Justin Morrison / Inside Higher Ed
Inside Higher Ed’s reporting on the college presidency is investigative and holds leaders to account. But three years ago we created a space where anyone who wants to know what’s happening behind the scenes of the college presidency can learn directly from the people on the job. The Sandbox is our weekly serving of real, anonymous essays from higher ed leaders, and it goes where our journalism can’t.
Co-created, curated and edited by Rachel Toor, a writer who has been in higher ed for more than 40 years and worked in every corner of the sector from academic publishing to admissions to her current job as a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, this Saturday-morning newsletter is where leaders get vulnerable about the challenges of the job, big and small. Anonymity allows them the safety to write freely and, because they’re not identified in any way, strips away higher ed’s entrenched institutional hierarchies: There are more similarities in the experiences of a community college president and an Ivy League leader than you might think.
Having covered higher ed for 15 years, I speak to leaders all the time and hear about the problems they encounter. I’ve learned from reading The Sandbox, though, that there are conversations with presidents I don’t have. Nor should I, as a journalist. But The Sandbox gives me a glimpse into the human side of the job.
Reading how many leaders endure death threats, sexism from donors and board members, and attacks on their children, it’s no wonder the average tenure for a college president is now little more than five years. For women and presidents of color, it’s even shorter. With state and federal funding cuts, remnants of a global pandemic, transformative federal policy changes, existential threats from artificial intelligence, and low public confidence, the pressures on presidents have only increased. Higher ed needs leaders who will stick around to carry it through this time of crisis. The essays in The Sandbox make clear the personal challenges that the job also requires them to endure.
Don’t confuse personal stories as a plea for sympathy, though. The presidents who write for The Sandbox are not asking us to feel sorry for them. They know what they’re getting themselves into. Their essays offer insight to a side of the job most of us will never see. Here are a few things I’ve learned about the college presidency from over 150 college leaders from every part of the sector.
Presidents are on all the time, and though they may appear polished and collected, for many it’s a slog. They work hard to build their networking skills and resiliency. One president wrote, “What I did not expect was the emotional toll of having others look to me for validation, vindication, and acceptance. As president, you are the symbol of the institution—a living mascot. One donor said, after chatting with me at a football game, that he felt like he’d ‘just met royalty.’” Leaders feel they are expected to always have the answer “and be willing to have pies thrown at you at any moment—whether at a board meeting, the Rotary Club, the Faculty Senate, or while out walking your dog.”
They’re surrounded by people and are lonely. Though they all have teams, it’s often a one-person gig. One wrote that loneliness is “a feature, not a bug, of the job.” They often don’t have confidants who can be their thought partners. The people they work most closely with are either their bosses—the board—or people they supervise, the cabinet. A theme that comes up regularly in The Sandbox is how devastating those relationships, when they’re bad, can be to a person’s ability to lead.
While presidents have thousands of peers, they struggle to be honest when they’re around each other. Read Inside Higher Ed for a week and you’ll learn how many institutions face low enrollment and money problems. Yet, as one author wrote, presidents in the company of other presidents aren’t forthcoming with the problems on their campuses. “Being a president is exhausting. Being around other presidents? Maybe even more exhausting. Not all of us, but definitely too many of us, can’t turn off the posturing. And being around that posturing, especially when behind closed doors, can really deplete me.”
Spouses and partners are expected to play the role of first gentleman or lady. Presidents write about the guilt of dragging their families into the job. While leaders accept their grueling schedules and being always on call, many boards also want their president’s spouse, who often has their own career and own identity outside the institution, to be a living mascot, too.
Their children are thrust into the spotlight, and their behavior scrutinized. One president wrote that after their relationship with the board deteriorated, some members went after their children. “They were attacked by these grown-ups and could not talk to their friends about what was happening,” the president wrote. “They had to cope without peer support. They were collateral damage in the board’s war on me, which made me feel awful and responsible. Worse, they thought if they did something—anything—wrong, it might be the final straw that cost me my job.”
Presidents and their families are often the targets of harassment and threats of violence, more often than most of us ever hear about. One president wrote that they have received two death threats and two threats of physical harm. “‘They will get you in a small room and won’t let you out’ and ‘This place will look like Columbine and Virginia Tech,’” the message threatened. They had been stalked for years, had a permanent restraining order against someone and one family member was “confronted by an employee brandishing a large knife offering to ‘slit your throat.’”
Female presidents write about double standards, obsessions with their appearance, comments about their clothing, weight and hair color. And they’re expected to carry out emotional work in ways their male predecessors never had to. One female president wrote that the tension between her gender and the responsibilities of the job “is part of my existence.”
“There are plenty of presidential training programs, but how many of them teach women how to negotiate in a predominantly male profession where the single most important part of your job is to raise funds while patiently faking smiles as you are mansplained to again and again,” she wrote. “My accomplishments feel nonexistent when I’m trying to avoid that creeping hand.”
A Black female president said she has grown into a leader who says things that many people—women, especially women of color and folks who are otherwise marginalized—cannot say. “Now I am willing to go into spaces and say that I see a therapist regularly, that constant code-switching takes a mental toll, that I get exhausted even when I appear indefatigable, and that sometimes it takes great effort to appear incessantly joyful and cheerful,” she wrote. “I do get tired of people feeling that I should take care of them when no one had such expectations of my male predecessors.”
But despite the mental and emotional toll of the presidency, leaders love their jobs. As one person told Rachel, “It’s hard, but it doesn’t suck.”
Many Sandbox authors write that the students invigorate them. Move-in days and commencement ceremonies make it all worth it. They marvel at living in houses they would never be able to afford on their own, though they often discover things like black mold, ancient plumbing and bats.
Some of them remain scholars at heart and love to geek out about the arcane research on their campuses. One wrote that the best thing about the job is “going to fantastic lectures in cool fields you haven’t studied by scholars who are interesting and smart and make you wish you could go back to school.” Another president said, “I learn about difference-making research happening on our own campus that I had zero clue about. The place is a treasure chest, and sometimes I don’t even know where the keys are until someone hands them to me.”
In just three years, Rachel has built a growing community of hundreds of current and former university presidents who are willing to tell hard stories that are usually only shared over drinks with close friends. Some say they find the writing therapeutic. As Rachel says of the personal, first-person perspective she pushes authors to take, “It’s the vivid and specific details that make us feel the lessons being imparted.” Those personal experiences that few of us ever see or hear about are an essential bit of knowledge if we want to truly understand the college presidency and the current challenges in higher ed.
