College presidencies turn over quickly. The American Council on Education (ACE) says the average tenure is now less than six years, a decline from 2006, when the rascals hung around for nine years on average. I’m not confident in that baseline. Back in 1990, ACE calculated the average tenure of a college president as 6.7 years. Another organization, the College and University Personnel Association, calculated the average in 1995 to be seven years.
All in all, this suggests a fairly consistent picture. The length of the average term has shrunk—but only a little. Serving as a college president is a hard job, and it’s little wonder that relatively few make it to the ten-year mark or beyond. The ancient Romans held a purificatory sacrifice every five years called a lustrum. The word is sometimes used to mean any five-year period, but the sacrifice was originally conducted in conjunction with a census. American colleges and universities may have developed a lustrum of their own. Every six years or so, they conduct a ritual of purification: immolating their old president and installing a new one. This often connects to a census of sorts: has the college risen or fallen in the national rankings?
Those numbers came to hand because, in 1998, I completed a book on the sources of instability in the academy. Titled Rough Drafts in Higher Education: A Forecast, the book never found a publisher willing to commit to its bleak vision. For that, I should be thankful. My tone was playful, but the forecast was grim: that a great many of the some 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States would not survive the headwinds of the ensuing quarter-century. I foresaw them dealing with declining enrollments and the rise of new technology by “stalling, temporizing, retreating, and re-defining,” which, I said, “come to much the same thing.” Most institutions, I predicted, “will find themselves improvising among these four options.”
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