Lawyers are leading U.S. colleges and universities more than ever before. Is that good or bad for higher education?


Wednesday, January 15, 2020

According to a recent study, during the past three decades, presidential universities’ chairs have been filled with more lawyers than ever before, with an staggering number of 158 appointed in the last half a decade. Is it good or bad?




Who are our universities being led by?

The American Council on Education in Partnership with the TIAA Institute has produced a study called the 2017 American College President Study. According to the study, 72 years old id the average age of university presidents, 70 percent are men, and 17 percent are minorities. 

The traditional path to a presidency is from professor to dean to provost. However, in 2018, according to Virginia Commonwealth University’s researchers, 40.5 percent of university presidents came into power in a ‘non-traditional’ way, which means that they came to the job without having a tenure-track or tenure position in higher education. This has been rising for years. 

Another characteristic of college and universities' presidents that needs to be revised is: how many are attorneys, and what this means for higher education.

According to Patricia E. Salkin, provost of provost of the graduate and professional divisions of Touro College in New York, it’s not surprising that an increasing number of lawyers are being chosen to lead revered institutions of higher education.

Some of the elite higher education institutions that have been choosing lawyers to lead them in the recent decades include: Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Tufts University, Dartmouth College and Barnard College, as well as George Washington University, New York University and the universities of California, Chicago, Iowa, Virginia, Miami, Indiana and Florida.

This trend has been rising during the last three decades. This indicates that in the 2020’s, we can expect to see a record number of lawyers as college and universities’s presidents. This increase, Patricia E. Sulkin said, is a good thing for higher education institutions since it allows them to be in constant evolution. 

The reasons for this increase are simple and relate to the complexities of running institutions of higher education that have become increasingly challenging. The reasons include skills necessary to preside an important educational institution that lawyers have successfully proved to have, they include:

  • Presidents are leaders of colleges and universities in all respects, supported by a team. Presidents are increasingly being called upon to handle budgets, fundraising and business decisions.
  • Higher education now functions in a more highly regulated environment both by the government and by various accrediting bodies. Stakeholders have become increasingly litigious and preventive law strategies are in demand to deal with human resource issues.
  • As some schools struggle to stay open and as others seek to develop new strategic partnerships, lawyers with mergers and acquisition skills may be in demand on some campuses.
  • The job of the college president today encompasses ensuring campus compliance with federal, state and local regulations; advocating in the public policy arena for desired and needed higher education reforms; and resource generation from the public, private and nonprofit sectors all tied to ensuring the economic sustainability of the institution.
  • Presidents have to be flexible to adapt to changing landscapes and they must be able to quickly assess opportunities and challenges. Lawyers tend to be comfortable navigating in these waters. 
  • Lawyers also bring creativity and problem-solving skills, political prowess, collaborative management approaches, preventive law strategies, and communication and negotiation skills, the ability to react quickly and strategically to the unexpected, and the ability to manage difficult personalities, honed from experience.
In the past it would have been unusual to find lawyers working in key senior leadership positions across the campus. Today, it is less of an anomaly and more widely accepted.

One important difference between the cohort of lawyer presidents and traditional presidents is that the lawyers bring significant work experience from outside the ivory tower.

The overwhelming majority of law professors are not hired for teaching jobs right out of law school. Law graduates seek judicial clerkships, employment with the government, nonprofits and the private sector. Professors are hired by law schools based in part on their work experience and what they can bring to the classroom and to the school as a result.

How might the impact of a continued doubling in the number of lawyer presidents in the next decade change higher education? Certainly lawyers have been leaders in protecting and promoting fundamental values of our society just as institutions of higher education have been home to the marketplace of ideas that supported and pioneered work on civil rights, diversity and inclusion, and free speech.

It remains to be seen, however, how lawyer presidents will prioritize the demands of the workforce of the future with the long-standing desire of campuses to protect the traditional liberal arts and classics education. 

Time will tell whether the lawyers will create more sustainable paths in higher education.




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