People like to talk about the pipeline problem in academia. This most often refers to the underrepresentation among undergraduates, then graduate students, then faculty, and finally tenured professors of certain racial minorities, especially in certain fields—an underrepresentation that becomes ever more obvious as one climbs the ivory tower, which is why a standard adjective for the pipeline is “leaky.”

In addition, there has for some time been a side drumbeat about the relative lack of scholars who identify as conservative. The most important account of why this is so remains Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner’s chapter “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives don’t Get Doctorates” in The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope, and Reforms, published by the AEI Press in 2009. In short, conservatives self-select for non-academic jobs. Or, as the authors put it, “The college faculty pipeline is indeed slanted; in addition to being the minority, conservatives aspire to pursue doctoral degrees only half as often as liberals.” It is my impression—a proper study is called for—that the percentage of whip-smart conservatives and even centrists who wish to become professors has dropped further since they wrote, especially in the past decade. We may hope that the rise of such ventures as the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida will help reverse this trend.

Then there’s the matter of college and university presidents. Here, too, there is a pipeline problem: At a time when inspiring leadership is badly needed and there are so many openings at elite universities, there would appear to be startlingly few plausible candidates for the top jobs.

Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have interim presidents for reasons that don’t need to be spelled out. Come July 1st, Cornell will have one as well since Martha Pollack abruptly announced her resignation on May 9th. Meanwhile, at UCLA, chancellor Gene Block is supposed to step down at the end of July, but no successor has yet been named.

Presidents of America’s most prominent educational institutions usually come from other high administrative positions—often a series of such positions. Take, for example, Maurie McInnis, whom Yale introduced yesterday as its twenty-fourth president: An art historian with a Ph.D. from Yale (on whose board of trustees she sits), McInnis is currently the president of Stony Brook University, before which she was the executive vice president and provost at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, she was an associate dean and then vice-provost at the University of Virginia.

Now, the bureaucratic ranks at most colleges and universities, including Yale, are growing like kudzu. The problem, then, is not that there aren’t people hungry for administrative promotion. Rather, so many of these individuals—almost none of them conservative, as my AEI colleague Sam Abrams has regularly pointed out since 2018—are unsuited for serious, public-facing work.

These days, the fact is that a good leader is hard to find. Yale announced McInnis’s appointment on May 29th, barely a month before she moves into her new office. By contrast, current president Peter Salovey (who was already a senior administrator at Yale and thus knew the ropes) was tapped almost eight months before his start date; his predecessor, Rick Levin (also already a senior administrator at Yale), had two and a half months to ease into his new job; and (if we leave aside interim president Howard Lamar) his predecessor in turn, Benno Schmidt, who held the position when I was an undergraduate, was given nearly seven months.

With public confidence in higher education at an all-time low, it is something of a mystery to me why anyone—regardless of race, political leanings, or anything else—would wish to become president of a place like Yale, many of whose students and faculty seem intent on turning it into the New Haven campus of the Free University of Hamas. That said, I am cautiously optimistic about Maurie McInnis. I do not know what her politics are but am pleased that she survived a vote of censure at Stony Brook earlier this month after having brought in the police, who proceeded to arrest twenty-nine pro-Palestinian protestors. I wish her wisdom and luck. She’s going to need both.

As other institutions struggle to fill their vacancies, I encourage trustees to consider looking beyond the pipeline—for people like Ben Sasse. Yes, Sasse has a PhD from Yale and was, at a very young age, the president of Midland University. But before becoming president of the University of Florida in February 2023, he spent eight years as the junior Republican senator from Nebraska. He has been, to my mind, an excellent leader. If there are more Ben Sasses out there, we need to find them.

The post Of Pipelines and Presidents appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.