The Worst of Times: FY 2025–26

The writer is a former president.

My job and the leadership tasks and qualities it entails are different in 2026 than they were in 2019. Of course there was COVID, and no one could see that coming when I was hired, but we survived that challenge. What, then, is the primary difference in university leadership now compared to seven years ago?

It is this: It used to be that one primary challenge, issue, or opportunity, whether planned or thrust upon us, took up most of our time and effort in a typical academic year. In some years it has been the need to reduce expenses to deliver balanced budgets. In early 2017 it was a series of federal edicts that challenged our international student recruitment and enrollment efforts when a new presidential administration took office. In 2019 and 2020 it was COVID. In 2024–25 it was student protests nationally and on our campus. 

Today we no longer confront just one principal challenge, opportunity, or response. Instead, we now confront multiple big, hairy challenges all at the same time. This past fiscal year, running from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026, provides plenty of evidence to support this assertion.

In previous years implementing a massive, complex efficiency initiative to combine academic colleges and thus reduce the number of deans and associate deans would have been considered that year’s heaviest and most crucial lift. Extending that effort to also include combining academic departments to reduce the number of department chairs and school directors would have, in the past, been left for another year to accomplish. Instead, in the past year we did both things at once.

But wait, there’s more. In the same year, we also complied fully with the largest, most transformational piece of state higher education legislation I have witnessed in my nearly 40-year career. In a span of 90 days, we eliminated all identity-based student support centers, a couple of which operated on our campus for 50 years. We stood up a new civics course and purchased software to put all course syllabi online, in compliance with the mandate that a syllabus be reachable within three clicks of our home page. We worked with our Faculty Senate to pass crucial requirements: for a new faculty workload policy, post-tenure review, implementing annual evaluations of faculty, and a new retrenchment policy that undoes the current policy created in the 1970s.

Each proposed change sparked hours of emotional debate in Faculty Senate across multiple meetings, in addition to requiring approval by the Board of Trustees. We also had to build a procedure to investigate complaints from those who may feel that we are not in compliance with the new omnibus law (of the eight complaints we received, only two were judged to merit an investigation).

The past fiscal year we confronted rapidly changing rules governing funded research, with some of these changes themselves being altered days and weeks later. And in addition to an ever-changing landscape of federal research policies, we also scrambled to rescue international enrollment and avoid a budget deficit when State Department visa denials increased more than 60 percent for students from India and more than 36 percent for students from other countries.

During FY26 we finalized the transfer operations for centers and moved all personnel out of a building in just a few months so that we could lease the facility and save operational costs. We also achieved full compliance with new, Title II ADA compliance requirements mandating all learning materials posted online be accessible to those with hearing and/or vision problems (this required purchasing a new software after first working with a faculty committee to determine our compliance plan).

I arrived at my institution in a different role during contentious contract negotiations with the labor union representing our full-time professors. My memory of that time is that the preparing of strategy and negotiating with the labor union was nearly a full-time job for several campus leaders and was one of the top two or three priorities in that fiscal year. Now, negotiations are just one of a dozen universitywide priorities and requirements, and negotiations this year are especially difficult given requirements in the law and a disagreement over what can and cannot be negotiated with the new law in place.

Finally, there is this: In late spring, as enrollment projections solidified (especially the likely decline in international enrollment), it became apparent that we would need to reduce budgeted expenditures by another huge amount to present a balanced budget for board approval. This became priority No. 1 for all vice presidents and for myself, and we collectively spent most of our time and effort in April, which is always the busiest month on campus because of end-of-year events, identifying these expense reductions. In years past, this effort would have been seen as singular and herculean. Now it is just another line on an entry of priority activities. And now, due to greater declines in enrollment than originally budgeted, we plan to reduce expenditures by another huge amount, for a total 5 percent reduction in expenditures compared to FY26.

I am not one to hold a pity party, and I dislike it when others do so. But I did feel it my responsibility to explain to the campus how our (my) world has changed since I began the job in 2019. Not all presidents are facing all of these challenges, but at this point, no one is immune from most of them.