As universities face chaotic pro-Palestinian protests in the new academic year, several questions are emerging: Who will replace all the university presidents who have resigned?
Why on earth would they want that job?
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik is in trouble Resigned on August 14thfollowing a chaotic spring semester of protests that culminated in the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Dozens of students arrested.
She's not alone: In the past year alone, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Stanford have all changed presidents.
Harvard University's interim president, Alan Garber, was officially named president last month, but Columbia University, Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania began the academic year under interim presidents.
Recruiters, professors, and alumni agree that the job hunt has never been more difficult.
“These jobs aren't getting any easier, and I don't see it getting any easier anytime soon,” Willie Funk, managing vice president of higher education recruiting firm Funk & Associates, told The Washington Post.
Daniel Drezner, a distinguished professor of international politics at Tufts University, said he had been contacted by recruiting agencies about the presidency since 2010 but turned them all down.
“No amount of pay is enough to be a college president. It's a thankless position,” Drezner told the Post. “The primary job of a college president is to raise funds and appease the most entitled constituency on the planet.”
“Increasing political polarization, not to mention student protests, are just bonuses on top of the thorny issues you have to deal with as president.”
Recently, increased scrutiny has put many university presidents and chancellors at risk of dismissal.
“Every decision made on a college campus has the potential to make front-page news. Everything is under more scrutiny than ever before,” Funk said. “Presidents across the country are under immense pressure to be, for lack of a better word, perfect.”
In early December, the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were summoned to testify before Congress about anti-Semitism after chaotic pro-Palestinian protests erupted on their campuses.
Within weeks, both Professors Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Liz McGill of the University of Pennsylvania, who had been hamstrung by plagiarism allegations and other scandals, resigned under public pressure.
In May, Martha Pollack of Cornell University She quit her jobHowever, she maintained that the campus protests had nothing to do with her decision. The summer before, Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after a student journalist drew attention to flawed research from his neuroscience lab.
American University Presidents Report From the American Council on Education It shows that turnover in the presidency is higher than ever before.
The average tenure of current college and university presidents has fallen from 8.5 years in 2006 to just 5.9 years by 2022. More than half of the presidents surveyed plan to step down within five years, which would be before the turbulent 2023-2024 academic year.
“It's been steadily declining. [in tenure]John Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, told The Washington Post, “I think there has been a great increase in public awareness of the difficulty of the job, so these trends are likely to accelerate rather than slow down or reverse.”
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the president of an elite university Earn a huge salary.
Shafiq's predecessor at Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, made more than $3.8 million in 2021. The presidents of New York University, University of Southern California, University of Chicago and Thomas Jefferson University all made more than $3 million. More than 90 private college presidents made seven-figure salaries that year.
“People are outraged that college presidents are paid exorbitant amounts of money, but they don't realize that the exorbitant amounts of money are the only thing that got them to take the job in the first place,” Drezner said. [job] It requires constantly catering to the demands of the wealthy, who surely have their own opinions on the best way to handle higher education.
“You're dealing with alumni, whose views of their alma mater have been frozen in amber since their undergrad days, and when something changes they turn into cranky reactionaries. And then there are the professors, who are the most entitled assholes you can imagine.”
With the new academic year about to begin, there is growing speculation that the appointment of an interim president is an attempt by the prestigious school to buy time.
“I think they recognize that right now is a tough time to recruit a good president, so maybe there's some hope that in a year's time the world might have changed and we'd go back to more normal times,” Cliff Stein, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University, told the Post. “I think they want to recruit in more normal times.”
Funk, who runs a recruiting firm that specializes in recruiting university presidents and deans, agreed that attracting top talent has never been harder.
“It's important for the institutions to calm things down and restore balance,” he said. “If the issues aren't resolved before the new president takes office, it will be to his detriment.”
