An Interim President for Every Institution

The best thinkers in higher education don’t speak in absolutes and tend to acknowledge that what Randy Bass calls “wicked” (complex, interconnected) problems do not have simple, let alone singular, solutions.

Postsecondary education has a wide array of underlying problems (along with many benefits and strengths), and no silver bullet answers.

Some problems are systemic, such as the confounding and inequitable way we fund higher education, and the growing mismatch between what faculty members are trained to do and what learners need from them now and into the future. These issues are difficult for any single institution to address on its own and, given how diffuse the industry is, extremely difficult if not impossible to solve.

Many other challenges can be dealt with at the campus level. Depending on the college, some might involve changes in institutional focus: expanding beyond traditional-age students to serve adult learners, changing the program mix, fully embracing blended learning. Others might be operational: increasing the teaching load for professors, restructuring departments or colleges, or reassessing the role of athletics.

For most institutions, it will entail much more than tinkering around the edges. As Arthur Levine, the short-term president of Brandeis University and co-author of the forthcoming From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed (Johns Hopkins University Press), put it in a recent interview, “This is an age in which reform won’t be sufficient. What most colleges need is reinvention, transformation.”

The bigger the change, the greater the disinclination to make it. There can be many reasons for that: inertia, decentralization and siloed operations, board or faculty opposition, lack of perceived incentive, risk aversion, and initiative fatigue, to name a few.

Another explanation for why we see so many institutions meandering for so long, seeming to avoid confronting known frailties or taking big swings to address them, can be summed up as a lack of courage.

That probably sounds harsh, but college and university leaders can have good reasons to avoid making difficult decisions or controversial choices.

Way too many boards say they want a “change agent” as president only to bail at the merest whiff of pushback (which almost any meaningful change will produce), leaving the leader to twist in the wind. (This is particularly true for first-time presidents hired by financially vulnerable colleges, and it’s been happening disproportionately to women and presidents of color in the last few years.)

Similarly, every faculty body has its (often surprisingly small) cohort of professors who make it their mission to oppose any transformation or policy they believe will hurt their status or make their lives more difficult. They pursue no-confidence votes or just use their influence to pour sand in the gears, believing (often rightly) that they can wait out the campus leader.

Presidents are not merely victims here: Their own excessive careerism is also a factor. A significant number of campus leaders have their eye on the next job, often up the perceived ladder of institutional prestige or wealth, and are disinclined to make hard decisions that might spark that no-confidence vote or piss off too many people. Let the next president take on that issue, they reason.

If, like me, you believe that many if not most colleges need fairly radical change to be viable for the long term and can’t afford to wait five to 10 years to get to work, consider this thought experiment: What if all of those colleges hired interim leaders for a short but meaningful period of time to make a set of hard, potentially controversial changes, resolve some chronic problems, and clear the way for their next permanent leader?

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How might that work?

First, board members at the institutions would have to take a deep, honest internal look and acknowledge that their college or university’s current path is not sustainable for the long term. No imminent threat in the next 5 or even 10 years, perhaps, but beyond that, far from a sure thing. In my view, that describes the vast majority of colleges and universities in the country, excluding at most maybe 100–200 wealthy private colleges and universities and flagship publics.

The trustees would need to recognize that the combination of demographic, financial, competitive and other pressures on traditional colleges and universities will eventually (if it hasn’t already) come for them, and no amount of nostalgia for the past or belief in institutional exceptionalism will shield them from reality.

I don’t underestimate the heavy lift this step requires. Board members are not necessarily selected for the right reasons, and far too many don’t understand the national landscape their institutions are operating in and how powerful the headwinds are. Many believe they and their institutions are special enough to be exempt.

The next step would be for every board to identify potential interim leaders with traits and experiences that would qualify them to do the hard work of setting the institution up for the period of transformation that’s ahead. The interims won’t necessarily be the designer of the innovation, as Levine has tried to be since he returned to Brandeis as an interim leader 16 months ago (he’s been extended through July 2027), but will clear out the underbrush and plot a course to allow their successor much more flexibility to think creatively and even radically.

Among the traits the interim will need, in rough order of importance:

A deep understanding of, and passion for, the institution in question. These aren’t hired guns, hatchet people brought in to do dirty work. Each college should scour its alumni rolls (or its list of former administrators) for experienced college leaders who know the institution well and care deeply about its survival and ability to thrive.

The institutional understanding is needed so the interim won’t have to spend a year on a “listening tour” to figure out what the college’s biggest challenges are (and what might should be done to address them). Belief in the college is required because the interim will almost certainly have to do hard things that they might not be able to stomach without an abiding faith that it is worth saving.

No need or desire for another job. This could have been listed first. An essential characteristic of these interims is what I’ve called (for myself) a case of the “fuck-its”—a willingness to say or do difficult things without fear of losing a job or having people be really mad at you. This doesn’t mean you run roughshod over people or act recklessly; it just means pursuing what you think is right for the institution and its people without worrying terribly about the consequences for yourself.

(When Levine spoke to the Brandeis faculty upon being appointed interim there in September 2024, he told them that he didn’t really want to be there. “This isn’t where I planned to spend the rest of my retirement,” he told them. “If I’m the worst president in Brandeis history, I’m going to be here for 20 months. If I’m the best president in Brandeis history, I’m going to be here for 20 months. If you vote no confidence in me, you’re really going to hurt my feelings, but I’m going to be here for 20 months. So let’s do this work together.”)

Ability to motivate (at least partially through fear) and inspire. Any college that pursued this strategy would by definition have already had a supportive board. The faculty is the other key constituent an interim leader of this sort would need to win over. Just about any substantive, high-impact transformation work is likely to require curricular adaptation and innovation, which can't succeed without faculty buy-in. And let’s face it: Unhappy professors can stop just about anything in its tracks.

When Levine got to Brandeis, he employed the wisdom he’d given to presidents during his decades as an analyst and observer of higher education change (and lack thereof): “Scare the shit out of the faculty by telling them the truth, then ask them to help you plan the future.” For Brandeis, the threat wasn’t existential as in closure, Levine says. “What was at risk was quality; we would be mediocre.” That was almost as threatening to its faculty.

Brandeis gave Levine another tool when it hired him for the short term: the ability to develop the job description for and choose his successor as permanent president. That may be an ideal condition for my interim scenario, as it has the potential to ensure continuity and alignment between the work done by the short-term president to prepare the institution to transform and what comes next.

Few boards might be willing to offer that degree of influence and authority (and let’s face it, there are only so many Arthur Levines out there).

But I suspect every institution could find a dedicated, courageous and well-intentioned (former and future) leader in its alumni ranks to (re-)position it for a more secure and successful future. It might be one way to drive institution-level transformation in higher ed.