A Better Approach to Searches for Successful College Presidents

Besieged by student protesters, congressional inquisitors, demands from parents and alumni, personal attacks, government regulations, and financial pressures, many college and university presidents are calling it quits. Earlier this year, the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign. The president of Cornell University announced her resignation in May, and many other elite institutions—including Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Florida; and Yale University—have either just completed or will soon be conducting searches to find new leadership. In Massachusetts alone, 12 of 58 private college presidencies were open this past year.

Presidents on average now serve less than six years. More than half of current presidents have indicated they will leave within five years.

Given the stakes, it’s worth thinking carefully about the process for finding presidents. The responsibility for selecting a president rests with the board of trustees, but a committee that includes faculty members, students and staff, as well as trustees, conducts most searches. And these days, committees typically rely on search firms to build a candidate pool, handle logistics, arrange interviews and help vet the finalists.

Some of the assumptions and practices underlying presidential searches, in our judgment, are problematic in the current environment. We’d like to highlight those assumptions and practices here and to encourage institutions of higher education to think beyond the model for presidential searches they are currently using.

The pool. Roughly 90 percent of college and university presidents come from academia. Sitting presidents, of course, are the most desirable candidates, but it is often difficult to lure them away from their current institution. Provosts are often regarded as the next best option, but there can be a mismatch between their credentials and the skills essential to a successful presidency.

Provosts manage budgets, faculty and staff members, but they often lack experience with fundraising, enrollment management, communications and marketing, government relations, and other aspects of the president’s job. Most important, their role does not offer many opportunities to articulate a vision for the institution and communicate it effectively to internal and external constituencies. Deans of colleges and professional schools, who often have more experience with fundraising, enrollment management and student affairs, may be at least as well prepared to be college presidents as provosts.

Search committees should also broaden the pool by identifying individuals who are not career academics. As state and federal funding has become increasingly important, some institutions have chosen politicians as their presidents. We recommend that well before a search begins, committees study the presidencies of, for example, Donna Shalala (University of Miami), Mitch Daniels (Purdue University), David Boren (University of Oklahoma), Janet Napolitano (University of California), Bob Kerry (New School) and Ben Sasse (University of Florida). Did they exhibit, or lack, a deep understanding of core values in higher education, including respect for academic freedom and an appreciation of basic as well as applied research? Did students and faculty members who did not share their political views view them with suspicion, or was that not at all a problem? How did such presidents and their institutions fare during their tenure?

The committee. In developing the position description, most committees consider the challenges a new president will likely face and the qualities the community seeks in a new leader. Most search committee members, however, have little understanding of what a college president does. Board members get a 30,000-foot view of the president’s role but see little of the leader’s day-to-day work. Faculty members and students may see the president more often, but they know little about budgets, fundraising, administration, endowment management or government, alumni and community relations.

We suggest that before committees begin their search, they have more extensive, detailed and candid conversations with the outgoing president and presidents of peer institutions about the responsibilities and challenges of the role. Questions that should be asked but seldom are might include: How do presidents allocate their time? What does a typical day or week look like? How important are what might be seen as small things, such as remembering names, knowing how to read a room or when and how to tell a joke? Search committees should also get a sense of the outgoing president’s meetings, meals and travel schedule; the number of talks, formal and informal, the president gave; the subjects of those remarks and who prepared them; and the volume of emails and how responses were handled.

The search firm. Search firms’ expertise and connections can prove invaluable, but the firms get paid only when a candidate is hired and may use their monopoly on information to overestimate strengths and downplay weaknesses. This issue can be mitigated if search committees take greater responsibility for checking references.

The search: Open, closed or hybrid? Faculty, students and staff generally favor, and some public institutions require, an open search in which candidates are identified to the community early in the process. Transparency may “reassure people who are frequently paranoid that something untoward is not happening behind their back,” but many institutions are convinced it will eliminate candidates reluctant to undermine their standing at their home institution. Search firms also favor closed searches, in which finalists—or a single finalist—are not announced until the end of the process. This approach makes the search firm’s job easier but limits community input—and scrutiny, which might well identify problems that would otherwise be overlooked.

We favor a hybrid search, in which finalists meet with a small but representative group of faculty, students and staff who agree to keep the meetings confidential. Two or at most three finalists should be asked to make formal presentations on an issue facing higher education and then respond to a broad array of questions about their experience, values and leadership style. Finalists who decide not to risk even this limited breach of secrecy should be dropped from consideration.

References. In addition to criminal background checks and, increasingly, plagiarism screens, reference checks are an essential part of the process. But the search firm often principally or exclusively handles those reference checks and screens. Committee members—and perhaps a few senior administrators and faculty who are not committee members—should be encouraged to make calls themselves, including to individuals not listed as references by the finalists. That will give the committee a broader and more candid sense of how the candidates are viewed by those who know them best.

As the glut of presidential openings suggests, now may be the toughest time ever to be a college or university president. Given the challenges they face, higher education institutions need to recruit strong leaders who can successfully lead them through those challenges over the long term. Institutions cannot afford a failed search or even one that yields a second-rate outcome. It will take more thought and work, but the results will be worth it. As legendary basketball coach John Wooden so aptly put it, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”