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When I arrived at college in the fall of freshman year, I was assigned to a floor of nine diverse young men: all races and major religions represented; three turned out to be gay, two turned out to be Sigma Alpha Epsilon; and political views all over the map. We were also from all over the map: Brooklyn, Connecticut, Virginia, Maryland, two from Washington State, one from a fancy private school in L.A., and a Canadian not recruited for hockey, which made me one of the most unusual minorities on campus. And then there was Ray from Sri Lanka.
Ray was a stranger in a strange land, but cheerful, polite, and always a true gentleman. Which sometimes made him the target of pranks. Like the time Chris from Brooklyn came across the hall and borrowed my phone to call his roommate Ray. Disguising his voice as a Boston Brahmin, Chris pretended to be “John from Harvard.”
Chris: How do you do. This is John from Harvard. May I speak with Chris?
Ray: No, John. Chris is not here at the moment.
Chris: Good heavens! How vexing… Would you tell him John from Harvard would like a word with him as soon as possible?
Ray: Yes John. I will give him this message.
Over the course of a few days, Chris repeated the call a half-dozen times, each time insisting that John from Harvard needed to speak with Chris, each time with increasing urgency, and shifting from intimating to alleging that Ray had not made a proper effort to relay the messages, which would never occur at Harvard. Until the final call:
Chris: Ray, it’s John from Harvard again. Where is Chris?
Ray: He is not here. I have given him all your messages.
Chris: Please find him and bring him to the phone forthwith.
Ray: [Long pause…] Blast you, John from Harvard. Blast you!
Appropriately for someone to whom that phrase came naturally, Ray became an astronomy major, then an astrophysicist, then a discoverer of exoplanets, then had an asteroid named after him ( asteroid 4668 Rayjay). After leadership positions at Cornell and Johns Hopkins, Ray Jayawardhana was just named the tenth president of Caltech.
Knowing Ray, this is great news for Caltech. He’ll do an amazing job even if he doesn’t attain my Caltech ideal (see e.g., Real Genius where “Pacific Tech” students freeze the dorm floors for a skating party, automate the submission of thousands of entries to cereal box contests, and destroy an evil professor’s ill-gotten house with a space laser and popcorn). It’s also a good lesson for higher education because Ray’s still young and has the energy and ambition for the work ahead.
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He’s going to need it because university president is one of the hardest jobs around. In addition to being a head of school, it’s like being managing director of a hedge fund, Chief Compliance Officer of a regulated entity, CEO of a hospital, and mayor of a small city with functions for every facet of life. Presidents need to placate faculty, reassure parents, outfox legislators, manage the board, and keep the institution moving forward amidst daily controversies while keeping alumni onside and raising money from real Boston Brahmins.
Perhaps the best comp for this always-on job is NFL head coach. During the season, between managing team personnel and strategies, practices, analytics, conditioning, injuries, the front office, and media, head coaches famously work a hundred hours per week. Mondays run 16 hours with film breakdown, player evaluations, injury review, and media availability. On Tuesdays – technically a day off for players – coaches focus on the upcoming opponent and might only work 12 hours. Then Wednesdays through Fridays are 16-hour days of planning and practicing. Saturdays often involve travel and end at 12 hours. Gameday is another long one.
Which explains why NFL coaches keep getting younger. Superbowl LX champion Seattle Seahawks are coached by 38-year-old Mike MacDonald – one of five head coaches under age 40. While the archetypal football coach of the 20th century was old and stoic (e.g., Dallas’ Tom Landry in a fedora), the new paradigm is analytics-oriented and young with vim and vigor to spare. As a result, the average age of NFL coaches has gone from mid-50s to mid-40s.
Higher education hasn’t taken the hint. According to the American Council on Education, the average age of university presidents is 60, not budging in the past two decades. Schools have been known to appoint presidents in their 70s. Berkeley’s former chancellor was selected at the age of 72. The new president of the UC system is 69. West Virginia’s leader, the estimable E. Gordon Gee, stepped down last year at the age of 81. A few years back, Inside Higher Ed asked a salient question: For College Presidents, Is 70 the New 50? The pounding of the presidency takes a toll on older leaders and explains why average tenure is less than six years and continuing to shrink.
That’s a huge problem. Because while NFL teams can be turned around quickly (e.g., New England Patriots who just lost to the Seahawks were 4-13 last year and ended this season 14-3 after replacing 58% of players), colleges require longer. Presidents can’t replace 58% of faculty and staff in a decade, let alone a year. Shared governance means presidents don’t have full control. Accreditors prioritize process, adherence to mission, and stability. Alumni donors are obsessed with keeping the school as they remember it. And alumni dominate the board, which is usually intentionally large for development purposes and therefore unwieldy and difficult to march in a new direction. Not surprisingly, few institutions credibly claim a culture that welcomes rapid change.
While Caltech doesn’t need to be turned around, hundreds of institutions do or will. Higher education’s core value proposition – and the likelihood of being able to continue to attract students at anywhere near the current number in five or ten years – is facing twin crises of affordability and employability.
As list tuition has climbed at roughly twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades and the cost of room, board, and other fees have climbed even faster, 77% of Americans say college is not affordable and 63% say a four-year degree isn’t worth the cost. Many selective schools are about to cross the $100,000 cost-of-attendance rubicon, which will attract further unwanted attention.
It would be one thing if every student graduated into a job that paid as much as a year of college. But we’re a long way from there. Digital transformation has reshaped good entry-level jobs to require specific technical and business skills that are difficult to acquire in the classroom while simultaneously giving rise to an experience gap: employers only considering candidates who have already demonstrated they can do the job, usually by already having done the job or some version thereof. The result is profound underemployment, proliferating unemployment, and a prevailing sense that college not only fails to guarantee career launch, but that the fact that it’s the only scaled alternative to a frontline retail or hospitality job for high school graduates is a prank worthy of John from Harvard.
