College Uncovered: The Politics of the College Presidency

Presidents of colleges and universities serve for less than six years on average. For women and people of color, that tenure is even shorter – a full year shorter. So what’s going on?

College presidents are under fire for what they say about issues such as systemic racism, abortion access and war in the Middle East, and what they do — or don’t do — about campus protests.

Why would anyone want to be a college president? And does it even matter to a student or a parent who the college president is?

What questions should students and their families be asking of colleges’ top brass?

We talk to former Colorado College President Song Richardson, who left her dream job because she wanted to speak freely about hot-button issues, and the current and former presidents of Macalester College, Suzanne Rivera and Brian Rosenberg, to learn more about the challenges and pitfalls of life at the top of the academic ladder.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

[Jon] This is College Uncovered . I’m Jon Marcus.

[Kirk] And I’m Kirk Carapezza.

As a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, Song Richardson says she noticed her graduate students were struggling to discuss their disagreements in class, a skill she thought somebody should have taught them already.

[Song Richardson] And I wanted to start instilling those values of having courageous conversations earlier in their educational lifecycle. And that meant going to a college.

[Kirk] So when Colorado College, a liberal arts school committed to combating racial and religious discrimination, strongly recruited her for its top job, she took it an honor.

[Song Richardson] I felt like it was a great fit in terms of our values and the mission of the school.

[Kirk] Richardson is a Harvard-educated civil rights attorney. She comes from a military family and grew up on army bases across the country. She’s the daughter of a Black father and Korean mother.

[Emcee] Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present to you Song Richardson, the 14th president of Colorado College.

[Kirk] In 2021 she became the first woman of color to lead the private college, a point she touched on in her inaugural address.

[Song Richardson] Colorado College is a place that is willing to take bold action. A place that’s willing to take courageous action to ignite our students’ potential in order to create a more just world. This is what we do. This is what drives us. And I am here because this is what drives me, too.

[Jon] But that optimism and ambition — it didn’t last long, Kirk. Richardson says outside events left her feeling limited by the restrictions of the job. Events like the Supreme Court rulings on race-conscious admission and reproductive rights, and female Ivy League presidents called to testify before Congress. She wanted the freedom to speak out.

[Song Richardson] These things were core to my identity as a faculty member. And as those debates started to grow across the country. I felt compelled to speak because these are the things that motivated my entire career as a scholar.

[Jon] So three years after she started her dream job, Richardson quit.

[Kirk] This is College Uncovered , from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work.

I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. …

[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report.

Colleges don’t want you to know what’s really going on. So GBH, …

[Kirk] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to break it all down.

In this election season, we’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and what students and their parents can do to navigate these choppy waters.

Today on the show: The Politics of the College Presidency.

You might be surprised to learn the average college president serves only four six years, Jon.

[Jon] Actually, I’m surprised that it isn’t even shorter, given how hard it is.

[Kirk] And for women and leaders of color like Song Richardson, it’s even less — a full year less.

Even though women now outnumber men among students in college, men outnumber women as college presidents by two to one, and nearly three quarters of presidents are white.

So what’s going on?

[Suzanne Rivera] I think the traditions of racism and sexism in our country make it really difficult to lead in a visible role when you don’t present in a traditional way.

[Kirk] Suzanne Rivera is the first woman of color to lead Macalester College in Minnesota. She saw herself as sort of an outsider candidate for becoming president of a college.

[Suzanne Rivera] And breaking barriers requires having the tenacity and resilience to withstand unfair criticisms or criticisms that are personal and not really about the work we do. But I can understand why people in these roles who have to field criticism that sometimes comes in the form of vulgar language, threatening language, fear about their personal safety might decide that this isn’t the right job for them.

[Kirk] And Rivera says that has consequences for turnover rates and campus culture. Before taking the helm at Macalester, Rivera participated in a presidents-in-residence program at Harvard — a kind of boot camp for new college presidents.

[Suzanne Rivera] A few of us developed really close friendships that I rely on. These are my most trusted advisers outside of the institution.

[Kirk] What percentage of your class of presidents are now gone?

[Suzanne Rivera] Gosh, I haven’t done the math, but I think at least a third are no longer sitting presidents from our version of the boot camp. And from what I hear when I go to professional meetings, something like a third of presidencies are open or have an interim serving right now. So there’s been a lot of volatility.

[Kirk] Rivera says one of the major reasons for that volatility is that the job itself has gotten more demanding.

[Suzanne Rivera] It’s more in the public eye than it used to be. I think social media has really ramped up the extent to which serving as a college or university president makes you more like an elected official than perhaps the job previously was.

[Jon] And who wants to feel like an elected official these days?

[Kirk] Yeah. College presidents are dealing with the same political polarization as everybody else who’s in the public eye.

