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These caricatures are unfair to the actual people who run and teach at colleges. But they’ve only gained purchase in recent years. Behind closed doors, presidents are more likely to grumble about obstreperous, obstructionist professors. In faculty-senate meetings and other public forums, those professors are directing distrust, even disdain, at administrative leaders.
The two factions aren’t meant to move in lockstep, and they never have. Tension is baked into the way colleges are run, says Brian C. Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College who’s now a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. The American Association of University Professors’ 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” laid out the blueprint most colleges follow. “The faculty has responsibility for the academic programs and curriculum,” Rosenberg says. “The president has responsibility for the other stuff. You have built into the shared-governance model this divide, so it’s always been strained.”
Today’s tensions arose from years of clashes over how best to steer these complex institutions. College leaders must often weigh difficult decisions shaped by forces beyond their control and act relatively quickly. College professors must stand up for the academic principles and longstanding values of the institutions where they will often spend decades. The tenures of college leaders are comparatively fleeting.
But today’s existential threats — more competition for students, tighter budgets, shifting student needs and wants, and a polarized citizenry that may agree only on its skepticism about the worth of college — have exacerbated the divides at many institutions. The stakes are higher, and the tensions are worse.
There is evidence beyond ambient bad vibes to suggest that the infighting between administrators and faculty members is intensifying. At least 141 faculty bodies voted no confidence in their leaders between 2012 and 2021, up from 50 the decade before, according to a 2022 Chronicle analysis. No-confidence votes have come for some of the most-prominent leaders in higher education in the past two years, including E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University, who oversaw broad program cuts, and Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, president of Columbia University, who drew fire for her response to pro-Palestinian protests. Gee kept his job, but Shafik resigned.
Since presidents generally don’t officially rebuke their own faculties, hard data on their sentiments is harder to come by. But a 2024 Chronicle survey of college employees revealed that many professors believe their administrations don’t respect them. While 81 percent of administrators agreed or strongly agreed that faculty members respected their jobs, only a little more than half of professors said they believe that administrators respect them back.
Experts point to three major factors that have strained relationships.
First, the Covid-19 pandemic upended colleges’ finances and often set institutional leaders at odds with professors. Administrators were motivated by concerns over financial losses to reopen campuses before many faculty members felt safe returning to the classroom. In the early months of the pandemic, when leaders and professors should have been united against a common threat, faculty members felt frozen out of decision-making altogether, says Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has studied colleges as workplaces. Many professors were alarmed by faculty members with relevant expertise not being consulted, he adds, leading to “a belief on some campuses that the approach to operating in the pandemic was putting people at risk, that there weren’t enough safeguards in place, and shared governance had kind of taken a back seat.”
When you don’t consult, you end up doing stupid things,” he says. “If there had been more willingness to listen, we would be in much less trouble.
Second, the financial landscape for most colleges has gotten rockier. The short-term fiscal worries of the pandemic were complicated by the ramifications of demographic shifts — growing competition for students and lower enrollments and tuition revenue. Wealthy private colleges and most public flagship universities have continued to prosper, but many institutions are struggling financially, which has contributed to widespread program cuts and faculty layoffs — moves almost guaranteed to cause worry and strife. “When you’re under the kind of financial pressure a lot of these places are under,” Rosenberg says, “there’s nothing you can do to make people feel great.”
Third, administrators and professors work in a more-volatile sociopolitical environment. In an increasingly polarized country, professors find themselves scrutinized and even attacked for what they teach and say amid widespread disagreement over the war in Gaza and other flashpoint issues. At the same time, college leaders must weigh publicly standing up for certain principles against the potential costs of taking overt stances. The president of a public university, for example, may believe in the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts but hesitate to buck state laws or rankle lawmakers or trustees.
“If the president takes the faculty’s point of view to the legislature, the legislature is actually going to come down harder against the institution and is going to wage war against it,” potentially costing the institution goodwill and scarce resources, says Teresa Valerio Parrot, principal of TVP Communications, a company that works with colleges. “If the president doesn’t take that point of view to the legislature, the faculty is going to say you don’t have our backs. It’s a lose-lose situation.”
