Are you presidential material? With stiff competition, officials say finding the right mix of 'passion and mission' has made the presidential search process more complicated

Black Issues in Higher Education, Oct 21, 2004 by Kendra Hamilton

Mix together a small army of stakeholders, add a paper trail long enough to rival the feats of Lewis and Clark, season with enough anxiety to keep the campus counseling professionals busy for a semester or two and you have a recipe for the presidential search I one of the most practically and psychologically fraught processes that the modern campus faces.

Talk to higher education observers around the country and just about everyone can point to spectacular examples of presidential searches gone wrong --searches, that is, that failed to produce matches. But ask those same experts about those elusive qualities that combine to produce a "fit" between campus and candidate, and you're likely to get only rueful sighs.

"If I knew the answer to that, I'd be making all kinds of money," says Bill Hawkins, president and chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based The Hawkins Co., an executive search firm with 20 years of experience in the business of serving up top candidates for corporate, governmental and educational clients.

But he adds: "It's tough a tough process and a difficult environment. The array of issues is simply mind-boggling." Hawkins proceeds to list a few: "The low tolerance of stakeholders, particularly state governments who have to answer to voters saying we want higher levels of accountability; accreditation problems; dwindling resources; and (for HBCUs) the competition for the best and brightest students."

In such an environment, it takes a lot for a candidate to rise to the top, says Hawkins--and very little for that person to fall from grace once he or she has gotten the job. And yet there's no shortage of people stepping forward to enter the lists: people with a self-described "passion and mission" to lead an educational institution.

ONE PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY

There's what one might call the "traditional" path to the presidency. Most in higher education would describe it as a slow but steady climb through the ranks. The first step involves obtaining a "union card," as one waggish Web manual for presidential aspirants describes it, meaning the Ph.D.

There are, of course, presidents who don't have one, particularly as colleges and universities tap business professionals and politicians for their fund-raising and "friend-raising" skills--but it's probably still safe to say that, while the paradigm may be shifting, the vast majority of presidents today have held deanships and vice presidencies at various levels, typically ending with a chief academic or chief finance position.

Dr. Rodney Smith describes just such a climb up the ladder at Hampton University as he prepared himself for his first presidency. In less than a decade, from 1992 to 2001, Smith rose from director of Hampton's academic support unit to a deanship to the vice presidential ranks, serving successively as vice president for student affairs, vice president for administration and director of student planning, then finally as vice president for planning and dean of the graduate college.

By the mid-1990s, Hampton's president, Dr. William Harvey, started urging Smith to think about a presidency of his own. "He was such an important factor," Smith says, "always encouraging me and training me and talking to me" about the challenges Smith would face on the climb.

But even though Harvey has produced a virtual assembly line of presidents--nine in his 27 years at the helm of Hampton; 13 if one counts all the top executives produced by his shop in areas like banking and college athletics--Smith wasn't so sure. Nominated for his first presidency at Talladega in 1998-1999, he withdrew his name so that he could continue to polish his skills at Hampton.

Smith continued to show remarkable restraint in other presidential competitions sometimes withdrawing his name from consideration; other times entering the chase with a will. He fast struck gold at Ramapo College of New Jersey, the No. 2 ranked public comprehensive school in the Northeast, which Smith steered through the worst financial crisis in the state's history--a 20 percent budget cut--while reorganizing the senior administration, balancing budgets and creating revenue-producing programs that quadrupled fund balances.

Now, this native Bahamian, raised and educated in the United States, has left Ramapo to take a dream job, at the College of the

Bahias, a two-year institution that's hoping to reorganize under his leadership as a four-year, doctoral-granting institution.

It's a vastly complicated undertaking, involving acts of parliament to restructure the campus as a corporate rather than a governmental entity, not to mention issues of accreditation, fund raising to build new facilities, beefing up old programs, creating new ones--all the while promoting shared governance practices to convince the various stakeholders to invest their time and talent in every step of the process. But this time Smith knows he's ready.

"The advantage I have is the tremendous mentoring I received [at] Hampton--plus my experiences at Ramapo College, where I did in three years what should have been stretched out to 10--plus my network at AASCU," the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, where Smith is a member of the African American Presidents' Affinity Group and a mentor in the Millennium Leadership Initiative for increasing the numbers of presidents of color (see Black Issues, Aug. 26).