I suspect that I am not the only former college president who has experienced a mild bout of PTSD during the past several months, as the frequency, intensity, and visibility of attacks on presidents have increased to a level that would have been difficult to imagine even on my worst days.
During my 17-year run as a president, I experienced many moments of joy and satisfaction. I also received criticism at faculty meetings and in the student newspaper, some temperate and some less so, and was faced with a number of sit-ins and building occupations. Most years at commencement a few students refused, for one reason or another, to shake my hand. My compensation was a pretty regular source of outrage. None of this was enjoyable, but only rarely did the attacks cross the line into something truly awful. In retrospect, I probably took much of it too seriously and too personally. I do know from many conversations that I was treated gently in comparison to presidents who are women or people of color or, especially, both.
The combination of this year’s campus protests, the politically motivated scapegoating of higher education, economic stressors, social media, and a general coarsening of our public discourse has made things significantly worse for current presidents — or for those who were presidents before being chased from office. Career academics whose most violent acts have been negatively reviewing a tenure file are being accused of genocide and having blood on their hands; Jewish presidents are being depicted in overtly antisemitic images that always seem to be antisemitic by mistake. Several presidents have been hauled before Congress for hearings that have little to do with “hearing” anything, and have been forced to endure the contemptible theatrics of a person like Elise Stefanik. At least the campus protesters have the excuse of youth and idealism; she has neither, though she is eagerly raising money by boasting about her childish ranting at Michael Schill, the president of Northwestern University.
On their own campuses, presidents faced with protests and encampments are blamed for doing too much or too little, for negotiating or failing to negotiate, for interfering or not interfering with campus disciplinary procedures. Even those who disagree about almost everything else appear to agree that the president’s judgment is bad, motivations are corrupt, and actions are wrong. I wonder sometimes if the trucks declaring the presidents to be pro-Hamas zealots ever drive past the trucks declaring them to be genocidal Zionists. If so, do the drivers wave to each other?
On many non-Ivied campuses, where there have been few protests or encampments, presidents are being blamed for attempts to tackle existential threats like sharply declining enrollments and deep, structural budget deficits. For every one of those threats that is the result of bad management — and there are some — dozens are the result of nearly irresistible economic and demographic trends. Frequently, new presidents are brought in by boards as “change agents” to deal with those intractable challenges, attempt to deal with them, are blessed with a faculty vote of no confidence (which are occurring in huge numbers), and disappear within a few years. The problems with which they were asked to wrestle, meanwhile, remain unsolved, and so the frequency of budget cuts continues to increase and colleges are closing at the rate of one per week.
Presidents faced with protests and encampments are blamed for doing too much or too little, for negotiating or failing to negotiate.
Either colleges are doing a remarkable job of selecting as their presidents a rogues’ gallery of the unscrupulous and the incompetent or — much more likely — they are selecting people who have, like all of us, strengths and weaknesses, but who are being asked to do a job that has become, in many cases, not just difficult or unpleasant, but nearly impossible.
Most who read this piece will feel little empathy for embattled presidents. In return for the prestige and the high salary (which at many small and public colleges is not so high and at some large universities is much lower than that of the football or basketball coach), a president should be willing to put up with the vitriol. Fair enough, provided one accepts that vitriol has a place within a campus community. Having few sympathizers and fewer friends is as much a part of the presidential deal as the car and the house. And some presidents, like some people in every job, do deserve to be roundly criticized and fired. But the relentless, hyperbolic, and often personal attacks on these leaders are symptomatic of problems more consequential than the impact on any one person’s career or psyche.
The focus of everyone from student protesters to powerful donors to self-serving members of Congress on the actions of the president reflects a deep and unhelpful misunderstanding of how colleges work. Put simply, presidents have less authority than most people think and little ability or desire to control the wide range of daily actions on their campuses. They are not perched like lifeguards on the quad, watching for tents to sprout or monitoring the social-media activity of every faculty member. They do not make decisions about how the endowment is invested or weigh in on every violation of the student-conduct code. They have virtually no control over the courses offered by any academic department, let alone over what goes on in individual classrooms. They do not quash dissent but are, at most colleges, criticized more frequently and more publicly by faculty members and students than anyone else on campus. They are not without power, but that power manifests itself chiefly in areas like broad strategic planning, fund raising, and, in the best cases, advocating for the mission and strengthening the culture of the institution.
If one genuinely wishes to change some aspect of higher education, one needs to begin with an accurate understanding of how the systems within higher education actually function and of what can and cannot, what should and should not, be centrally controlled. Absent that understanding, we find ourselves in our current situation: frequent turnover at the top but little change anywhere else. In most cases, it is a mistake to believe that switching out the president will alter the culture or solve the persistent problems of the institution. Stefanik and Christopher Rufo might boast about taking down the presidents of Harvard and Penn, but that speaks mostly to their own pettiness and cruelty, and will do far less than they appear to believe to alter either university. More important, those who actually seek to make higher education more sustainable, affordable, innovative, and effective need to do more than play musical chairs with the people nominally in charge.
