The Search for the Next Exceptional President

Takeaways

It is becoming much more difficult to attract an exceptional college president as the challenges of the position seem greater than ever in today’s continuously changing environment.
The talents required to lead on the contested higher education landscape go beyond standard academic credentials. Personal resilience, political savvy, multicultural competence, and other strengths of character are among the most important traits.
Recruiting these talented leaders requires extra effort in the search process. Boards should seek search consultants who engage in advance recruiting, support more sophisticated search committees, focus on diverse candidates with the special strengths to tackle today’s challenges, and perform deep background checks to verify these leadership qualities.

Why is it so hard to find and hire truly exceptional college and university presidents?

Trustees are finding it more difficult than ever to recruit presidents with the right talent for these challenging times. Since members of the U.S. House of Representatives declared open season on reputable presidents at top schools, it has become harder still to persuade good candidates that these jobs are worth pursuing. To make matters worse, the anti-DEI movement sweeping across the country threatens to close off a reservoir of talent with the skill and cultural competence suited to the work of a modern academic chief executive.

Even before these latest barriers rose, according to The American College President: 2023 Edition, the ninth report of its kind published by the American Council on Education (ACE), presidents report intentions to depart sooner than in the past. More than half of respondents to the ACE report said they planned to leave the office within five years, and half of those indicated they would quit their posts within two years.

Many sitting presidents no longer wait for their contracts to expire before departing. Early exits erupt across the full spectrum of colleges, universities, and systems. A president in one of the largest public university systems in the country was speaking for her colleagues when she told us, “We’ll honor our five-year commitment, but most of us plan to leave immediately after that.”

Great Opportunity in the Great Resignation

Ironically, there is an upside to the leadership crisis. The wave of departures presents the opportunity to fill vacancies with candidates possessing the right combination of experience and character to handle the rigors of the job. A reservoir of talented individuals who have overcome adversity from an early age and often through the course of their careers as well represent a larger untapped resource for higher education leadership. Their challenged upbringings, combined with their native intelligence and academic accomplishments, endow these people with the mental toughness and savvy to take on the problems facing higher education. Very often they are persons of color, women, immigrants and their children, people for whom English is a second language, members of LGBTQ+ communities, and White people who, as one told us, were “raised in sorrows’ kitchen.” These are individuals whose identities and challenging life experiences have often led the academy to place them at the margins.

In this article and in The New College President: How a Generation of Diverse Leaders is Changing Higher Education, our forthcoming book from Johns Hopkins University Press, we make the case for tapping into this talented pool much more intentionally than in the past. In many cases, their experience facing and overcoming adversity endows them with the strengths of character and practical intelligence to address higher education’s challenges.

What Needs to Change?

Boards, search committees, and the academic community in general will need to embrace three significant changes to recruit and retain this new generation of academic leaders.

The traditional mindset that harbors a conventional and increasingly less relevant stereotype of the college president must change to focus on the real strengths needed in today’s presidency. Very often the individuals best qualified for the demanding work of today’s leaders will come from those heretofore set aside because, as one liberal academic said, “They just don’t fit in.”
Strengths of character developed through challenging life experiences must assume importance at least equal to traditional academic qualifications. According to an experienced search consultant, “too often academics take academic credentials as a proxy for leadership talent since the latter is harder to identify.”
Search strategies themselves will need to be strengthened through such changes as proactive recruiting before the search is formally announced, deeper background checks that go beyond evidence of lawsuits and speeding tickets, and—most importantly—upgrading the sophistication of search committees so they recognize the talents required to succeed in the modern presidency.

Research Supporting these Assertions

The data analysis underpinning our recommendations grows out of our combined 50 years of watching presidents come and go, as well as our work evaluating presidential performance. Over the course of a decade beginning in 2012 we interviewed some 500 individuals including presidents themselves, as well as trustees, faculty members, staff members, and students who willingly offered their perspective on the performance of the president. These testimonies confirmed what every current president and many trustees know: good people are departing their posts because the contemporary presidency is more difficult and less rewarding than at any time at least since the 1960s.

Presidents report a yawning gap between their expectations before they landed their first presidency and the frustrations they experience while in office. The image of the president as an esteemed figure presiding over a relatively stable enterprise has yielded to that of a harried and occasionally reviled authority figure. Many described their work environment as “toxic.” Faculty no confidence votes in their president, once a rare and devastating occurrence, have become as inevitable as the painful changes that incite them. As the life of college presidents became more tenuous and uncomfortable, the sudden eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and its secondary effects made their lives more stressful and their jobs more precarious.

