Three Ivies Will Simultaneously Search for Next President

The ad in this Sunday's New York Times reads very simply: "President. Harvard University."

Below, in a smaller font, it offers an unassuming pitch.

"Nominations and applications are invited for the presidency of Harvard University. The successful candidate is expected to be a person of high intellectual distinction and demonstrated leadership qualities. Letters and supporting material may be sent to the Harvard University Presidential Search Committee."

The ad is easily missed, stuck on page 8 of the Week in Review section, along with others for executive assistants and speech pathologists.

Now, Harvard is not the only Ivy League university looking for a president.

Friday afternoon, Harold T. Shapiro of Princeton University said that at the end of the year he will step down from his post as president.

Earlier this year, E. Gordon Gee shocked Brown by announcing that after only two years in Providence, he would leave to assume Vanderbilt University's chancellorship.

The recent spike in executive resignations is reminiscent of a period in the early 1990s when several high-profile universities--Columbia, Yale, Duke and the University of Chicago--lost their presidents simultaneously.

Such periods may be becoming more and more common as the average term of the university president decreases. Professional presidents move from university to university, serving terms that average less than 10 years--often at schools with which they have had no prior affiliation.

In an extreme manifestation of this trend, E. Gordon Gee announced his resignation from Brown University in February, succumbing to the allure of the Vanderbilt chancellorship and its million-dollar paycheck. He had spent only two years in Providence; Vanderbilt will be his fifth university presidency in two decades.

Though he will have served a decade at his retirement, Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine is the shortest-serving Harvard president in modern times--and only the second not to graduate from the College. Indeed, before assuming the presidency, he was closely tied to Princeton University, where as provost he was second in command.

In contrast, Derek C. Bok, his predecessor, went to Harvard Law School, served as dean there and then served as president of Harvard for two decades.

Despite the differences between these two presidents, Harvard's prestige has helped to insulate the University from changing times. Administrators now move between schools almost as fast as corporate executives switch companies, but search experts say that Harvard's present search will not be more difficult than those before it.

The University has not even hired a consulting firm to help with the search--unlike most other universities.

The Professional President

In the last half century, as universities got bigger, fund-raising became more important and campuses grew more politicized, the university presidency has transformed from an easy job for the tweed-wearing academic into a high-powered position for the smooth-talking politician-fundraiser.

James B. Conant '14, who came out of the ranks of Harvard's chemistry department to head the university, was the last professor without central administrative experience to head Harvard.

Professors still sometimes turn into presidents, but not at Harvard. (The last two to have a shot were Baker Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein '61 and Andrus Professor of Genetics Philip M. Leder '56--who lost out to Rudenstine.) Wellesley plucked Diana Chapman Walsh from the School of Public Health faculty to serve as its leader in 1993.

But the typical college president now has years of administrative experience under his belt, often including the presidency of another institution.

According to a report by the American Council on Education (ACE), 38 percent of presidents at American research universities in 1998 had served as president of another university immediately prior to assuming their present positions.

Experts on higher education say that the rise of the professional presidency has largely been the result of the importance of financial matters in the modern university.

"There is such a thing as a professional president. There's no doubt about that," said Madeleine F. Green '67, ACE vice president. "To be a rank amateur and run a billion-dollar enterprise is tough going."

Nowadays, the typical route to the university presidency involves a rise though a number of administrative positions over many years.

"You begin as a faculty member," explains Judith Block McLaughlin, a professor of the Graduate School of Education and a scholar of the college presidency. "Typically the route is through department chair to a dean or a provost and into the presidency. With each appointment comes a wider range of leadership experiences."

Three of the seven Ivy League schools with permanent presidents have a leader who headed at least one university in the past. One example is George E. Rupp, former president of Rice and current president of Columbia.

McLaughlin says that there is a common thread running through his career at the two institutions.

"I think there is loyalty to a particular place and there's also loyalty to a particular kind of place...to institutional mission or culture or a set of values," she said. "Rice and Columbia, of course, have enormous differences. There are also things that George Rupp very much believes in that are present in both places."

