Being a college president is a bit like being the pickle on a hamburger. No matter which way someone takes a bite, you’re usually the first thing they complain about.
Boards push from one side. Faculty, students, alumni, donors, and the public push from the other.
In a nearly 30-year analysis of presidencies at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, researcher Erin Lynch, Ed.D., found that public HBCUs experienced the highest rates of presidential turnover, averaging a new president approximately every four years.
These findings are particularly relevant as Fisk University navigates intense public debate surrounding a proposed data center project. The conversation has expanded beyond the project itself to broader questions of governance, mission, community impact, and institutional leadership.
Whatever ultimately happens at Fisk, the debate illustrates a broader challenge confronting colleges across the country.
Institutions recruit presidents to lead transformation, but they often devote far more attention to making consequential decisions than to creating the conditions necessary to sustain them.
In many cases, presidents leave just as their institutions begin confronting the difficult decisions they were hired to make. As a result, presidential turnover is often viewed as a leadership problem when, in many cases, it reflects an institutional governance problem.
A decision is not truly institutional because a board voted. It becomes institutional when enough of the institution assumes responsibility for carrying it forward.
Institutions that successfully sustain institutional change do more than make difficult decisions. They create the conditions that allow those decisions to become institutional commitments.
Five conditions for college presidents
1. Establish shared understanding before seeking agreement. Institutions often make the mistake of seeking agreement before establishing why change is necessary. Stakeholders are far more likely to engage constructively, even when they disagree with the ultimate decision, if they understand why maintaining the status quo is no longer viable.
The goal is not consensus but understanding, not the elimination of disagreement but the reduction of surprise. The conversation surrounding Fisk University’s proposed data center illustrates why consequential institutional decisions require thoughtful engagement long before they are publicly announced.
2. Build legitimacy across the institution. Lasting institutional change requires more than board approval. Every college and university has formal and informal centers of influence—from faculty and cabinet members to alumni, donors, students, and community leaders—that shape whether a decision succeeds.
Their role is not to exercise veto power over every decision, but their influence remains significant. Ignoring these constituencies does not reduce their influence; it simply means it will surface later, often after positions have hardened and trust has become more difficult to rebuild.
3. Create shared ownership. Engagement informs stakeholders; ownership gives them confidence that their perspectives genuinely influenced the final outcome. Institutions need not grant every stakeholder veto power, but they should create meaningful opportunities for participation and demonstrate how input shaped the decision.
People are more likely to support difficult decisions when they see themselves as contributors to the institution’s future rather than observers of decisions made around them.
4. Equip champions, not just defenders. Institutions rely too heavily on presidents to explain consequential decisions. Sustainable change depends on trusted voices across the institution.
Faculty leaders, trustees, cabinet members, alumni, student leaders, and community partners bring credibility with different audiences. Their role is to explain why they believe a decision serves the institution’s long-term interests, not merely repeat talking points.
When responsibility for sustaining difficult decisions is shared, institutions become more resilient through periods of uncertainty and resistance.
5. Sustain commitment after the announcement. Too often, institutions treat a consequential decision as the finish line rather than the starting point. Yet the hardest work begins after the decision becomes public, when questions emerge, resistance grows, and stakeholders look for evidence that leaders remain committed.
Successful institutions continue reinforcing why the decision was made, how it will be implemented, the progress being achieved, and their accountability along the way. The commitment to the commitment must be as strong as the commitment itself.
Ensuring big decisions can survive
Presidents are often hired to solve institutional problems, but they are evaluated on whether institutions can sustain the solutions.
Transformation is often experienced as disruption before it is recognized as progress. Stakeholders who support change in principle may resist its consequences in practice.
When sustaining the solution becomes too inconvenient, institutions sometimes replace the leader in hopes the underlying challenge will disappear. It never does.
In consequential moments, some opposition is inevitable. But institutions that successfully navigate change create enough support to ensure decisions can survive the friction they generate.
Without that support, even well-made decisions remain fragile—or worse, unfunded, deprioritized, or stuck in what I like to call “frozen success”—the condition in which an institution becomes more committed to preserving stability than pursuing necessary change.
The result is predictable. Leaders exit. Institutions reset. The underlying issues remain.
This is why leadership churn in higher education feels both constant and unresolved. It is not simply a matter of individual performance. It is structural.
The most important outcome of the Fisk debate may not be the project itself. Whether the proposal advances or not, the institution will still face the challenge confronting colleges across the country: translating consequential decisions into sustained institutional action.
If support for leadership exists only while decisions remain hypothetical, institutions will continue to experience leadership churn regardless of who occupies the president’s office.
Colleges hire presidents to make difficult decisions. Their greater challenge is ensuring those decisions belong to the institution, not just the president.
The image above was created with AI.
