The College Presidency Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

We have our disagreements, and yet for presidents, faculty and staff can still be a source of strength. I can’t tell you how many times I was struggling with one or another external matter or disaster, and a faculty member emailed me to say they were behind me. Or a staffer stopped me on campus to buck me up. If their relationship with employees is good, presidents can withstand almost any outside forces.

Building a culture of support is tough, but we’ve made it tougher on ourselves. The central problem of the presidency these days is what some political scientists call “calcification,” a hardening of our internal political configuration. We have a university senate, a legislature, with standing committees, with many rules, with representatives who are assigned some extremely heavy lifting, and with others who don’t do squat. The president visits the legislature, rushes in and out of meetings. It all feels heavy, a chore for all the incredibly busy people involved.

Some of the committees have been around forever. Every problem that arises must fit into the existing structures. Too many committees have too vague a charter (“Student Affairs” or “Diversity,” for instance), and get wrapped up in nonurgent matters that might be dealt with by other means. This calcified infrastructure is oppressive and unproductive, no matter the good intentions.

We do not need “disrupter” presidents (a bizarre corporate term that makes zero sense in academe), to somehow “blow things up.” But we do need to rethink how faculty and staff can help presidents. One idea is for the president to come before them, as a colleague, at the start of every year and lay out the most daunting, expensive, and harrowing problems the university faces. This way, everyone can decide on the committees that are needed for the coming year.

That may sound dull and technical. But getting the structure of an organization to match the problems of that organization is foundational work. Just as American political culture has been profoundly damaged by calcification (e.g., gridlock in Congress), so it is for our universities. No wild-eyed disrupters are needed, just a realization that our greatest strength — the people who love the university — must share in the work of meeting the real and urgent challenges presidents will always face.

Susan Herbst is president emeritus of the University of Connecticut.

The expense of college is a legitimate and pressing concern, as is the ever-decreasing public funding that colleges face. Meanwhile, most politicians who take potshots have college degrees themselves. They brag about their Ivy League credentials when it suits them, and then denigrate higher ed to pander to their bases.

What we see too infrequently in the media are stories of satisfied alumni who believe that getting a college education changed their lives. One of the best parts of my job is hearing from alumni on a regular basis who bear witness to the transformation they underwent at Reed. I would love to see headlines highlighting the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2024 State of Higher Education poll in which 75 percent of respondents said that a bachelor’s degree is “extremely or very valuable,” and 87 percent of currently enrolled students said the bachelor’s degree is “extremely or very valuable.”

How can we get this message across? Let’s imagine a sweeping advertising campaign. Lest you think this sounds far-fetched, consider the wildly successful ad launched in 1972 by the United Negro College Fund and the Ad Council, “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” Back in the days when we could not record our favorite programs and then fast forward through commercials, that slogan was inescapable. This ad ran for four decades and helped the UNCF raise funds for scholarships for underrepresented students while reminding the public that education is empowerment.

I was an adolescent when that campaign hit the airwaves, and even though I am white, it grabbed my attention and introduced me to the idea of higher education as a good thing. I would go on to become a first-generation college student who got hooked on philosophy.

Higher ed’s critics have made a concerted effort to devalue something of enormous value. A campaign to highlight the real stories of people who have benefited from their college experience would make the case for why college matters, and rally support for the important work we do.

Young people’s minds are still terrible things to waste. Let’s spread the word.

Audrey Bilger is president of Reed College.

Years later, the executive director of the Big Ten urged member presidents to bring in Penn State University. The president of the University of Michigan and I resisted on the grounds that traveling to Penn State was too time-consuming for our players. We were outvoted by those who argued that TV revenues from an expanded Big Ten made the move worthwhile.

What a wildly different world we live in today. Money increasingly undercuts the academic purposes of colleges, student-athletes have become paid gladiators, their coaches have become multimillionaires. The Big Ten now has 18 members, stretching from coast to coast, and their players spend more time on airplanes than they do in classrooms. In all the major conferences, the arms race to spend more and more money is accelerating, even though revenues exceed expenses at only a handful of campuses.