[Suzanne Rivera] So when people disagree with the decisions a college or university president makes, the discourse has become really impolite at times. And I think lots of sitting presidents have made the assessment that as much as they love higher education and love leading their institutions, the amount of abuse might be more than they’re prepared to take.

[Jon] Let’s just look at the Ivy League, for example, Kirk. Last year, six out of eight Ivy League presidents were women. Then Gaza related protests shook their campuses, putting all of them in the hot seat.

[Chair of committee] Good morning. The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order.

[Jon] Suddenly they were called before a congressional committee looking at claims of anti-semitism on campus. This kind of aggressive questioning of then-Harvard President Claudine Gay by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik went viral. Here’s the moment that would forever shake American higher education.

[Elise Stefanik] Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

[Claudine Gay] It can be, depending on the context.

[Elise Stefanik] What’s the context?

[Claudine Gay] Targeted at an individual. Targeted at an individual.

[Elise Stefanik] It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign.

[Kirk] Gay did resign, a month after that testimony. Now, it’s complicated — she was also facing plagiarism allegations, which she said were politically motivated. An internal investigation found she did, in fact, use some material without credit. Her time in office lasted just six months and two days. Harvard’s first Black woman president was also its shortest serving. Liz Magill at Penn and Minouche Shafik at Columbia also resigned under intense pressure.

[Jon] And, you know, while the Ivy League takes up a lot of the oxygen and media spotlight, there’s pressure on college presidents everywhere. Presidents of all kinds of institutions are under fire for what they say about broader political issues such as systemic racism, abortion access, the war 5,000 miles away in Gaza and especially how they handle campus protests.

[Kirk] Yet critics say it’s the presidents who are making the job more political by being so outspoken about controversial topics, rather than focusing on the central missions of their schools.

[Jon] Add the pandemic and enrollment challenges and near-constant battles with state lawmakers over funding and today, the college presidency is as political as it is academic.

[Kirk] Jon, in reporting this episode, I asked one former community college president why she left the job early, and once she stopped laughing, she provided this list of why the job was so impossible.

One, funding and enrollment declining every year.

Two, faculty increasingly unhappy and worried about their jobs and resisting needed changes.

And three, the growing public questions about the value of college degrees.

It’s all a lot, but the politics of being a college president aren’t necessarily new. The job’s just gotten more intense.

[Brian Rosenberg] There have always been political dimensions to it.

[Jon] Brian Rosenberg is a visiting fellow at Harvard and author of the book ‘Whatever it Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.’ What has changed, he says, is that in recent years the college presidency has become not just more political but nearly impossible at certain schools.

[Brian Rosenberg] So no one really is paying a lot of attention to the politics of the presidents of community colleges or regional public colleges or small rural liberal arts colleges. And the reality is, that’s where most students go. We’re really talking for the most part about wealthy selective institutions.

[Jon] Rosenberg isn’t saying that all of that criticism is fair or justified, but he does say leaders at those highly selective schools do need to take some responsibility.

[Brian Rosenberg] I think these institutions have over the last couple of decades leaned pretty heavily, maybe too heavily, into social issues, and that’s provoked a backlash.

[Jon] Rosenberg says colleges and universities have made themselves easy targets for conservatives like J.D. Vance.

[J.D. Vance] The professors are the enemy.

[Jon] That was Vance speaking when he was running for Senate in Ohio. Here’s Brian Rosenberg again.

[Brian Rosenberg] And so you began to see the pushback against DEI, critical race theory, things like that. And then you began to see all the action in legislatures, mostly in the South and Midwest.

[Sound of protest]

[Jon] And Rosenberg says Oct. 7 and the subsequent protests over the fighting in the Middle East further divided these selective college campuses.

[Brian Rosenberg] What was so distinctive about that event and what followed was that it was the first event that I could recall that really divided the progressive culture on campuses. There tended to be a consensus around most of them. Now there was a split, and that provoked a lot of political pushback, both on campus and off campus.

[Sound of protest]

[Kirk] Even in peacetime, college presidents have to balance the demands of students and their parents, faculty and staff, boards and alumni.

Ted Mitchell is head of the American Council on Education and a former college president himself. He says each of those stakeholders expects to have a voice and sometimes even a vote in what happens on campus.

[Ted Mitchell] Presidents are on edge all the time. It’s in the best of times like tap-dancing on a surfboard in the middle of a storm. And I think the storms are just getting more rugged.

[Kirk] Here’s Suzanne Rivera again, the president of Macalester College. She takes that tap-dancing analogy one step further.

[Suzanne Rivera] Some days it feels like that. Other days it feels like a pesky mosquito that you need to swat in order to do the important work.

[Jon] So given all these challenges, why on earth would anyone want to be a college president today? Lynn Pasquerella is the former president of Mount Holyoke College and the current president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. She says those who take the role are often called to it ….

