It makes for a most tempting “Help Wanted” ad: Earn $5 million a year to lead one of the nation’s most powerful and prestigious institutions. Enjoy fancy dinners, almost unlimited travel, and a complimentary mansion in Upper Manhattan.
This is an incomplete list of the perks that the president of Columbia University receives. And yet no one seems to want the job.
In late March, Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, resigned after an unhappy seven-month tenure, one marked by a never-ending dispute about campus anti-Semitism, and by President Donald Trump’s war on Columbia’s funding and independence. The school is now on its fourth president in only three years, and its latest leader isn’t even an academic.
In a sure sign of near-pathological administrative dysfunction, Columbia’s board of trustees chose its own co-chair, the journalist Claire Shipman, to serve as the school’s newest acting president. In other words, the hiring committee, evidently finding no one willing or able to run the school, hired itself. This is an exceedingly rare occurrence in the history of elite higher education, a fact Shipman seemed to acknowledge in her first public statement: “Ornamental language can’t disguise the fact that this is a precarious moment for Columbia University.” (A university spokesperson declined to comment on how the acting president was chosen. Shipman did not respond to an interview request.)
Columbia’s difficulty in appointing even an acting president suggests that it may be, at least for the moment, nearly unmanageable. But it is not the only elite university in trouble. Three of the other seven Ivy League universities are led by presidents who began as interim appointments. Across the country, the average length of college presidents’ tenure has fallen to less than six years.
With declining trust in higher education, campuses fractured over the Israel-Hamas conflict, and a White House eager to wage populist war on elites (a White House run, incidentally, by Trump, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, and Yale Law alumnus J. D. Vance), the job of elite college president, formerly considered difficult but prestigious, has become, on many campuses, impossible and thankless. Presidents are charged with leading an inflexible organization made up of autonomous and competing constituencies through a period that requires immediate change. But they can’t do anything without angering either parents, students, professors, donors, administrators, or Trump. Any false step might cost them their position. Being president of an elite university might once have been the greatest job in America. Now it is the greatest worst job.
The job was hard even before the Hamas attack on southern Israel in 2023 and the rise of Trump 2.0. Modern university presidents are judged on the size of the donations they bring in, their crisis-management skills, and their ability to climb the rankings of a publication, U.S. News & World Report, that barely exists as a journalistic entity. They must possess not only academic experience, but a set of attributes that a career in academia does not inculcate: fundraising prowess, financial and budgetary skills, and charisma. “It’s one of those job descriptions that nobody could ever come close to,” Nicholas Dirks, a former chancellor of UC Berkeley, told me. Even the search committees charged with selecting university presidents often can’t agree on what they’re looking for, said one search-firm executive, who requested anonymity to avoid compromising future searches.
As their responsibilities have expanded, top-tier presidents must ceaselessly service empowered constituencies. Students, who pay (or whose parents pay) for a luxury product, believe they can demand more for their money. Donors must be kept happy. The number of administrators has grown much faster than tenured faculty; they’ve become a powerful constituency of their own. Amid these changes, faculty members have remained a crucial bloc. And as universities conduct more and more research, they’ve become more dependent on federal grants. These shifts enabled universities’ growth. But they also make the president vulnerable when constituencies disagree.
The events following October 7, 2023, made that clear. “No matter what a president does, he or she is going to get pilloried,” Brian Rosenberg, a visiting education professor at Harvard and a former president of Macalester College, in Minnesota, told me. “It’s the first thing that I can remember that really fractured the consensus on campus.” Presidents faced calls to crack down on anti-Semitism at anti-Israel protests, and were condemned when they did so. Any decision enraged some group—if not all of them at once. “There were literally trucks driving around my neighborhood in Cambridge both criticizing the president of Harvard for being too soft on the protesters and for being too hard on the protesters,” Rosenberg said.
Congressional Republicans summoned the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to testify about anti-Semitism on their campuses. After the university leaders gave disastrously robotic answers, donors threatened to withhold millions in gifts unless they resigned. Four days later, Liz Magill, Penn’s president, stepped down. A month later, under the added pressure of credible plagiarism allegations, Claudine Gay left her post at Harvard.
At a second hearing, Minouche Shafik, who took over Columbia in July 2023, accepted the premise that her school had an anti-Semitism problem and publicly committed to disciplining professors and students. Congress was, for the moment, satisfied. But campus protests then became even more disruptive. Against the faculty senate’s wishes, Shafik called in the police, who made more than 100 arrests. Professors who had lost faith in her leadership considered censuring her for the move. She soon resigned as well, speaking of her struggle to “overcome divergent views across our community” and the “considerable toll” that the role had taken on her and her family.
The Trump administration has taken full advantage of these internal divisions. In March, it canceled $400 million worth of federal grants and contracts at Columbia, ostensibly as punishment for what the administration claims has been an insufficient response to anti-Semitism. The government demanded extensive concessions—including that Columbia administrators place the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies into receivership—as a precondition for getting the funding back.
Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, largely acquiesced, with some minor modifications. She then had to face the faculty. Some were furious that she would allow the government to dictate university policy, one professor told me. (The professor spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had received threats after commenting publicly on these issues.) In a meeting with faculty, Armstrong downplayed the scope of the changes in response to the Trump administration, saying, for example, that the university wasn’t banning masks that conceal protesters’ identities, according to The Wall Street Journal. When that leaked to the media, the Trump administration demanded that she double down on her commitments. Armstrong did so—and resigned three days later.
Clearly, a Columbia president won’t succeed by trying to evade scrutiny or appease all constituencies simultaneously. “The president of Harvard is gone. The president of Penn is gone. The president of Columbia is gone,” Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who has influenced the Trump administration’s approach to higher education, recently told The New York Times. “That’s a pretty good track record. That’s three for three. That’s a hat trick right off the bat.”
Universities searching for new presidents are now prioritizing candidates who can play politics on a national level—candidates with political acumen and crisis-management experience. “Especially at some of the elite universities, you wanted that scholar,” Rod McDavis, the head of AGB Search, told me. “Today, we’re seeing a different need from the standpoint of what a president has to be.”
Some faculty argue that if presidents resisted government coercion, they could preserve university independence and keep their job. Here, Harvard provides a test case. Earlier this month, the government threatened to cancel up to $9 billion worth of grants and contracts to the university if Harvard did not agree to a series of demands. These included appointing an external body to audit faculty viewpoints and screening foreign students for disfavored beliefs. But last Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said that the university had rejected the government’s demands. In response, the Trump administration promptly canceled about $2 billion worth of federal funding for the university, with more cuts on the way; in addition, the IRS is planning to rescind its tax-exempt nonprofit status, and the Department of Homeland Security has threatened to revoke its ability to enroll foreign students. If Garber can push back against the administration and keep his job, he will provide an example of a path forward—albeit an expensive one. (Garber does seem to be inspiring other universities to stand up to the government. Faculty at several Big Ten schools have now passed resolutions to establish a “mutual defense compact” that would provide resources to any member institution that ends up in a legal fight with the administration.)
Columbia will also have the chance to find out whether a different approach can placate everyone. On Thursday, the board chair announced the start of the public search for the school’s next leader, with the generous start date of January 2026. In the meantime, Shipman, the acting president, has said that she will proceed with the reforms that her predecessor agreed to, but will reject further government intrusion. “I am committed to navigating Columbia through this moment to the best of my ability,” she wrote in a message to the campus community. The day after she took the job, congressional Republicans predicted that her tenure would be short-lived.
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