Dear Commons Community,

A number of votes of no confidence in college leaders, mostly prompted by their handling of pro-Palestinian encampments, has surged in higher ed in the past month.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

While faculty governance bodies and unions haven’t been shy about expressing dissatisfaction with their leaders in recent years, the recent surge, with at least eight no-confidence actions undertaken and more proposed by various campus bodies, underscores how fraught the job of college president has become. While complaints about police intervention in encampments have been the leading reason for many of the recent votes of no confidence, more-traditional issues, like concerns about shared governance, have been factors, too.

The votes of no confidence indicate that displeased faculty members are just another audience presidents must face at a moment when students, donors, and politicians are already closely scrutinizing their words and actions, particularly concerning the Israel-Hamas war. And while no-confidence votes hold no inherent power, they have in the past put presidencies on the ropes: A 2022 Chronicle analysis found that, about 51 percent of the time, a president on the receiving end of a no-confidence vote winds up leaving office within a year, though those departures are rarely publicly linked to the vote.

Tough times for higher education administrators!

Below is a list of some of the colleges taking votes of no confidence.

Tony

—————————————————————————————-

University of Kentucky

University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh

California State Polytechnic University-Humboldt

Barnard College

Indiana University at Bloomington

Two Schools at Emory University

The New School

New York University

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.