The wave of turnover among college presidents feels portentous. The list of college leaders who have announced their retirement over the past two years includes some of the best-known presidents in the nation at some of the most-revered institutions.

We don’t know yet whether the changing of higher education’s senior guard signals a change in how institutions are run. But it is the latest evidence of how the world is changing around higher education.

Many of the presidents now retiring began their climb to leadership in the late 1990s and 2000s, when higher education itself seemed irrepressibly ascendant: enrollments were on a steady climb, a larger share of the public and politicians had a positive view of higher education, and even state appropriations to public colleges were still on the rise.

Now consider higher education’s more recent misfortunes. The Great Recession in 2008, a rapid shrinking of per-student state appropriations, public dissatisfaction with the price of college revealed in polling, persistent demands from politicians and activists across the partisan spectrum, the looming enrollment cliff, and a global pandemic that triggered another major recession. All of that on top of longstanding financial challenges for all but the wealthiest institutions.

The Chronicle interviewed nine college presidents who are stepping down soon or have left their post over the past year. They reflected on the nature of leadership, the changing demands of running a college, and their concerns about the increasing headwinds facing higher education.

College presidents are often reluctant to talk openly about the challenges they or their institutions face. Any acknowledgment of weakness or failure is usually buried under layers of forward-looking affirmations that are heavy on the “progress” the college is making away from some scandal or toward some goal. But once they let down their guards (a tiny bit), most presidents admitted that the job, while rewarding, comes with little or no real training, demands total commitment with little room for a personal life, and requires a good dose of humility.

Most of the presidents interviewed here, though not all, have led institutions well-positioned to weather the economic storms and have avoided major political clashes. All the same, they are worried about the long-term future of higher education, and whether and how it can continue to contribute to the nation’s well-being.

‘Too Many Bosses’

Eric J. Barron, Pennsylvania State University

A president’s job often involves balancing the concerns of numerous groups with disparate interests. Eric J. Barron, departing president at Pennsylvania State University, is deeply familiar with that challenge, assuming office in the wake of a sex-abuse scandal that reverberated throughout higher education and led to deep divisions on campus and among alumni.

“You have too many bosses; you have too many constituencies,” said Barron, who stepped down on May 8 after eight years as president. “We’re polite. We call them constituencies.”

Some of these constituents also have considerable leverage over the university, Barron said, and a climate of political polarization makes it difficult to forge compromise among them.

“The state legislature and the governor are very keen in guiding the university and saying, ‘You better not do this,’ or, ‘We really want you to do this, and you realize I have to vote on your appropriation,’” said Barron, who was president for four years at Florida State University before accepting his position at Penn State.

“The boards have fiduciary responsibilities, and they also have lots and lots of different thoughts on different topics. We have alumni, in general, who frequently view the university as theirs and have very different interests in terms of what it is that you might do,” he said.

“The students increasingly view themselves as the customers,” he continued, “and we have a faculty and staff that, in a shared governance role, have a great deal to say and very high expectations.”

For example, opinions were split nearly even on whether Penn State should require Covid-19 vaccination of those on campus, Barron said: “No matter what, you’re going to have half the population furious with you, and they didn’t mind expressing it in a lot of different ways.”

“I made the argument, and got convinced that my staff was going to support me, that I could achieve the levels of vaccination of a mandate without using the word,” Barron said. The result, Barron said, is that 92 percent of students are now vaccinated.

‘Get That Dime Ready’

Morton O. Schapiro, Northwestern University

“Presidents should be public voices, but you’ve got to understand the consequences of that if you’re well known to present your views on controversial issues,” said Morton O. Schapiro, president since 2009 at Northwestern University. Schapiro was also president for nine years at Williams College before assuming his current position.

The political climate has made it difficult for presidents to speak out publicly on important issues, said Schapiro, a co-author of a book on how “rigid adherence to ideological thinking” is undermining democracy.

When presidents opine publicly, they should be prepared for a backlash, including from current or potential donors, said Schapiro, who has bylines on some 60 opinion pieces for various news outlets during his time at Northwestern. But if people are threatening not to donate, he said, it probably has little to do with whatever the president has said or done.

After one recent article, Schapiro said, an alum from the 1970s wrote: “I’m never going to give another dime when you’re president.”

“Well, thank God, I’m leaving August 31,” Schapiro said. “Get that dime ready.”

‘Let the Chips Fall’

William R. Harvey, Hampton University

“One of the things I say is that a leader is going to be criticized, is going to be attacked, is going to be moved on, going to be gossiped on, going to be lied on, and you need to understand that,” said William R. Harvey, who has been president of Hampton University for 44 years. Harvey will end his tenure on June 30.