The NCAA has offered no effective leadership in dealing with those issues. Each conference is now responsible for governance. Some within the NCAA are urging colleges to make athletics an academic discipline, like music and other performing arts, so that academic credit can be given for athletic performances. That would only make the mess worse.

What to do? An individual president would be at peril trying to make significant changes. Reform is possible only if it involves many colleges whose teams regularly compete. Most important would be agreements to dial back the arms race in ways consistent with the law.

It is probably too late for the big five conferences. The smaller conferences, however, still have a chance to take lessons from the Ivy League, which does not allow athletic scholarships, and from Division II and III campuses, which have managed the entire student-athlete scene far more successfully than those in Division I. The primacy of academics over athletics is at stake.

Thomas Ehrlich is president emeritus of Indiana University, former provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and former dean of Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of The Search: An Insider’s Novel About a University President.

Fortunately, we have a model. The medical and public-health community has taken seriously the high rates of burnout among physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers. That has led to a reckoning that is real and impressive.

The characteristics of burnout are familiar to leaders in higher education: “a workplace syndrome characterized by high emotional exhaustion, high depersonalization (e.g., cynicism), and a low sense of personal accomplishment.”

The National Academy of Medicine, of which I’m a member, has gathered experts to better understand why burnout is so prevalent in its ranks and how to address it. We need a similar approach in higher education. We need to think about the array of systemic, institutional, and human factors that have led us to this point. We can enlist the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesor the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to pull experts together, gather evidence, and propose a plan. There is no shortage of issues they might explore: career pathways to presidencies, structures of support surrounding the president, reporting functions and relationships, professional development, working with a board, dignified exits, ways to shield a president’s family from abuse, and post-presidential opportunities.

We need a plan. Physician burnout can lead to the death of patients. It’s unlikely people will die as a result of burned-out presidents. But some of our colleges might.

Raynard S. Kington is president emeritus of Grinnell College and head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover.

The benefits were twofold: We were able to identify future leaders and those who were talented but less well-suited for the top job. Twice during my term on the board the CEO departed, and twice the replacement was a woman from within the organization who had knowledge of its culture, familiarity with its challenges, and extensive leadership experience. I would describe both transitions as successful.

That is a best practice in almost all industries. Almost all. In this area, as in so many others, higher education is an outlier.

As far as I can tell, higher ed has virtually no tradition of succession planning. When a president departs voluntarily after a successful term, the process of finding a successor is almost always the same: search committee, search consultant, months of conversations and listening sessions, and, usually, a hire from outside. Even when the hire is internal, it is too often apparent that they have not been purposefully prepared for the job.

When a president departs more suddenly — an increasingly common occurrence these days — an interim is usually appointed from within, but there is little evidence that the candidates for this appointment have been vetted and prepared. Sometimes these interim appointees are excellent, the result of good fortune rather than good planning.

The lack of attention to leadership succession is an outgrowth of higher ed’s tendency to prioritize participation over outcomes. For a variety of reasons, succession planning has to be a highly confidential and carefully guided process: Everyone in the organization cannot be invited to express an opinion. A small committee can be involved, and its members can include representatives from throughout the college, but the work of that committee cannot be made public.

Another challenge is that colleges can be fractious and politicized places, meaning that most people who have held leadership positions of any kind will have made enemies. An outsider will be closer to a blank slate — for about a week, then enemies will begin to materialize. But universal approbation should not be a job requirement, and the opponents of an outstanding internal candidate should not be able to exercise a hecklers’ veto.

Succession planning does not guarantee that a new president will come from within the college: Sometimes none of the internal candidates will be sufficiently strong, and an external candidate will be irresistibly compelling. Sometimes the introduction of an outside perspective will be more important than familiarity with recent history and campus culture. But it does increase the likelihood that new presidents will come from within and bring to the job both leadership training and institutional knowledge. It increases the likelihood that interims will be well-prepared. And it lessens the likelihood that new presidents will make the kind of missteps that have doomed too many from the start.

