Alena Selezneva
Whenever I chat with college and university presidents, there’s one question I always ask. And even though the response never changes, I keep hoping to find someone who will surprise me and say something I haven’t heard before.
“Who do you talk to?”
The answer is always “no one.” Except the times when they say it’s their spouse, partner or even a child.
Nearly every president circles back to the isolation and emotional toll of the presidency. The job is lonely. They’re buffeted from all sides and carry burdens they can’t share. And like air traffic controllers, anesthesiologists and marathon race directors, if they do their work well, no one ever says, “Good job.” But when something goes wrong—even when it isn’t their fault—they can be publicly and viciously reviled.
Now, as a faculty member, I might be tempted to say, Well, buddy, that’s why you get the big bucks. When your salary is so much bigger than those of the people who work for you—except perhaps the football coach—maybe this is what you’ve signed up for.
But until I started diving deep into higher ed leadership circles, it just hadn’t occurred to me that presidents didn’t really have colleagues to share their struggles. We need people at the top to reassure us, to relieve us from worrying about stuff that isn’t our job to worry about, like demographic cliffs, ginormous budget deficits and the latest slew of poo coming out of D.C. A president can never present themselves as victim.
What surprised me most is that when you get a bunch of presidents together in a room, including those from institutions whose struggles are well-documented, what you’ll hear is “Everything’s great.” They can rarely put down their cheerleader-in-chief pompoms and say, “Yikes! I need help.”
The one place they might be able to get it is from those who should be their most trusted advisers: trustees. It’s great for a president to have good relations with faculty leadership, but it’s essential that the board chair is onboard with leadership.
And boards are the big black box in higher ed. Whether they are public or private, appointed or elected, supportive or undermining, it’s about as easy to see what’s really going on between a president and a board chair as it is to understand someone else’s marriage.
What I’ve heard from presidents ranges from “we’re in love” to “I didn’t realize I was in an abusive relationship until I got out.” The abuse comes in lots of forms, from micromanaging to going around the president to senior staff or even faculty to collect information to telling a president how to dress or how to speak.
What we know about relationships in general is that there are things that should never go without saying. “Thank you.” “Good job.” “I appreciate you.” And I’ll throw in Louise Penny’s four statements to lead to wisdom: “I don’t know.” “I need help.” “I was wrong.” “I’m sorry.”
When I asked a whole bunch of presidents what they want from their board chairs, it can sound contradictory: “Pay closer attention to me” and “Stay the fuck out of the weeds.”
Several presidents told me that chairs should start by asking, “How can we best support you?” Seems obvious, but the question rarely gets asked. And there’s a risk in answering too honestly. As one president put it, “Board members often miss how the president might be feeling because we have to look strong. After all, they are our bosses.” This is not a relationship of equals, and pretty much no one has power over a board.
A president can look composed at a meeting and still be exhausted, frightened for their family or worn down by the Angry Eight on faculty. As wearying as the attacks from the public are, the internal blows hurt the most. One president told me, “I’m sick of always having to be the better person to people who don’t show the same degree of compassion to me.” Chairs don’t need to act as therapists, but they can check in, make it possible to take time off and occasionally offer a pat on the back.
One president of a struggling institution told me her board chair will donate frequent-flier miles to upgrade the president on lengthy flights. Small gestures can go a long way toward making someone feel valued. What’s worse is that the easiest things to do are often withheld. One president told me, “I can count on one hand the number of times someone told me personally, ‘Nice job.’ And I have a good board!”
Paying attention also means learning to tell the difference between a real problem and hissy fits. Trustees may get an earful from faculty members or VPs they’ve known for years or see a flurry of complaints online and assume they’re hearing from the whole campus. A president may know otherwise. “Most of us have very large middles who support us but will say nothing publicly,” one told me. Another offered this advice to chairs: “Look for the signal (if there is one) and not just the noise.”
That doesn’t mean dismissing criticism or giving a president a free pass. Boards need to ask hard questions and give honest feedback, preferably in private. But asking whether a complaint points to a larger problem is different from forwarding every rumor passed on by a golf buddy with an implicit instruction to fix it.
And then there are the weeds. If boards feel they’ve hired the right person, they need to let that person lead. Most presidents are impressed by their board members’ experience and welcome trustees’ help with financial and strategic thinking, fundraising, and opening doors. They do not need a board redoing marketing materials or second-guessing the people the president hired to do that work. This obviously makes it harder for the president to lead their team, and it sure doesn’t make the institution better.
None of this means chairs should be disengaged. Boards made up of bigwigs from other industries can be forgiven for not understanding just how quirky our sector is. “Shared governance” is a term everyone throws around but few can define. “Academic freedom” and “freedom of speech” sometimes get conflated. Tenure is, well, not typical in the corporate world. And college today is different from what it was a few decades ago—even from what it was five years ago. Plus, not many CEOs live on the same acreage where all their employees work; the president’s house is a public space, and that creates a whole weird set of issues.
So, it’s up to presidents to educate their boards and for board members to be good students: open, curious, engaged. It’s up to chairs to manage them and to use what they bring to the table. They can introduce a new president to people in the community, help raise money and speak up for higher education when presidents advocating for their own institutions are easy to dismiss as just trying to bolster their rankings or boost enrollment. In many ways, I believe that board members are perfectly poised to help bolster public trust, and we need to help them understand how to do that.
Most of all, boards need to understand that the work they hired a president to do may take years. A chair who panics at every complaint, demands big changes but offers no cover for making them or fails to notice that a president is burning out can make the job impossible.
I keep thinking about a president who told me that a board member once urged them to take a few days off. “I needed to be reminded that I had a responsibility to rest and recharge,” the president said. “We don’t think of working nonstop as failing in any way, but if we burn out, we don’t do the students and our campuses any good.”
And I keep thinking about what another president at a well-resourced institution with no enrollment problems said when we spoke: “Bottom line: There is for me an expiration date. It is just too much.” The sad truth is how often I’m hearing from good leaders in every niche of our ecosystem the same thing: “I’m done.”
When I shared a draft of this column with a board chair who has an unusually broad and generous perspective, he responded, “Maybe the real topic here is ‘Lost in Translation.’ How can the faculty understand the president is isolated and on an island of one and that some trustees view the president as CEO who needs to suck it up and do their job. What a mess when there is no common language of experiences to bridge the gaps.”
What a mess, indeed. A board chair can’t make the college or university presidency an easy job. But they can decide whether they’ll be one more reason a president quits and leaves the institution in even worse shape.