“So you do what you think is right and best, and let the chips fall where they may. And that’s what I have done,” said Harvey, who might be called “old school” for his insistence that the historically Black college with about 2,900 undergraduates maintain a conservative social culture and commitment to personal responsibility.

Harvey has also taken a lot of flak over the years, he said, for promoting civility rather than parroting a partisan agenda of either the political left or right.

“Why not think about working together to solve problems, rather than attacking one another? I get criticized for that,” he said, “but I don’t care because I believe that we ought to work together for the good of the people, not for the good of a party or a particular position.”

‘Symbol for the Institution’

A. Gabriel Esteban, DePaul University

“You’re a symbol for the institution; you speak on behalf of the institution. But depending on who you are — your background — you become a symbol for different groups of people,” said A. Gabriel Esteban, who began his tenure at DePaul University in July 2017 and will step down on June 30. He is a native of the Philippines and the first lay president and person of color to lead DePaul. At Seton Hall University, where he was president previously, he was the first lay president in more than two decades.

“The first time I became president,” he said, “I got all this mail — snail mail and email — from individuals in the Philippines who said, ‘You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of so-and-so. Can you help me get a job? Can you help me with the scholarship?’”

“But what was also interesting is, on campus at my first presidency and even here, it became a symbol for immigrants,” he went on. “I had people come up and say they point to me as an example of what could happen. And they use this example to their children because they’re immigrants.”

Despite that honor, Esteban said, he tried to make sure that people supported the university as a whole and not just him as a personality: “It’s helpful if they like me, because then hopefully they’ll give more money. But if their loyalty is to Gabe and Gabe alone, then what happens when Gabe is gone?”

‘The Be-All, End-All’

Carol Quillen, Davidson College

On July 31, Carol Quillen will step down as president of Davidson College after 11 years in that position. But she is not done working in or on higher education. During the coming year, Quillen will take a sabbatical to think about how she can help tackle some of the pressing questions facing higher education.

“One of the things I’ve learned in this job is that it’s time for us to really think hard about the obligations the postsecondary educational sector has to the country,” Quillen said. “What is, as it were, the social contract between that sector and the society that supports us? And what do we need to do to fulfill our obligations there?”

At the root of those questions are thorny, systemic problems like making a wide range of educational opportunities affordable to everyone, Quillen said, and then figuring out who will bear those costs: “The question is, who pays and how do we as a society express our sense that education is a public good?”

Colleges, too, must re-earn the public’s confidence that they are meeting the needs of students, she said: “There’s not a lot of trust in postsecondary education right now from the community that we’re meant to serve.”

“How do we reassert ourselves as honest brokers of knowledge and the truth,” she said, “at a time when I think those things are going to become really important?”

Quillen is also not done thinking about Davidson. To find its proper place in the higher-education ecosystem, Quillen said, Davidson must recognize that it fills a niche and that many other institutions are serving a much wider purpose and more diverse population. Not everyone wants or needs to spend four years on a residential campus getting a bachelor’s degree, she said: Many adult learners, for example, just want a short-term credential to move up in their career.

“The biggest thing places like Davidson can do to contribute to reimagining the postsecondary educational sector,” she said, “is to stop claiming that we are like the be-all, end-all of higher education, because we’re not.”

‘Nobody Is Listening’

David W. Leebron, Rice University

“Being a college president is a lot like walking through a graveyard,” said David W. Leebron, who will step down in June after 18 years as president at Rice University. “There are a lot of people underneath you, but nobody is listening,” he said, landing a well-practiced punchline.

Since Leebron became president, enrollment has increased by more than 50 percent, to a total of about 7,500 students. The university is also completing a nearly $2-billion building campaign. But one of the challenges, Leebron said, is that universities are not hierarchies in the same way that private businesses are. Universities are complex, and presidents often have limited authority over the largest faction of employees: the faculty.

“How do you understand the organization of the university?” Leebron sets up another joke: “Well, you need to begin with something simple, like the Holy Roman Empire, and then we can build up from there.”

A president can help to set the mission and values of the institution, Leebron said, and then ensure that the money the institution spends supports the mission and values. “One of the first things I did on coming to Rice was we formulated the mission statement to really set very clearly what our identity and aspirations were,” Leebron said, “and then a little later, we formed a values statement, which I’m proud of. The values are responsibility, integrity, community, and excellence, which you can figure out spells Rice.”

“As I occasionally quip, it’s a good thing our name wasn’t Vanderbilt.”

