Crisis of Confidence

3 current and former college presidents discuss the recent spate of failures at the top

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By PAUL FAIN

From the firestorm over Lawrence H. Summers at Harvard University to the ouster of Jesus Carreon, chancellor of the Dallas County Community College District, after clashes with faculty members, this year has featured an unusual number of presidential meltdowns. Although the drama has often hinged on faculty members' no-confidence votes, several college presidents have also tussled with governing boards or become ensnared in spending scandals and legal troubles.

The Chronicle asked three higher-education veterans why college presidents seem to be having a rough year. The following was excerpted from interviews with John A. DiBiaggio, a consultant with Academic Search Consultation Service, a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Massachusetts, and the former president of Tufts University, Michigan State University, and the University of Connecticut; Glenn DuBois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System, who formerly led community-college systems in New York and New Hampshire; and Stephen J. Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University since 1988, who recently announced that he will step down next year.

It seems like more college presidents than usual have had problems this year. What's going on?

Mr. Trachtenberg: It does appear that way to me, too. But I never know with these things whether it's appearance or there's empirical data ... There does seem to be a lot of media attention on presidencies either failing or retiring. Now the second could be the effect of simply a cycle going on. And you wait 10 years and you see it again.

Mr. DiBiaggio: It doesn't seem to be so, to me at least. These things have occurred occasionally throughout the last several years. It's probably been amplified by the situation at Harvard. It gets so much visibility. And I think that probably brings about more focus than would normally occur.

Can a failed presidency at one university influence unrest at another campus?

Mr. Trachtenberg: Sometimes stuff happens. So there's no connection between Cornell, where the president has a falling out with the Board of Trustees and steps down after two years, and Case Western Reserve, where the president has a falling out with the faculty and steps down after four years. The one that really worries me is Harvard ... what happens there is a litmus for the rest of higher education. And therefore, it colors all decisions made on campuses from coast to coast.

Has the job of college president changed in recent years? What role has that played?

Mr. DiBiaggio: There is no question that the job has become more demanding, and there is greater accountability expected than what was perhaps once the case. The days are gone when university presidents used to go off for the summer, to Europe or somewhere. Now it's not only a 12-month-a-year job, it's a 24/7 job. And quite frankly, the pressures are far, far greater than they once were.

Mr. DuBois: The expectations are increasing. The resources are strained. The need to innovate, to raise nontax revenue, to develop partnerships, to respond to unmet community needs is greater and greater and greater. So the jobs are getting tougher. Look at just the community-college presidency: Ten years ago fund raising was at best an optional activity, or some just chose not to even get involved in it. Today you cannot be an effective college president without those skills.

Mr. Trachtenberg: Everybody would agree traveling is harder than it used to be. And if you're going to raise money you're going to have to be on the road a lot, and it takes more out of you than it used to. Your domestic constituents — students and neighbors — are less forgiving when they don't see you for a while. So on the one hand they smack you for not getting on the road and raising money, and on the other hand if you're on the road they smack you for not being around. ... It's very hard. If you're out there raising money, you're not engaged in the politics of the campus. If you're engaged in the politics, you're not doing something else.

Are new presidents more prone to missteps?

Mr. DiBiaggio: A new president is well advised to spend the first year just learning the culture and assessing the people, and the second year working with the faculty and with the trustees and with others in developing some kind of a strategic plan and then spending the rest of his or her time there attempting to carry that out.

Mr. DuBois: New leaders can quickly get into trouble. Particularly if they come into the role, they haven't built up a support base, and they make a couple of mistakes. The new presidents often take on too much, they implement a change agenda without having built up their support base, they have done very little leading with their ears, and they create relationship problems.

I've never heard anybody complain about new presidents in trouble over the goals. It's always over the methods and the relationships — the lack of them. The common mistakes I see that the seasoned ones make — and they don't make many — but when they do it's usually a major mistake about money. Or they've grown to the place in their career where they exempt themselves from all the rules. And they've wrapped the organization around their own ego needs. Ultimately that will result probably in a termination.

Can college presidents still speak out on touchy issues?

Mr. Trachtenberg: I was on a panel the other day in which I argued that whenever you become a university president you surrender a certain amount of your First Amendment rights. And inevitably, whether you say 'I'm saying this in my private capacity' or not, people don't hear that, and they assume that the university stands behind it.

Every time there's a national problem — make it grade inflation, make it affirmative action, make it alcohol, make it sports and poor [President] Brodhead at Duke — it always comes down to [creating] a national commission; they look into the problem, they analyze the problem, and then they say: What we need is for the presidents to step forward and take more responsibility for this. I'm thinking to myself, The poor presidents only have 24-hour days like everybody else. They look around and they need to pin this tail on some donkey. And the campus donkey turns out to be the president.

