As universities face down a new semester of disruptive pro-Palestine protests, a couple of questions have emerged: Who will replace all the college presidents who have resigned?
And why in the world would they want the job?
Embattled Columbia president Minouche Shafik stepped down August 14, following a chaotic spring semester of protests that culminated with the occupation of Hamilton Hall and dozens of student arrests.
She’s not alone. In just the past year, the presidential positions at Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Columbia and Stanford have all turned over.
Although Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, was appointed to the position permanently last month, Columbia, Cornell and Penn started the new school year with interim presidents.
Recruitment professionals, professors and alumni agree that the job search is harder than ever before.
“These jobs aren’t getting any easier, and I don’t think they will anytime soon either,” Willie Funk, managing vice president of higher education recruiting firm Funk and Associates, told The Post.
Daniel Drezner, a distinguished professor of International Politics at Tufts University, said he has been contacted by recruiting firms about presidency positions since 2010. He’s shut them all down.
“You could not pay me enough to be a college president. It’s a thankless position,” Drezner told The Post. “The primary jobs of any college president are fundraising and appeasing the most entitled constituencies on the planet.
“The rising political polarization, and obviously the student protests, those are just the cherry on top of the crap sandwich that you’re dealing with as president.”
Increased scrutiny has landed many university chancellors and presidents on the chopping block recently.
“Every decision made on a college campus is potentially going to make it onto the front page of the media. Everything is more scrutinized than it’s ever been,” Funk said. “There’s a lot of pressure on presidents across the country to be, for lack of a better word, flawless.”
After chaotic pro-Palestine protests broke out on their campuses, the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were all hauled before Congress to testify about antisemitism in early December.
Within weeks, Harvard’s Claudine Gay — hobbled in part by claims of plagiarism — and Penn’s Liz Magill had both stepped down under public pressure.
In May, Martha Pollack of Cornell University also relinquished her gig, though she insisted that campus protests had nothing to do with her decision. The summer before, Stanford University president Marc Tessier Lavigne resigned from his post after a student journalist called attention to flawed research from his neuroscience lab.
The American College President report from the American Council on Education shows presidency job turnover is higher than ever.
The average tenure of a current university president has shrunk from 8.5 years in 2006 to just 5.9 in 2022. More than half of polled presidents planned to step down within five years — and that was before the chaotic 2023-2024 school year.
“It’s been a pretty steady decline [in tenure],” Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, told The Post. “I think the public perception of the challenges of the job have grown a lot, so, if anything, those trends are probably accelerating rather than slowing down or reversing.”
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, university presidents at elite institutions are raking in massive salaries.
Lee Bollinger, who preceded Shafik at Columbia, made more than $3.8 million in 2021. The presidents of New York University, the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago and Thomas Jefferson University all surpassed $3 million. More than 90 presidents of private universities made seven figures that year.
“People get outraged that university presidents are being paid obscene amounts of money, but they don’t realize that the obscene amounts of money are the only way to get them to take the job in the first place,” Drezner said. “This [job] requires constantly catering to wealthy people who reliably have their own opinions about the best way to handle higher education.
“You’re dealing with alumni, whose view of their alma mater is frozen in amber from when they were undergraduates, and so anything that changes turns them into cranky reactionaries. And then there are the professors, and we’re the most entitled assholes you can possibly imagine.”
As the new school year begins, many are speculating that interim presidential appointments might be attempts by high-profile schools to buy time.
“I think they perceive that it’s a difficult time to recruit a good president, so maybe there’s some hope that the world may be different in a year and we may return to more normal times,” Cliff Stein, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University, told The Post. “I think they’d like to recruit in those more normal times.”
Funk, whose recruitment firm specializes in hiring university presidents and deans, agrees that attracting top talent is more challenging than ever.
“It’s important for institutions to let things settle down and to rebalance,” he said. “It does the incoming president a disservice if challenges have not been addressed prior to them coming in.”
