Tackling the college presidency crisis

It's a lot of responsibility for one person

Welcome to the Take Bakery, our weekend column where editorial assistant Ben explores policy ideas that are exciting, but may still need a little more time in the oven.

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Before the congressional campus antisemitism hearings that shined a national spotlight on the ultimately doomed tenures of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and UPenn’s Elizabeth Magill, I’m guessing that most people didn’t have particularly strong opinions on the performance of university presidents.

The role is generally regarded as a position of ultimate prestige, the pinnacle of ivory tower academia. The president’s stewardship over the next generation of intellectuals, business leaders, and creatives imbues the role with a certain cultural importance. And the perks are quite nice, with a salary that can range into seven figures and a house befitting a lower-standing 19th century Vanderbilt.

The perks and the status remain. However, many prestigious universities are trying to fill the job —Cornell, Harvard, UCLA, and Penn — and the consensus seems to be that interest is low. As The Wall Street Journal recently summed up rather succinctly, Wanted: New College Presidents. Mission: Impossible.

The dueling crisis of campus protests and rising antisemitism have exposed some serious failures of leadership at some of the country’s top universities. However, while the university presidency has been burdened recently by increased political pressures and highly polarizing issues around campus speech, those specific political issues will pass while a serious structural issue in the college presidency will remain: The position has become burdened by a breadth of responsibilities that far exceed what any singular person can responsibly handle.

Higher education institutions vary from massive research universities to small liberal arts colleges, but this issue is pervasive across the spectrum. Solutions are needed, and they range from shrinking the president's extensive responsibilities to entirely imagining the structure of the university president itself.

The college presidency is nasty, brutish, and short

A 2022 survey by the American Council on Education found that the average tenure for the position has fallen from 8.5 years in 2006 to 5.9 in 2022, with nearly 45% of schools having presidents with tenures less than four years. In a recent New York Times article, Nicholas Dirks, the former U.C. Berkeley chancellor, said candidate pools for opening jobs are shrinking due to lack of interest.

So why are so many people fleeing this extraordinarily high-status, high-paying job?

Daniel Drezner, a Tufts international politics professor and a nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, has some ideas. He recently wrote an op-ed titled “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President.”

While Drezner told me he’d be terrible in the role, he specified why exactly the job is so hard in the first place. “The job of any college president is to simultaneously inspire, but really you’re just dealing with a whole bunch of ridiculously entitled interest groups.”

These interest groups can range from dogmatic students and faculty to the dueling, and sometimes conflicting, voices of the alumni, big-shot donors, and the state (for public institutions).

The university president’s job is to satisfy all of them, all while dealing with an exceedingly long list of core job responsibilities. Michael T. Miller, a professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas, said, “The college president is responsible for everything that happens on a college campus.” This extensive mandate ranges from fundraising (far and away the number one priority) to student performance, graduation rates, and quality of campus life.

Interestingly, this extended presidential portfolio is actually a new concept. In a Washington Post article, Jeffrey J. Selingo, the former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, described the evolution of the college presidency:

“A century ago, the college presidency was often described as “a club,” as those in the position came largely from the faculty ranks and were from a similar pedigree. In the 1970s, as financial pressures grew on higher education, presidents were hired for their administrative experience. These days the president is expected to be a multidimensional leader able to navigate a range of challenges from technology to sexual assault as well as keep up with the changing nature of learning and emerging academic disciplines..

In my conversation with former UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor, Holden Thorp —who resigned from his position after several sports related scandals — he added another issue that is prevalent at many universities: declining trust between the board and president. “Boards are spending more time deciding whether to support the president than they are in how they will support the president.”

So it’s a tricky time to be a college president. You have to manage a weary board, juggle a wide range of responsibilities, and deal with constant pressure from interest groups. On top of all that, the higher education business model is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain at many universities.

This all invites an existential question about the presidency: Should it really be done by one person?

