Illustration by The Chronicle; images by Michael F. McElroy for The Chronicle (Walker), Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune (Banks), HigherEchelon (Caslen), AP (Spellings, Whittaker)
Clockwise from top: H. Fred Walker, M. Katherine Banks, Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., Margaret Spellings, Dale Whittaker
The Chronicle analyzed what halted chief executives’ tenures during the past five years.
One certainty about the job of college president, known for its unpredictability, is that every one must eventually come to an end.
Less certain are the circumstances under which that happens.
Sometimes presidents leave on a high note, awash in praise from faculty, staff, students, and board members. Other times a presidency ends unexpectedly and is precipitated by a reputation-tarnishing event — much like the one that recently claimed M. Katherine Banks’s job at Texas A&M University’s flagship campus. Her retirement, spurred by fallout from the compromised hiring process of a respected journalist and Texas A&M alum to lead the university’s journalism department, was effective immediately.
The unexpected end to Banks’s tenure raises interesting questions about the lifespan of a presidency. What factors lead to a president’s exit? And once the first stirrings of a controversy or of an ultimately unsolvable personal or professional challenge become known, how long does it take for presidents to announce their resignation or retirement, or to be fired?
To find answers to those questions, The Chronicle turned to its data on executive compensation and job changes, among other sources, to analyze the departures of 119 presidents, chancellors, and system leaders over the past five years. We used news-media reports and statements by college officials to identify the nature of events that occurred before presidents announced their departure.
Excluded from our data set were job-hopping presidents, unless some campus controversy preceded their jump. Also excluded were exits whose circumstances were impossible to categorize and presidencies cut short solely by illness.
Our analysis revealed that a single incident is often not the culprit. Some leaders, like Margaret Spellings, the former president of the University of North Carolina system, left the job after navigating an extended period of turmoil. The main factor behind her exit: political interference.
However, of the 19 presidency-ending factors that surfaced in our analysis, the one most likely to result in an exit — even for an interim leader — was an internal or external investigation. The reasons for such investigations commonly included the purported mishandling of sexual-assault accusations, allegations that the president had engaged in such conduct himself or herself, or accusations that the executive had created a toxic workplace.
Some presidents in our analysis weathered controversy for months, while others announced their resignation almost as soon as the events that triggered it became publicly known.
Let’s take a closer look at the shelf life of presidencies under pressure, and what factors contributed to their eventual end.
Taken together, the data suggest that a job-threatening crisis for a presidency can emerge from just about anywhere. It might come from student activists, like those who pulled down Silent Sam, the controversial statue of a Confederate soldier that had long stood at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — an act that ratcheted up pressure on Carol L. Folt, who had been the chancellor. Or it can come from the misdeeds of other people who work at the institution, like the staff members at Seton Hall University who an investigation found had embezzled nearly $1 million, which led to the resignation of Joseph Nyre as president; or the behavior of the president himself could be the issue, as it was for Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., who resigned after plagiarizing part of a commencement speech at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.
Methodology
This analysis includes a subset of colleges and universities and is not meant to be taken as representative of all campuses nationwide. The data were compiled from The Chronicle’s past news coverage, its data on executive compensation, and its Gazette of job changes from 2018 to August 1, 2023.
Presidents were included if they or their institution announced their resignation, retirement, or firing, or the nonrenewal of their contract, after a campus event or controversy or after a job-ending challenge became publicly known. The reasons for a president’s departure can be complex and multifaceted, but we attempted to identify the most salient events or controversies that occurred closest to a departure announcement. Because several factors could be associated with a single departure, and those factors could include personal failures, institutional problems, and the manifestation of existing problems, the 19 categories may not always carry equal weight in every instance, which could skew the results. This list excludes presidents who left without a notable public controversy leading up to their announced departure.
Tenure is calculated from the first day of the month that the president took office to the day of an announced resignation. The length of time between an inciting factor and the announced departure was calculated by identifying as the starting point the date of an event or when the controversy became public, according to news-media reports. The end date is when a resignation was announced, not the date of the departure itself.
The categories assigned to each case were determined by analyzing the public explanations for departures that were given by institutions, boards, and departing executives, along with what appeared in media reports around that time. Categories were as follows: accreditation; accusations of sexual misconduct; alleged hostile work environment; arrested; athletics; board conflict; controversial actions/remarks; financial concerns; financial fraud; handling of alleged sexual misconduct; hiring; investigation; legal issues; plagiarism; political; poor performance; religious controversy; research; and vote of no confidence. More than one category could be assigned to each case. About half of the cases were assigned to more than one category.
Nick Perez contributed to this article.