Brian Rosenberg is president emeritus of Macalester College and a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the author of ‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It': Resistance to Change in Higher Education. (Harvard Education Press, 2023)

Are we perhaps engaged in a romantic distortion of history? In 1975, I, a young college president, met with William J. McGill, then president of Columbia. He took me aside and in a low voice, his eyes darting back and forth to check that no one was within earshot, told me to move off campus, get my own personal security, and make sure my phone number was unlisted. No wonder a presidential-search committee, long before this past year, in response to a request for a reference, received this apt warning: “Anyone who wants to be a college president is by definition disqualified.”

To be effective, a president must have the solid backing of the governing board. Too often the capacity to get something done is compromised by second-guessing from above. The first and primary obligation of governing boards is to be certain that they have the president they want. Keeping that support has become more difficult, given the outsized influence of social media and its tendency to inflame emotions. Criticisms, allegations, and negative commentary about a president’s views, once occasional, now are a daily reality. Since tuition and fees make up less of an institution’s budget than in the past, philanthropy has become more crucial, increasing the threat of excessive influence from donors.

The only proper reason to become a president is the opportunity to strengthen the university’s unique and essential mission: teaching, research, and scholarship. To do so, a president must inspire rigorous innovation and the renewal of tradition. A president has to have the respect of the faculty and students and be more than an ambassador, salesperson, or politician. Administrative experience is not necessary, but concrete ideas and idealism are. Colleges are not ordinary businesses.

To foster both tradition and innovation, presidents must relish conversation and debate. The present circumstances therefore require presidents who are teachers and scholars, not bureaucrats, leaders who cherish inquiry, excellence, and academic freedom, who can speak plainly without fear, and who command the respect of the only constituencies that really matter: students and faculty. Such leadership can diminish the threat of intrusive politics, and has always been the most resilient argument for financial support.

Leon Botstein is the president of Bard College.

Incorporating professional skills and the mindset of professionalism into teaching requires us to challenge long-held concepts of what a college — especially a public college — is and should be.

Our idea of a four-year college is often focused around giving students the tools to become critical thinkers. We teach them concepts and arm them with a classical education, assuming they will be ready for the world. And we are right — students do need intellectual development to understand how to think, how to learn, and how to be contributing members of society.

But that is not all they need. Students, their families, and employers, tell us that we should do more to connect intellectual development with professional development. That we need to teach skills that are career-related.

When graduates find work in their fields, connected to what they studied, they are more likely to view college as worth it. And that is more likely to happen when they get professional experience outside a classroom.

The traditional internship is a great example. We know that students who have one are more likely to get jobs after graduation. A recent Strada report found that about half of college graduates are underemployed — but the odds of underemployment for graduates who had at least one internship are 48.5-percent lower than those who had no internships.

And students are often hired by their internship employer. The National Association of Colleges and Employers annual survey has consistently found that 50 percent to 60 percent of eligible interns convert to full-time employees.

But we also know that there are more students than internships. Recently, the National Survey of College Internships from the Center for Research on College-Work Transitions, in partnership with Strada, found that 63 percent of college seniors wanted an internship, but only 41 percent had one — and not all of those were paid.

Higher ed needs to build relationships and partnerships with businesses and employers to expand the opportunities for students to have professional experiences while they’re still in college. In fact, students need different professional experiences each year of college, as they advance in their skills and in their majors.

When we integrate those experiences with what we are teaching in classrooms, students benefit. Over the years, I have seen too many of them conclude that they do not gel with the field they are studying — but they don’t discover this until they are three-quarters of the way to their degree.

As leaders, it’s our responsibility to evolve how we fulfill our most basic mission: to give students the best preparation for the world in which they will live and work.

Michael Rao is the president of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Yet even in this contentious era, we see many presidents and their campuses thrive. What makes the difference between giving in to the stress and rising above it? One surprising answer is love — love of the mission, the people, and the promise of higher education. Commitment to mission and people is the deep source from which leaders draw courage, wisdom, and resilience. The best presidents are filled with this love on days both good and bad.