We observed sharp differences between presidents who thrived in the new environment and those who managed well enough but whose appetite for leadership waned as the disruptions mounted. The president’s age, the prospects for an institution’s continued financial health, and the quality of the board’s and community’s support influenced individual decisions to rise to the challenges or to seek a safe harbor elsewhere. The presidents we advised, coached, or assessed possessed adequate to superior academic backgrounds. Yet distinguished degrees and a string of respected publications had little to do with an individual’s willingness to continue to lead in the minefield of the contemporary academy. Personal leadership qualities were decisive in determining a president’s willingness and ability to engage with the daunting challenges confronting their institutions and themselves.

Beginning in late 2020, we decided to synthesize the information gathered in our interviews and our experience as leaders into The New College President. The book pursues answers to questions like these:

What qualities of character and other leadership traits are most prominent in high performing college and university presidents in today’s environment?
What behaviors and hallmarks separate truly exceptional leaders from run-of-the-mill performers?
How can searches be reengineered to identify, recruit, vet, hire, and support presidents better suited to today’s challenges?

Profiles

The seven presidents we profiled at length in The New College President experienced upbringings that enabled them to become exceptional leaders well suited to the challenges their institutions faced. They accepted and addressed the unique challenges their schools faced; performed better than their peers in measurable terms; brought about long-lasting signature changes; and stayed the course over many years beyond the usual presidential tenures.

Our subjects were Jeffrey Bullock, The University of Dubuque; Waded Cruzado, Montana State University; Mary Dana Hinton, Hollins University; Freeman Hrabowski, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Robert Jones, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Kwang-Wu Kim, Columbia College Chicago; and Mary Marcy, Dominican University of California.

“Forensic” Recruiting

Despite the best efforts of professional search consultants, the diligence of search committees, and the good intentions of nearly all trustees, presidential searches too often fail to recruit presidents as talented as these. Achieving a forensic degree of depth and analysis of a candidate’s strengths requires departures from conventional search habits. The most effective search firms and consultants, such as AGB Search, and others adhere to something like the following. Interviews with prospective firms should insist on them. Below are four of the most important features of the seven improvements suggested in The New College President.

Advance recruiting. A search consultant ruefully admitted that his recruiting amounted to advertising “for a month or two and see what we get.” The recruiting process should begin well before the search is officially announced. One or more recruiters who know the institution’s real needs for leadership and who possess a network of contacts should perform this advance work.
More sophisticated committees. Typical search committee members deny they have any need of cultural diversity “training.” Many believe they can detect honesty in a candidate by their direct eye contact. Academics often mistake credentials for leadership competence. A few hours spent early in the process to disabuse the group of these and other myths unsupported by evidence will help ensure the promising candidates make it to the finals.
Focus on character strengths. Academic credentials and experience are important for establishing credibility with the faculty and for demonstrating familiarity with the business side of the enterprise. Verifiable examples of a candidate’s experience in making difficult, unpopular choices; recovering quickly from setbacks and disappointments; navigating the complex politics of the academy and the milieu that surrounds it are every bit as important as credentials. Leadership and personality assessments often used in corporate hiring can help search committees identify personal strengths and weaknesses in a candidate for president.
Deeper background checks. Some hyperbole is expected from candidates vying to become a president. Yet accepting without verification the accuracy of their CV, their claims during the interview of stellar achievement, and the words of their friends who agreed to provide references is a mistake. A more revealing approach is to insist on answers to questions like these: what role the candidate really played in some great initiative, what are they really like when the pressure mounts, and how have they responded to inevitable disappointments.

There is a reservoir of talented individuals out there who offer great potential for meeting today’s challenges. The task of the board, search committees and those who assist them is to seek them out and support their candidacies. This new generation possesses the strengths of character to withstand criticism and opposition, having known worse challenges earlier in their lives. They display essential virtues such as courage, tenacity, multiculture awareness, and other qualities of character so important to presidents in this conflicted era.

This article is adapted from The New College President: How a Generation of Diverse Leaders Is Changing Higher Education by Terrence J. MacTaggart and Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran, which will be published in August 2024. Copyright 2024. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Terrence MacTaggart, PhD, is the former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Superior, the Minnesota State University System, and on two occasions of the University of Maine System. He is a senior fellow and senior consultant with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran, PhD, is the president emerita of Kalamazoo College and a senior fellow and senior consultant with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.