More college presidents are jumping ship or leaving under pressure than ever before as higher education faces snowballing fiscal and enrollment challenges, recent reports show.

The average presidential tenure has shortened by 2.6 years over the past 17 years, according to surveys from the American Council on Education.

This year, the 1,075 presidents responding to the group’s survey have served an average of 5.9 years on the job. That’s down from 6.5 years in 2016, 7.0 years in 2011 and 8.5 years in 2006. About 3,900 degree-granting colleges and universities are in the U.S., according to the Department of Education.

In a single week at the end of July, five presidents stepped down for various reasons at Stanford University, Texas A&M University, Seton Hall University, Thomas Jefferson University and Berklee College of Music. Only Marc Tessier-Lavigne at Stanford held the job longer than five years.

Presidents are juggling increased demands from donors, trustees and students to raise money while placating political interest groups, said John Agresto, the president of St. John’s College in New Mexico, a private liberal arts college, from 1989 to 2000. 

“Now the mission of almost every college is strangled by politics,” Mr. Agresto, a former acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan, told The Washington Times. “We have to be sure we’re multicultural enough, that our faculty is ‘diverse’ enough, that every group no matter how centrist or fringe is catered to and made ‘comfortable,’ that the latest political slogan is supported at all levels of teaching, etc.”

The surge in presidential resignations comes as colleges compete for a dwindling number of applicants amid falling birth rates and as rising costs drive falling enrollments and tuition revenues. Buckling to the pressure, several colleges have shuttered in recent years, citing financial hardships.

“The pandemic created an environment where students began to question the value, benefits and costs of higher education,” Taylor Ingles, marketing engagement and outreach manager at the American College of Education, an online for-profit school based in Indianapolis, said in an email. “Return on investment is now at the forefront of students’ minds as they shy away from the long-term debt that comes with the high cost of traditional brick-and-mortar institutions.”

On Monday, trustees at Baptist-run Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia voted to close the 625-student campus, founded in 1932, just weeks before the academic year begins. The decision follows years of financial struggles, including a 2015 default on repaying bonds worth more than $36 million.

Accelerating turnover rates mean less stability for universities since the ideal presidential term runs 7-10 years, said Bob Dickeson, a higher education consultant and former president of the University of Northern Colorado.

“I think institutions … benefit from stability and continuity that comes from long-term relationships with leadership,” Mr. Dickeson told trade publication Inside Higher Ed on Tuesday. “And if there’s excessive turnover, I think, the institution suffers.”
 
The presidents of Texas A&M, Thomas Jefferson and Stanford resigned under clouds of scandal or political pressure.

Mr. Tessier-Lavigne has pledged to depart the Stanford presidency on Aug. 31 after a months-long investigation into research misconduct cleared him of personal wrongdoing but found he had left mistakes uncorrected in scientific papers published under his name.

The Canadian-born neuroscientist will remain on the faculty of the prestigious Palo Alto, California, private research university but said it is in Stanford’s best interest for him to quit the top job.

At Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia, another private research university, physician Mark Tykocinski quit after just one year as president and dean of the medical college. He will remain on faculty as a full professor to focus on his research into cancer immunotherapy, according to the school.

Dr. Tykocinski departed under pressure for “liking” tweets on X.com that criticized COVID-19 vaccines, gender transition surgeries and academic diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

At public Texas A&M, President M. Katherine Banks resigned on July 21 under scrutiny about the botched hiring of Kathleen McElroy, a Black former New York Times editor specializing in diversity, equity and inclusion.

Ms. McElroy said the president offered her a tenured position to revive the university’s journalism program, then changed it to a one-year contract without a tenure clause. She ultimately refused the job as Ms. Banks professed ignorance about the change.

On Thursday, the Texas A&M University system announced it will pay $1 million to settle legal claims by Ms. McElroy and released a five-page report concluding the former president helped change the job offer.  

The debacle shows the precarious position of presidents who “panicked after George Floyd and went all in” on racial justice promises they failed to keep, said Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars.

“If you’re a college president today, the odds are you have a sincere and deeply held commitment to wokeness, and it turns out that that’s not a good recipe for management,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University.

In some cases, colleges gave no public reason for their presidential departures.

At the private Berklee College of Music in Boston, composer and conductor Erica Muhl resigned from the presidency on July 24, less than a month after going on a surprise leave of absence.

Berklee’s board said it was “unable to share” the reasons for Ms. Muhl’s resignation after two years on the job. She became the shortest-serving president at the school, which has had just four leaders in 78 years.

Higher education experts blame declining enrollment and the accompanying loss of revenue for the growing instability of campus leaders. 

Enrollments across all higher education sectors fell by 0.5% from 17,246,157 in spring 2022 to 17,153,317 in spring 2023, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported in May. This spring’s final tally remained 1,309,284 students short of the 18,462,601 scholars the nonprofit clearinghouse counted in spring 2019, before the pandemic.

While the declines have hurt both public and private campuses, most recent presidential resignations have involved private schools that rely less on government funding.

On July 24, Joseph Nyre announced his departure from the presidency of Seton Hall, a Catholic university in New Jersey. He spent four years on the job and will step down after taking a sabbatical during the coming school year.

Local news outlets reported that Mr. Nyre resigned amid conflicts over an embezzlement scandal at Seton Hall Law School, where employees pocketed nearly $1 million. University statements on his departure made no mention of the incident.

It’s no surprise that being a college president has become harder as inflation drives up expenses for campuses, said Michael Warder, a California-based business consultant and former vice chancellor at Pepperdine University, a private Christian school.

“It is a highly demanding job,” Mr. Warder said in an email. “Recruiting students with demographic declines, rising tuition costs and competition from well-paying ‘dirty jobs’ is a further requirement.”

• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.