Four of the seven permanent presidents of Ivy League schools attended the university they now head.

"In an earlier day, that anyone would be president who was not an alumni would be out of the question," says David Riesman '31 who once covered President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, for The Crimson.

But even in the age of nation-wide searches, internal candidates are often selected. Stanford's new president, John L. Hennessy has worked at the university since 1977.

"You do a national search but end up with a person in the office next door," McLaughlin says. "And there may be very good reasons for that. You have a chance to evaluate your own local talent."

Tenure matters

The tenure of the university president is also shrinking. With 12 years of service, Princeton's Shapiro is now the longest-serving president in the Ivy League--a term that is a far cry from the 40-year tenure of Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1857, who served from 1869 to 1909.

Bok says the demands that lead universities to call on already-experienced administrators as their presidents are the same as those that lead to the shortening of presidential terms: finance and politics.

"You had two things happening at once [in the 1970s]," he says. "It was the era of boundless expansion and rising stock markets came to a shuddering halt. That increased the financial burdens; you're desperately trying to keep money. The other thing, of course, was there was a great deal of student unrest."

McLaughlin also emphasizes that frequent transitions are good for universities because they bring new blood.

"One of the reasons for shorter tenures is that institutions and individuals benefit from renewal and reinvigoration, starting a different conversation, asking different questions differently and viewing the place from a new perspective," she says.

Additionally, she says that the college presidency has become a tougher job over the years--a difficulty symbolized by the 3-month leave of absence Rudenstine took in 1994 on account of exhaustion.

"It's much more nonstop," McLaughlin says. "In an earlier day presidents took the summers off to head off to Europe to do their riding. It now has a relentless pace that exhausts people."

To handle these more frequent searches, universities have developed more efficient search skills.

An important development has been the use of professional corporate search firms, which aid in finding candidates outside the searching institution, as well as candidates from minority backgrounds.

Decisions that were once made in obscurity in smoky back rooms have become increasingly public.

"There was a time when searches were done by a few trustees who would call a friend of theirs in the Harvard Club," McLaughlin says. "As searches became national in scope, the complexity of managing the process meant search firms could help. National search firms can send the message that it's really an open search."

Search firms including Academic Search Consulting Service and A. T. Kearney, Inc. are under contract with a number of colleges and universities that are currently looking for presidents: Bowdoin and Georgetown suggest that visitors to their websites contact A. T. Kearney to provide input.

Overlapping pools?

Each year, 10 percent of university presidents decide it's time to move on. According to Marlene Ross, the director of the National Presidents' Study at the American Council on Education, this year the turnover may seem higher because institutions like Harvard, Princeton and Brown tend to grab media attention.

"This year it may seem like more because these are high-profile, well-known institutions," Ross says.

But that doesn't mean that Harvard, Brown and Princeton will be wrestling over common candidates. In fact, the applicant pool may widen as prominent educators recognize that so many openings are available.

"The bottom line is that one person becomes president," Ross says. "You're talking about needing three qualified leaders. I'd like to think there's a lot more than that out there."

When administrators pick between schools, the main issue is "fit"--compatibility between the atmosphere of the school and the applicant. John Chandler--former president of Williams College who is now a senior consultant at Academic Search Consulting Service--says that a lot depends on how well the individual and the institution know each other.

Chandler likens this year's administrative flurry of activity to the period in the early 1990s when four prominent universities were simultaneously searching for presidents. Numerous search committees tossed around the names of Gerhard S. Casper, who eventually went to Stanford University, and Nannerl O. Keohane , who ended up at Duke University. But today, he says, there aren't such obviously universal contenders.

"I see fewer candidates who are likley to jump quickly to mind as the logical, obvious candidates for those institutions," Chandler says. "In an earlier period, someone such as...Nan Keohane figured into speculation quite widely then." Nevertheless, he adds, "there's likely to be a substantial amount of overlap in the pools."