Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
News

The Making of a First-Time President

Certain colleges excel at cultivating the next group of college chiefs

By Peter Monaghan August 20, 2018
Adam Falk congratulates Sarah Bolton at her  inauguration as president of the College of Wooster. He mentored her when he was president of Williams College and she was dean of the college.
Adam Falk congratulates Sarah Bolton at her inauguration as president of the College of Wooster. He mentored her when he was president of Williams College and she was dean of the college. College of Wooster

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.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

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.

2018 Almanac Profession Front
The Profession: Almanac 2018
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.
  • Faculty With No Tenure Status, by Location
  • Backgrounds of New Chief Executives at Colleges, 2017-18
  • Annual Change in Faculty Salaries
  • Gender, Race, and Ethnicity of Newly Hired Instructional Staff Members
  • Highest- to Lowest-Paid Noninstructional College Employees

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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?’”

ADVERTISEMENT

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.


Return to the Almanac home page, or go to the Profession, Students, Finance, or States section. To purchase a copy of the Almanac in print or as a downloadable interactive PDF, visit the Chronicle Store. Help guide us to give you the data you need by taking our 10-minute online Almanac survey.

A version of this article appeared in the August 24, 2018, issue.
Read other items in The Profession: Almanac 2018.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Leadership & Governance Data Innovation & Transformation Finance & Operations
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Peter Monaghan
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin