little progress to speak of, the faculty went on a six-day strike in January 2023.

“It was very difficult because the folks that led the university and who had the most influence over moving negotiations along were all interim,” recalled Kate Floros, a clinical associate professor of political science who also served as a member of the union’s bargaining team. “There was no one who owned it.”

Having interim administrators in place can create all kinds of challenges, including inconvenient bureaucratic snafus or an inability to make meaningful progress on substantive issues. As colleges look to their leaders to steer them through crises including drops in enrollment, growing public skepticism of the value of college, and the disastrous rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, interim positions can add to the turbulence.

Interim leaders themselves face a daunting task. They are often asked to tackle longstanding problems without the full authority, mandate, or resources of someone in a permanent position, all within an abbreviated time frame. Many critics believe their decisions may be motivated more by career advancement than by what’s best for an institution.

With several high-profile college presidents across the country under fire over the past year, interim administrators are suddenly in the spotlight.

Although hard numbers are scarce, the trend is clear. Kevin J. Matthews, chief executive of The Registry, which has a roster of experienced administrators, including presidents, cabinet-level officers, provosts, and deans, that it places in interim positions on college campuses, said demand rose during the pandemic. The need for interims has abated some since it peaked in March 2023, when The Registry had 209 interim administrators in the field, but it remains above pre-pandemic levels, Matthews said.

The number of high-level interim administrative positions in The Chronicle’s job advertisements, albeit a small percentage of the total number of ads, nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022. (Complete data for 2023 is not available yet.)

Interviews with interim college leaders and the faculty members under their watch reveal the inherent tension over the definition and boundaries of the role. Interim administrators are trying to help institutions tackle urgent challenges, while respecting the temporary nature of their roles.

But long-term faculty members answering to interim leaders say the interim status can mean problems simply remain unresolved.

Or, as Floros put it, “decisions get punted down the road. And in the meantime, if things are not going well, they’re continuing not to go well.”

For decades, colleges have turned to interim leaders when they need to fill high-level positions and keep operations running during the months that it typically takes to complete a search. Experts offered several theories to explain why there’s been such a glut in recent years.

“I think universities want change. Boards want change,” said Rebecca Eckstein, who has become something of a professional interim administrator after spending about 25 years in permanent roles in higher education. Since 2018, Eckstein has served as an interim vice president for enrollment at five colleges, including the University of Houston-Downtown, Iona College, in New Rochelle, N.Y., and the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. “The world’s more chaotic. Higher ed is under scrutiny. We have a cliff coming. People feel the intensity of remaining viable and sustainable.”

Amid all the uncertainty, colleges want to take their time to find the right person for high-level jobs, which often means finding an interim to fill the gap. That process can sometimes stretch into years, leaving institutions in limbo. “They don’t want to rush into it,” Eckstein said. “They want to think through it.”

In addition to the turnover in administrators during the “great resignation” and the trend toward briefer college presidencies, a generational shift may be contributing to the demand for interim leaders: As baby boomers retire and the much smaller Generation X steps up, it can take longer to fill leadership positions.

It’s true that many colleges could do a better job of succession planning. But even the best-laid plans can be suddenly upended by a tempting job offer from another college. A nationwide search can easily take half a year to complete, making interims all but inevitable for many institutions.

One shift: Some observers say colleges appear to be hiring more outside candidates for interim jobs than they did in the past, perhaps to help prevent the downstream cascade of interims, and the resulting disruption, that can result from filling an interim position with an inside candidate.

Having interim administrators in place can slow down or even stall day-to-day work. An interim administrator may hesitate to fill key vacancies in deference to the person who will be hired for the permanent role, for example.

Robert Johnston, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and chief steward at UIC United Faculty, said that when the university had multiple interim leaders, faculty hires seemed to slow down and a proposal to restructure the budget fizzled.

“It seemed like everything was in flux and no major decisions were being made,” Johnston said. “There was a pretty good reason to suspect that the interim-ness of all of that made a difference, especially when it was multiple interims.”

Floros said the budget-redesign project has been hanging over the university for three years, and “nothing’s been done because we haven’t had the team in place who could take ownership of it and see it through.”

Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez, UIC’s spokeswoman, said the university recently hired a new vice chancellor for finance who is assessing the university’s financial position, “which will inform decision-making moving forward, including the budget redesign.”

Floros believes UIC is particularly susceptible to having high turnover in administrators because it is desirable enough to attract qualified candidates but not good enough to keep them forever. The university ends up with a lot of ambitious people who are eager to use it as a steppingstone to their next role, she said.

Kevin Wehr, a professor of sociology at California State University at Sacramento and chair of bargaining for the California Faculty Association, a 29,000-member union representing faculty and staff in the California State University system, estimates that he has worked under dozens of interim leaders over the two decades that he’s been in higher ed.

He puts interims into two camps: those who are gunning for the permanent job and those who have no interest in staying on. Wehr prefers the latter, who in his experience are less worried about their résumés and more focused on moving the institution in the right direction.

