Goodbye to All That (We Won't Miss You, 2023)

From Rachel Toor, Sandboxer-in-Chief 

A number of friends had stressful Thanksgiving dinners last month. American Jews found themselves caught in surprising intergenerational strife. Parents shook their heads and said, "We did not do a good job teaching our kids the long history." Oy. 

The overwhelming sense I get from higher ed leaders at the end of this  shit-show interesting year is exhaustion and sadness. And maybe a bit of schadenfreude.

Some presidents think they would have been able to parry the Congressional ambush better than the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT did. They list things the women should have said, and explain how important it is to give humanistic, rather than legalistic, responses. They say they should have been prepared by a team that wasn't a bunch of lawyers, should have known to expect the trap.

Well, everyone will likely get their chance to perform. These sulfurous and thought-executing fires are coming for all of us.

Other presidents, including those who have served longer and regularly get to interact with hostile legislators, wonder if they might have fallen into the same argumentative traps. They remind us it's easy to say stuff when you're not the one in the hot seat under the glare of a national audience. 

Most people have only read news and commentary about the testimony and seen the short clip from the hearings that came after 5 hours and 23 minutes of grilling. Given my admittedly low brow, I watched the whole thing. Am now tempted to create The Real Housewives of the House. Some of the nastiest questioning came from well-Botoxed congresswomen in a spectacle that was as theatrically produced as any reality TV show. 

The answers the presidents gave in the first five hours to rude, condescending, and downright stupid questions were delivered with grace, dignity, and the patience of academics accustomed to teaching students who don't know nearly as much as they think they do.  

Harvard was the focus of the majority of the hearing. Claudine Gay remained thoughtful and composed throughout. The women each said the things you thought they should have said, and they tried to give complex answers. 

The presidents were constantly interrupted and asked ridiculous yes or no questions. It's hard to imagine anyone doing a good job in that situation. I guess they could have responded, "I like beer." They didn't. Instead, they were the portrait of presidential restraint. 

But after answering the same question many times, they all fell for a carefully choreographed gotcha moment at the end. And that's what made the news. 

The goal of The Sandbox is to help support higher ed leaders. The attack on higher ed will no doubt be fueled by the way the hearing was portrayed in the media. Maybe let's try not to add to the problem by trashing these women. At this point, we still need good people to step into leadership roles. And for many, for much of the time, the job can bring plenty of good things. Which is why I've included in this issue a reminder about people who don't go looking for the gig but have leadership thrust upon them.

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Your snow-shoveling Sandboxers will be on break until the first Saturday in January (just can't bear to write that date). 

Feel free to forward this email to other leaders, engaged faculty members, invested trustees, dog lovers, and readers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or better yet, stuff their holiday stashes. We offer group discounts for teams of 10 or more individuals who would like to be members of Inside Higher Ed. Email if you want in.

Here's hoping 2024 will bring some comfort and a whole lot of joy.

As told to me by a former president

Go to graduate school even though you know there are no jobs. Get a Ph.D. in something that has nothing to do with higher ed. Luck out and snag a tenure track job. Publish a book. Take your teaching seriously, but not yourself. At least not too seriously. Earn promotion with tenure. Chair something. Maybe a search committee or the faculty senate. Publish a second book. Do your work. And hope someone asks you to be dean.

The president asks you to become a dean. 

Three weeks into your deanship, you must cancel all searches and faculty travel for two years because a catastrophic event rocks the world.

Grow into the job despite the hard times. Enjoy the work. Keep doing your scholarly work. Keep teaching. Oversee a large capital campaign.

When an alum asks you to have lunch with a board chair who is looking for a president at a completely different—and less prestigious—kind of place, say you’re not interested.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Just have lunch with him. As a favor.”

At lunch, say you’re not interested.

Then the board chair says, “I’m going to give you some numbers.”

Wow. 

There’s a big honking endowment. A lot of money and no strong institutional identity. Your career has been at a place with worn-down marble and the reek of self-satisfaction.

You use your imagination. Think of lots of ways to shape an institution into something that will make the world better.

It’s a real opportunity. Not everyone gets this lucky, you know. The presidency is supposed to be a sudden swerve from being a member of the scholarly community to being a businessperson, but the fact is, a large part of fund-raising is like teaching; a large part of building a building is like writing a book. You did this as a dean. You liked doing it.

So, you go for it. You take the job. You move to a new city. You keep teaching. You love working with your cabinet. How much fun it is to see how people do their jobs and help them succeed in every facet of a complex institution’s work, from admissions to student life to alumni affairs. It’s exhausting and thrilling.

You run into friends at scholarly meetings in your field. They express sympathy. They ask how you’re doing. 

“No, really,” they say. “How are you?”

Because you’d have to be crazy to want to actually do this. 

“How can you ask for money?” they want to know.

You remind them you’re not asking for you—you’re doing this for the students. For future students. It’s like teaching. A room full of people who are eager to listen to you talk about a subject that incites your passion? That is not hard. The money makes things possible.

But then things get hard for a relatively trivial reason. To add a new athletic program, enthusiastically supported by key donors who help with other aspects of the university, you decide that you must cut another athletic program to maintain balance between academics and athletics.

For the first time in your long career, some students hate you. They put up mean posters, yell at you from a distance, and try to get newspapers to publish stories critical of you.

You sulk. 

People say you need a thicker skin.

You say, “My job is to have a thin skin.”

You discover that the affection and respect to which you’ve become accustomed is more contingent than you acknowledged. You have been making hard decisions for a decade now, taking away from some people for the greater good, but this is hard because it involves students so immediately and directly. 

You tell yourself, and usually believe, that the presidency is a job and not who you are. That both the praise and the anger are for what you’ve done, what you’ve had to do, not who you are. It’s still hard. Time passes, the angry students leave, and good vibes return.

When, several years later, you’ve hit the goals you set for yourself, you decide to step away.

You have more books to write, more educational missions to accomplish. Being a member of the faculty is luxurious. You recall that teaching is not a zero-sum game.

The world is different now, you know. It would be harder to run a university now. Though it’s less than a decade since you stepped away, it’s been, as we all know, a time.

But the parts of the job you loved can still be enjoyed by others who, like you, want to serve; those whose ambitions are not careerist but come from a sense of moral responsibility. Your own success makes you giggle like a kid. You are amazed and grateful when a professionally nosy writer of a newsletter for presidents asks to hear your stories.

You thank her, repeatedly, for listening to you. You say you’ve talked too much. You say it a few times. You ask how you can help.

She tells you that she’d heard so much about leadership struggles and challenges that she had overlooked the fact that for some people—those who know themselves well enough to make good choices and find the right institutional match, the ones who are driven by mission and see clearly how they can contribute and build stuff—the presidency can be wondrous. She’d been as surprised by your conversation as she often is by the first glorious day of spring.

All she can think is, “What is all this juice and all this joy?”