Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis

By Eric J. Gertler

The Wall Street Journal

August 15, 2024

Will the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik be a turning point for higher education? Her tenure, as well as those of Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, suggests that some of these elite universities are selecting the wrong people for the top job.

Some have shown promise in dealing with the immediate challenges. Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier and Dartmouth’s Sian Beilock have been proactive in understanding the need to provide students with clear guidelines balancing the need for free speech and safety.

But the job of a university president has dimensions that go far beyond dealing with this sort of crisis. Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees and community members.

Today’s universities are multibillion-dollar enterprises that are far more complex than they were a generation ago. Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members. It operates more than a dozen graduate schools, manages an endowment of more than $50 billion, and has a large and growing real-estate footprint in Cambridge, Mass. It is making massive investments in world-class research facilities in emerging and complex scientific disciplines.

Columbia and New York University are two of their city’s largest landowners. Many state schools are the centers of regional development hubs, and smaller schools, even community colleges, have become engines of growth in every state.

Oversight of such complex organizations requires the skills akin to a Fortune 1000 CEO. The academic mission is crucial, but university presidents spend much of their time on nonacademic matters—fundraising, budget management, real-estate development, hiring and firing, public-relations crises, managing boards, and sensitive community relations—for which they have had little previous experience.

While some provosts and deans have the skills to excel as university presidents, others don’t. Trustees have a responsibility to expand the recruiting pool for university presidents. Successful CEOs have experience in running a playbook for different situations and are “battle tested.” When dealing with crisis, they can rely on previous experiences that many current university leaders lack.

Trustees should also consider leaders from the military, political and nonprofit worlds. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia in 1948, he lacked the academic credentials of a typical university president. But he had the foresight and skills to handle a university environment and its concomitant challenges.

More recently, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels reenergized Purdue University with innovative thinking and confident leadership. Michael Crow, an academic innovator, has taken advantage of his unconventional experience as an adviser to government agencies and a designer of knowledge enterprises to remake Arizona State University. Shirley Jackson’s experience at Bell Labs and as a White House adviser enhanced her tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic.

Trustees must recognize that their roles are no longer simply titular, broaden their search for leaders, and be bold enough to make tough decisions when they realize they have selected the wrong person for the job.

Mr. Gertler is executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News & World Report.