The flaying of college presidents also reflects a deep misunderstanding of the role and power of the college in the world, particularly among the campus protesters. That misunderstanding was captured by a student at Rutgers, whose president, Jonathan Holloway, was among those called before Congress: “We want to end the Palestinian suffering, and Rutgers can simply do that, but they choose not to.” A similar sentiment was expressed by a protester at Stanford: “We are Stanford University! We control things!” Actually, Rutgers cannot simply end Palestinian suffering, however much Jonathan Holloway might want to do so, and Stanford might provide wonderful access to jobs in Silicon Valley, but it does not control conflicts in the Middle East. In my view Columbia’s President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik responded disastrously to the tents on her campus, but even a perfect response (assuming such a thing exists) would not have saved a life or freed a hostage.
The channeling of anger at death and barbarity toward the actions of American colleges directs too many students away from taking steps that might have at least a small chance of making a difference — like building effective political coalitions or voting — and toward steps, like divestments and boycotts, that feel virtuous but in fact have little impact, even at a symbolic level. When institutions broadly perceived to be left-leaning take actions that are broadly perceived to be left-leaning, it changes very few minds.
In most cases, it is a mistake to believe that switching out the president will alter the culture or solve the persistent problems of the institution.
To be fair, colleges must own some of this misunderstanding, since they have for a long time been promoting their ability to bring about consequential change. Outside the entryway into the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I teach, hangs a large banner that reads, “Learn to Change the World.” The motto of Stanford business school is “Change lives, change organizations, change the world.” The University of Texas at Austin? “What starts here changes the world.” Presumably Harvard, Stanford, and Texas know that change comes from the cumulative work over time of individual graduates and not from the direct intervention of the dean or the president in global affairs, but it appears that some students are misinterpreting the message.
Politicians and pundits are little better when they act as if problems like antisemitism or Islamophobia are unique to or originate on college campuses. The challenges of the university have always been the challenges of the larger society, made more intense by the tight-knit nature of the community and more visible by the avidity with which people pay attention to what happens at places like Harvard and Stanford. The New York Times and CNN covered the takeover of Hamilton Hall by a couple of dozen people at Columbia University as if it had the world-historical importance of the storming of the Bastille. For weeks, protests against the war in Gaza — staged by a relatively small number of students, mostly at elite universities — received more attention in the United States than the actual war in Gaza.
The common wisdom seems to have become that colleges, and college presidents in particular, have no one to blame for this state of affairs but themselves. They have been making statements and taking positions on politically controversial topics with increasing frequency, so they should not be surprised that they are now paying the price for what a growing number of people inside and outside the academy are calling a colossal mistake. Students now see colleges as political actors, and elected officials see them as tempting political targets. Some version or another of the “Chicago Principles” — thou shalt stick to research and teaching — is being widely embraced as a much-needed corrective.
As someone who made a number of those public statements when I was a president, I acknowledge that they might have become too commonplace, but there have been reasons for their increasing frequency beyond the weakness or haplessness of presidents. Chicago’s own Kalven Report, the ur-text on institutional neutrality, notes that “from time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively defend its mission and its values.” The past decade has seen more such “instances” than any other period in my now-lengthy career, from attacks on racial equality to threatened bans on immigration to restrictions on what is allowed by law to be taught. Despite what some think, most presidents are not clueless when it comes to the importance of free and open inquiry, but again and again since 2015 they have been pulled between their commitment to restraint and their need to defend the mission and values of their institutions. And they have been roundly criticized regardless of the course they chose.
At a time when nearly everything has become politicized — even the very notion of truth — the choice for presidents is often not between neutrality and advocacy, but between engagement with the world and retreat from it: between speech and silence.
What is pretty universally recognized as a crisis in mental health — especially among students but also among faculty and staff members — has also made the role of the college president more “pastoral” than ever before. It is no longer enough to be chief executive; the president is expected by many on campus and by many parents to be chief comforter, chief empathizer, to a degree that was simply not the case in decades past. Many of the statements issued by presidents are less about politics than about pain. Some will dismiss such actions as coddling; few or none of them, I submit, are or have been college presidents. When I issued statements about the threatened elimination of DACA or about the killing of an unarmed Black man by the police only miles from my campus, I was responding to what I felt was a profound need in the community I was expected to lead.
Despite what some think, most presidents are not clueless when it comes to the importance of free and open inquiry.
One reason that the events since October 7 have proved so vexing for presidents is that, to an almost unprecedented extent, they have divided college communities in a way that makes it nearly impossible to comfort one group on campus without offending and inflaming another. While that might seem to be an argument for saying nothing at all, it leads sometimes to offending and inflaming everyone: It is read not as studied neutrality but as indifference.
The current, almost intolerably toxic environment for college presidents is likely to chase away exactly the kind of people one should want in positions of leadership. Ask any search firm, and you will be told that the pool of candidates for college presidencies is shallower than ever. More and more institutions are delaying even searching for a president, and are appointing “acting” or “interim” leaders — adjectives that might accurately be affixed to almost any new president these days, when the average tenure is fewer than six years and thus a “midcareer” president is in Year 3.
Despite the less-than-imperial power of the presidency, the people who occupy these positions do matter and can, at the very least, model the behavior and values that should be reflected throughout the institution. Presidents might not be all-powerful or all-knowing, but they can be honest, intellectually serious, and as authentic as the position will allow. It seems fair to ask, at the moment, how many such people would be willing to take on the job.