Interims who want the permanent job, on the other hand, can be “dangerous,” in Wehr’s view, because they try to appease their higher-ups without doing their due diligence. “They say, ‘I’m going to be bold; I’m going to show vision and leadership. I’m going to do something daring and attach my name to it and use that as the firepower that’s going to power the rocket to drive me up the ladder.’”

The Registry strongly discourages its interims from competing for the permanent positions so they will not be influenced by a desire for the job, Matthews said.

Wehr said that the interim provost at CSU Sacramento, Carlos Nevarez, has made it known that he wants the institution to move up in the Carnegie Classifications to become an R2, or high research activity institution, which in 2025 will require spending $5 million on research and awarding at least 20 doctorates.

“I think he is trying to make a bold move,” Wehr said. “He’s trying to attach his name to it to show that he is a leader.” But Wehr worries that those goals will create new research expectations for faculty without adequate resources to achieve them. For assistant professors who have not gone up for tenure, he said, it could feel like the goal posts were shifted after they were hired. Wehr said the faculty senate is now weighing in on the conversation, which is still unfolding.

Nevarez has been interim provost since 2021. He said CSU Sacramento now meets the criteria to become an R2 institution and that he expects the designation to change in January. He wants the university to get recognition for what it has already achieved, along with access to grants that R2 institutions are able to apply for. He said the designation will help to create research opportunities for students. He also said that he cannot change the criteria for retention, tenure, and promotion, which fall within the purview of academic departments.

With higher education in flux, interims say they can’t just keep seats warm. For example, interim administrators can be asked to fill vacancies, start programs, provide leadership to new staff, help to recruit and retain faculty members, analyze how a division is structured and whether it should be restructured, evaluate staff to determine strengths and weaknesses, and increase enrollment, all during tenures that can last for as short as a few months.

For interims who come from the outside, that’s a short period of time to build relationships, develop trust, learn the culture of a college, and make substantive progress.

“You’re pressured to perform in a very timely manner in a very short time span,” said Nevarez, who is preparing to apply for the permanent provost position this fall. It’s difficult to make a tangible impact, he added, “particularly when you’re talking about working in higher education,” where institutions are slow to change.

Some college leaders ask interims to take on unpleasant tasks to help smooth the way for a permanent hire. Eckstein, for example, was once asked to deal with an underperforming call center, which involved outsourcing the work and laying off five employees.

“They specifically wanted me to be involved in it to ease the burden on the new vice president coming in,” said Eckstein. She understood the instinct to give the task to an interim, however, because earlier in her career, she was asked to lay people off on a campus in her first week.

The temporary nature of being an interim — particularly for external hires who don’t plan to stay in the job permanently — can mean not having to worry as much about campus politics.

“It doesn’t mean you’re reckless and you just rip the Band-Aid off and drop the bombs in the air,” said Patricia L. Hardaway, who was interim president and then president of Wilberforce University before retiring in 2013. She has served in six interim positions since, including provost at Mills College, chief human-resources officer at Palmer College of Chiropractic, and chief human-resources officer at Hebrew Union College, in New York. But as an interim, she said, she can speak more freely. “You don’t have that lens of, This is my career and how will this decision impact my career tomorrow or later today?” Hardaway said.

Still, Hardaway tries to set herself up to succeed by convening departmentwide gatherings to discuss what needs to happen each day, and by inviting people to talk with her one on one to share their thoughts and suggestions.

Hardaway thinks being an interim who is not applying for a permanent job also has a positive impact on how people receive what she says. “There is not the concern among others that I am making a statement or adopting a position in order to benefit myself.”

Salvadore Liberto, who is now serving in his sixth interim role since 2014, is always conscious from the start that before long, he will be handing the reins to someone else. Liberto was hired in June 2023 as interim dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass., and had his term extended.

Liberto said he tries to get work done without committing his successor to too much. “So it’s finding that nice balance between what can we do now that’s going to be really effective, and then how can we set this next person up to be successful,” he said.

Liberto, whose previous positions have included interim associate vice president for enrollment at both the University of South Alabama and Cambridge College, in Boston, tries to help prepare his successor for the position. “I love for the new person to come in really well-informed,” said Liberto. “I tend to leave them a very long document detailing things that they might want to think about and things that we’ve done.”

For example, Liberto sent a previous successor a nine-page letter that he shared with The Chronicle that provided details on topics including the targeted discount rate for the upcoming year, vendors the department was working with on specific campaigns, the target date to send out student-aid awards, a campaign to engage with college counselors, whether there would be room in the budget for new programs (yes!), and his experience working with other departments. He also shared some thoughts on colleagues, describing one as filled with energy and eager to learn, another as “good at holding the line on funding,” and a third as having an “incredible mind for systems.”

“Hi,” the letter began. “Please feel free to add to this and ask questions here. This can be our living document for you as we work together over these next few weeks. I will add to it every few days. For starters, here are some of the things I am thinking about for you as you begin to transition to [college nickname] (that’s what they call it here). If there is anything specific you’d like me to work on for you, please let me know and I will move it forward.”

Interactive News Editor Brian O’Leary contributed to this article.