[Lynn Pasquerella] … because they are committed to thriving institutions. They haven’t aspired to become college presidents, but they’re good at what they do. And so they’re asked to take on increasing leadership roles.

[Jon] When she began her career in academia in the 1980s, Pasquerella says there was still the idea that a president could be an intellectual leader who made a difference in society.

[Lynn Pasquerella] And I think that’s almost completely disappeared in the way that we’ve moved away from the notion of higher education as a public good to viewing it as a private commodity — tuition in exchange for jobs. There’s now a sense that presidents are there to raise money, and that’s the job.

[Jon] Now, let’s pause here for a moment, Kirk, and point out that college presidents are very well paid for doing that job. The average pay for private college presidents is just under $1 million a year.

[Kirk] That’s on average?

[Jon] Yes, on average. And that’s more than double what it was 10 years ago, even accounting for inflation. Eighty of them make more than $1 million a year. So do 19 public university presidents. Most of them also get houses provided or housing subsidies, cars, club memberships and other perks.

[Kirk] Never underestimate the power of the perks, Jon.

[Jon] Yeah, or the promise of job security, Kirk. Even after they resign, college presidents typically get to keep their jobs on the faculty.

[Kirk] Nice work if you can get it.

[Jon] I know. Imagine if a private-sector CEO got fired or stepped down, but still had a job with the company.

[Kirk] So what does all this palace intrigue mean for you? I mean, does it really matter who your college president is? We wanted to find out whether students even know. So I went over to Commonwealth Avenue here in Boston to pose that question to some students at Boston University. Now, for context, we should say it was days before Melissa Gilliam, the first Black and first female president at New England’s largest private university, was to be inaugurated.

[Andrew Steele] My name’s Andrew Steele. I am getting my master’s in music and voice performance.

[Kirk] Do you know who the president is, of BU?

[Andrew Steele] I think she just got anointed or something. I saw videos about it. I don’t know.

[Kirk] Does it matter who the president is?

[Andrew Steele] Hmm. That’s a great question. I don’t really know what they do, but it seems like it matters. I just, I don’t know.

[Kirk] Here’s seniors Kaitlyn Amado and Jahiem Jones.

So who’s the president of the college?

[Jahiem Jones] Dr. Melissa Gilliam.

[Kirk] Nice. You’re the first one to get it.

[Kaitlyn Amado] I was, like, I was going to say, I know her face. I’m so bad with names, though.

[Kirk] You knew her by name. Does it matter who the president is?

[Jahiem Jones] I think so. Yeah.

[Kirk] Why?

[Jahiem Jones] I think there’s a there’s a culture and a dynamic, and I think it requires someone who is really multifaceted and diverse.

[Kirk] And you said yes emphatically.

[Kaitlyn Amado] Yeah, because I feel like representation matters a lot. Especially because I feel like applying to BU, I was looking at the president and I was, like, it matters to me when they’re introducing their university and their values, and you could tell how she presents herself.

[Kirk] Tim McCorry, Fynn Buesnel and George Audi are all studying computer science at BU, and they aren’t so sure the university’s leadership matters to their day-to-day life on campus.

[Tim McCorry] I don’t think we have really too much interaction with the president now.

[George Audi] I still feel like it’s important to have a good president, though. I don’t know what constitutes a good president for us, but it’s important.

[Kirk] What do you think makes a good president?

[Tim McCorry] I mean, there’s just so few points of interaction. Like, we get an email every couple of weeks and maybe you see a clip on Instagram.

[Kirk] We also asked higher ed experts the same question. And surprisingly, we got a similar answer. If I’m a student and — don’t take this personally — does it matter who my president is?

[Brian Rosenberg] I don’t take it personally at all.

[Kirk] Brian Rosenberg is the former president of Macalester College, and he admits it really depends on the kind of institution.

[Brian Rosenberg] At the institution where I’m teaching right now, Harvard University, the simple answer is no. I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I probably could not name the president when I was a student. It makes a little bit more difference at smaller institutions, at institutions that are financially challenged, because the president does have the ability to create a particular culture on campus.

[Jon] Besides keeping the lights on, Suzanne Rivera, the current president of Macalester, agrees that at smaller colleges, the president plays a more visible role.

[Suzanne Rivera] I think at small, independent liberal arts college where I know the students by their first name and I know what their extracurriculars are and I can compliment them on their performance in the soccer game on Friday night when I see them on campus Monday morning, then it really does matter who your college president is.

[Kirk] Former Colorado College President Song Richardson says leadership always matters no matter the size of the school.

[Song Richardson] Everything from do you see yourself in the president of the institution? I think that’s an important part for students. How the president is able to engage with leaders across the campus to create an environment where people feel valued.