Those factors played into the downfall of Robert C. Robbins, president of the University of Arizona. The university found itself plunged into a $225-million budget deficit in 2023, thanks in part to its acquisition of the for-profit Ashford University, a decision Robbins authorized over the objections of faculty members. Many Arizona professors questioned why the university needed to acquire a large for-profit online operation rather than build up its existing in-house online platform, called Arizona Online. They voted no confidence in Robbins in May 2023. He resigned about a year later.
Gary D. Rhoades, a professor of higher education at Arizona, has studied and written about the rise in the number of management personnel at colleges and how it has helped facilitate an operational mindset more disposed to action and less patient with faculty involvement. Universities operating more and more like the large businesses that they are, he says, has encouraged leaders “to think we’ve got to generate more revenue, so we’ve got to pursue these initiatives, and we’ve got to move quickly, and we don’t have time for consultation.”
Bringing professors into the process to consult may slow it down, but “when you don’t consult, you end up doing stupid things,” he says. “If there had been more willingness to listen, we would be in much less trouble.” Robbins could not be reached for comment.
Ronald W. Marx understands the Arizona faculty’s frustration. Like many administrators, he came from the faculty. A professor of educational psychology who has been at the university for 22 years, he was tapped last year to serve as the interim provost and vice president for academic affairs amid the university’s leadership turnover. Marx agrees that communication between leaders and professors is critical. But he is unapologetic about the need to bring in professionals to manage a $3-billion institution.
“We’ve had to expand the technocratic class at the university, just because it’s such a big enterprise,” he says. It’s important for administrators and professors to share the same values and mission, but sometimes values don’t align “and people see each other as being antagonistic and not going in the same direction.” It would be nice to go back to a world of small universities where everyone knows each other, he adds. But it’s never going to happen.
Parrot, the communications consultant, agrees. College leaders are drawn in so many different directions and work under such high expectations that it has become more difficult for presidents to build and maintain good relationships with faculty members, she says. The days of scholar-presidents strolling around and chatting casually with students and professors have evaporated due to airtight scheduling and, often, layers of staff who “have chosen to serve as gatekeepers,” she adds. “I believe that their intentions are to keep those leaders safe, but instead they have walled them off and created such separation that their own leaders no longer can keep the pulse of their communities.”
Another reason some can’t connect with their communities: They simply don’t stay around long enough to do so. The average college president now serves for 5.9 years, according to a quinquennial survey conducted by the American Council on Education, down from 6.5 years in 2016, a historic low.
The faculty’s say in shared governance has further weakened simply because there are fewer tenured faculty. In 1987, only about a third of faculty members were part-time adjuncts, according to a 2023 AAUP report. By 2021, nearly 50 percent of faculty members were part-time, and only 24 percent held tenure. The tenured appointments that exist are sometimes more fraught and tenuous, with struggling colleges increasing workloads or eliminating tenured positions to save money or reconfigure academic offerings. In the last few years, Wolfson says, “job condition and security has led to a much more contentious relationship between administrators and faculty.”
The faculty have overused the no-confidence vote to the extent now where it does, in many cases, not have much of an impact.
Few things stoke tensions at a college of any size like personnel cuts. Minnesota State University at Moorhead, like many regional public universities, has seen its enrollment wane. In 2007, it enrolled more than 7,500 students, a total that had slipped to around 5,500, a decline of about 25 percent, in the fall of 2024. In 2020, the university announced that it would lay off about 10 percent of its work force, mostly faculty, and close 10 academic programs. As at many colleges, tensions at Moorhead rose between professors and administrators over the clash of two critical imperatives — the need to offer the best university education possible and the need to keep the doors open.
Even professors whose positions weren’t on the line felt the anxiety. Denise Gorsline, an assistant professor of communications, wasn’t on the chopping block, but the worries about finances and colleagues losing their jobs “makes everybody nervous,” she says. “And if you’re nervous, your trust scale changes — you’re probably going to be more skeptical rather than more trustful.” The proposed layoffs brought protests in meetings and soured faculty relationships with the college’s leadership.
