Beginning about a decade ago, I started receiving queries from executive-search firms asking whether I would be interested in applying to be the dean of a public-policy school. These are well-remunerated, prestigious jobs, often viewed as steppingstones to college presidencies and positions of similar stature and responsibility. To many, being a university president sounds like a sweet gig.
My gut reaction, as someone with paltry reservoirs of executive functioning, was to politely decline. But the queries kept coming, and I began to wonder: “Do I want to be a dean?!”
So I leaned into my administrative duties. I agreed to serve on committees that I otherwise would never have joined. I took a greater interest in how my institution was run.
What I learned was that my initial reluctance was well-founded. Presidents and deans occupy terrible, no-win positions. And the events of the past few weeks, which led to the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s M. Elizabeth Magill, are just the most recent data points to reinforce this conclusion.
In theory, university presidents and deans can exercise real leadership in education, inspiring the faculty to be better educators and the students to be better learners. That mission is a noble one.
The primary task of any dean or president is to deal with the most spoiled, entitled, pigheaded interest groups imaginable.
So why are these such horrible jobs? Because the primary task of any dean or president is to deal with the most spoiled, entitled, pigheaded interest groups imaginable.
First, there are the students — yeah, I said it. As tuition prices have increased far faster than inflation, they view themselves (not entirely unjustifiably) less as apprentices in knowledge and more as customers demanding platinum-level service. Students possess a volatile mix of knowledge and ignorance. Quite often they are the ones who can tell when a particular intellectual emperor is wearing no clothes. At the same time, they have zero idea of how large organizations are run. Most students are super-confident about how they think the world should be run and woefully uninformed about how the world is actually run. Good luck to the college dean or president tasked with explaining any of this to them — because what students want the most is to have their thoughts validated rather than challenged.
If students are bad, tenure-stream faculty members are worse. Professors are a bunch of know-it-alls who never speak for five minutes when 50 will do. Our comparative advantage in the university system is that we complain longer and stronger than everyone else about the most picayune issues imaginable. We demand to be the primary governors of our institutions. At the same time, compared to the students most of us possess only a marginally better understanding of how our institutions are run. Most professors believe that they can do most things better than the administrators at their university, and most of them are quite blinkered in this belief. Can you imagine how awful it must be for a president, provost, or dean to ride herd on us? We are complete assholes!
This takes us to the lower-level administrators, the folks charged with actually making sure the trains run on time. Both students and faculty treat them as the lowest of the low. They must reconcile multiple, conflicting mandates. They are no doubt amazed at the organizational incompetence displayed on a daily basis by the faculty and senior university leadership.
Do most of the stakeholders listed above lean left? Absolutely, a fact that many, many, many, people have documented in recent decades. So in the wake of the disastrous performance of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn in front of Congress, one can kinda sorta see why folks like the National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar write what they write:
Regardless of whether Liz Magill or Claudine Gay are cashiered within the hour, what will remain behind are the abiding monocultures of the universities they lead. Faculty, countless DEI administrators, graduate students, and bumptious ill-formed undergraduates alike are what actually shape the culture of an educational institution, far more than any handbook or notional set of rules. And they have been drinking deep draughts from the well of identitarian and oppression-hierarchy grievance since their youths. Habits learned at that age are rarely, if ever, unlearned. Absent seismic reform — the likes of which would probably only go hand-in-hand with some other vast convulsion in American society that none of us wish to live through — the problem of campus antisemitism is not going away, or even arguably ameliorating any time soon. The “great unlearning,” if it ever comes, will take generations, not years.
The problem with Blehar’s assessment is that it is partial. He conveniently omitted the other stakeholders that college presidents and deans must appease: the alumni, the donors, and the state. And those groups often tilt in a different political direction than the ones discussed above.
Alumni, particularly the ones who are active in fund raising and governance, love their colleges. But they don’t love them as they exist today: They love the idealized, nostalgic memory of their alma mater, frozen in amber, when they were students. The proliferation of college services — studying services, mental-health clinics, and yes, DEI administrators — strike many of them as turning current students “soft.” Most of this stuff probably wasn’t around when they were in school — and they turned out fine! That student demographics have shifted from decade to decade is often lost on them. What is important to them is that their children get a leg up in being accepted into their alma mater — particularly for selective private universities.
