Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by RealClear Education on July 25, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission.
College presidencies turn over quickly. The American Council on Education (ACE) says the average tenure is now less than six years, a decline from 2006, when the rascals hung around for nine years on average. I’m not confident in that baseline. Back in 1990, ACE calculated the average tenure of a college president as 6.7 years. Another organization, the College and University Personnel Association, calculated the average in 1995 to be seven years.
All in all, this suggests a fairly consistent picture. The length of the average term has shrunk—but only a little. Serving as a college president is a hard job, and it’s little wonder that relatively few make it to the ten-year mark or beyond. The ancient Romans held a purificatory sacrifice every five years called a lustrum. The word is sometimes used to mean any five-year period, but the sacrifice was originally conducted in conjunction with a census. American colleges and universities may have developed a lustrum of their own. Every six years or so, they conduct a ritual of purification: immolating their old president and installing a new one. This often connects to a census of sorts: has the college risen or fallen in the national rankings?
Those numbers came to hand because, in 1998, I completed a book on the sources of instability in the academy. Titled Rough Drafts in Higher Education: A Forecast, the book never found a publisher willing to commit to its bleak vision. For that, I should be thankful. My tone was playful, but the forecast was grim: that a great many of the some 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States would not survive the headwinds of the ensuing quarter-century. I foresaw them dealing with declining enrollments and the rise of new technology by “stalling, temporizing, retreating, and re-defining,” which, I said, “come to much the same thing.” Most institutions, I predicted, “will find themselves improvising among these four options.”
I long ago awarded myself the Cassandra Prize for accurate prophecy ignored in its time. Cassandra, of course, was the Trojan priestess cursed by Apollo to foretell events accurately but never be believed. She warned her countrymen about that wooden horse.
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Not that my prophecy was dead-on accurate. More than 500 colleges have indeed closed, and many others are in financial distress. But so far, the rate of survival exceeds my 1998 prediction.
My warning went unheeded, and no writer enjoys seeing years of work result in an unpublishable manuscript. Still, the two years I spent working on Rough Drafts were far from wasted. They required me to study seriously the many working parts of higher education. That learning served me well. I became president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) in no small part because I had spent that time studying how universities conduct their affairs.
And that’s why I’m venturing now to answer a pair of questions I’ve been asked by people in two states concerned with the quality of their public universities: What should they look for in the next president of their flagship institutions?
I’ve never been a college president, though I’ve served directly under three—in roles including associate provost, chief of staff to the president, and provost—for a total of twenty years. As president of the NAS for the last sixteen years, I’ve gotten to know quite a few college presidents, though not always on genial terms. These are my qualifications: I’m an interested and reasonably informed outsider.
Most of what makes a good college president is obvious. Governors, trustees, and others involved in the selection should seek someone of high personal integrity, intelligence, and commitment to the tasks at hand. The individual should be confident, energetic, and able to command the respect of faculty, students, and legislators. He or she should be likable but not overly eager to please. Above all, the candidate must understand the deeper purposes of higher education and possess the courage to pursue them in the face of substantial opposition.
These qualities are obvious, but search committees often have a hard time finding candidates who embody more than a few of them. If this list sounds banal, that’s because I’ve deliberately phrased it as a matter of character, not credentials, achievements, or expertise. Search committees often focus on these more tangible assets at the expense of assessing character.
Once upon a time, the preferred candidate for college president was a faculty member with years of experience at the institution, someone who had a thorough knowledge of his colleagues and the school’s traditions. Today, such homegrown candidates are few. Moreover, given the domination of many faculties by left-wing activists who often camouflage themselves as moderates, search committees might well be advised to look further afield.
It doesn’t really matter if a college president has a Ph.D. or a terminal degree in medicine or law. It doesn’t matter if the individual wrote scholarly books, served as a dean or provost, or made scientific breakthroughs. Nor does it matter if the individual has demonstrated financial acumen. Success in any of these areas may be helpful, but none is essential.
What is essential is that the college president has the personal integrity and temperament for the tasks ahead. But what does that look like?
