The President as Pain Sponge

The writer is a current president.

There’s a quiet truth most college presidents learn the hard way: The job is no longer just about budgets and mission. It’s about becoming the one person on campus at whom everyone feels free to aim their anger. These days, almost anyone with a stake in the institution seems to feel licensed to say anything to a president, in any tone, at any hour, with no guardrails.

The criticisms aren’t just sharp; they’re personal. And that’s new.

We’ve always had disagreements in higher education. That’s the point of the enterprise: debate, test ideas, refine them. But the climate around the presidency has shifted from principled disagreement to something that looks and feels like bullying. Trustees, faculty and staff, students, alumni, legislators, and online commentators often treat a president not as a person exercising judgment but as an all-purpose receptacle for grievance. The result is a role that becomes less sustainable by the day.

One of the most striking changes is the sense of permission people feel to cross personal boundaries. Presidents now routinely receive messages they wouldn’t wish on anyone else in their community—language they would never allow in a classroom or a staff meeting. It’s not “I disagree with this decision because…” It’s “You are a fraud,” “You lack character,” “You should be ashamed,” and far worse. Identity becomes fair game. Family isn’t always off-limits. Rumor and innuendo get laundered as “accountability.”

The medium amplifies it. A late-night email dashed off in frustration, a viral thread that abstracts a leader into a caricature, a public comment period that becomes a performance rather than a conversation—these can all land like a punch. People who would never berate a colleague face-to-face seem to feel free to unload on a president. The title, paradoxically, removes basic courtesy.

Boards are meant to be a president’s strategic ballast. Too often now, they function as another front of pressure—sometimes internalizing the cultural storm rather than steadying the ship. Presidents get mixed signals: “Don’t speak publicly” and “Why aren’t you leading?” “Move fast” and “Don’t make waves.” When the winds shift, the president becomes the easiest person to blame—because the president is the most visible person in the room. Accountability is necessary; scapegoating is corrosive. There’s a difference.

The healthiest boards I’ve seen ask hard questions in private and have their president’s back in public. They avoid performative oversight. They set direction, hold to values, and let presidents operate. That model is getting rarer.

Faculty and staff carry their own heavy burdens right now—tight budgets, rising expectations, exhausted colleagues, polarized classrooms. Frustration will surface; it should. But somewhere along the way, the line blurred between critiquing decisions and attacking the person who made them. When “I disagree with this policy” becomes “You’re dishonest, you don’t care about students, you’re unfit,” we lose the possibility of working through the disagreement at all.

Student and alumni voices matter deeply. They also travel faster and land harder than ever before. A single clip can define an entire decision. Nuance doesn’t always survive the algorithm. When the temperature is already high, even good-faith disagreements can calcify into personal condemnation of the president. It’s one thing to hold a leader to account; it’s another to pursue them as a symbol to be toppled.

A president is the steward of the whole, not the spokesperson for any one faction. That means there will be days when the president disappoints everyone, because trade-offs are real and values sometimes collide. It’s fair to be angry about an outcome. It’s not fair to deny another human being basic dignity.

Presidents learn to absorb a lot. What people don’t see is the human cost of being the institution’s shock absorber. It’s the steady erosion that comes from daily incivility: the midnight emails that land like a rock in the gut, the meeting where a line gets crossed and everyone looks down, the moment you realize your children’s names were mentioned in a thread. It’s the loneliness of holding confidences you can’t break, not being able to overcome problems you didn’t create and can’t control, and being bound by constraints you can’t explain, while people assume your silence means you don’t care.

Most presidents I know are not brittle or thin-skinned. They chose this work because they believe in the good that higher education can do. But no one can flourish in a role where personal attack and scapegoating is normalized, where boundaries are optional, and where the president is expected to be endlessly available as the target of everybody’s blame and pain.