The 2023-24 academic year has inarguably been one of the toughest years in recent history to be a college president.
Following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and amid Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza, campuses erupted in activism, with thousands of students, faculty, and community members mobilizing to protest an Israeli offensive that to date has killed more than 36,000.
College presidents — and their response to the war and protests — have consequently come under withering scrutiny as they have struggled to respond to events.
As the faces of higher education institutions, they have been criticized for saying too much or too little in their statements about the war. Amid campus protests, students, families, and advocacy groups have complained that they weren’t doing enough to keep students safe from Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian racism.
By December, it was clear that many college presidents just couldn’t win. Powerful donors seized on the moment, putting pressure on presidents to resign, while House lawmakers summoned them to Washington for televised hearings to grade them on their performance amid the intractable conflict. The result? Since the fall, several presidents have announced their resignations, sending schools on the hunt for new leaders.
Though some may simply focus on the loftiness of the role — some college presidents earn seven figures — the nonstop challenges this year reveal how increasingly public and scrutinized the role of the college president has become in a polarized time. The drama surrounding the leaders has raised questions about the state of the college presidency and what it ought to be.
“There is a lot more attention being paid to what the college presidency is,” said Hiro Okahana, the assistant vice president and executive director of the Education Futures Lab at the American Council on Education, which publishes a major survey on US college presidents.
The college president’s job, explained
The role of the college president has always been complex and difficult. The sheer breadth of stakeholders they manage, from students and faculty to alumni, trustees, donors, and state and federal regulators, illustrates the magnitude of their responsibilities.
The job can involve overseeing a large medical center, running a sporting organization, or being at the helm of the largest employer in their town. In this way, college and university presidents are sometimes viewed as chief executive officers or even mayors.
“One of the biggest challenges of the president’s role is balancing all of the various constituencies,” said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law, who recently testified before Congress in a hearing about antisemitism on campuses. “And that is always true about any issue, but it’s particularly true when it’s one that’s quite so polarized and so fraught as issues of our present moment.”
Even before this year, college presidents have said many of the roadblocks they encounter in the role are unexpected. Women in the position are more likely than men to feel they weren’t adequately informed of the challenges of the role during the search process, while presidents of color were more likely to express this than white presidents, according to the American Council on Education’s 2023 “The American College President” survey.
And before this year’s challenges, turnover rates among presidents had been increasing and tenure lengths decreasing. The survey found that presidents in 2022 had been in their current roles for an average of 5.9 years, down from 6.5 years in 2016 and 8.5 years in 2006.
While most presidents said they have a support system, some of them indicated that they have “struggled to find people who understand the experience of being a president,” a signal that all presidents, but particularly women and presidents of color, need help, the report concluded.
“The president routinely has people who he or she consults, and the last couple of people he or she wants in the room. That could be the board chair, the provost, or the chief of operations, for example,” Lawrence said. “You are always trying to get input from people who can help you make the decision, since it’s never a good idea to make a decision in isolation.”
But when it comes down to a binary moment, like whether a school will negotiate with student protesters or call the police, presidents make the call.
“At the end of the day,” Lawrence said, “it’s the president who has to say, ‘We’re gonna go this way.’”
How the Israel-Hamas conflict changed everything for many presidents
The protests that began on campuses last fall exposed larger questions about free speech and the role academia ought to play in protecting it — questions that some looked to college presidents to answer.
On campus after campus, many presidents failed, outright shutting down lines of communication to students and offering little transparency. Though many started off the year trying to have open dialogue with students, by the end of the year, they succumbed to pressure to lock down campuses.
University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill became the first to resign under the pressure. When lawmakers asked her whether calling for the genocide of Jews would constitute bullying or harassment under school policy, Magill responded that it was a “context-dependent decision.” Her response, during a highly politicized hearing led by Republican lawmakers, exemplified the complicated situation many college presidents find themselves in.
Under continued pressure, others, including Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned, while others made difficult, often incendiary decisions, like abandoning college commitments to free speech or cracking down on student protests by calling in the police.
