A flurry of votes of no confidence in college leaders, many of them prompted by their handling of pro-Palestinian encampments, has swept higher ed in the past month.
While faculty governance bodies and unions haven’t been shy about expressing dissatisfaction with their leaders in recent years, the recent surge, with at least eight no-confidence actions undertaken or proposed by various campus bodies, underscores how fraught the job of college president has become. While complaints about police intervention in encampments have been the leading reason for many of the recent votes of no confidence, more-traditional issues, like concerns about shared governance, have been factors, too.
The votes of no confidence indicate that displeased faculty members are just another audience presidents must face at a moment when students, donors, and politicians are already closely scrutinizing their words and actions, particularly concerning the Israel-Hamas war. And while no-confidence votes hold no inherent power, they have in the past put presidencies on the ropes: A 2022 Chronicle analysis found that, about 51 percent of the time, a president on the receiving end of a no-confidence vote winds up leaving office within a year, though those departures are rarely publicly linked to the vote.
A public disavowal from the faculty — one of a president’s largest constituencies — can sour working relationships, and bad press often prompts leaders to tread carefully. Some apologize, institute change, or decide to quit (a Chronicle project found that no-confidence votes had contributed to 13 percent of presidents’ resignations between 2018 and 2023).
The recent flurry of no-confidence votes has ranged in scope from official campuswide votes to rebukes from smaller faculty groups.
Formal Rebukes
On Monday the University Senate of the University of Kentucky approved a resolution of no confidence in the president, Eli Capilouto, who last month proposed to Kentucky’s board a new governance structure that faculty members say will strip them of power. Trustees then voted to adopt the plan, which will dissolve the senate and replace it with an advisory body, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. The current senate, which has authority over academic matters, has fought the changes for months; Monday’s resolution said Capilouto had “made significant, repeated management errors that have created unnecessary confusion, anxiety, and risk.” E. Britt Brockman, the board chair, said in a video statement that the board “unequivocally supports” the president. “Leadership requires making tough decisions, and doing the right thing even in the face of criticism.”
At the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, 72 percent of participating faculty members said last month that they’d lost faith in the chancellor, Andrew J. Leavitt, who in the last year has laid off more than 200 staff members and imposed furloughs to help close an $18-million budget deficit, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Leavitt called the vote “a reaction to hard but necessary decisions I have made as chancellor,” and senior administrators at the University of Wisconsin system affirmed their “full support” for him.
Other recent no-confidence votes have centered on presidents’ decisions to ask the police to disband pro-Palestinian encampments.
At Barnard College, for example, more than three-quarters of participating faculty on April 30 voted no confidence in Laura A. Rosenbury, who is in her first year in office. The 77-percent vote in favor, according to the Barnard Bulletin, followed a unanimous vote by the New York college’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Barnard placed more than 50 students who participated in a “Gaza solidarity encampment” on interim suspensions in mid-April, revoking their access to their dorm rooms, dining halls, and other campus facilities. Both no-confidence votes against Rosenbury cited those disciplinary measures, with the AAUP chapter saying in a statement that her administration “has done damage to the college at virtually every level of responsibility.”
A Barnard spokesperson acknowledged the faculty-wide vote in a statement to the Bulletin, saying the college was “grateful to our faculty for providing such care and support for students all year, especially over the last few challenging weeks.”
On the opposite coast, California State Polytechnic University-Humboldt’s faculty voted no confidence in its president, Tom Jackson Jr., and chief of staff, Mark Johnson, citing their decision last month to call the police on students occupying Siemens Hall, a campus building that houses the president’s office. The administrators, according to the resolution, “mishandled the protest”; police officers arrested 31 people at two campus buildings. The Humboldt administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Criticism of how leaders of Indiana University at Bloomington have handled a student encampment has been widespread. But a vote there preceded those events: 93.1 percent of voting faculty members said they had no confidence in Pamela Whitten, the president, in mid-April. The provost and vice provost for faculty and academic affairs also received rebukes, the Indiana Daily Student reported. Faculty critics cited a series of academic-freedom controversies at Indiana in the past year — including the administration’s decisions to cancel an exhibit by a Palestinian American artist, deny permission for a talk organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, and punish that student group’s faculty adviser — and what they saw as a lukewarm response to a new state law under which faculty members at Indiana’s public colleges will be evaluated on whether they’re espousing “intellectual diversity” in the classroom.
Indiana’s Board of Trustees released a statement confirming that the president had its support “at a time in higher education where the status quo is not an option,” with the chair adding in a separate statement that Whitten “will be serving as our president for years to come.”
