B y Dwaun J. Warmack’s count, he is one of 13 first-time college presidents whom Edison O. Jackson mentored. “He prided himself on his success in doing that,” says Warmack, president since 2014 of Harris-Stowe State University, in St. Louis.
Jackson’s accomplishment in nurturing future presidents during the five years he led Bethune-Cookman University and, before that, Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York and a community college in California, makes him something of a fabled figure at historically black colleges and universities like Harris-Stowe, even as he is known elsewhere for getting mired in controversies toward the end of his tenure at Bethune-Cookman.
In that sector of higher education, as in others, administrators know who the super-mentors are, and many say they revere them. “He invested in me,” says Warmack, who was a senior vice president at Bethune-Cookman, a private nonprofit institution, before taking the helm at Harris-Stowe, which is public. “He gave me transformational experiences,” both within his cabinet and at leadership-training programs around the country.
See how faculty members stand, in terms of tenure, pay, promotion, and diversity. This collection of 22 tables and charts also delves into the backgrounds of new chief executives.
Jackson says that he was inspired to play that guiding role by his own mentor and former thesis adviser, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, who led Virginia Union and North Carolina A&T State Universities. “I never looked for budding young people to keep them for myself, but rather, How you can help them to grow and have experiences that will prepare them?” He wishes more college chief executives would do that “for the sake of the larger academic community.”
Mentors like Jackson fill a critical role in effective academic leadership, and they do it from an admirable conviction “that higher education is better when many of its institutions are strong,” says Sherri Lind Hughes, associate vice president for leadership at the American Council on Education.
Some institutions and college leaders do particularly well in galvanizing others to aspire to that path (see the accompanying list).
What explains their success?
Disproportionate numbers of first-time presidents emerge from certain small, niche institutions to lead other colleges with a common purpose, such as HBCUs, women’s colleges, or small liberal-arts colleges. Others come from large institutions like Harvard University and the University of Chicago, where deans and other senior administrators run divisions as large and complex as any liberal-arts college.
T he key element, say present and former presidents and mentors, is a combination of cultivation and supportive structures that help midlevel administrators make their way up the management ladder.
Judith R. Shapiro, who retired this summer as president of the Teagle Foundation, credits such guidance with advancing her career. She was one of several protégées of Mary Patterson McPherson, president of Bryn Mawr College from 1978 to 1997, who rose to the presidencies of other women’s or small liberal-arts colleges. Shapiro, who was a faculty member, anthropology chair, acting dean, and provost at Bryn Mawr, became president of Barnard College in 1994 and led it for 14 years. She speaks glowingly of McPherson. “Pat,” she says, using McPherson’s nickname, “really was a strong president with almost a regal bearing but she was also very nonauthoritarian — she was authoritative but not authoritarian.”
Sarah Bolton, president of the College of Wooster since 2016, similarly benefited from inspiring guidance and sustained support, in her case while at Williams College. She uses plaudits like “brilliant” to describe Adam Falk, who is, like her, a physicist by training and who helped cultivate her leadership skills.
Bolton says that when Falk, now president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, became Williams’s president in 2010, he strengthened the college’s longstanding system of revolving faculty leaders through three-year stints in the president’s cabinet. The system had long ensured that the college always had a healthy cadre of well-informed and informative faculty leaders. In various ways, Bolton says, Falk supercharged that setup by hiring senior administrators and support staff all “committed to helping those of us fortunate enough to be in those faculty leadership roles to learn much more quickly and much more deeply about the kind of work we were engaging in and the institution was engaging in.”
Falk says the key is creating a culture where faculty leaders willingly step up to cabinet roles. Williams’s system of rotations allows faculty members to say, for example, “I haven’t left the physics department to become the provost; I’m serving some time as provost, as a service to the college,” he says. From there, many return to the classroom, while others come to conceive of a presidency as a means to play an even-broader role in higher education.
W illiams, like many institutions, also sends promising faculty members and administrators to leadership-training programs and institutes that many higher-education associations, organizations, and institutions now offer. Those are important nurturers of future presidents, too, says John W. Garland, president emeritus of Central State University, who now runs TM2, Executive Search, a company that recruits presidents for HBCUs. “To run an institution, you do need training and a world view that you get from attending certain kinds of programs, to learn the theory behind what you’re doing.”
The right balance between institute and on-the-job training depends on the individual, and the kinds of institutions involved, says Karl W. Einolf, president of the Indiana Institute of Technology. As dean of the business school at Mount St. Mary’s University from 2012 to 2016, his job involved many presidentlike roles such as fund raising, community relations, and an accreditation renewal. Also part of his preparation, less happily, was being called on to become, in 2016, acting president and what a colleague called “a force for healing and reconciliation” when the institution’s board fired the sitting president. Fortunately, says Einolf, 19 years of professional-development opportunities at Mount St. Mary’s “had made me a better speaker, and a better writer, and I was able to hone my interpersonal skills; and all those things have helped me to be a better leader.” He is one of three new presidents produced at Mount St. Mary’s since mid-2012.
Unfortunately, search committees and boards of trustees do not always recognize gradually accumulated academic-management skills and the personal qualities that facilitate them, says ACE’s Hughes. A major tension in the fostering of first-time presidents, she says, is that search committees persist in hiring new leaders from institutions they perceive as better than their own. “People think, if I hire somebody who comes from Harvard, they will allow us to be more like Harvard.” But, she cautions. provenance does not guarantee suitability.
Also vexing, says John Garland of TM2,, is that search committees and trustees often fail to appreciate the carefully developed skills and qualifications of aspiring first-time presidents who have been well mentored, and instead “fall in love” with a flashier candidate. Trustees from business backgrounds, for example, may favor candidates with like experience, even though the college presidency requires quite different skills and attributes — the ones that sitting presidents long ago recognized in the up-and-coming academics they undertook to groom. That special and rare combination, he says, includes accomplishment in an academic field that has generated “the rigor and discipline necessary to identify a problem, and have an approach to addressing it.” Also among the desired traits are honesty, industriousness, a winning personality, and self-assurance that is “selfless, in some respects, so you’re not constantly thinking ‘Will this get me ahead?’ or “Do I look good?’”
Of course, every time mentors successfully propel an administrator to a first presidency, they would seem to lose a highly valued colleague. Not altogether, says Shapiro. In her experience, a profound sense of collegiality develops when a mentor who may have alerted a junior colleague to her suitability to one day join academe’s top rank sees that colleague succeed.
She recalls her transition from provost at Bryn Mawr to president at Barnard after years of support from McPherson: “Pat was really lovely. On the one hand, she managed to convey that she really regretted seeing me go, but, on the other hand, I’m quite sure that she could not have been more supportive in any of her conversations with Barnard people. So I felt this kind of being valued, being supported, at the same time, and I also felt that she would be someone I could always commune with as a colleague — as a colleague president.”
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle.
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