Searching highs and lows

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Fall 2003 by Qualters, Sheri

The Quest for the Best Fit in a College President

Like a marriage, the college presidential selection process begins with the excitement of dating several prospects, the euphoria of courtship, the bliss of the commitment ceremony, or inauguration, and sometimes, an untimely divorce. Unlike their counterparts for most of the 20th century, today's college presidents rarely serve for an entire generation.

Indeed, the average tenure of current presidents was 6.6 years in 2001, just about where it has hovered since 1986, according to the Washington, D.C.-based American Council on Education (ACE). Thirty percent of the nearly 2,600 chief executives surveyed by the ACE in 2002 were hired between 1999 and 2001.

True, it's not unusual for New England presidents to serve a decade or more. Richard Gustafson left the University of Southern New Hampshire recently after 16 years. James Craiglow left Antioch New England Graduate School after 16 years. Donald Harward left Bates after 13. Dale Rogers Marshall will soon leave Wheaton after 12. But bringing down the average are academia's equivalent of one-termers. Former Bentley College President Joseph Cronin, now dean of Lesley University's School of Education, says sudden departures "happen more than people realize."

Trinity College in Hartford faced just such a challenge after the departure in August of Richard Hersch, after about 18 months on the job.

As president of Hobart and William Smith College in New York, Hersch oversaw a fundraising campaign that tripled the endowment and bankrolled several new facilities. At Trinity, however, he was perceived as combative and aggressive.

It didn't help that Hersch succeeded one of the nation's highest-profile presidents. Evan Dobelle's commitment to neighborhood revitalization during his 1995-2001 tenure won him national renown.

The discord surrounding Hersch reached a flashpoint last spring when the student newspaper published an open letter to trustees exhorting the board to weigh a vote of no confidence in him. Trinity Tripod Editor-in-Chief Abigail Thomas scolded Hersch for "publicly airing problems or concerns" to the Hartford Courant, belittling the faculty and individual members and for not taking the time to understand the school.

In his resignation letter to trustees, Hersch noted that faculty and students have "experienced my leadership style in a way that has resulted in my becoming too much the focus of attention."

Search party

Trinity officials declined to discuss the search process that led to Hersch's selection (or the problems that led to his resignation). But experts in the field suggest that a higher education institution can increase its odds of finding a good match by clearly articulating the school's goals before the search begins.

The first step is hiring a search committee and developing a list of at least five candidates that the institution would be comfortable with as president, according to William Farrell, the former University System of New Hampshire chancellor who now serves as the first male and the first lay president of Rivier College, a Catholic institution in Nashua, N.H. Farrell filled the Rivier post first on an interim basis, then was asked to become a candidate for the permanent job. Despite the Rivier experience, Farrell says using a search firm is the surest way to identify the strongest candidates. About half of the searches conducted between 1999 and 2001 involved search consultants, compared with less than 16 percent of searches between 1968 and 1984, according to the ACE study.

One trap search committees stumble into is focusing on luring individual candidates, particularly academic or business stars, before goals are outlined and disseminated to campus constituencies. "When people start thinking about doing a search, they think about doing it backwards," says Nancy Archer-Martin, a Nantucket-based search consultant with Witt/Kieffer, an Illinois executive search firm. "They think about who are we going to get rather than thinking about the agenda." The first job of any institution in the market for a new leader is figuring out what the school wants to be good at and what qualities or programs it wants outsiders to associate with the institution, she says.

Judith Block McLaughlin, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and educational chair of the Harvard seminar for new presidents, warns against unrealistic expectations. "Trying to find someone to shake up the place ... is unrealistic and may be inappropriate," she says. "Institutions don't change quickly. They can get disrupted easily, but they don't change."

Presidents leave

Yet even successful relationships sometimes end suddenly. Consider the approximately two-year tenure of E. Gordon Gee at Brown University. Despite an apparently flourishing presidency, Gee left Brown in 2000 for a job at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He was ultimately replaced at Brown by Ruth Simmons, who had previously served as president of Smith College and in a senior post at Princeton University. Gee, in contrast, had built a career in large public higher education systems, most recently as president of Ohio State University. Simmons was "more of a natural fit" due to her experience at East Coast private schools, according to Laura Freid, Brown's executive vice president of public affairs and university relations. "The learning curve was steeper and the Ivy League culture less familiar for Gee."