The co-presidency

The idea that the job should be shared is actually a serious solution that was presented by Karen Gross, the former president of the Southern University of Vermont, in an Aspen Institute opinion piece:

A co-presidency send a loud and clear message about collaboration and cooperation. An academic could partner with a government or business official. A financially savvy person could partner with someone with vast expertise in student life. It bespeaks taking risks but navigating them well. It is about putting one’s ego in the right place and giving glory to another and sharing blame. It is about, fundamentally, some of the very skills we want students to acquire: problem-solving, teamwork, and decency.

The closest actually existing analog to this idea is the relationship between the provost and the president, the provost being the one who handles the academic affairs, with the president acting as the institutional CEO. Functionally, however, the president still is responsible and graded on everything that happens at the university, much like a business chief executive.

The co-presidency is quite different, and its raison d'etre is predicated on the fact that presidential portfolios have ballooned beyond any single person’s capacity. Managing the business of the university and fundraising is an incredibly important job, but it’s also important to understand academic affairs and have a strong connection with the student body. Rarely do the skills overlap.

That’s why it’d be best if the co-presidency involved people from different sectors, so the responsibilities could be divided to better align with each president’s strengths. Budget and growth initiatives could be assigned to the business person and students affairs and research to the one with more experience in campus academia.

These partnerships would not be randomly assigned by the board. Rather, it would be a duo with shared experience and familiarity. The interview process would seek to find a team that won’t be tempted by the whims of jealousy or one one-upmanship, but rather united in the goal of the betterment of the university.

It's important to recognize that the co-president is a living idea, moldable to the problems that each school needs. That means in times of absolute crisis management, when one voice is essential, the board could designate one of the presidents as the public spokesperson. Every major decision might not be completely shared — co-presidents could consult one another, but defer to the individual with the most experience over the matter in cases where there’s an obvious imbalance. If that decision ended up being wrong, it’d be a test of the co-presidency to ensure solidarity within the unit.

It’s true, as Gross says in her piece, that not every institution needs a co-president. But it’s an interesting idea, and with university presidency in crisis, it’s a solution worth pondering.

The duties that matter

Most people I talked to agreed that it’d be nice if the board, students, faculty, and general public could maybe just lower their expectation for what a president can realistically do. Even if the co-presidency isn’t the solution, I still think it’d be worth it to consider narrowing the president’s responsibilities.

In his opinion piece, Drezner says that the testimony of the university presidents before Congress was “overly lawyered ” in part because of all the competing interest groups that are in the president’s ear. The competing interest groups extend from all the different responsibilities that a president must answer for.

Providing clear campus leadership on these issues matters. Ensuring the university continues to be financially viable matters. However, maybe presidents shouldn’t have to answer for the academic success of the school or the quality student life. Those issues are, of course, important, but maybe the provost and other deans can act as the highest executive for those matters.

Ultimately, university boards should judge their leaders on the fundamental tasks that the Journal of Research on the College President defines as most critical to the job: enrollment management, budget, and strategic planning.

These might sound like vague responsibilities regurgitated by an AI-trained on opaque university lingo, but I can assure you, they’re quite important. And when done right, they can be enormously beneficial to the school.

Take a look at the presidents who were responsible for significant reform at their school. Generally, the points of accomplishment are narrow and fall into those buckets. Diana Natalico exponentially grew research funding at UT El Paso, Mark Beeker eliminated racial graduation gaps at Georgia State State, and Catharine Bond Hill dramatically shifted financial aid packages at Vassar. Each reform was singular but incredibly impactful to the overall success and survival of the university.

The use of the word survival is intentional here.

Universities are facing an enrollment crisis right now, which is the result of declining birth rates and broader societal questions about the value of college. These present an existential risk to some smaller, private schools. But it is still something that major universities need to reckon with, along with the major questions regarding antisemitism we saw over the past several months.

So if you’re a college president, now is the time to batten down the hatches and focus on the mandate the university: educating students and providing an academic environment that both protects students and upholds the mandate of campus free speech.

This is all obviously easier said than done. And it will require a president with fewer responsibilities to do it.