Tired of ads? Subscribers enjoy a distraction-free reading experience.
Click here to subscribe today or Login.

The increase in the turnover in various professions is also apparent in college presidencies.

In 2006 the average tenure time for a college or university president was 8.5 years. Today it stands at 6.5 years, but this decline is not due to pandemic-related issues, according to AGB Search, that conducts searches for higher education institutions. Instead, the shelf-life of a president is often shortened by the pressures and unique complexities of the job.

This has been the case for a long time.

Three years after WW II ended, General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, was inaugurated as the 13th President of Columbia University. During his five-year tenure at Columbia, and before assuming the presidency of the United States, Eisenhower faced many of the same issues that have, and will continue to vex most college presidents. Even though he had led tens of thousands of troops in the greatest war of modern times, overseeing allies from different countries and cultures, while managing the likes of Patton and De Gaulle, whose egos sometimes outstripped their usefulness, he still found university leadership defied even his most capable management skills.

As a five-star general, Eisenhower was certainly familiar with bureaucracies, yet he found the idiosyncrasies of selecting internal university leadership perplexing. He recorded in his diary, “There is no more complicated business in the world than that of picking a new dean within the university.” In his 38 years in the Army, Eisenhower was no stranger to the amount of paperwork military bureaucracies could generate, but he soon learned a university could even outpace the Army in generating administrivia.

Trying to mitigate the seemingly endless meetings and paperwork he encountered at Columbia, Ike tried to insist that every new idea presented to him be reduced to one typewritten piece of paper. According to Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, such a request to reduce verbosity brought some Columbia professors to helpless rage or laughter. One quipped that if the president read more than one page his lips got tired.

Eisenhower was no foreigner to criticism. During his 38 years of active service, he experienced many critical reviews, but few were echoed publicly by those for whom he felt directly responsible nor were they made in such a mocking fashion. To be fair, Eisenhower knew when he accepted the position at Columbia that the culture of the academy differed significantly from that of the military.

Despite these obvious cultural differences, Ike set out to do the best he could, successfully raising the visibility and funds for Columbia and managing the university’s finances very well. What he was unprepared for was the lethargic approach to problem solving within the university.

His successor at Columbia, Grayson Kirk, identified the dilemma very well, saying that Eisenhower’s management style was built out of his military experience. He wanted to have problems presented to him in a cogent and brief form so he could make an informed decision. He believed it better to decide rather than to postpone a decision. He found that professors, on the other hand, much preferred protracted discussions to decisions.

This clash of cultures was almost inevitable for perhaps there are two no more dissimilar occupations than the military and academe. This is not to suggest that one is necessarily better than the other, although to many the efficiency of Eisenhower’s management style, coupled with his impatience with procrastination, best mirrored mainstream American values.

Today many university presidents are in the crosshairs.

Criticized profusely for allowing students and faculty to offend the public’s sense of efficiency and propriety, they are sometimes maligned for adhering to a lethargic response to undertake needed change within the academy. Often, presidents are placed in the unenviable position of defending statements and actions that they themselves find antithetical to the thinking of most Americans.

A college president’s job is made even harder today by a politically divided country which often sees a college campus as the breeding ground for unpopular thinking and actions. To those who serve as college presidents it is comforting to remember one of the world’s great leaders, who not only won a war but also led a battered post-war world to rebuild in relative peace, found the job of a college president sometimes a bit overwhelming.

Michael A. MacDowell served as President of Misericordia University for 15 years.