‘Do a Lot More’

Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, Amherst College

Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin has had what seems like two very different careers as a college leader. From 2008 to 2011, Martin was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a flagship, public research university that enrolled about 42,000 students at the time and is a member of the Big Ten athletic conference. Since 2011, she has been president of Amherst College, a small, highly selective private college that enrolls fewer than 1,800 undergraduates.

Martin said she had no regrets about leaving Madison for the far cozier campus in Massachusetts — her departure was marked by a failed effort to split the flagship campus from the rest of Wisconsin’s university system.

As chancellor, Martin said, much of her time and energy was spent interacting with several governing boards or private entities created to manage the various interests of the university, such as alumni relations, fund raising, and technology transfer. “Presidents at major research universities are much more removed from what I consider the heart and soul of the campus,” she said, “that is the interactions with faculty and students and staff.”

At Amherst, Martin’s tenure has been notable for its increasing diversity. A plurality of enrolled students are persons of color, as are 60 percent of students admitted for the fall. In addition, more than 20 percent of those admitted are first-generation college students, and more than a quarter of enrolled students are eligible to receive Pell Grants.

“How much more can Amherst do? Well, it’s going to want to do a lot more,” said Martin, who will leave her post sometime over the summer, according to a college spokesperson.

Diversifying the student body is only the first step for colleges like Amherst, said Martin.

“Since our graduation rate is so high,” Martin said, “the real question for me is, Do students succeed in the areas they came in wanting to study? Did they succeed in math? Did they succeed in chemistry? Did they get through the pre-med sequence?”

“For those places that can say they have achieved greater diversity, I think the much harder and more interesting challenge is what to do once you have a diverse student body,” she said. “And what do you do to ensure that it feels good to be at a place like Amherst, regardless of your background, and that you can go in the direction that you really most want to go?”

But Martin also acknowledged that her and Amherst’s commitment to diversity and inclusion came much later than it should have, including the college’s antiracist program that was announced in August 2020. “There’s so many things I would change,” Martin said about what she should have done earlier in her career. “A lot of the things that we’re doing right now, I ask myself, Why didn’t you start that sooner?”

‘Hollowing Out’

Mary B. Marcy, Dominican University of California

“I think that the stratification in higher education is mirroring the stratification in society,” said Mary B. Marcy, president emerita of Dominican University of California. “It’s kind of a hollowing out of what we used to think of as the middle class.”

Dominican might be considered one of those middle-class institutions: a private college of less than 1,400 students that accepts 86 percent of applicants, and a minority-serving institution, with a quarter of its students eligible for Pell Grants and an endowment of about $33 million.

If real change is going to happen in higher education, it will have to come from such institutions, said Marcy, who stepped down as president late last year after a decade in that position.

“Dominican has a really small endowment,” she said. “But one of the advantages that I had is that Dominican never confused itself with being an institution that was wealthy and didn’t have to change in order to thrive. It was never going to say, ‘We’re comfortable, and we don’t need to do anything.’”

What gets in the way of that change, however, is the continued focus on wealthy, elite institutions as the only model of success in higher education, said Marcy, who has written a book on ways that small colleges can survive the current challenges.

Elite institutions can help as advocates for higher education generally, Marcy said. “The place they actually can’t help and tend to want to, in my experience, is in telling less-elite institutions how to do things because they don’t know how to do things without money.”

‘Growing Humility’

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Freeman A. Hrabowski III brims with the kind of enthusiasm and positivity you might expect from a president who has held that job for far less time. Hrabowski, who is retiring after 30 years leading the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, is often credited with raising the profile of a modest public regional institution to a powerhouse for science and technology and creating a model of inclusive excellence for minority students.

One key to success, Hrabowski said, for both himself and the university, is to be open about failures.

That has led the campus, for example, to do a deep review of its policies and procedures for responding to sexual misconduct, a program called “Retriever Courage,” announced in 2018 after protests and lawsuits alleging the university had not acted appropriately in such cases.

“We have been through those periods as a campus,” Hrabowski said, “when we thought we were doing the right thing and it turns out it wasn’t enough.”

Hrabowski said the same is true for his staff in talking with him: “People know they can tell me the truth. I’m not simply looking for something to sugarcoat it, to tell me how wonderful I am.”

“I know these weaknesses of mine,” Hrabowski said. “Sometimes I get so intense that before I know it, I can be cranky.”

Daily activities like tai chi, meditation, and exercise are also important to keep him calm and centered, he said, but he also has learned, while dealing with serious issues, not to take himself too seriously.

“I do think that a part of wisdom — and I’ve thought about this a lot — involves growing humility, becoming even more humble,” he said. “I’m so much more humble than I was 30 years ago.”