No bet, but you might find the following of interest:

Needed: college presidents Vacancies abound, but fewer seek this pressure job
By Renee Loth, The Boston Globe
March 31, 1991
© 1991 New York Times Company.

Thumbing through a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, one finds help-wanted ads for Regis College, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dallas County Community College, Wheelock, Louisiana's Grambling State University, Salem College in North Carolina, Front Range (Colorado) Community College, Frostburg (Maryland) State University and the New York Theological Seminary. All are seeking presidents.

Last week, after a 10-month search, Harvard University celebrated the selection of Neil Rudenstine as its 26th president. But Brandeis was reportedly spurned by four of its leading candidates and returned to the hunt.

As other employment sectors shrink, the market for college presidents is booming: Between 300 and 400 presidencies will likely turn over among the nation's 2,000 degree-granting institutions this year.
Modern pressures of fund-raising, internal politics, declining enrollments and an increasingly litigious and regulatory environment on campus have left college presidents less and less time for scholarly pursuits. Fewer people want the job and those who take it don't stay as long; the average job span of a college presidency is now five to seven years, or, as John Silber acidly puts it, "almost as short as the superintendency of the Boston public schools."

Daniel Singer, a Washington attorney and university trustee who recently served on the presidential search committee at Swarthmore College, his alma mater, says the 10 members of his group (which included three faculty members and two students) were "exquisitely aware" of those pressures.

"It is not easy to be the president of even a great university," he says. "I think it's fair to say that in many ways the job is a more difficult one than it was a decade ago, and it is in many ways a different job."

But others suggest it is the increasing politicization of the selection process itself, more than the grueling nature of the job, that is frustrating executive appointments in the academy.

David Riesman, a Harvard sociologist who this month co-published an entertaining study of five different presidential searches over the last 10 years, says the selection process has come to resemble a political campaign.

University boards of trustees, once the ward bosses of academia, who selected their leaders in private, smoky clubs, have lost influence relative to faculty, alumni, students and other constituency groups, submitting presidential selections to the messy demands of democracy.

"The president has to please a lot of people other than the board," Riesman says. "That's the great change that's happened in the last 25 years. I think the democratization of the search is in danger of leading to consensus candidates."

Also like a political contest, the ability to raise money has become increasingly important in determining the most attractive candidates for the office of college president. At Brandeis, a $6 million deficit was one factor cited by Duke University vice president Joel Fleishman when he withdrew from consideration for the top job there last week.

Fleishman had just completed a successful, eight-year fund-raising drive at Duke and said he was looking for a break.

Budget pressures are not a particularly new demand on a college or university president's time. Arthur Twining Hadley, who was president of Yale University at the turn of the century, remarked upon the evolution of a college president's primary activities from "reading Kant in his study" to "examining balance sheets in his office."

But the fund-raising imperative can only grow stronger, as demographics conspire against college administrators. Especially in New England, which is suffering a shortage of 18- to 24-year-olds, both enrollments and applications are down. In Massachusetts, public university enrollments are taking the sharpest hit, declining 11.6 percent last fall.

Add to this the graying of the college faculty, which will require still more money for recruitment drives, and the bill for deferred maintenance of the physical plant at many colleges that is now coming due, and a university trustee might be forgiven if he yearned privately for an application by Robert Farmer, who raised more than $10 million for Michael Dukakis in 19 months.

Clare Cotton, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Massachusetts, adds another often overlooked intrusion of public-sector pressure on higher education: the new regulatory climate on campus.

Beginning in September, for example, colleges will be required to report the proportion of their students who complete four-year degree programs within at least six years. There is increasing scrutiny over college athletics programs and stringent new safety rules for every student activity, from the sailing team to chemistry lab.

Cotton says the regulations can mean protection both for students and the university in litigious times. Nevertheless, he says, "They add to the cost of doing business, and somebody has to be on top of it."

Finally, presidential searches are coming to resemble political campaigns in their deference to interest groups of the right and left. Though potential candidates are rarely submitted to a "litmus test" on particular issues, Riesman's study -- which he wrote with Harvard colleague Judith Block McLaughlin -- does consider the trustees' desire to appear "politically correct," citing examples where trustees agonized over the racial, gender and ethnic composition of their search teams.

A different study, the Harvard Watch project, sponsored by Ralph Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law, published a survey last fall of 13 private university search committees -- including Brown, Princeton and Dartmouth -- in an effort to show how out of step Harvard was for not including students in the search process that eventually led to Rudenstine. Brown and Princeton, the report notes, made "a special effort to recruit ethnic, racial and sexual minorities to the search committee."

At Gallaudet University, the prestigious school for the deaf in Washington, D.C., a presidential search process coincided with the blossoming of the disabled-rights movement. In 1988, with the help of sympathetic faculty and then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, students at Gallaudet succeeded in toppling a "hearing" presidential selection in favor of I. King Jordan, who lost his hearing during his youth.

Daniel Singer says that including students and faculty on the Swarthmore search committee was a plus, at least at that cozy (1,285 students) college. "It's a community in which you see and touch and are impacted by the president regularly, so it's of some importance that one know how various constituencies act on the campus," he says. "The best way to get that articulated is to plug them right into the middle of the process."

Inclusion can get out of hand, however. At the University of Florida the search committee grew to more than 40 people. "You're not going to get any discourse with a committee of that size," says Riesman.

John Silber, who has shown adroitness at both politics and raising money at Boston University, is dismissive of efforts to democratize university institutions, whether they be tenure awards or presidential searches.

"Political correctness means you have turned the university into an ideology and propaganda factory," Silber says. "Any trustee worth his salt wouldn't hire someone who couldn't stand up to the correct-thought crowd."

Silber faults many presidential-search committees for lacking backbone, saying they wish to avoid controversy above all.

"They'll have a guy who comes in with some excitement about him," Silber says, "and they say `oh, that's too frightening,' and turn the matter over to some headhunters and come up with someone with a law degree or MBA and try to pass someone who's non-intellectual, try to pass him off as a college president."

For his part, Riesman has an unorthodox suggestion for circumventing the politicization of the search process: Start looking overseas.
Riesman is nostalgic for the charismatic career of Robert M. Hutchins, who was "wonderfully aloof" from conservative political pressures while chancellor of the University of Chicago during Sen. Joseph McCarthy's active years.

Riesman, who was on the University of Chicago faculty at that time, has been nurturing the idea that "a tall, aristocratic Oxfordian" could be similarly immune from today's political pressures, which tend to come from the left.

"It's a fantasy of mine to think of such a man, and what kind of freedom and detachment he would have from some of our racial, ethnic and other struggles, by virtue of distance," he says.

Maybe the Times of London's Education Supplement should expect some new help-wanted ads coming in soon.

*end*
 

Remember that none of the candidates ever *applied* for this job.
 

Interestingly, in retrospect, the subtitle of your book seems highly prescient: there's more soul-struggle going on now, arguably, than ever. You saw the wave coming.