Harvard, Peer Universities Rely on Interim Leaders Amid Deluge of Presidential Vacancies

A common strategy has emerged as several elite American universities contend with sudden presidential vacancies: appoint interim leaders — and keep them.

The Harvard Corporation’s decision on Friday to permanently appoint Alan M. Garber ’76 as the school’s 31st president was historic for Harvard, but it also put the University in line with many peer schools that recently made similar moves.

Top universities across the country have seen rapid turnover among their top officials in recent years: six Ivy League universities, MIT, and Stanford have all replaced their presidents since 2022. Many of them were forced to replace departing leaders in the midst of a historically tense climate at college campuses, as elite universities across the country have been roiled by protests over Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s war in Gaza.

But while Yale and Stanford managed to begin and end their presidential searches within the last year, other schools — such as Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, and now Harvard — have elected to extend the tenure of their interim presidents instead.

Former Harvard President Claudine Gay and former UPenn President Liz Magill suddenly resigned just weeks after their disastrous congressional testimony in December, forcing top officials at both universities to scramble to appoint interim leaders.

The Harvard Corporation asked Garber, the longtime University provost, to step into the role. Meanwhile, Penn’s Board of Trustees selected the dean of their medical school, J. Larry Jameson.

As the war in the Middle East drags on and tensions linger on college campuses, Garber and Jameson will both remain in their roles longer than the “interim” tags initially suggested: Garber will serve as the University’s 31st president through the 2026-2027 academic year, while Jameson will helm UPenn through the 2025-2026 academic year, with still no timeline in place to find his successor.

Former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow said he was unsurprised that universities have chosen to extend interim presidencies on a fixed timeline, citing recent campus controversies as roadblocks in any current presidential search process.

“This would not be an ideal time to try and recruit a new president,” Bacow said.

Bacow added that the tactic of appointing interim presidents with lengthy tenures — or removing the tag altogether — is not just happening at Penn or Harvard.

In May, after Cornell University president Martha E. Pollack announced her retirement — which Pollack wrote was independent of political events — Cornell’s Board of Trustees announced that the university’s provost, Michael I. Koltikoff, would serve as interim president through 2026. A presidential search committee will be formed six to nine months before his scheduled departure.

But while Garber is the only one of the three to have shed the “interim” label, all have sunset dates for their presidencies.

At both Yale and Stanford, presidential searches succeeded without having to appoint lengthy interim leaders. Although the departures of both institutions’ presidents were not related to the fallout of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the universities still conducted and concluded their searches in a charged political climate.

After Yale president Peter Salovey announced in August 2023 that he would be retiring at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, his successor was selected by May 2024.

At Stanford, the search similarly only lasted seven months. Following the July 2023 resignation of Marc Tessier-Lavigne over allegations of research misconduct, the university appointed Richard Saller as an interim. Saller would drop the interim label when he was formally installed in a private ceremony in October even as Stanford launched a search for his successor.

By May, Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean Jonathan D. Levin was appointed as the university’s next president.

Still, Scott L. Bok — a former chair of the Penn Board of Trustees who resigned shortly after Magill resigned as president — wrote in an emailed statement that removing Garber’s “interim” title differentiated him from the other two presidents in name only. He added that Jameson “will not be thought of as a typical interim president.”

“He will likely be thought of very similarly to the way Garber is, as an internal candidate who stepped into the breach for an extended period of challenging times,” Bok wrote.

The choice to select internal university leaders as interim presidents is also a convenient solution for university boards who would otherwise face the dual challenges of limited enthusiasm for presidency positions and peer schools conducting their own searches at the same time.

“Attracting the best candidates would be more difficult in the current environment than it has been historically,” Bok wrote. “So no surprise that universities aren’t rushing into search processes.”

Richard Chait, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, agreed, saying that for Garber, his three-year term is “perfect to reposition the university and a way to — frankly — time when the college presidency becomes a more attractive proposition for more people.”

“Right now it’s not,” Chait added.

—Staff writers William C. Mao, Veronica H. Paulus and Saketh Sundar contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves or on Threads @elyse.goncalves.

—Staff writer S. Mac Healey can be reached at mac.healey@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @MacHealey.