College presidents find themselves taking heat from alumni, faculty, students, trustees, politicians and parents, on issues from scholarships to parking -- and yet they are expected to spend much of their time asking many of those same people for more and more money.
Johns Hopkins University President William C. Richardson, who announced his resignation yesterday, will leave these stresses when he becomes the CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in August.
"It's a burnout job from the standpoint of pressure," Morris W. Offit, chairman of the Hopkins board of trustees, said of the college presidency. "At the same time, certain people thrive in this kind of job. Bill is one of them."
Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine, for one, is not. Earlier this month, Dr. Rudenstine, president of Harvard since 1991, took an unexpected leave of absence.
Medical advisers said Dr. Rudenstine ran himself to exhaustion and became unable to sleep as he headed the university's $2.1 billion fund-raising drive. In announcing the drive last spring, according to U.S. News & World Report, Dr. Rudenstine looked at a clock in University Hall and said, "It's almost $1 million a day, and it's almost 12 o'clock."
Dr. Rudenstine's leave, which stunned the Cambridge, Mass., campus, emphasized the pressure under which prominent college presidents now operate.
"When I was a kid, university presidents, once appointed, served until retirement, or death," said Michael I. Sovern, president of Columbia University from 1980 to 1993. "My group served 10 to 15 years. The new group is averaging five years. That's not long enough to learn the job well and effectively take advantage of what you've learned."
"It's one thing to believe in the cause, and it's another to say you didn't sleep last night," said Louis Albert, vice president of the American Assocation for Higher Education.
Many presidents now force themselves to build time into their daily routine for a quick swim or a brisk jog -- brief releases in arduous days.
Some, like former Williams College President John Chandler, suggest that presidents should get a semester or a year off after the first five or six years in office -- much as faculty members receive sabbatical leave every seven years. That might extend the duration of presidential terms, he said.
Balancing the budget has always been a key part of the job, but financial pressure on presidents has increased in recent years.
More than a decade of tuition increases has pushed costs beyond what many middle-class families are able to pay and has sent college financial aid costs skyward.
The federal government has tightened controls on research funding, and the new Republican majority in Congress could mean cutbacks in grants. And private college presidents now find themselves competing for donors with state universities and even public school systems.
All of this means that presidents must spent more time and energy asking for money -- Hopkins this fall launched a $900 million fund-raising drive.
Yet, when presidents attempt to cut programs or departments, they face strong opposition from faculty and other university constituencies. Both Columbia's Mr. Sovern and Benno C. Schmidt Jr., former president of Yale University, resigned in the last few years under heavy pressure from faculty opposing attempts at cost-cutting.
The pressures have resulted in an era in which college presidents do not speak loudly on public issues of the day -- a far cry from decades past, when they were expected, as prominent public leaders, to use their campus presidencies as bully pulpits.
Presidents "have to be careful not to get caught in controversies that might alienate donors," said Dr. Chandler, now a head-hunter for universities seeking new presidents. "They may appear to be timid, but if they are to be attentive to the needs of their constituencies, they can't get engaged in too many fights that are not directly related to their universities."