Turmoil at Bloomington has intensified in the weeks since the no-confidence votes, with more than three dozen people arrested in two separate police incursions at pro-Palestinian encampments. Four faculty members and 19 students were arrested and banned from campus for one year.
Bubbling Discontent
On other campuses, portions of the faculty have taken steps to express disapproval of their leaders, though they haven’t formally voted no confidence as a full body.
For example, faculty members in two of Emory University’s nine schools passed no-confidence votes in the president, Gregory L. Fenves, after police officers used physical force and “chemical irritants” to disband an encampment on April 25. More than two dozen people were arrested in the clash, including the chair of Emory’s philosophy department.
Last week three-quarters of the faculty of Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences voted no confidence in Fenves, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. An email announcing the results of the vote called Fenves’s decision to summon the police “an affront to everything Emory stands for.” A few days earlier, faculty members in Emory’s Oxford College passed their own no-confidence vote by an even wider margin, according to The Emory Wheel. And this week, Emory’s undergraduate student body also voted no confidence in Fenves.
“While we take any concerns expressed by members of our community seriously, there are a wide range of perspectives being shared within the Emory community,” a university spokesperson said of the College of Arts and Sciences vote.
In a particularly fractious set of votes last week, several leaders at the New School, including the interim president, Donna E. Shalala, came in for criticism. At a meeting hosted by the campus chapter of the AAUP, faculty members overwhelmingly voted no confidence in Shalala and the New York university’s trustees, and, by a slimmer margin, in their own Faculty Senate, The New School Free Press reported. The votes came in an emergency meeting on Friday, after 43 people were arrested at an encampment inside a New School building that morning. (The New School did not respond to a request for comment.)
At New York University, the president, Linda G. Mills, faced a no-confidence vote last month from full-time faculty members in its Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Of 66 eligible voters, 44 said they’d lost faith in Mills, the Washington Square News reported. Police officers at an NYU encampment, an April 26 letter read, had compromised “not only academic freedom but the safety” of NYU community members. (Mills said in a statement that the move had been necessary because the encampment presented an “escalating risk to the safety of our community.”) The chair of NYU’s Board of Trustees, Evan R. Chesler, affirmed in a statement to the Washington Square News the board’s “complete confidence in and full support” of Mills and “her efforts to keep the campus safe.”
Smaller-scale votes like those, despite not carrying the imprimatur of an entire faculty, still carry significant weight, said Sean McKinniss, a consultant who maintains a public database of votes dating back three decades. “The point is, a no-confidence vote is being published and shared and syndicated throughout the university community,” he said. “I think that still sends a signal that there’s something wrong.”
More Votes Possible
Though the spring term is winding to a close, many encampments remain active. Police involvement — and subsequent pushback from faculty members — is still a possibility. More no-confidence votes may be in the offing; for example, Columbia University’s AAUP chapter has called for one against the president, Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
At the University of Texas at Austin, more than 600 faculty members signed an open letter saying they’d lost confidence in the president, Jay Hartzell, after he called for police officers to respond to an April 24 protest and teach-in organized by the student-run Palestinian Solidarity Committee. Hartzell’s decision to deploy the police “needlessly put students, staff, and faculty in danger,” the open letter, which was circulated by the UT-Austin AAUP chapter, said. Hartzell at the time said that the flagship had “held firm, enforcing our rules while protecting the constitutional right to free speech.”
The letter, which was sent to Hartzell’s office on April 29, also condemned him for closing UT-Austin’s Division of Campus and Community Engagement, which had already been overhauled to comply with a Texas law, SB 17, that bans DEI offices and employees at the state’s public colleges.
Student bodies may also conduct votes, as Emory’s has. The student government at American University declared no confidence in Sylvia M. Burwell, the president, last week, while Dartmouth College’s Student Government Senate initially voted no confidence in Sian Leah Beilock, its president. That vote, which was taken publicly, was followed by a closed-session vote that failed; the student-body president vetoed the result of the public vote, according to The Dartmouth, saying that several senators wanted to discuss the matter further.
Will the recent proliferation of no-confidence votes weaken their power as a means of expressing dissatisfaction and prompting change? Maybe, McKinniss said, though the votes in response to encampments carry a different, perhaps more political, valence than do traditional votes, which he finds are typically triggered by financial mismanagement, a president’s perceived failure to participate in shared governance, or interpersonal friction.
If the volume of votes dilutes their collective effect, people — whether trustees, administrators, legislators, or members of the public — may well start “rolling their eyes, saying, ‘Oh, there they go again,’” McKinniss said. “That could be a problem, to the point where it becomes performative.”
