Dissecting a no-confidence vote
It’s a blow when a higher-ed leader suffers a no-confidence vote from the faculty, like the recent one at Rutgers University against President Jonathan Holloway, and at West Virginia University against President Gordon Gee.
While such moves always have specific reasons — at Rutgers those include a strike by instructors, a hospital merger, and the ouster of the Newark campus’s chancellor; at West Virginia sweeping budget cuts are the main factor — we have seen a definite rise in no-confidence votes in recent years, including 24 in 2021 alone.
To understand this phenomenon, I called Sean McKinniss, a researcher who studies higher-ed governance and is writing a book about presidential no-confidence votes dating back to the one in 2005 against Harvard University’s president, Lawrence Summers, after his controversial remarks about women in science.
More than anything, McKinniss said, the increasingly frustrated faculty is another symptom of a sector facing rising demands from all sides. To be a leader today is to walk a razor-thin line between constituencies more at odds than ever.
Just look at Gee. Serving in his seventh presidency, he has decades of experience and savvy, but in proposing deep cuts, he lost the faculty.
“Demographics, budgets, expectations, public opinion, and political pressure” — that’s McKinniss’s short list of trouble spots. “If you fail at any of those areas,” he said, “you’re setting yourself up not just for a no-confidence vote, but a failed presidency.”
Here is more from McKinniss on why no-confidence votes happen and why, lately, they feel impossible to avoid.
Three main factors often lead to a no-confidence vote.
A president who has poor interpersonal skills, is seen not to respect shared governance, or handles finances in a way that is perceived as inept or noncollaborative risks losing the trust of the faculty, he said. On finances, not raising enough money or proposing budget cuts can tilt opinions, he said.
Deserved or not, a vote typically shortens a leader’s tenure.
About half of presidents hit with a no-confidence vote leave the role within a year, said McKinniss, who created a database of votes from 1989 through mid-2021. The vote is rarely cited as the reason for the departure, but at institutions of all types, it casts an undeniable pall over the leader’s tenure, he said.
The recent increase in votes comes as presidents are already serving shorter terms. The average presidential tenure has shrunk to 5.9 years, down from 6.5 years in 2016, according to this year’s American Council on Education president survey.
Conditions are right for these votes to increase further.
The pandemic, political polarization, and demographic shifts have made no-confidence votes more common. Federal relief funding during the pandemic provided key financial support, so only now are many colleges feeling the brutal impact of the past few years, forcing leaders to make difficult choices, McKinniss said.
“There aren’t enough people to sustain this model in my view, and that’s going to transfer into pressures on leadership,” he said. “And pressures on leadership invariably result in no-confidence votes.”
A vote can signal the deep stress and tensions of rapid change.
For many faculty members, still reeling from the pandemic, profound changes under consideration or already underway threaten higher ed as they know it. Some are also coping with economic challenges that make it difficult to remain in the profession.
“The vote of no confidence is and has become, in just the last two or three years, sort of a last-ditch effort to express that,” he said. “It’s self-preservation in the end.”
Also on the topic of tensions between faculty members and administrators, we published an essay by a former college president last week that seemed to hit a nerve. Brian Rosenberg, who served for 17 years as president of Macalester College and is now a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote candidly about the harm that higher ed inflicts on itself because of its aversion to real change.
A resistance to even talking about change holds colleges back from the structural reforms necessary to confront the serious financial pressures that threaten their future, he wrote. “Virtually any administrator or faculty member who begins with an idea for transformational change will eventually reach the same conclusion about the battle: It’s not worth it.”
The essay is adapted from Rosenberg’s forthcoming book, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Look for a conversation with him in an upcoming edition of Leading.