Some of the nation's top college presidents are leaving office, and while most of their replacements are coming from within academic ranks, increasingly, lawyers and corporate executives are taking over.
"When the going gets sticky, people tend to turn to lawyers," said Victor E. Ferrell Jr., a Washington, D.C., lawyer, who took over in October as president of Beloit College in Wisconsin.At a time of budget deficits, plummeting enrollments and other problems, the heads of Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, Michigan State and other schools have left.
Those departures follow closely the appointments of new presidents at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, American and Tufts.
"You have the exactly equivalent situation as at IBM and Chrysler and the oil companies and the banks," said D. Stanley Carpenter, director of the Association for the Study of Higher Education at Texas A&M University. "People are leaving because their institutions are in disarray."
The presidents who have resigned this year are among the longest-serving and most prominent in higher education.
Columbia President Michael I. Sovern and Yale President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. this month became the latest to announce they were stepping down. Sovern said he needed to devote time to his wife, who's battling cancer, and Schmidt left to run a national chain of private schools.
Like many of their counterparts, both will leave behind projected $15 million budget shortfalls. Yale also must spend about $1 billion on maintenance in the next decade.
Keith Brodie quit this year as president of Duke University, a North Carolina school that cut costs to trim its deficit and as of Friday anticipated a $1.5 million surplus. Stanford President Donald Kennedy, whose school expects to face a $24 million budget gap, resigned last year after admitting that he mishandled allegations that the school misused more than $200 million in federal research funds.
Today's academic presidents, on average, leave office after six years, according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.