Cornell President Martha E. Pollock announced that she would step down after seven years, and though she said the decision was her own, she has faced criticism for revising the terms of faculty political speech and temporarily suspending pro-Palestinian student protesters this spring. After being celebrated last fall for fostering “authentic discussions about differing points of view,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock was censured by faculty after she called in the police just hours after students erected a pro-Palestinian encampment. The University of Southern California’s faculty senate censured president Carol Folt after she banned the school’s pro-Palestinian Muslim valedictorian from speaking at commencement.
The California State University System suspended Sonoma State University President Mike Lee for “insubordination” after he reached an agreement with pro-Palestinian students that the school would become the first US university to refuse to work with Israeli academic institutions.
Many eyes remain on Columbia University, where President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik has faced intense pressure from all sides to resign from her post. To signal their disapproval last month, hundreds of student protesters took the annual “primal scream” tradition to the president’s home and screamed for a minute and a half, then chanted “resign” and “shame on you.”
Some free-speech experts think the presidents made it harder for themselves this year. By shutting down student protests over controversial phrases such as “from the river to the sea,” presidents suppressed debate and stood accused of violating free-speech commitments.
“They’ve been exposed as being hypocritical on free speech, since many have preached how we need to punish offensive speech that makes people feel uncomfortable to ensure that campuses remain civil and peaceful,” said Zach Greenberg, a senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that defends free-speech rights on colleges campuses. The group also urges higher education leaders to adopt “institutional neutrality” — that is, taking positions on social and political issues only when they “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.”
This stance would provide reasoning for college presidents to avoid pressure to offer comment on social and political issues that inevitably alienates various groups. Nearly nearly 70 institutions have adopted the position in the past few years.
“Fighting for free speech is difficult when the speech is offensive or controversial. It’s easy when the speech is benign and mild,” said Greenberg. “Being principled means defending free speech even though it may be difficult or unpopular to do so.”
But crises like the ones this year “are usually best handled through dialogue and with processes that go back long before the immediate moment,” said Lawrence. “So that at the time the immediate crisis is upon us, there already are longstanding relationships and understandings that exist between and among the constituencies.”
The coming school year likely won’t be easier
This summer, presidents will try to tie up loose ends when it comes to student disciplinary cases and congressional and federal inquiries and investigations. By August, millions of students will be back on campus, and the coming academic year, with a presidential election between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, is likely to present more challenges.
“We’re living in a polarized time, so people are looking for ways of taking complex issues and making them black-white issues, or probably more accurately in our time, blue-red issues. People are looking to capitalize on it,” Lawrence said.
Traditionally, the fall has had the highest intensity of protests, Greenberg said. “It’s the biggest season for free speech and for getting out there. [Students] are back on campus, energized, motivated, and they want to make their voices heard. We expect them to be amplified this [fall] because of the election. We’re strapped in and gearing up for it,” he said.
Schools are already making changes. Harvard recently announced that it would adopt a new “institutional voice” protocol to avoid making statements on political or social issues that would “side with one perspective or another” according to a report about the new strategy. Under the policy, the school won’t make statements on “public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” But Harvard says the position is different from “institutional neutrality” since “the university as an institution can never be neutral,” the report’s authors wrote.
Amid a continued erosion of trust in higher education as enrollment declines, the moment demands that stakeholders step in to support what they see as a pillar of American democracy, leaders told Vox.
“It’s not just about putting persons of color or women into the college presidency but setting them up so that they can succeed as leaders,” said Okahana. “How can the field and how can individual institutions create work environments where leaders can thrive too?”
Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis, echoed the sentiment. “It is critically important that there be a broad recognition that, flaws and all, these are institutions and leaders that require public support in every way. The mission of the university includes the creation and discovery of knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge, an important service.
“I hope that we will be able to restore a sense that when one has concerns about one’s college, as an alumnus, as a student, as a faculty member, that it should be viewed constructively, in terms of, ‘How can I help?’”
