By the night of February 3, the fallout had begun.
The email inbox of William S. Ayer, chairman of the University of Washington’s Board of Regents, had started to pile up with the frustrations of the Husky faithful.
Earlier that day, Mr. Ayer had released a statement announcing that Michael K. Young, the university’s president of less than four years, was leaving for Texas A&M University at College Station. Mr. Young talked about big opportunities at Texas A&M, a respected research university, but this seemed like a lateral move at best. To many people in Seattle, the move looked like a money grab. The president was poised to earn at least $1.8 million in his first year at College Station, more than twice what he had made at Washington.
Mr. Young’s resignation felt like yet another slap in the face for the university, which had lost its previous president, Mark A. Emmert, to a high-paying gig at the top of the NCAA.
At 5:18 p.m., Howard P. Behar, a past chairman of the University of Washington Foundation and former president of Starbucks, let his disappointment be known.
“Young just pisses me off,” Mr. Behar wrote to Mr. Ayer. "… we have had two hired guns in a row … neither one cared about the U of W … just about themselves.”
The fatigue with leadership turnover is palpable at the University of Washington. Professors, alumni, and local business leaders say they have simply had enough of what seems to be today’s typical college president, whom they view as overly opportunistic, increasingly corporate-minded, and downright greedy. Their concerns echo disenchantment elsewhere with higher-education administration. But at Washington, Mr. Young’s unexpected exit has provoked difficult questions about how the university, engaged in yet another presidential search, can best identify a leader of uncommon commitment and loyalty.
The past decade has been particularly disruptive to the university, says James N. Gregory, past chairman of the Faculty Senate: Every new president wants to “shake things up” and start programs — which may or may not be championed with the same enthusiasm by the next leader.
Many college presidents view higher education “as a checkerboard,” says Mr. Gregory, a history professor. “They are going to move around and get more prestige and more money. So their personal strategy is at odds with what universities really need.”
The CEO
The criticism one hears in Washington is not so much about Michael Young in particular. But he is a proxy for a burgeoning model of higher-education executive, one that bears little resemblance to the college president of yesteryear.
At Washington, Mr. Young saw himself as a businessman running a $6.5-billion enterprise. It is not a job, he says, that necessarily ingratiates a person to the community.
“You’re viewed as the CEO,” he says. “Who likes the CEO? Name one company where the CEO is viewed as the father figure and a hero.”
But Mr. Young, who is 65, rejects the charge that he, like a stereotypical corporate executive, has hopped from job to job in pursuit of an ever-bigger payday. His first presidency, at the University of Utah, paid less than he had made as dean of George Washington University’s law school, he says. His salary at Texas A&M, while generous, pales in comparison to the $5 million to $7 million a year he says he has turned down in the legal profession.
“If it were about money, neither A&M nor UW would be anywhere on the radar screen,” Mr. Young says. “The notion somehow that I’m moving for more money, compared to the real alternatives that were out there for me, is just silly. You can’t follow my career and say I’m anything other than a story of economic downward mobility.”
Mr. Young says he left Washington because he was frustrated with the Legislature’s disinvestment in the university and enticed by Texas A&M’s trajectory in important areas of research, including water, energy, and food safety.
Uncomfortable Fit
When the University of Washington started courting Mr. Young, he seemed to be a dream candidate for the job.
“They became fairly enamored with Michael,” recalls R. William (Bill) Funk, a search consultant to the university. “Frankly, we had other sitting presidents in the pool, and it came down to a small group, and they felt most comfortable with him.”
But the story of Mr. Young’s tenure at Washington is a textbook illustration of the complexities of presidential fit. Finding a qualified university leader, Washington’s recent history suggests, may be considerably easier than identifying a person at home in the culture of an institution or adjusting to one who is not.
Mr. Young acknowledges that he was slow to adjust to Seattle, and decisions in his personal life raised questions about his judgment. He anticipated, for example, that his divorce from his wife of 38 years and his relationship with a Utah undergraduate, albeit one in her late 30s, might be an issue.
“I told the search consultant that he needed to poll the board, and if a divorced president was a problem, that was fine,” Mr. Young says. “They came back with a lot of assurances: No, no, no it wasn’t a problem.”
But for some people it was.
Shortly after his arrival in Washington, Mr. Young married his fiancée, Marti Denkers, on the deck of the presidential home. Pictures of the university’s new leader embracing a woman 22 years his junior circulated online. Back in Utah, The Salt Lake Tribune questioned whether Mr. Young’s relationship with Ms. Denkers, whose ex-husband led a prominent philanthropic foundation, had compromised future gifts to the University of Utah.