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In 2025, it looks very different from what it did fifty or a hundred years ago. That earlier era of American higher education was thoroughly secularized but still committed to open-mindedness, American values, the pursuit of truth, and the intellectual supremacy of the natural sciences. Ideal presidents included figures like Clark Kerr, the economist who served as the first chancellor of the University of California (1952–1964), and James B. Conant, the chemist and president of Harvard (1933–1953). It was an era of liberal technocrats.
In an earlier age still, college presidents were generally clerics, since most colleges were founded by religious denominations and upheld their creeds. Mandatory chapel was the norm. Piety and personal integrity topped the list of presidential qualifications. This era ended around 1900, as chronicled by historians like James Tunstead Burtchaell (The Dying of the Light), though it lingers at some Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish institutions.
The core qualities of good character haven’t changed, but the challenges facing today’s college presidents are vastly different. Liberal openness flounders in the face of the hardcore identitarian demands of the diversity regime. The older tradition of clerical control is a distant memory, preserved only in Latin honors and ceremonial robes. In contemporary higher education, religion has been relegated to the realm of the incidental, alongside a fondness for golf or enthusiasm for French wine.
Today’s would-be college president must be someone who can convincingly manage a faculty that includes many radicalized members who must reckon with situations in which the radicals hold real power. Even if technically a minority, they often dominate the faculty through intimidation, career threats, and the training of student-activist allies. A new president may face a choice between capitulating to the radicals, appeasing them, or confronting an organized and obstreperous resistance.
Search committees should seek someone prepared to meet that resistance with clear-eyed resolve. What’s at stake is the real mission of the university. The radicals understand this perfectly well. Their goal is to replace substantive and unbiased education with ideological indoctrination—often starting with skepticism about American and Western values and ending with hardened contempt for the core ideals of our civilization.
This may sound like a caricature. A few classes do make such “hardened contempt” explicit. But in most, it’s ambient: the background assumptions that “everybody knows” and that therefore escape critical scrutiny. The teachers in these courses are not militant ideologues but loyal followers of the dream of “social justice.” They may not fully grasp the educationally disastrous consequences of politicizing the curriculum.
A reform-minded president must distinguish between the true radicals and their well-meaning but misguided followers, and respond accordingly. That means standing up to the hardliners while appealing to the rest with positive steps toward restoring the genuine ideals of higher education.
There are many branches to that tree. These ideals begin with freedom of thought and expression and the disinterested pursuit of truth, but they don’t end there. Universities can and should differ on how much they emphasize classical civilization, the American Founding, the place of religion, preparation for careers, whether the bachelor’s degree is an end or a step toward further study, the balance of academics and campus life, the regulation of human appetites, moral formation, and whether students receive a shared intellectual experience—e.g., a core curriculum, distribution requirements, speaker invitations, etc. To this list we must now add artificial intelligence and the question of how much attention a college should give to the tension between progress and decline.
These are not fixed stars but live questions—ones every college answers, even when it pretends not to. A candidate for the presidency of any institution should already know what positions the college has taken—openly or implicitly—and have a clear idea of what changes are needed.
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Few if any colleges today warrant the response: “No changes. I like you just the way you are.” The real job of the college president is to bring constructive change.
I’ve avoided using the “L” word until now, but let’s go there: the candidate most deserving of the presidency is someone cut out to be a leader. No one really knows what that word means. It invites fakery and self-regard. But at the very least, it points toward someone who sees a destination and can rally others to reach it.
These days, we have “leaders” in higher education by the dozens—people with no ideas of their own, who conform to whatever social or political fad happens to be trending. These are the candidates to avoid: well-spoken, ingratiating champions of fatuity.
I once worked for a notably successful university president who held office for twenty-five years. One of his aphorisms: “The more democratic a university is, the lousier it is.” He believed the university could and should play a vital role in a democratic society, but the university itself must be governed by merit and the pursuit of excellence.
Was he right about that? That’s the question I would ask anyone seeking a college presidency—not in search of a particular answer, but of an answer that reveals the character required for the job.
Image of President’s House, University of Michigan by Jared Gould
