Surviving in a college presidency has gotten harder in the last year. The evidence is everywhere. The kind of scandal-induced turnover that was mainly centered in public universities has spread to the Ivy League. Protests that used to be acknowledged and waited out are now quickly leading to arrests and massive heartache. And deference to athletics and other revenue-producing parts of the university has increased.
Those of us who clung to older ideals about college presidencies need to face the fact that those ideals are mostly gone.
We have reached the post-presidential era. While there will be a few exceptions at places where the politics and type of institution will permit traditional academic leadership to persist, outside forces — donors, trustees, politicians — are making the decisions now. The president is mostly a facilitator of that vision. Whether that person is an academic or not matters less than ever. When I asked Peter Hans, president of the University of North Carolina system, about this, he said without hesitation that he thought of everything through an administrative perspective. I admire Hans’s candor, but it’s a purely technocratic view. Mr. Chips, meet the Committee on Committees.
The evidence of this transition is everywhere. The congressional hearings that led to the departure of multiple women leading Ivies have gotten the most attention, but there are others. Universities and their presidents are rushing to declare their institutional neutrality, making space for fringe ideas that cannot withstand scholarly scrutiny. Presidents who used to endure scorn for rebuking activists are now rewarded for arresting them as soon as they show up. And the current president of the University of Michigan, where former president Mary Sue Coleman once proclaimed after NCAA violations that “this is a day of shame for the university,” tried to retain Jim Harbaugh as the football coach even though it was clear that he would be at least temporarily banned from coaching for similarly serious violations. (He eventually got a four-year “show cause” penalty, which is unusually punitive.)
The presidents who are adapting to these realities are behaving rationally, as depressing as that is to admit. If they didn’t conform, they’d be replaced by someone who would. And they need political allies; there’s simply too much potential trouble to run universities without powerful supporters. While the ugliest ideas in American politics are behind many of these changes, presidents who call that out are not going to survive very long.
So, while I admire and support the activists and outspoken faculty who strive to make their individual institutions better, I’ve come to the conclusion that fighting this battle on isolated campuses is a losing proposition. Better to support the presidents who are willing to withstand all of this, accept that they have limited latitude, and try to win the national debate over a liberal education. That doesn’t mean giving up: The new crop of leaders and their boards are making commitments, and we should hold them to their word.
Defend Faculty and Findings That Are Controversial
The logic behind institutional neutrality — as written in its Magna Carta, the Kalven Report — is that the university should be home to critics and not the critic itself. Hans told me when I asked him about the implications of neutrality for science that he will not support or oppose a particular scientific finding but “will defend all day the faculty’s right to share that finding with the world.” I’m skeptical that this conviction will hold in the long run. For example, Stanford shut down a misinformation-research program over political concerns, and the presidents of Florida’s state and community colleges pledged to silence faculty who taught critical race theory. Still, if presidents are using neutrality to stay out of trouble, they need to be true to their word and defend the rights of faculty and students to exercise their academic freedom. When that doesn’t happen, it’s fair game to call them out.
Administrative Transparency
It’s not enough to say, “We’re neutral,” and then retreat into the conference rooms. Administrators are too heavily scripted by attorneys and communications officers. If anything, the post-presidential era should be one in which it is easier for the president to answer questions on the record and not rely on precrafted statements. A good question to ask: Why is there little institutional touting about research on climate or critical race theory, while every university is trumpeting their advances in artificial intelligence? Is AI not political? If you don’t think so, come to Washington and see how many congressional hearings are going on. Launching AI initiatives and bragging about local expertise in the subject is hardly neutral. Administrators should be willing to explain this disconnect on the record.
Operate Like a Business
One of the mantras of the post-presidential era is to “operate the university like a business.” If that is going to happen, the group that says it the most, the board, needs to listen to their own admonition. A well-functioning corporate board would never have multiple members speaking to the press; at most, the board chair would speak — and only when it’s appropriate for someone other than management to say anything. Well-functioning corporate boards would not throw individual administrators under the bus and circumvent the ability of the CEO to manage their own team. They would never surprise management with decisions or statements at a board meeting. And if they were subject to public-records laws, they would at least be mindful of that. But such instances of poor governance are common at public universities, and increasingly at private ones, when a crisis comes along.
Often the very trustees that press for institutional neutrality forget that they also speak for the university. The Kalven Report does not limit university speech specifically to the president, so if the president is required to observe neutrality, it is even more important that their supervisors also do the same. A well-run corporate board would certainly follow company policy.
End Administrative Trivia
If the university is truly to be operated like a business, leaders should streamline the administrative burden and make life better for students, staff, and faculty. Faculty have never been required to fill out more forms, obtain more approvals, and watch more training videos of unknown efficacy. This never-ending crush of administrative trivia is driving faculty out of teaching and research and taking away the ability of universities to move in creative directions. Staff are burdened by complaints that everything moves too slowly while paperwork and regulations continue to get piled on them. Attention to students and their needs is being sacrificed to feed the bureaucratic machine. The business executives, business-oriented political figures, and business-school deans who are coming into presidencies should finally take this on. If the presidency is now a purely administrative role, administrative efficiency should be a priority.
Hire for These New Traits
If the president is simply an administrative facilitator, then the hiring process could be dramatically simplified. There’s no reason for presidential candidates to have to spin a vision about AI, big data, civic education, or any other current buzzword. The neutrality principle explicitly says that these things are the purview of the faculty. The reality is that has always been true. Instead of hiring for people who can weave the technicolor dream of knowledge and then throwing them into the political maelstrom, why not just start every presidential interview by asking: “Tell us how you’re going to make life better for the faculty, staff, and students.” Vanishingly few people on campuses have ever cared whether a president wanted to build up one academic field or another. Instead, ask how they are going to make it easier to get courses approved, grants submitted and accounted for, hiring facilitated, student well-being enhanced, and contracts executed. After all, if the president is always to defer to the expertise of the faculty, then facilitating that expertise should be their primary job.
This is admittedly a jaded vision. But we have every reason to be cynical. I believe that in time the pendulum will swing back. And that will happen when higher education as a whole convinces the country that it’s a force for good. The last time that happened on a big scale was in 1945, when federally funded science was launched. People saw knowledge and education as the keys to the American future.
Now, a lot of voters see higher education as a benefit for the elite and for those who want to pursue a career in major urban centers. What does higher education offer people who want to stay in their small towns and raise their families? Of course, such people benefit from the knowledge produced and the economic activity generated by universities, but they don’t feel it right now, and many of them see higher education as suggesting they lack ambition. It’s time to stop fighting campus by campus and start making a holistic case for higher education. That’s easier said than done, because college presidents are constrained in what they can talk about.
So who will make the case for higher education? Individual colleges are overwhelmed, associations understandably don’t want to make life more complicated for their member institutions, and the media prefers covering localized stories with individual personalities that make for compelling reading rather than the larger issues. As a result, a belief in higher education as a public good has been lost in the public discourse. We need to come together and figure out how to get it back.