[Kirk] For example, Richardson made headlines by pulling Colorado College out of the U.S. News rankings, a move she says was driven by the school’s core mission.

[Song Richardson] Continuing to participate in U.S. News and World Report was inconsistent with the values of equity and intellectual engagement and academic rigor.

[Kirk] Richardson’s decision sparked intense backlash, especially from alumni who questioned her character and her credentials.

[Song Richardson] So it was, ‘You have a woke president. You have a president who I don’t believe went to Harvard.’

[Kirk] Richardson says she had faced sexism and racism before, so she understood that everything she did or said would be filtered through that lens.

[Song Richardson] People began to paint me as someone who cared only about equity issues and not about the other issues that were important in higher ed at the time.

[Kirk] Then when the Dobbs decision leaked, signaling restrictions on abortion rights, Richardson felt compelled to speak out.

[Song Richardson] At that point, as president, I was hoping that we could live in a world where I could speak in my voice as an individual, both as president and share my opinions, and that others would also feel free to disagree with me.

[Kirk] She quickly realized, though, that her speaking out made conservative students feel alienated.

[Song Richardson] Because their leader is expressing an opinion that they don’t agree with. And that made me start to wonder, what is the role of the president and when and how should I speak about controversial issues when I feel like my role is to be the voice box for the institution and that represents everyone?

[Kirk] After you received that feedback, you continued to speak out, though. Did that pull you back at all?

[Song Richardson] So I have to share, Kirk, that one of the things that my leadership team will always say to me is that Song has gone off script. Because I am someone who loves to speak my mind. That’s just who I am. And so what it caused me to do was to pause a little bit before speaking.

[Kirk] When did you realize you just couldn’t stay in the position anymore?

[Song Richardson] It was an evolution. It was in my third year of the presidency that I started to realize that the compromise I had to make of speaking freely and robustly about how I felt about the issues that were happening across the country was constrained because of my role as president. It felt like my mouth was taped shut.

[Kirk] Eventually, she says, the constraints of the role — not sexism or racism — led her to step down and return to teaching and lecturing at UC Irvine.

[Song Richardson, in class] It is such a pleasure to be here today to speak with all of you on the day before Constitution Day. I want to focus on the epidemic — I would call it an epidemic — of racial violence that’s taking place across the country. And the continued and relentless killings of young Black men and women at the hands of the police are disturbing but unfortunately, unsurprising.

[Song Richardson] I had to live my values, Kirk, and that’s really what this is about. This was a decision about leaving one type of leadership position because I couldn’t be my full, authentic self. That’s really what it is.

[Jon] So what does all of this leadership turnover mean for students, for you? Well, Brian Rosenberg says frequent changes in leadership hurt stability and delay progress on strategic planning or long-term plans.

[Brian Rosenberg] And if you’re continually changing your leadership, essentially that process tends to start all over again. And so you end up in this endless cycle of restarting, planning and strategic efforts that really never gets beyond the planning stage.

[Kirk] So in this tumultuous environment, with so much volatility, what should prospective students and parents ask about college leadership?

[Song Richardson] How do they think about the learning environment?

[Kirk] Here’s Song Richardson again.

[Song Richardson] Is this a president and leaders who will support difficult and uncomfortable conversations in the classroom. Or is this a leader and a leadership team that will cave to pressure from groups to shut down conversation?

[Kirk] Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester.

[Brian Rosenberg] You know, when you choose a college as a student or as a parent, you don’t really care a lot about the fact that they have a giant medical center. And unless you’re an intercollegiate athlete, you don’t care a lot about what the Division 1 football facilities look like. You want to know whether your child or you are going to get an education, get an opportunity to have a job. And so the question I would ask is where on your list of priorities does undergraduate education actually rank? Is it 10th? Is it fifth? Is it first? That, to me, is the most important question.

[Kirk] Suzanne Rivera, the current president of Macalester, says the most important thing is how college presidents keep the focus on the success of student.

[Suzanne Rivera] One of the most fun things I get to do during orientation week is give a pep talk to the parents as they’re getting ready to depart our campus and drop their children off.

[Suzanne Rivera, at orientation] We may be living through hard times now, but we’re not doing so alone. We’re doing it in communities. So we owe it to each other to be our best selves, especially when it’s hard. Because if this community is to be the inclusive place to live and grow that we all want, then it also needs to be a place where people are free to speak, free to learn and make mistakes, and free to be themselves.

[Suzanne Rivera] And I thank them for trusting us with the responsibility to educate their children. But I also say to them that this is a really exciting time in their child’s life and that it’s a privilege for me to get to walk alongside their student as they figure out what kind of adult they’re going to be.

[Kirk] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.

[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

[Kirk] … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.

Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.

Ellen London is executive producer.

Production Assistance from Diane Adame.

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman.

Project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robbins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

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