I don't have any fantasies. I get paid very well by normal standards. On the other hand, I've been doing this for 30 years. I've never had a sabbatical. I work 11 and a half months a year. I work six days a week. Nobody calls professors at 4 in the morning to say there's a gas leak in their dormitory or that the trains blew up in Madrid, and 'Did we have any GW students in Spain at the time?'

What are common factors that can lead to breakdowns in the relationship between presidents and faculty members?

Mr. Trachtenberg: Often the presidents in the past came from the faculty, and were chosen because of their academic accomplishments rather than for their managerial skills. Again, the job wasn't so complex, and it was really more to be a symbol of the institution than it was to be someone who had to be concerned about financial and other managerial issues. As [faculty members] became less committed to the institution at which they served and more to their discipline, they felt much more at ease about just leaving.

That changed the relationship between the president, who was originally the first among peers, to someone who was supposed to take care of the needs of the faculty and to make certain they had everything they needed to do their job well, rather than being someone that they would naturally turn to for advice and counsel.

A president has a very clear need to develop a relationship with the faculty, a level of trust, and a collegiality where they have some respect for that individual, and are willing to accept decisions that are made even when they take some exception to them. So what you have to do is you have to succeed by assuasion rather than by direction.

Mr. DuBois: Where I see presidents getting into trouble, it's generally not over the goals. It's how those goals are implemented and how they're being carried out. It's often a matter of style.

Has tension between presidents and faculty members gotten worse lately?

Mr. Trachtenberg: In all the 38 years I've been in universities, there's been this Marxist division between management and workers. It's a classic historic tradition. It's interesting: The minute I announced two months ago that I was stepping down at the end of the year, faculty members who've been breaking my bones for 18 years came up and thanked me for what a wonderful job I had done and that they hoped I had a good year next year, and they were as huggy as can be.

There is not enough intergroup empathy. I'm willing to carry my burden, so it may be that administrators are not as deep down empathetic and sympathetic to faculty as they need to be. But it's surely true...that faculty do not understand what it means to be a president.

Has the dynamic between presidents and governing boards changed? Has this shift helped to create failed presidencies?

Mr. DiBiaggio: There's been more and more engagement of boards in day-to-day operational matters, in what are really administrative decisions — managerial issues that really I think go beyond the normal responsibilities of boards, at least as I perceive it. They are policy-making bodies.

And indeed, those policies have to be followed once they've been articulated by a board, once a policy has been approved. But when they start to second-guess decisions as to personnel, for instance, or the specific use of resources, or even the design of buildings on the campus, then I think they've gone beyond the scope of their responsibilities.

Mr. Trachtenberg: There's no question. An awful lot of your board members are corporate. They bring the Sarbanes-Oxley perspective to the university meetings. The corporate experiences help to inform their thinking. They hold the presidents and the universities to a different standard. They are more demanding. They seek greater accountability. They seek greater transparency. They don't like everything they see.

They don't understand or at least are not sympathetic to a lot of the unspoken conventions and compromises that we live with in a university setting — the blind eye that we turn to the unproductive faculty member. And so they put pressure on presidents, which I think then flavors the relationship between presidents and deans, and vice presidents and faculty.

How can boards help presidents succeed?

Mr. DuBois: I think boards are getting more involved on the accountability agenda, as they should. And I think effective CEO's, one of the variables that they can point to to explain their effectiveness and their role, is their relationship with the board. And the good ones know how to develop that relationship and sustain it.

If you show me a micromanaging board, the first thing I will try to look for is the behavior of the CEO. I wouldn't be surprised if I found an ineffective CEO who invites the board into matters that they shouldn't be invited into, or cannot carry out or lead the institution, so board members who are talented volunteers, who have a passion for the mission, feel out of a sense of duty to get involved in what I would call operational, week-to-week, month-to-month, day-to-day kinds of decisions.

Mr. DiBiaggio: [Trustees] are supposed to be spokespersons for the institution; they're supposed to be able to articulate its mission and to gain support for the institution, whether that's from the state or whether it's from contributions from individuals. It's a tripartite kind of a function, and done well it works very, very well.

Many trustees are not comfortable in engaging in dialogue with the political leadership of the state or even helping in generating support from individuals and others. So they fall into the thing that's the easiest for them to get at, which is day-to-day management issues. And that's unfortunate, because that makes the job so much harder.