Addressing these challenges might not require a digital transformation, but will require a dramatic one: reengineering entire institutions to deliver faster, cheaper, and work-based programs. Given the aforementioned allergies to change, if Caltech is hiring presidents for the long run, most colleges and universities should be hiring for the longer run. Because presidents who won’t be around to reap the rewards are less likely to take the requisite risks.
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In my first job out of law school, I worked at Columbia University for a hard-charging Executive Vice Provost named Michael Crow. He was 43 at the time and impressed everyone with his rigorous thinking, communication skills, and profound commitment. Three years later he left New York for beiger pastures: Arizona State University. At the time, ASU was viewed as a party school, with an academic reputation best described as uneven. But where most saw sand and sororities (and probably some sororities with sand in the basement from indoor beach parties), he saw opportunity and got to work. His vision – the New American University – was to redefine excellence not based on how many students are excluded, but on how many are included and how they succeed.
You probably already know this hero’s journey. Under President Crow, ASU simultaneously increased research intensity, reorganized schools and programs based on present-day problems rather than academic nomenclature, and grew enrollment onground and online. ASU launched hundreds of partnerships with companies, government, and philanthropy to address community needs and attack market opportunities. Today, ASU is regarded as America’s most innovative university. It’s also winning per traditional measures: research grants up nearly 10x and new R1 status; enrollment up nearly 3x including more National Merit Scholars than all but a handful of highly selective institutions; enrollment of Pell-eligible students up 4x and graduating at a rate that exceeds ASU’s average graduation rate when he assumed the reins; operating budget up 7x; endowment up 8x.
Michael Crow is a visionary. But he might not have been so ambitious and energetic if he hadn’t foreseen a 24-year-and-counting run. He put in the work, took the risks, and transformed ASU into America’s model public university. That’s his legacy, along with hundreds of thousands of students, faculty, and staff who’ve benefited from his leadership. Leadership that began at age 46.
This is not to diminish the importance of experience. When I was in my 20s and working with him at Columbia, I was impatient for a leadership role. Intelligence and effort would better serve our project than someone with a decade or two more experience, but who seemed to care half as much. I now recognize such thinking is the byproduct of inexperience. Particularly in leadership roles, it's really useful to have seen situations before – to have the benefit of patterns of past experience. It's highly relevant for specific business challenges, for evaluating candidates and matching them to roles, and even recognizing personality types and acting accordingly. That’s often the difference between successful and dysfunctional organizations. Witness the chaos and frequent implosions of so many start-ups.
At the same time, experience isn't everything, and in most cases not the dispositive thing. There's a happy medium that will vary by circumstance. It just so happens that the circumstance of most colleges and universities weighs heavily in favor of leaders with a longer time horizon and who have every incentive to be bold. Leaders like 46-year-old Michael Crow instead of candidates who’ve climbed the rungs, checked the boxes, and appear to be safe choices. More institutions than ever don’t have the luxury of playing it safe.
***
Last week Gordon Gee, former president of Ohio State, University of Colorado, Brown, Vanderbilt, and West Virginia, was back on the Ohio State campus when a documentary filmmaker approached him for an interview. Seeking to safeguard the former president, an assistant professor slapped the camera out of the interviewer’s hand and tackled him to the ground. The filmmaker, an Ohio State alumnus, was taken to the ER for injuries to his neck and shoulder.
One additional reason to stop hiring septuagenarian and octogenarian presidents is so professors don’t get into trouble trying to protect them. Another better reason is AI. Every industry will be transformed by AI and higher ed is no exception. To successfully navigate the storm – to keep the ship afloat as product/service development, delivery, marketing, sales, customer service, and admin functions and employees are whipsawed – other sectors are already manifesting a penchant for CEOs who are AI natives, “who bring more of a beginner’s mind and adaptability.” That means going younger and skipping Gen X candidates for Millennials, as Kickstarter, Lime, and Red Lobster just did. The shrimp-scarred seafood chain named a 36-year-old CEO.
If higher education proves unsusceptible to the charms of younger leaders, Doug Lederman suggests the opposite: bring in an end-of-career interim president for a year or two to get the really hard stuff done. Citing Arthur Levine, Brandeis’ 77-year-old leader who started as interim president in November ’24 before having the interim title ripped away last summer by an overexcited board, Lederman agrees that “reform won’t be sufficient. What most colleges need is reinvention, transformation.” The problem may be that there aren’t enough Arthur Levines, let alone 70-something higher ed vets capable of rolling out an “AI-powered phone ordering agent that will revolutionize takeout ordering across all Red Lobster locations.”
Sadly, most colleges and universities aren’t close to a hard decision on leadership for the next few decades because they haven’t faced up to their fading value proposition. They’ve been preoccupied by the unprecedented actions of an unpredictable federal government – problems which are the product of a President of the United States who turns 80 in less than four months. Problems which prompted Northwestern to bring back an 86-year-old interim president. It’s a battle of the oldies.
Last month former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called for a mandatory retirement age of 75 for the president, cabinet officers, members of congress, and federal judges. It’s not quite Logan’s Run, but if we’d taken this step a few years ago, hundreds of schools might be tackling less exciting but more existential challenges. And boards of trustees might be on the cusp of selecting younger leaders with a time horizon to address them.
I’m pretty sure I know what Caltech’s new president would say about this unfortunate and unnecessary delay:
Blast you, Donald from Queens. Blast you!