What Can a University President Do?
The sudden but not entirely surprising resignation last week of Columbia University President Manouche Shafik belies a bit of conventional wisdom that goes like this: If you're getting criticized from people on both sides of a given controversy, that means you're striking the right balance between their competing demands. Shafik was bitterly criticized by conservatives and others who thought she was under-reacting to antisemitism on the Columbia campus by insufficiently enforcing rules against people in encampments and in other ways demonstrating against Israel's war in Gaza. She was also bitterly criticized by the demonstrators and others after she called the police onto campus to make arrests.
Moderation by threading the needle between under-reacting and over-reacting? Hardly. It is possible to under-react and then over-correct or simply to handle a situation badly, full stop.
Depending on how one counts, the presidents of either three Ivy League universities (U Penn, Harvard, and Columbia) or four such presidents (those three plus Cornell) have now seen their presidencies ended as a result of unhappiness with their handling of campus unrest over Gaza. Cornell is open to debate. President Martha Pollack announced her resignation in May, effective at the beginning of July. Her statement said that the decision was hers, and I am sure that's true. (I gave a presentation to the Cornell Board of Trustees last spring, during which it was clear to me that the Board had confidence in President Pollack.) But to all outward appearances, President Shafik likewise was not pressured to resign by Columbia's Trustees. However, in each case (and especially at Columbia), it is hard to believe that the difficulty of being a university president at this historical moment did not play a substantial role in the decision to resign.
Can anybody lead a major university these days without succumbing to the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't phenomenon? The short answer is probably yes, but it's not a pretty picture. Under pressure from litigation (like the case that a federal district judge recently allowed to proceed against Harvard) and the Department of Education (which has extracted agreements from various universities, including this one from the University of Michigan), some universities will simply choose one horn of the dilemma. They will insist on strict enforcement of time, place, and manner rules, while accepting a broad definition of impermissible hostile environment harassment under Title VI. They will, in short, crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters. That will result in criticism by students, faculty, and some in the press, but will mostly avoid legal liability or the loss of funding from donors and the government (although the Department of Education almost never actually withholds federal funds).
Even so, it cannot be a pleasant job to run a well-funded university that stays out of legal trouble if a great many of your faculty and students regard you as a tyrant. And so it would not surprise me if, in the next year or two, we see additional resignations, even by presidents who are not being forced out, simply because they conclude that whatever additional money, power, and prestige come with being a university president, life is much much better as a scholar and teacher.
In other words, being a university president these days sounds quite a bit like the description of being the mayor of Baltimore in The Wire: each constituency you must serve brings you a giant bowl of shit each day, and your job is to eat them all.
I suspect that some people who become university presidents do so for some combination of bad reasons, including ego, greed, and a thirst for power (of a certain sort). There are also good reasons to want to do the job, including service to an academic community and, in at least some cases, an interest in implementing a distinctive vision of higher education. Yet even someone with a sufficiently thick skin to handle the slings and arrows that come their way as a university president will likely find that nearly all of their time that is not scheduled for the endless series of meetings and ceremonial events is now taken up with crisis management.
A visionary university president in constant meetings with campus security officers and listening sessions with aggrieved students and faculty, on the phone trying to mollify alumni, or spending days in futile preparation for testifying before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee a House committee or subcommittee meeting at which they will be redbaited interrogated by Elise Stefanik will have little time left to think about, much less implement, bold new ideas.
At a well-run university, students, faculty, and other administrators besides the president can produce innovations, so the distraction of constantly putting out fires does not stall all progress. However, while I believe strongly in faculty governance in higher education, that is primarily as a matter of setting priorities (including through decisions about faculty hiring). A distracted university president will not be able to devote the necessary time or attention to implementing proposals that bubble up from below.
As students begin to return to college campuses around the country, we can brace for controversy and potential conflict. We should not expect substantial progress on the sorts of issues that ought to be at the top of the agenda: affordability; diversity in the wake of last year's affirmative action decision in the Harvard case; and defending academic freedom against assault by the likes of Ron DeSantis.