We could make the presidency easier and more successful by expanding that love. The more campus constituencies — students, faculty, staff, trustees, parents, alumni — come to know and understand each other’s hopes and fears, the easier it is to find collective solutions.

We can also give up the magical thinking that accompanies searches and do more to develop talent from within, promoting people who understand and already love an institution’s culture and mission. We can ensure the president has the resources to build collaborative leadership teams grounded in a shared love and vision for the institution. We can provide better support for presidents breaking barriers of race, gender, and religion by acknowledging and mitigating the biases that undermine them. Most crucially, we can all work to cultivate grace, turning down the hostile rhetoric and the politics of suspicion that permeate our campuses and our communities.

The presidency will never be an easy job. But it is one that can be deeply fulfilling.

Marjorie Hass is president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and former president of Austin College and Rhodes College. She is the author of A Leadership Guide for Women in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Press, 2021).

One example: Over the past decade, presidents have faced increased demands to issue statements on topics of all kinds, many having little to do with the university itself: natural disasters, presidential-election outcomes, Supreme Court decisions, or — most recently — the conflict in Israel and Gaza. While it can be tempting to give people what they want, especially when the issue is not controversial (or at least, not controversial on your campus), every statement comes at a cost.

Statements center the president’s voice at the expense of others. Each one contributes to a self-reinforcing expectation that the university (and the president) should weigh in on issues large and small. This expectation is both inappropriate and impossible to satisfy, and the president’s inevitable silence on some issue or other is guaranteed to cause anger or hurt among those for whom that issue is particularly important.

Issuing statements implicitly establishes a college orthodoxy, narrowing the range of permissible viewpoints and undermining the kind of robust debate we need to sustain our research and teaching missions. In that sense, some requests for statements are not that different from efforts to deplatform speakers or to punish students or faculty who give voice to controversial views. In the short term, statements enhance the power and visibility of the president, but at the cost of a more-inclusive campus conversation. It is both telling and troubling that, this past spring, one of the most ubiquitous demands of pro-Palestine activists on campus was for presidents to issue statements endorsing their perspective on the conflict.

Two years ago, I sent a message to our community that I refer to as my “Statement on Statements.” I said that I would limit university statements to issues and events that have some direct bearing on Seattle University. The result would be a diminished voice for the president but greater space for others. Although this precommitment did not prevent activist demands for a statement this past spring, it did forestall the argument that — in declining to speak — I was doing so because of their specific viewpoint.

This is not to say that presidents should never weigh in. But we should do so judiciously, and only when there are clear institutional imperatives. Over time, the choices we make can help us to avoid creating expectations that no leader can possibly satisfy.

Eduardo M. Peñalver is the president of Seattle University.

Presidents of better-endowed colleges should significantly increase spending on need-based financial aid and educating more low- and middle-income students. Sticking with the status quo risks losing not just public trust but also federal and state subsidies.

In a world where colleges compete with each other, rising income inequality has contributed to pushing up tuition and costs. Colleges compete for high-income students, and these families, having benefited from rising incomes, want the goods and services that their high tuition helps to support. That pushes up tuition and spending per student at the better-off institutions, making it more challenging for low- and middle-income students to afford to attend. Spending on need-based aid helps, but there are disincentives to increasing this spending too rapidly, because any resources spent on financial aid can’t be spent on competing for those high-income students.

Because of the competitive environment within which colleges operate, it is difficult for any one institution to do much on its own. Unilateral disarmament doesn’t work. A college that acts on its own will find itself at a competitive disadvantage with its peers in recruiting students who can pay tuition, and some full-pay students are needed to make the finances work even at the best-endowed institutions.

The problem requires a collective response. Institutions with the most resources could have an impact on economic mobility if they collectively spent significantly more on need-based financial aid, without putting any one institution at a disadvantage. The Department of Justice, however, has repeatedly used antitrust laws to prevent or discourage colleges from cooperating. Economists strongly support the idea that competition leads to efficiency gains under specific conditions, but those conditions don’t exist in higher education. Enforcing competition is misguided and has created disincentives for colleges to spend more on need-based financial aid. As a result, the Department of Justice, the Higher Education Act, and the Department of Education are working directly against each other.