Donors are like “Alumni: Extreme Version.” Most wealthy donors do a fantastic job of inductively generalizing from their own experiences. This means they attribute their success entirely to their own skill and will, often failing to realize on a conscious level that fortuna, circumstance, and larger structures have their role to play as well. They have enough money to be wooed and schmoozed on a regular basis from a variety of charities, philanthropies, and nonprofits. The primary job of any dean or president is fund raising, and some folks might be surprised at how hard it is to perform that task with any dignity or grace. The key thing to understand is that if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money. It’s harder. Donors are rarely if ever contradicted when they posit and pontificate about the best way to run a university. They do not make suggestions — they impart wisdom from on high, and if they do not see an institutional response they will ask to speak with the manager.
Think I’m exaggerating? Read The New York Times’ four-reporter (?!) story providing a behind-the-scenes look at what led to Magill’s resignation. They note that “donors, among the most crucial constituencies at a private university, waged an intense campaign” to drive Magill from power. Based on what one donor did after the October 7 Hamas attack, that assessment reads like an understatement:
Marc Rowan, a billionaire and an alumnus of Wharton, Penn’s business school, launched a campaign, curbing his contributions and beseeching other donors to do the same. Mr. Rowan also chaired the advisory board of Wharton, which stood to benefit from the gifts….
Ms. Magill had deep board support. But Mr. Rowan, known on Wall Street for hardball tactics, began to send trustees a protest email every day — numbered for emphasis. And he turned Wharton’s advisory board into an alternative center of power at Penn, even if at times some of its members questioned his aggressive tactics….
Mr. Rowan continued his email campaign. Around 7 a.m. on Thanksgiving, the Penn trustees received an email with the subject line: “Day 40” — the elapsed time since he started pressing them to take action. “The single worst thing a collection of alumni can be is apathetic,” he wrote.
This is an extreme example, so I’m sure it would be difficult to find another example quite this ba— oh, wait, what’s this other New York Times story about a Harvard donor, Bill Ackman?
Mr. Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, resents that officials at his alma mater, to which he’s donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, have not heeded his advice on a variety of topics.
Most recently, this includes how to respond to complaints of antisemitism and the specter of violence against supporters of Israel on campus.
“It would have been smart for her to listen, or to at least pick up the phone,” Mr. Ackman said in an interview, describing a recent outreach to Dr. Gay that was part of a stream of calls, texts and letters to university officials….
Both stories highlight how wealthy donors — as well as the boards of trustees that often consist mostly of elite donors — can exert enormous hidden power over universities and their presidents and deans. And they ain’t left-leaning.
Finally, there is the state. Public universities are often sabotaged by conservative state legislatures and governors who view these institutions as convenient ideological punching bags. To paraphrase Elise Stefanik, these legislatures seem to be marching toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant illiberal views. As the recent House hearing on antisemitism demonstrated, the scope of political pressure extends further than state legislatures. If Donald J. Trump wins in 2024, the weaponization of the federal government to constrain campus speech will make the current political environment look positively Jeffersonian. Presidents and deans have little choice but to grit their teeth and smile politely when politicians from both parties yell at them.
Presidents and deans have two jobs: 1) raise money; and 2) find ways to appease students, faculty, administrators, alumni, donors, and the state. The one trait all these interest groups share is a powerful sense of entitlement in telling administrators how to do their jobs.
Not that these groups are always wrong in their critiques. Students, faculty, and administrators deserve a voice in how their universities are run. Donors and alumni groups contribute money and enthusiasm — they need to be listened to as well. Federal and state governments fund an awful lot of higher education. Tax dollars necessitate oversight and regulation. Furthermore, I share some of the frustrations others have with how DEI has been bureaucratized on college campuses. And yeah, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn did royally screw up at the House hearing. The whirlwind they are reaping is one that is partially of their own making.
Still, I cannot blame Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, or Elizabeth Magill for getting overly lawyered before testifying. As The New York Times observed: “Preparing for congressional testimony involves blending legal caution with political savvy and common sense, legal experts say. Lawyers typically advise those testifying to be mindful of the law but to also consider headlines that could come out of the hearing. That can be a difficult task after hours of pointed questioning.” Add balancing the interests of multiple loud interest groups, and one begins to appreciate the thankless dimensions of these jobs.
I never want to be a university president. That’s OK — I would be a horrible one. The problem, however, is there are not a lot of folks who are able to do these jobs well. They require a unique blend of scholarly gravitas, organizational competence, political skill, and fund-raising prowess. What worries me about this acrimonious moment is that the longer it continues, the number of folks willing and able to do these jobs will shrink into nothingness.
A previous version of this essay appeared on the author’s Substack, Drezner’s World.
