Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis

Columbia’s Minouche Shafik is the latest Ivy League resignation. Will it prove a turning point?


By Eric J. Gertler

The Wall Street Journal

August 15, 2024


Will the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik be a turning point for higher education? Her tenure, as well as those of Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, suggests that some of these elite universities are selecting the wrong people for the top job.


Some have shown promise in dealing with the immediate challenges. Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier and Dartmouth’s Sian Beilock have been proactive in understanding the need to provide students with clear guidelines balancing the need for free speech and safety.


But the job of a university president has dimensions that go far beyond dealing with this sort of crisis. Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees and community members.


Today’s universities are multibillion-dollar enterprises that are far more complex than they were a generation ago. Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members. It operates more than a dozen graduate schools, manages an endowment of more than $50 billion, and has a large and growing real-estate footprint in Cambridge, Mass. It is making massive investments in world-class research facilities in emerging and complex scientific disciplines.


Columbia and New York University are two of their city’s largest landowners. Many state schools are the centers of regional development hubs, and smaller schools, even community colleges, have become engines of growth in every state.


Oversight of such complex organizations requires the skills akin to a Fortune 1000 CEO. The academic mission is crucial, but university presidents spend much of their time on nonacademic matters—fundraising, budget management, real-estate development, hiring and firing, public-relations crises, managing boards, and sensitive community relations—for which they have had little previous experience.


While some provosts and deans have the skills to excel as university presidents, others don’t. Trustees have a responsibility to expand the recruiting pool for university presidents. Successful CEOs have experience in running a playbook for different situations and are “battle tested.” When dealing with crisis, they can rely on previous experiences that many current university leaders lack.


Trustees should also consider leaders from the military, political and nonprofit worlds. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia in 1948, he lacked the academic credentials of a typical university president. But he had the foresight and skills to handle a university environment and its concomitant challenges.


More recently, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels reenergized Purdue University with innovative thinking and confident leadership. Michael Crow, an academic innovator, has taken advantage of his unconventional experience as an adviser to government agencies and a designer of knowledge enterprises to remake Arizona State University. Shirley Jackson’s experience at Bell Labs and as a White House adviser enhanced her tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic.


Trustees must recognize that their roles are no longer simply titular, broaden their search for leaders, and be bold enough to make tough decisions when they realize they have selected the wrong person for the job.


Mr. Gertler is executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News & World Report.

Where Liberty and Learning Endure

June 29, 2026
As America commemorates 250 years of independence, we reflect on the enduring principles of liberty and learning that have defined Davidson College for nearly two centuries.

Bankruptcy and Higher Education

June 21, 2026
By Todd Zywicki The Wall Street Journal June 21, 2026 Auburn University is known for its agricultural and STEM programs, its flight school and athletic programs. But the land-grant university recently became notable for another reason: The board of trustees is taking control of the school back from its faculty. The board began seizing the university’s academic programs—including curriculum, course offerings, degree requirements and academic credentials—at its June 5 meeting. The board also dissolved the faculty senate and replaced it with an advisory council to the president, which includes two faculty members from each of the university’s colleges and additional members appointed by the president. The board’s assertion of authority mirrors incoming mandates by the Alabama Legislature restricting the role of faculty senates in the state’s public university system. Predictably, Auburn’s faculty has responded with howls of outrage, decrying these intrusions on the faculty’s authority over academic operations. How could outsiders appointed through a political process have the expertise to make such delicate decisions? I’ve been a professor at a state university for almost 30 years, and I am sympathetic up to a point. But before becoming a professor I was a bankruptcy lawyer. And bankruptcy law teaches an important lesson for how academia can respond to this moment. Bankruptcy gives businesses an opportunity to admit mistakes, reform and emerge stronger. Successful enterprises don’t need bankruptcy lawyers. But when an enterprise loses its way, it goes into receivership. Most universities aren’t financially bankrupt but have lost their mission and direction. Society has long recognized certain institutions’ authority to manage their own affairs. Two notable examples are licensed professionals—such as doctors and lawyers—and universities. Universities, even state universities, have run their enterprises with minimal external oversight. Faculties enjoyed substantial rights of self-governance because they committed to higher standards than those required by ordinary jobs. Professors would establish and maintain standards of scholarly integrity, freedom of speech and inquiry, and rigorous dedication to merit-based assessment of research in specialized areas. They policed their own house, enforcing norms of truth-seeking, maintaining scholarly integrity and rigor, and ensuring that students emerged with basic knowledge, employable skills and civic competency. But over the past several decades, commitment to those values collapsed. Surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently reveal fear among students and faculty around expressing unfashionable ideas. Universities have seen shout-downs, cancellations and even violence against speakers. Merit and quality yielded to “diversity” and “equity.” Truth-seeking has been displaced by faddish theories and ideologically charged teaching and research. Professors design esoteric departments and teach niche classes to cliques of activist students while the needs of other students and taxpayers for real education go unaddressed. Like companies I represented, universities have lost their way. And many have proved either unable or unwilling to self-correct. When that happens, it is appropriate to put institutions into receivership until they reform and rededicate themselves to their mission. At Auburn incoming students must now take certain required civics and history courses to master basic competency in U.S. history and government. To ensure the classes actually meet that objective, professors will have to make their syllabi publicly available. In the classroom, instructors will be expected to stick to the matter at hand and avoid free-ranging political punditry. Just as other companies can learn from the ones that go bankrupt, other institutions of higher education can learn something from Auburn: Fix what’s broken, or someone else might fix it for you. Mr. Zywicki is a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He was a Dartmouth College trustee, 2005-09. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bankruptcy-and-higher-education-4c2b178e

Race Preferences Are Falling Nationwide

June 19, 2026
By the Editorial Board The Wall Street Journal June 19, 2026 The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences is turning out to be a landmark with profound consequences as its influence spreads. On Thursday the famously progressive Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a state program that issued scholarships based on race violates the U.S. Constitution. Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the court that the Constitution requires “that every person ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,’” and that the state cannot “use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” That must have been painful for the activist liberal majority on the court. In a concurrence, Wisconsin Chief Justice Jill Karofsky took some shots at Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023) before acknowledging that “I am bound by the precedent set forth in SFFA” and other Supreme Court rulings “when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment.” The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty against a 1985 Badger State law that reserved need-based scholarships through a grant program for “Black American,” “American Indian,” “Hispanic” and some Southeast Asian undergraduate students enrolled in Wisconsin’s private and technical colleges. Last week the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a scholarship program earmarked for black University of Iowa students studying physical sciences was “impracticable” under SFFA. State governments would be wise to repeal these discriminatory grant programs, or the courts will do it for them.
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