The resignation this week of the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Bacow, adds to a growing list of higher education leaders who will step down from their roles in the next year. The exodus, occurring in the wake of a pandemic that rocked campuses to their core, signals a changing of the guard at some of America’s most prestigious colleges and universities.  

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s president, L. Rafael Reif, Tufts’ Anthony P. Monaco, Dartmouth’s Philip J. Hanlon, and Columbia’s Lee C. Bollinger will all step down next summer, in addition to a string of presidents who have resigned this year.

These departures reflect national trends. More than half of educators surveyed by the National Education Association said they are more likely to retire from education sooner than planned because of the pandemic. They cite stress and burnout as the primary issues leading to voluntary resignation.

“I don’t think that Covid precipitated any of these retirements or resignations, but I think it probably affirmed the decisions,” a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Richard Chait, told the Sun. He speculated that without the pandemic, these presidents might not have headed for the exits so soon.   

Mr. Chait points not to a crisis of shortened tenures or rapid leadership turnover but to the growing demands of university presidencies. “They’re often described by the incumbents as rather joyless, and that was certainly exacerbated by the divisive politics in the country, the toxic nature of relationships, and the fault lines of identity politics.” 

“When you take this job under its best scenario, it’s a grueling, depleting, always-visible job,” a managing director at Storbeck Search Diversified Search Group, Ruth Shoemaker Wood, explained.

Mrs. Wood, who advises institutions of higher education on presidential searches, said that over the past two years, university presidents have had to become experts in public health, race relations, politics, and the law. “This is not the job that anyone signed on for,” she said. “It’s really not the job that it once was.” 

“People are ready to make an impact in a way they feel they can’t do as they had hoped to in this current configuration,” Mrs. Wood observed, citing conversations with sitting university presidents and campus search committees.

Universities must now look for their presidential successors, a process that often unfolds in public under great scrutiny. 

Having served as an observer or advisor in scores of presidential searches at various universities, Mr. Chait said the desired qualities of a university president, or the desiderata, as it is described in academia, is difficult to generalize. He observed that during the interview process, the personality and character traits of prospective presidents loom large. 

Fund-raising skills are always a priority for search committees as they seek revenue generation to enable innovative research and for other reasons. In the wake of the pandemic, schools might also begin looking for crisis management skills in their next leaders, a criteria Mrs. Wood is seeing at an unprecedented level in current searches.

Political considerations are also salient. “Unequivocally, search committees are unwilling to compromise around a deep and demonstrated commitment to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Mrs. Wood notes. 

Higher education leadership is largely “homegrown,” Mr. Chait said. Many administrators were undergraduate or graduate students at their universities or served on faculty and therefore have extensive institutional memories. Hiring people from outside the university community would minimize the insularity of ideas, he suggested: “Any organization benefits from having fresh perspectives and outside points of view.”