Relationships at Moorhead remain somewhat tense but are improving, says Arrick Jackson, the university’s provost and senior vice president for academic and student affairs. “I’ve worked very hard to be transparent and to be deliberate and to make a decision,” he says. “I think that’s what the staff and the faculty have wanted here. The people here are professionals, and they can accept a decision as long as the decision has been shared, been open, and they’ve had a chance to give input.”
Jackson and other leaders rely on a monthly meeting with the leaders of the unions representing the university’s employees to discuss enrollment and budget data and any impending issues. They also hold a meeting before the meeting to make sure there are no surprises. “If there are other issues or conflicts,” he says, “we try to resolve them there at that table and provide some clarity to make sure we’re going to be talking about the same thing and that we are on the same page.”
In the end, faculty at Moorhead only trust administrators so much, thanks to the faculty union. Administrators are “pretty good at reading the contract and following it,” says Oscar Flores-Ibarra, a professor of economics and president of the Moorhead Faculty Association. “There may be times where they may see the need to do something which I don’t like, and then I let them know,” he adds. “Pretty clearly and firmly, but not rudely.”
Professors bear some responsibility for deteriorating cooperation with administrators. “Faculty are the worst,” says McClure, of UNC Wilmington. They are experts — confident in their intelligence, knowledge, and beliefs — so some “are willing to put themselves out there and die on the proverbial hill, even with limited actual training in the subject matter,” he says. They ask for a seat at the table regarding major decisions at their institutions, but sometimes “people are not coming, they’re not coming prepared, or they’re coming in a way where they show up and they just step into the meeting and drop a bomb — throw out opinions that are not necessarily helping to advance any particular agenda.”
Robin C. Capehart, president of Bluefield State University, in West Virginia, blasted recalcitrant faculty members at length in a blog post in 2022, calling them “chronically miserable” and “ungrateful.” The faculty soon voted no confidence in him. A year later, he announced his retirement.
But the rise of the no-confidence vote, at one time the neutron bomb professors could deploy against leaders they distrusted, has sapped it of much of its power. Votes of no confidence can still unhorse a leader — Ronald D. Liebowitz stepped down as president of Brandeis University days after such a vote in the fall of 2024 — “but they definitely have become less impactful,” says Rosenberg, the former Macalester president. “Anytime something becomes common, it becomes less noteworthy,” he adds. “The faculty have overused the no-confidence vote to the extent now where it does, in many cases, not have much of an impact.”
In fact, a no-confidence vote can serve as a badge of honor in some cases. Parrot, the communications consultant, says she knows of public-university presidents who won praise from their institutions’ boards of trustees for inspiring a no-confidence vote. “It means you made the tough decision,” she says.
When Robbins, the Arizona president, resigned last year, he was succeeded by Suresh Garimella, former president of the University of Vermont. Garimella enjoys a leg up in building good relationships with Arizona faculty, says Rhoades, the higher-education professor. “If you’re going to become a new president, be a new president in a place where the person before you was a complete disaster — you can only go up,” he says. Many Arizona professors are wary in the wake of the university’s recent problems, he adds, but there’s also hope that the new institutional leadership will consult faculty more.
Professors at Buena Vista University, a small private institution in Storm Lake, Iowa, have seen plenty of decisions they didn’t support in recent years, including faculty layoffs due to budget constraints in 2020. When Joshua D. Merchant, Buena Vista’s president until 2020, made those calls, “it didn’t always feel like it was in the best interest of the faculty or the students or the institution,” says Steven Mills, a professor of Spanish and chair of the Faculty Senate. “So we lost some trust there, I think.” Merchant did not respond to a request for comment.
Brian A. Lenzmeier, the university’s provost, was named interim president upon Merchant’s departure. He took over an institution dealing with a smaller number of professors teaching more students. Factor in the aftermath of the pandemic, students coming to college less prepared, and the disruption of all the changes, he says, and “faculty really started saying, ‘I’m stressed. I can’t do this. I’m exhausted.’”