“People say don’t talk about personal stuff, but everybody cares a lot about the personal stuff,” says Kellye Y. Testy, chairwoman of the presidential-search committee.
Ms. Testy, who is dean of Washington’s law school, says the president’s new marriage “was an issue that people were focusing on a lot. Rather than totally embrace them — ‘Here’s our president and his wife’ — there was always a little bit of discomfort there.”
At the same time, Mr. Young sent signals suggesting he was not enamored with Washington. He says he tried to quietly size up the university with a “listening tour,” but he wound up pegged as overly skeptical. People thought the president was not “all in” with the job.
“Of course he’s not ‘all in,’ " Mr. Young responds. “You didn’t hire him to be all in. You hired him to take the university to the next level. And if he’s all in and completely drinks the Kool-Aid, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
Mr. Young acknowledges early tensions with the governing board. There were disagreements about how he should approach “the public dimension of the job,” he says, without elaboration.
“I still think I was right. They still think they were right,” Mr. Young says. “God bless us both.”
Mr. Ayer, the board chairman, declined a request for an interview.
Less than two years into Mr. Young’s presidency, in 2013, the regents commissioned an independent consultant to conduct a comprehensive review of his performance.
An evaluation of this kind, often called a 360, remains atypical but not unprecedented in higher education. It is rare, however, to have such a review so early on, and the timing was regarded by some people at the university with “discomfort and even suspicion of the board’s intentions,” according to a report from Sheila Delaney Duke, an executive coach who conducted the assessment.
The report, which The Chronicle obtained through a public-records request, illustrates the extent to which Mr. Young’s perceived status as an outsider contributed to his rough start.
“Almost every respondent mentioned ‘cultural’ misses and mistakes of varying degrees and impact, during the early days in his role,” Ms. Duke wrote.
The president, she continued, “occasionally feels like ‘other’ (meaning not from the UW or the Pacific Northwest).”
The report described Mr. Young as “meeting expectations.” One respondent recommended a course of action for the president: “Open yourself up to falling in love with this place.”
The Insider
One of the reasons Mr. Young’s departure was particularly hard to swallow was that his predecessor, Mr. Emmert, had also surprised people when he resigned, in 2010. Mr. Emmert, who made much of his Washington roots when he was hired, was less than a year into a five-year contract extension when he announced his intention to leave for the NCAA’s top post. He served for six years in Washington.
There are not great data on the average length of presidential tenures at major research institutions, but eight years is generally considered a good run. The University of Washington, however, had a history of longtime presidents, which may help to explain professors’ impatience with latter-day presidential fickleness. In the postwar era, two presidents of Washington served for 16 years each.
Feeling burned by outsiders, a university might look inward for future leaders. But this too is fraught.
Anytime a strong internal candidate emerges, as has happened in Washington, there is a risk that qualified external contenders will remove themselves from consideration. Going through a presidential search is exhaustive, and few people want to endure the process or risk compromising their current positions if the result appears predetermined.
Washington’s board has promised to conduct an “inclusive and deliberate” search, but there is a broad perception that the scales are tipped in favor of Ana Mari Cauce, who was named interim president after Mr. Young resigned.
Ms. Cauce is the ultimate insider. She joined the faculty in 1986 as an assistant professor of psychology, and went on to serve as department chair, dean, and chief academic officer.
Last week professors and students petitioned the regents to conduct a search far more transparent than those that ended in the hiring of the two most recent presidents. A review of university records, however, shows considerable back-channel discussions about how the search should be handled and even how it should end.
Jodi Green, a member of the search committee, made her top choice for the job known the day after Mr. Young announced his intention to resign.
“It’s time for a president who cares about this institution and who will spend their career helping make it the best it can be,” Ms. Green, chair of the university’s foundation, wrote in an email to Mr. Ayer. “I would advocate for Ana Mari becoming the next president. Not just the interim.”
The 29-member Presidential Search Advisory Committee is to recommend finalists to the Board of Regents by November 30.
There is significant support for Ms. Cauce’s candidacy, which has emotional appeal at an institution soured by fleeting leadership. But Washington’s recent history demonstrates that the choice of president is just one piece of a complex retention puzzle.
David Giuliani, an entrepreneur in Washington who has licensed inventions from the university, says that the institutional frustration is understandable, but that it’s time for a bit of soul-searching.
“It’s what all executives should ask themselves when something doesn’t go right: What could we have done? Rather than, What’s wrong with him for having left?” says Mr. Giuliani, a co-founder of the Washington Business Alliance. “Let’s start with a little self-ownership here. People usually don’t leave for money. They leave for other reasons.”
Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.
