Are University Presidents “Leaders” in Higher Education or Merely Bureaucrats & Fund Raisers?
This Blog is inspired by two articles that I’ve read in the last 24 hours. One is the message from the president of my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, in the summer 2024 issue of the university’s magazine, named Think. Here is that message:
People Making a Difference
More often than not, it's the people in our lives who shape us the most—family members, friends, mentors, sometimes even individuals we've not met. This power to positively influence another human being is special.
At Case Western Reserve University, people who make a difference are central to our past, our present and our future.
When our two new residence halls in the South Residential Village open this fall, they will bear the names of two trailblazing alumni—John Sykes Fayette and Mary Chilton Noyes. When Fayette earned his bachelor's degree in 1836, he became the first known African American graduate of Western Reserve College and the first African American student to enroll in and graduate from a university in Ohio. He studied theology and was active in the abolitionist movement as a student. Noyes, who earned her PhD in physics in 1895, was the first woman to earn a graduate degree from Western Reserve University. An early woman in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), Noyes was also among the first women in the country to be awarded a doctoral degree in physics.
This spring, we will begin demolition of Yost Hall on the Case Quad to make way for construction of our Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building (ISEB), a nearly 200,000-square-foot research facility that we expect to open in 2026. We're excited about the ISEB and the innovative discoveries that will come from it. Indeed, it will be a space for collaborative research that improves our planet and its people.
Also, we are proud to share that, beginning this fall, the university will cover the full cost of attendance—tuition, housing, books and other expenses—and provide mentored, paid research or internship experience on campus for students in our Cleveland Scholars program. We want to remove financial barriers to a Case Western Reserve education for these exceptional graduates of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and East Cleveland public schools. We know that improving access to higher education can transform futures.
Finally, I want to congratulate our Class of 2024 graduates. These promising young people certainly have left an indelible mark on our campus community. Our hope for them is that they continue to be change agents, wherever their paths lead them.
Sincerely,
Eric W. Kaler
President
And here is the email I wrote to the editor of the magazine last night:
Dear Editor Livingston,
As a former Director of University Communication at Case, I feel reluctantly compelled to comment on the President's Message in the summer issue of Think. Briefly, I think it would merit a "C", if written by a Case freshman.
It opens with a bland statement about how we are influenced by many different people, including some we've never met. No kidding?
The second sentence is equally bland. I assume it is intended to transition us into his announcement about the naming of the two new residence halls. Certainly the two alumni chosen are noteworthy as the first of their kind among Case alums. But how have they, or how should they, influence me as the reader? How does this paragraph connect back to the theme announced in the first paragraph?
And how did they influence the university? Did they encourage the university to become more diverse, or to admit more African Americans and women? If so, we're not told.
Instead, we're off to the demolition of Yost Hall... a logical next paragraph only in the sense that the preceding one is also about new construction projects.
I expect something thoughtful from the president of a first-class university. Instead, I get two bland cliches, designed only to set up pieces of news that could have been covered inside the magazine.
Please forgive my blunt comments. I hope I don't sound too snarky. After all, I was never the president of a famous university. But I humbly request you work with President Kaler and encourage him to give us the benefit of his insights, wisdom and experience and leave the news blurbs to the news pages of your excellent magazine. A well-conceived and well-written little essay each quarter would be welcomed... at least by this alumnus.
Cordially,
/Jim Castagnera/ PhD '79, JD '81
The second article that caught my attention is in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed online newspaper. It’s headlined “Jewish College Presidents Reflect on Navigating Campus Protests and Criticisms.” The piece harks back to the debacle that occurred a few months ago, when several presidents from leading universities were hauled before a Congressional committee, where they performed very poorly in defending their response to antisemitism on their campuses. One —- Penn’s —-actually lost her job. Here’s the excerpt from that article that really caught my attention:
Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican, accused the group of being “directly responsible” for the recent rise in antisemitism on college campuses, comparing the current climate to the lead-up to the Holocaust, and lectured them on Jewish history.
“To everyone who will see this, I ask that you visit the Holocaust museum here in D.C.,” she said during the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing last month. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz. I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.”
“Those deaths were enabled by global culture, indifference and hatred, a culture which each of us has a role in either enabling or ending” she said addressing each of the presidents by name. “I would remind you … of who you are, you are leaders of culture. At this present moment, you have abandoned that role. I hope you reclaim it because we’ll certainly be watching.”
The question that these two articles raise in my mind this morning is: Have college presidents abandoned their leadership role? Once upon a time. university presidents were thought leaders in American society. One such, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, went on to become the governor of New Jersey and the president of the United States. Can you imagine any college president achieving that today? The fact, amply illustrated by the CWRU president’s bland platitudes and the performance by the presidents taken to task by Congresswoman Chavez-DeRemer, is that university presidents today are primarily fund raisers and bureaucrats, expected to manage their institutions competently and bring in as much money as they possibly can. Those are not easy tasks and I applaud those presidents who perform them well.
But protecting their jobs, their institutions and their endowments comes with a price. It contributes to the decline in the influence of higher education in the American political and cultural debate that is ripping our nation in half. It cedes to the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs the “bully pulpit.” It turns the world’s greatest higher education system, indeed the greatest one in human history, into a political punching bag. At a time when higher education should be leading the conversation about Generative AI, about the future of our Republic, about the fitness of a convicted felon to run for the nation’s highest office, about antisemitism, etc., America’s university presidents choose to play it safe. And that’s a damned shame!