In 2024, Buena Vista’s leadership conducted a faculty “burnout” survey devised by the University of Iowa. The results helped Lenzmeier and other administrators understand the causes of faculty aggravation and devise solutions. For example, the university hired success coaches for first- and second-year students, freeing faculty members from having to serve as advisers to underclassmen. College leaders are also looking at adjusting course-load requirements for professors who serve on the Faculty Senate.
Occasional tension between administrators and faculty is unavoidable, and even desirable. “If there’s no tension, to me, that means nobody cares,” Lenzmeier says. “But you have to manage it and listen and not let it fester.”
Administrators and professors agree that honesty, candidness, and consistency help build trust, and without trust, it’s difficult to get anything constructive done in a shared-governance environment. “My primary goal is to increase faculty trust,” says Megan Halteman Zwart, interim provost for Saint Mary’s College, a private women’s Catholic institution near South Bend, Indiana. “I’m always asking myself, in everything I do, is this advancing trust and is it safeguarding people’s feeling that they have some agency? Because if you feel that everything is being done to you, then even if there are outcomes you like, you will not feel that you’re a part of it.”
Zwart has work to do. In 2023, Saint Mary’s quietly decided it would admit transgender students starting in 2024. When the bishop of Saint Mary’s diocese learned of the policy months later, he fomented opposition. Resistance from the local community and alumnae caused Katie Conboy, the college’s president, to reverse the decision. Many faculty members had supported the decision to admit trans students. They were disappointed when it was countermanded, says Sarah Noonan, an associate professor of English, and frustrated that the blowback hadn’t been anticipated and prepared for more actively. “We had a pretty low-morale experience,” Zwart says. The chance to build understanding inspired her to leave her role as chair of the philosophy department and join the administration.
Saint Mary’s leadership has since increased pay for many of its employees, including some faculty. “If you tell people over and over again you want to raise their salaries, but you never do it, you aren’t trustworthy,” Zwart says, “because you’re not following through with what you’ve said.” College leaders also hired the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges to help it create a better shared-governance process, meant not only to improve decision-making but also to serve as a “really concrete way to say we know that trust needs to be built up, and we’re going to.”
One of the best ways for a leader to curry a good relationship with professors is to have one already. Zwart and Lenzmeier both benefit from being internal hires at small institutions. They already had close ties to faculty members. Noonan has been at the college for 10 years. During that time, “the most conflict” has been “when a president or provost is brought in from outside,” she says. “You feel like you have to get them up to speed on everything, and then they’re bringing with them a lot of the lessons that they learned in prior institutions, some of which will work here, and some of which won’t.” The work of Zwart and other administrators “feels like a positive sign of leadership,” Noonan says. “When you can acknowledge like, ‘Oh, this was wrong. I wish I would’ve known that before, and we’re going to try to improve moving forward.’”
Or it could sow deeper division on campuses. One of the deepest frustrations many professors feel stems from what they see as their leaders’ passive responses to the political attacks and public backlash against colleges. Many leaders have adopted a neutral stance on hot-button issues after years of regular public statements of principle. On the Gaza war and the attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, especially, presidents have been seen as more responsive to appeasing lawmakers than espousing academic freedom. Leaders coming from outside academe may be even less inclined to back professors than their erstwhile faculty peers.
Rosenberg, the former Macalester president, points to states like Florida and Texas, where higher education and academic freedom have been under duress and college presidents have failed to push back. “It’s been sort of astonishing to me,” he says. “Sometimes your job as a president is to defend your institution and not to preserve your job, and I’ve been shocked and disappointed by how few presidents have.”
Ultimately, most administrators and professors want the same thing: to do right by their students and continue their work. Many of the obstacles they face they share, including their own foibles. “Tension is inevitable because we’re humans,” says Mills, of Buena Vista University, “trying to do human things.” If administrators and professors can look beyond their own immediate concerns and consider those of their counterparts, who knows what could happen?