Recruiting more low- and middle-income high-school students and significantly increasing transfer students from community colleges, including enlisted veterans, would contribute to economic mobility, strengthen the economy, and help restore trust in higher education.

Catharine Bond Hill, former president of Vassar College, is managing director of Ithaka S+R.

One of the greatest challenges is balancing the needs of diverse constituencies — faculty, students, alumni, donors, boards of trustees — with unique and sometimes competing interests. This can be quite daunting. The key is to view these groups not as isolated stakeholders but as interconnected parts of a broader ecosystem, creating a framework in which the success of one group often benefits the others, fostering a sense of unity and shared purpose.

At Morgan, we have largely achieved that result by focusing on shared governance. By actively soliciting input and being transparent in decision-making, I’ve built trust and developed a culture of collaboration.

Fostering a harmonious relationship with the Board of Regents has been crucial. I see the board not as overseers but as key collaborators. It’s essential for a president to engage actively with the board, keeping them fully informed and involved in major decisions while also respecting their governance role. When there is mutual respect and a shared vision, the board can be a powerful ally.

The presidency is formidably multifaceted, but leading effectively is both possible and highly rewarding with the right strategy and partnerships. For me, it has been a labor of love.

David K. Wilson is the president of Morgan State University.

During my two decades as a public-university president and chancellor in four separate states, we experienced only five years of state-budget increases for public higher education and 16 years of state-budgetary decreases. Two of those positive state-budgetary years were in Kentucky under Gov. Paul Patton, and three were in California under Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown due to the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 and 2010. However, it was even more difficult to be a president in Louisiana from 2011 to 2020: The state legislature cut public higher education 16 times in nine years. The consequences of this consistent state disinvestment and lack of support for public higher education are the privatization of many of our public colleges, the rapid escalation of student tuition and fees, and the much-publicized crisis of student-loan debt affecting 48 million former students.

There is a reason why there has been a substantive and consistent decline in the duration of college leadership. We have led and attempted to manage our institutions through this period of state disinvestment, one created by politicians who assume that the student is the beneficiary of a college education, and therefore, should pay the lion’s share of the cost, not society at-large. Fighting this regressive that logic has been the key battle for many academic leaders, yet it has yielded only a few victories.

F. King Alexander is former president of Louisiana State University.

No wonder colleges are cursed with a revolving door of leadership.

Not a week goes by without someone reminding me of how lucky I am to have retired as a president two years ago. But you know what? I miss it. Not the screaming and posturing, but the daily intellectual stimulation that comes with leading an academic institution.

During my final years in the job, whenever I attended a gathering of college presidents, one of them would invariably ask me to share the secret to a long presidency. My reply was simple: Take care of yourself physically and emotionally, and always remember that you are in a position to learn from some of the world’s brightest and most inquisitive minds.

When I started off as an economics professor, I was happy to focus exclusively on my field. But after crossing over to “the dark side” and becoming an administrator, I became acutely aware of how little I knew about departments other than my own. I committed myself to expanding my knowledge base, and eventually gained an appreciation for how different disciplines pursue teaching and research.

Friends on the faculty would tell me how sorry they were that I was forced to spend a chunk of my time “begging rich people” for gifts. What they didn’t realize was that without those rich folks, important initiatives wouldn’t be launched, or existing ones maintained. Unless presidents think of fundraising as an exciting opportunity rather than a burden, they will not be long for the job.

So why, during these perilous times, would anyone want to be a college president? The house, the money, and the prestige are all nice, but they will not sustain you in the long run. Intellectual fulfillment is an even more critical ingredient for an effective presidency than having a supportive board. And the greater the challenges, the more important it is to actually live the life of the mind, not just promote it to others.

Morton Schapiro was the president of Williams College from 2000 to 2009, and Northwestern University from 2009 to 2022.