Alena Selezneva
The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins at an awards banquet where the entire staff of a winning publication receives notice, midcelebration, that they’ve been fired. They are (rightly) outraged and (surprisingly?) shocked. The film is set 20 years after young Andy stumbled into fashion journalism as a (normal-sized) “smart fat girl” (in normal clothes) who fell into a beat at the magazine Runway that wasn’t right for her.
I started writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1997 and for glossy magazines not long after. The Chronicle remains, but the magazines where my name appeared on the masthead no longer exist in their original forms. Trail Runner was swallowed by Outside, a once-great publication that has now mostly faded. Running Times was bought by Runner’s World, jogged along for a while and then disappeared completely. So, a mass firing at an award-winning publication didn’t surprise me. That is the state of journalism today, and some of us have already lived through versions of it. (Think for a second about recent events at 60 Minutes.)
The movie wants us to feel the tragedy of Runway’s possible demise, and it makes a compelling case for why a fashion rag matters. But it doesn’t reckon with the fact that The New York Times is now a puzzles-and-recipes company that also does the news. Journalism, even in its most serious form, is in deep doo doo.
What interests me is that the film’s focus shifts from the young person entering a niche world to the visionary leader who has been at the forefront for decades. Miranda Priestly is the center of gravity now, sometimes looking imperious as ever and at others, a bit dazed and confused. This is a portrait of the artist as an older woman; it asks what it means to have built something through vision, hard work and unsentimental business acumen, and then to wonder if you’ve stayed too long at the fair.
It’s hard to accept change and even more challenging to reimagine a life, and that’s what Miranda Priestly two decades later is really sitting with: How do you know when it’s time to go? Especially if you love your job. The honest answer is that you often don’t, and that’s the problem.
The people most invested in a particular vision of an institution are frequently the last ones able to see when that vision has become the obstacle rather than the engine.
I’ve been thinking about the Mirandas of higher ed, which is to say, the leaders who have built institutions and run them in ways that are creative, innovative and, well, interesting. Often, it’s through vision and intelligence, but those are necessary but not sufficient traits to achieve something big. What it requires, I think, is something more like charismatic leadership. It’s not enough just to have a good idea. I mean, hey, I have 20 great ideas before breakfast practically every day. Many of us do. It’s about getting others to buy in and the ability to execute.
For the past three years I’ve been doing my own little informal postdoc in higher education leadership. I’ve seen fantastic and talented people who were hired by boards to be “change agents,” a term I’ve come to detest, and who got chewed up and spat out. While it’s a whole lot harder to get shit done in higher ed than it is running a magazine, there are, nevertheless, those who are able to innovate.
The presidents who are now in a position to do and say things that most others can’t tend to be those who have served long enough to have the trust of their many varied—often at odds with each other—constituencies. They have boards that trust them to do the right things and faculties who, even when they don’t agree with every decision, are nevertheless committed to the institution. They have managed (or inherited) finances to be able to continue along the path they have charted. Or (spoiler alert: if you haven’t yet seen The Devil Wears Prada 2, skip the rest of this sentence), they have cozied up to MacKenzie Scott or Melinda French Gates, who will bail them out.
These folks can basically say whatever they want, something most currently serving presidents cannot. Until they retire, that is, at which point they can say or do anything, including skewering their former colleagues. Given what I’ve seen, I’ve come to believe that anyone who left the college or university presidency before 2020 was doing a completely different job and what they say has little bearing on current realities.
The question the movie circles without quite asking is the one Succession revolved around. Just as the death of Logan Roy sent his family reeling, who could fill Miranda Priestley’s Manolos? When I think of the current visionary leaders in higher ed, many of them are of a certain age. Those who built institutions, often by force of personality, leave big commencement gowns to fill. And even were they to groom the person they think is best to succeed them, the way higher ed works means that it’s not at all clear their pick will matter.
New leaders come in, look at an institution with fresh eyes or from a different perch, and think, Yikes! Why did they do that? And, Yowser! There’s a problem I need to fix. And, because they are human, they might also want to put their own stamp on stuff.
Each time I go to a different stylist, she will run her fingers through my hair and tut-tut as she combs through strands she finds inconsistently chopped or weirdly dyed. Sometimes she’ll even mutter something like, “What was she thinking?” as she assures me she can clean up the mess. (The truth: It would be easier to muck out the Augean stables.)
Each new president inherits an institution the way a stylist approaches a new client. Some of what looks like a mistake was deliberate, though the reasons may no longer be obvious. A cut that worked beautifully a decade ago may now look dated, even as the client resists the passage of time. (Who? Moi?) The challenge is partly for the Mirandas to know when to leave the runway, but also for those who follow her to recognize what still works, what no longer does and what must change if the enterprise is going to endure.
It’s also for those of us who are not quite at the top but have been in our jobs for a long time to wonder when we’ve passed our own sell-by dates. That will be the topic of another column.
