With the recent resignation of the third Ivy League president in the 10-month period following October 7, 2023, university trustees are likely to face continued questions about hiring policies and practices.
All three of those presidents had unusually short tenures. Claudine Gay left the president’s office at Harvard after only six months. Minouche Shafik resigned from Columbia after holding the job for 13 months. Liz Magill resigned from the presidency of University of Pennsylvania after less than two years on the job.
All three women faced accusations from parties within and outside their universities that they horribly mishandled the campus protests following the conflict that erupted after the Hamas attacks on Israel. All three also failed to convince members of Congress they had taken adequate measures to protect their Jewish students from antisemitic attacks. And all three faced public criticism from some of their institutions’ largest donors.
Harvard trustees responded to Gay’s resignation by first appointing provost Alan Garber as interim president and then naming him president of the university on August 2. The Harvard Corporation announced he will be in office until mid-2027. At Penn, medical school dean Larry Jameson has been serving as interim president since December 2023 and has agreed to remain in that role through academic year 2025-2026 or until a successor has been identified. Penn has not yet announced that a presidential search process is underway. Columbia has already named as interim president its executive vice president for health and biological sciences, Dr. Karen Armstrong. No mention has been made of her likely tenure in that position.
The action of the trustees at all three universities indicates a wariness about choosing leaders from outside their inner circles at a time when more turbulence is anticipated. The same is true at Cornell, where provost Michael Kotlikoff was named interim president following the retirement of Martha Pollack, who had assumed the presidency 2017.
In announcing his appointment the university reported, “At the request of the board of trustees, Kotlikoff will serve a two-year term as interim president. The board will form a search committee to select Cornell’s 15th president six to nine months before Kotlikoff’s term ends.”
Higher education donors may well consider how college and university trustees will frame the duties and assess the abilities of the next generation of presidential hires. They may also begin to address needed reforms in private and public universities alike. For the immediate future, however, all eyes will be on the return of students to campus and the ongoing tensions around free speech and campus conduct.
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